Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 21:55:51 -0600
From: Tom Emerson <Thomas@btl.net>
Subject: ONE FISH AT A TIME CHAPT. FIFTEEN & SIXTEEN

                         CHAPTER FIFTEEN


                         "Darling?" the adult Harry said to his beautiful
daughter, "did you like the story?"
                         "Mmm," the girl purred, "I just don't know why you
didn't stay closer over the years, or even get married; that's been all the
rage for the last few years."

                         "Good question," her father said, "but that's
life.  We often do move on to new things, new people, instead of cherishing
what we have and had.  Usually this works out for the better, sometimes
not.  Forest and I lost touch in high school, but guess who got a
delicious, delightful, and delectable pixie, sprite, wiseguy, darling in
return?"
                         "The dude who won the Powerball?" the girl asked.
Her playful response startled both adult males, who suddenly realized
they'd won an ethereal jackpot without even buying a ticket (this, a rough
parallel to the Virgin's conception).  They looked over her slim, athletic
body into each other's eyes, nodding silently in thanks and affirmation.
To think she cooked and cleaned, and, total boggle beyond human
comprehension by half a billion light years, could, with encouragement,
reproduce herself repeatedly.  Oh, freaking, wow.

                         "Lo-ho-ho-ho-zer," Harry laughed, imitating Jim
Carey, "he'd have given the prize to have driven over here with you."
                         "And I wouldn't have taken it," the sweetie
laughed, "unless I ended up here, with you and Forest."
                         "You may not turn out to be a great
businesswoman," Forest said.

                         "I know I'm too young to make these decisions for
myself," the girl responded, "but my idea would be to have six or eight
kids with the two of you, and let one of them be the tycoon."

                         Again the adults looked across the child at each
other.  What would be wrong with that?  In ten-thousand years, what would
be wrong with that?  In every aspect, from buckling the kids' boots, to
gross income, to the death or disability of any of them, three would be
better than two.  From getting her pregnant, to surviving her, three would
beat a pair.  William F. Buckley, Jr., the sailor, makes quite an issue of
three forming a gang of two, with the third ostracized.  No problem, after
the separation, there'd still be a partnership to carry on, perhaps
stronger for the omission, as Anne was surely a more ardent and active
lover, having rid herself of me.  (Something the Cruise family may get to
experience again as these huge battlewagon novels blast their way into
public consciousness.  They'll be able, once again, to relive excluding me
the first time.  Talk about an enduring wedding present, a gift that keeps
on giving.)

                         "Unfortunately," Harry replied to his daughter, "a
cat drinks by curling its tongue to the rear, when you'd bet a thousand
dollars on the common sense supposition that it drinks curling it forward.
So common sense does not fit all scenarios, which is a good thing, or
everyone would fall off Australia, but is a bad thing when it comes to sane
familial relationships.  A no-touchy daddy can abuse and neglect his
daughter a hundred legal ways until she ends up a frosted-haired,
silver-nailed hireling of the Dairy Queen empire, while a reading,
traveling, hiking, boating, baseball loving, super dad can go to jail for
years off a single shower."

                         "Isn't the system now proven so defective that
people just pretty well ignore it; you know, play the game a little, pay
lip service, and do what they want?"
                         "Yes," Forest answered the girl, "but there's
still the danger of someone making a case because they don't like you, when
they'd accept three times what you're doing from someone they happened to
like, and you don't have to be convicted of anything to run up a hundred
grand in legal fees, or lose your job or your friends."

                         "Then it might be a good idea to make some new
friends," the girl said, raising her face to the handsome new man in her
life for a kiss.
                         "It is a matter of drawing lines," Harry
continued, "and it's always the cheap, easy shot to be an iconoclast or
disenfranchised nihilist, wearing a chip the size of Africa on your
shoulder.  At the same time, the system can't exactly come to a stop to
draw up a scheme for every couple, threesome, foursome, or group who think
they have found the answer to communal, extended-family living.  It's not
that society won't do it, or doesn't want to do it, but more that society
can't do it, but it can do better, much better, just by backing off
arbitrary, mindless negative involvement, which is usually involvement for
its own sake, not to help somebody or keep a truly dangerous criminal off
the streets.  Playing the game.  Going through the motions.  The only good
thing that ever comes of it is that out of the hundreds of girls
traumatized ten times more by the system than the perpetrator, or rapist,
some will become so dysfunctional they end up in the psychic court of last
resort, which happens to be the lending library.  Out of these hundreds, or
thousands, we'll end up, twenty years down the road, with a few pretty fair
writers.  Otherwise, the picture is entirely negative.  Everyone involved
in it starts by going though the buzz saw.  How much they lose depends on a
variety of factors, but it's a pretty safe bet that everyone losses
something.  And the oddest thing about it is if you're hillbilly overt, and
drag your stiff-legged, dirty-legged, dirty-haired, half-starved daughter
around town, tummy bulging, no official will lift a finger or say a word.
Meantime, let you or I or any respectable person be the subject of the
slightest rumor or hint that something's going on, and we'll be in the cop
shop `till dawn."

                         "And I was going to shine so for Show-and-Tell on
Monday," the smashing girl sighed, mopping her hand across her brow with
enough drama to paralyze her entire audience with a fear of starting to
laugh and not being able to stop until Monday, in short, in not sharing
with her anything TO tell.

                         They lay together, breathing softly, for some
time.  "Darling," Harry finally said to her, "I have what may be a really
bad idea, but I want to tell you about it, anyway, okay?"
                         "As long as it has nothing to do with leaving,"
the girl said.
                         "It's about a hundred times more complicated than
that," the man said, "which is why I keep going over it, and why I think it
might be right up your alley."
                         "What is it?" the ten year old asked.

                         "What if you lost your virginity with someone
besides one of us?" Harry said.  "Just went out on your own, and came back
here, assuming you wanted to, later tonight, or even in the morning?"
                         "Oh, Dad, wow," the girl whispered.
                         "What do you think, Forest?" he then asked.
                         "Lying here for who knows how long, drawing
pictures in our minds of who she's with, and how she's responding to them,
you mean?" he asked, "instead of cumming with her, ourselves?  For sure, it
would be nothing we'd ever forget," he had to acknowledge.
                         "Don't you think it might be sort of a symbol of
permanence," Harry said, nod doggedly, but wishing to pursue the idea,
"that one night, amongst the three of us, means little or nothing, because
it's the next night that's important, and the next.  If we have to work, or
travel, or attend to any number and variety of affairs, they come first,
and our sleeping together is always secondary to the overall vitality of
the relationship."

                         "I don't know," Forest mused, "if I were a
novelist I might stick something like that in as a plot thickener or
word-count extender; but how it would work out in real life?  Hmm?"
                         "Is that a Yes?" the girl whispered.
                         "Do you want it to be?" her dad asked.
                         "It would give us something to talk about on the
drive back home," the girl observed, "and I love both of you so much, a
week with Brad Pitt wouldn't make the slightest difference in how I feel."
                         "We're taking you pretty far afield," Harry said,
"first the business problem, or former problem, at the core of our being
together, then your being with Vargas Real for two or three hours,
tomorrow, and now dispatching you to find your first lover.  It might be a
good idea to buy you a puppy on the way home, so you will have something to
talk about in class on Monday."
                         "If I were the tactician," Tina responded, "I'd
buy the girl a Glock, because even telling about that, much less showing
it, would gum up every officious psyche for a hundred miles, and, with that
lot down for the count, we could get away with me turning up pregnant in
seventh grade and no one would stop ducking long enough to notice."

                         "She has a point," both males nodded in
affirmation, without having to articulate the words, but, nah, it was a
stretch: not feasible, even if by a tantalizingly small a margin.  Some
busybody would be sure to give a heads-up, and, while the level of obesity
was beyond extreme, a slim face along with slim limbs and a big belly could
hardly help but let the cat out of the bag.  Of course, maybe the pixie was
just trying to be funny, to ease the atmosphere in light of the cross
currents that were bound to be part of a child's transition from dolls to
dicks, and to be sure everyone got the most out of the resort over the
upcoming weekend.  It all bore much pondering and consideration.
Fortunately, a methodical, one-step-at-a-time approach suited the
temperament of each member of the threesome, a fact which undoubtedly had
much to do with their being a threesome, in the first place.  They talked
in whispers, fondling the young female, passing her lithe, athletic body
between themselves, wrestling with each other and the pixie, pretending to
eat her toes and fingers, as if she were a child, and indulging in a little
bit of brief tickling.  They licked here her, kissed her there, and
caressed her everywhere.  The liked her, loved her, adored her, and came
back for more.  The ten year old was open with her tongue and hands,
learning quickly this and even faster picking up that, only avoiding
deliberate touching of their swollen uncircumcised penises, in the manner
of a mature child with the good upbringing and good manners to save the
best for last.  Both males thrust gently against her slim, white body,
masturbating themselves and each other against the particularly spicy flesh
high on her inner thighs, gasping and tensing with urgency, before backing
away to toy with her in less fulsome ways.  Neither did they kiss her on
the lips, instinctively realizing this would be something she would want to
save for another day and a boy close to her own age.  Violating all the
rules, they nonetheless set their own rigid standards of behavior, decency,
and morality as inviolable and absolute as the stoning, chopping, burning,
and drowning priorities of a rural Muslim village.

                         Much of the time the males lay nose to nose, their
cheeks low on her smooth, white belly, their hands fondling her between her
long slender legs, as they tried to come to grips with what it would be
like to ravish her orally, in turn, sharing, tongue to tongue, the salty
seed of a third, strange, adult male.  This left them on the horns of a
dilemma, because both wanted to, a, finger her, newly wet, and, b,
experience the salty sperm of her first true lover, while, c, never in a
hundred years ending what was now going on between the three of them.

                         The state of perfect equilibrium lasted most of an
hour.  At the end of this time, the sensitive and alert child noted a
rising level of urgency in her male companions, and was bright enough to
interpret it as corresponding with a rising level of discomfort.  At ten,
she'd heard a thing or two in school, and realized matters would only get
worse unless she took an active role in making them better.  But how?  She
liked the idea of returning to the pool area, half a wildfire, for a mount
that was free of incestuous taint.  After all, that was as innocent as
she'd ever be from this moment on, but, before it happened, before she
walked hand in hand in her conservative little two piece bathing suit off
with a handsome male to another bungalow, she owed an overwhelming debt of
gratitude to her father and Forest for not treating her like some little
bubble-headed, nail-polishing mirror queen.  Two phrases ran through her
mind: `jerking off' and. `blow-job'.  The boys used them more than the
girls, but that was natural enough when she looked at her father and her
honorary uncle, for they were more than girls.  Could she interpret them on
her own?  Neither her dad nor Forest was anything to do with any kind of
jerk that she'd ever heard of, and the process of elimination also
precluded their going off.  Where?  Why?  When?  Nor could she exactly see
exchanging blows with them, or them with each other, whether they were on
the job, or at home.  So, it must be some kind of slang or vernacular of
the street.  If she used her hands on one of their hugely swollen and rock
hard penises, wouldn't she be jerking on?  Surely it wouldn't come off,
that would obviously be fatal, and catastrophically messy -- out of the
question.  But men certainly had to do something physical to get girls
pregnant, so maybe some part or some thing did come off.  If you pounded on
them?  Creepsy must, they looked so sensitive, how could blows, or even one
blow, do anything but hurt?  Of course, she could ask, achieve empowerment
through a meaningful dialogue and resolve issues as a byproduct of scads of
quality time, which could hardly help but further the bonding process.

                         Girl thoughts.  The boys were thinking, too.  Yes,
they were pleased, who wouldn't have been?  She was a delight, a fancy
tickler par excellence, a smoldering, smoking, sensation multiplying senses
and sensibilities, not by X, but by sex; squaring heaven, cubing earth; the
sun, the clouds, the rains, the rivers, the oceans, the seas; the forests,
the plains, the woods and trees; all birds; all bees.  Not, by any means, a
roll in the hay, a trifle, a plaything, a trinket, a toy.  She was a total
major-league bash, a heavenly smash, the opposite of a market crash, a
Caddy, not a Nash, and worth a ton of cash.  Porking her in situ, whatever
transient pleasures it might offer, whatever relief, and for relief they
were all but howling, might have been tempting, but Harry and Forest
weren't those kinds of guys.  In the lobby, on an easel, they'd seen, and,
distracted, hardly noticed, a poster announcing: Kid Carlson, King of the
Clarinet, and Kids of the King.  A dance.  Good clean fun.  Convention.
And what really did it for the doting father was the mental image of his
absolute cutie pie in high heels and stockings.

                         "Sweetie," he said, "how's about you run in and
take a shower for a few minutes while I talk to your uncle Forest?"



                         Ah, there's a little break.  She doesn't have to
undress or anything, so just grins, kisses her menfolk, and we see her slim
frame headed across the carpeting of the suite, and, in a few moments the
hiss of the shower head and clunk of the heavy glass door.
                         There is a difference in not smoking pot, but I'm
trying to figure out what it is.  For sure, the word count's taken a nose
dive, but yesterday I cleaned the refrigerator, washed walls, and caught up
with domestic stuff.  Samantha was here for much of the day, and I think I
was able to focus on and review out status perhaps more incisively than
when I'm all gone way out stoned on weed, or whatever one does on the
stuff, or, in my case, doesn't do.  The clearest difference is in the field
of dreams.  I noted that in June, also pot free.  Much shorter, sharper,
clearer, and more memorable dreams.  Just now I was, in dreamland, visiting
some kind of institution on the west coast in my old VW 411.  When I
returned to the car I found the rear deck open (where the engine is) and a
note that I needed something electrical done, along with signs of a minor
fire.  Then, along comes John Goodman, from "Rosanne" to help fix whatever
electrical problem there is.  Very uninteresting, but sharp as a tack, and,
since the car I had was yellow, and the car in the dream was yellow, that
answers the question about dreaming in monochrome, which some people say is
most common.  I'll have to see about the word-count thing.  I do take days
off from time to time, a day off being defined as under three-thousand
words, even as a dope fiend, so it may take awhile to generate usable
statistics, by which time the money will be in, the ganja supply resorted,
and things restored to abnormal.  Also, the domestic agenda.  Am I going to
suddenly start painting the place, or chopping my own property?  I actually
like not smoking, not having to waste time opening packs, lighting
cigarettes, and emptying ashtrays.  I see on television about cravings, but
feel them only in respect to Samantha.  I smoke because I like the flavor
of tobacco, and the fact it serves as a reward which is free of calories.
Pot is about the same.  I don't miss it when I don't have it, wouldn't
spend more than three dollars a day for it, but find, all things being
equal, it does vastly extend my work day.

                         Delton finally showed up with his arm almost back
to normal, so there's one good deed that apparently paid off.  If my luck
is in he'll stop by this (Sunday) morning and I'll be able to dispatch him
to Malcolm Dale's to get a carton of cigarettes (pronounced, locally,
cartoon, which you quickly get used to) and ten ball-ups, which are dollar
lots of marijuana wrapped in foil.  Stupid.  They used to be wrapped in
brown paper, which, if you flicked them away at night, were hard for the
Babylon (police) to see in the dark.  As I wrote this, Queenie showed up,
so the mission goes to Daisy who needs to get to Belize City to visit
Junior, who's in jail, and, as about the nicest kid I ever met in my life -
very much the reason I help them, in the first place.  (If I ever do get
put away for inappropriate attention to Samantha, or possession, I'll have
more friends inside, than I do outside.)

                         So, I'm cleaning and sober, the house is a
freaking masterpiece of domestic focus, and I seem to be rattling away
about the same as ever.  It occurs to me, even after all these years, I
still have something extraordinary in common with Anne Whatever Her Name is
Now, nee, Fairchild.  We both would agree she's the world's stupidest
woman.  She, for ever having dated, loved, or marrying me, me, for her
having divorced a wealthy, funny, attractive, committed artist and husband
over huffs and puffs of nothing.  Terrific guy that I am in so many
respects, I send her brother copies of my work so he can forward them to
her, ha-ha, so she'll know how right she was all along.  Steve McQueen
offered Ali McGraw a million dollars to come back to him, and I'll bet my
former wife and princess of herself wouldn't have me gift-wrapped in a
billion.  Women are big on decisions like that.  Stupid, but big.  Oddly
enough, if she was any semblance of her former self, and wanted to paint,
fucking-eh seriously, I'd take her back, though not at the cost of
Samantha.

                         Here's one for the book.  Smoking stains the
teeth, right?  I don't have a mirror in my room, or bathroom, knowing I'm
about as cute as they come at my age, and having moved the dresser, with
mirror, into Linden's room, when he was here.  So I was a little horrified
to find my choppers pretty badly stained.  Out of idle curiosity, and
inspired by a young girlfriend, I experimented with scraping my teeth with
the blade of a craft knife.  Believe it or not, it worked beautifully, and
in ten minutes all trace of staining, which, in my case, would be tea and
tobacco, were gone.  My guess is four-ought steel wool might work, too.
Also in the believe it or not category, is the fact that Samantha brushes
her teeth with Colgate and Clorox, straight from the bottle.  I've never
heard of that, and do wonder about the long-term effect, although, for
sure, her smile is dazzling at the moment.

                         Speaking of clean, haven't we wandered off and
left someone in the shower?

                         "What hath god wrought?"  If memory serves, those
are the first words transmitted over the transatlantic cable.  "What hath
the salon wrought?" Harry and Forest breathed in stunned admiration as Tina
emerged from The Play Pen's youth-oriented House of Mischievous Miracles .
Hair high, shoulders bare, legs forever from under the hem of little black
dress to her first pair of heels, eyes huge do to the touch of Panda Bear
Pete, former makeup artist behind bars, a pearl choker -- I knew good and
damn well my haberdashic ignorance was going to one day stifle me as a
novelist -- against the ivory white of her flat chest; this bracelet, those
earrings, the other bauble, that accent, adding, in a radiating symphony,
to the tall, simple, brown-haired, brown-eyed elegance that needed freaking
squat to stop the show.

                         She walked, tripping a mesmerizing version of the
light fantastic in her new pumps (I hope), between the tall males in their
bib and tucker, moon above, quiet lighting along the pathway below, setting
their step to the music flowing from the auditorium, half kids going to a
sock hop, half adults attending a state occasion.  Lots of everything for
everybody, and, and I'm not bragging here, as fine a send-off for a long
legged tomboy virgin as any proud poppa could dream, fantasize, or imagine,
at least on this planet.

                         As I've said before, though no walk in the park,
write enough long novels, and you to catch the occasional break.  In this
case, it's Queenie and Samantha going off to spend the morning together,
after dancing punta together in my west bedroom window.  Not quite a proud
poppa watching them shine on each other, their contrasting beauties adding
a healthy ten percent to one plus one.  Risky business, of course, because
as far as I know, they could be heading to Louise's boyfriend's house, who
might have a friend...  And, if they didn't have garden lights and music
wafting onto the evening air from the auditorium, they didn't need it.
What a freaking pair.  To try to guide them into more aggression in the
housekeeping department, so their relationships will last, when I'm outta
here, and be friend to both, and lover to one, is a down-home version of
the million-pager.  It's freaking music that one enhances the other,
working from the dynamic duo to the novel, not vice versa, because they
have no idea I'm even a writer, just that I'm always home, typing.  They
have no concept of myself as artist, and I'll bet in the whole of the
coming year, they never once ask for an autograph.  I try to impress in
other ways.  While they were gone, three hours, I cut my hair, kneaded ten
pounds of tortilla dough, whipped up a tub of spicy chili and onion rice,
cleaned the house, left the kitchen immaculate, entertained and fed Delton
and Simpson, and wrote a thousand words.  Guess I've earned a cup of tea.
More than, it turns out, for Samantha and Randy just arrived.  He's eating
my rice with banana, says it's great.  More than.

                         Dancing anyone?

                         Tina wore a lily on her left wrist.  Guess what it
signified.  Every male of the hundred or more knew.  Every eye of the two
hundred or more, the number actually odd because of a lean, Nordic athlete
wearing a black patch, flashed hard and lingered a long moment.  Not a
murmur from the thirty something females.  Guess what that signified.

                         Tina's eyes wide from, believe it or not, a touch
of belladonna (proving I know at least something of my craft), saw
everything as a hazy blur of color and shape.  She squeezed the arms of her
very lucky seeing-eye dogs, and they guided her through the reception line,
where Vargas plucked her like a prize rose and swept her off to the
orchestra's lilting accompaniment.  Formalities over, Harry and Forest were
escorted to a floorside table, and, alcohol denied as ludicrous overkill,
served a house punch consisting of equal parts grape juice and ginger ale,
to which had been added an additional ten percent of strong tea.  At The
Play Pen (yes, you loyal readers, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Plunkett
Group) even the punch was otherworldly.

                         It was a dance, was a dance, was a dance.  A
nicer-country club ambience, with two notable exceptions.  The men weren't
all outrageously young, and three were easily in their fifties, but there
was not one single extra pound in a dozen, and, the girls were young, with
Tina approximately of a middle age.  Five of the girls wore blue pansies on
their left wrists, so there'd be no surprises in the bridal suits.
Everyone knew what blue signified.  Can you guess?

                         Six virgins, Tina in the middle, one wearing a
becoming combination of blue and white.  They whirled to the music, colors
flying, fit males panting, lithe girls laughing, the Kids of the King not
averse to a little raggae and rap in their mix.  Sometimes the serendipity
thing really has some kick.  Samantha's dancing to Lucky Dube "This Choice
I Made", with Randy setting at my left shoulder clapping time.  You know
those balls with all the little mirrors?  Who needs one?  Now Kira has her
own chair to dance in as she looks west to the mountains, a sight lost on
her because Randy's taken her plastic flute.  Now she's pointing at
something, the setting sun playing through her hair, and me thinking black
thoughts about Linden for thieving the camera.

                         In fantasy land the band played on.  Fathers and
daughters.  Big brothers and little sisters, uncles and nieces or nephews,
odd couples, four and five footers mismatched with men for the most part
six feet and over They did the bunny hop, a ten-minute twist mix, Bee-Gee
greats, and The Kids could more than half play Abba's "Nina Pretty
Ballerina".

                         Midnight came, and it was not without trepidation
that the males watched the fateful clock, for surely at least some of these
girls must turn to pumpkins.  Nymphs they were, however, and nymphs they
remained.  The orchestra slowed its pace, reprising Righteous Brothers and
Elvis standards.  Over the next hour a pecking order slowly evolved, a
circle of four or five males circling each virgin, with one or two
attaching themselves to each of the girls with a red or blue flower.  Less
time on the floor, more huddled at the tables, by consensus a loyalty bond
building so that for the last half-hour each pair or group remained intact.
A final waltz extended into the darkness of guttering candles and an energy
level quite out of place at the end of a long evening.
                         While the Plunkett enterprise was perhaps light on
bowing and scraping servitude, it was nonetheless run with a weather eye
for showmanship.  The male or alpha male of the evening with each girl
ordered the bower of his choice, leading the female and her attendent
males, if any, to their individual creation.  There were sailor motifs,
summer camp motifs, along with their scouting cousins, and a variety of
scenarios from a simulated coal mine to a radio broadcast booth.  Half were
novel, the other half variations of the standard honeymoon suite.

                         Tina had nodded at Gregg Killington, a tall, rangy
Japanese American an hour earlier, and his if-I'm-a-winner choice had been
neatly executed by the competent staff of the resort.  His bungalow had
been re-decorated as an Oriental tea room, and Harry and Forest nodded to
their host as they entered the mild and lovely room.  Gregg bad his guests
change, asking, as was his prerogative, Tina to remain in her black sheath
rather than donning the traditional silks of Asia.  As he taught his bride
of the evening the rudiments of the tea ceremony, the ten year old's father
and honorary uncle emerged from the bathroom and bedroom of the suite,
along with two sailors, Cliff and Dennis, both boyish ensigns in the
Australian navy.  At Gregg's nod, they knelt at the table as their host
helped Tina, his left arms gently around her slim waist, pour each
porcelain cup.  Harry, in turn, nodded at the delicate beauty of a former
farmhand and tomboy, and the girl allowed Gregg to bring her delicate face
to his for their first welcoming kiss.  Quickly, it was back to the tea,
and all six sat knowing there was no place saner nor more likely to be
happy than the place they were.

                         From here on, the play was in Tina's hands.  As
Gregg's touches became more intimate the girl nodded at the males kneeling
around the table, then at the bedroom.  This was typical, but it was also
possible for a girl to be alone with her lover, if she wished, either to
return to them, or spend the night behind a closed door while the males
satisfied themselves and each other as they fantasized about the couple in
the adjoining bedroom.

                         The males stood, each huge against the silk of his
robe, and the girl led Gregg through the paper door.  She placed her father
and Forest a foot and a half from the waist of the low bed, with the two
Australians at her feet.  She and Gregg left the bedroom, returning in a
moment as if coming home from an evening out.  The tall male carried the
girl across the threshold and placed her on the seat at the dresser,
kissing her hair and unclipping her pearl necklace.  "I hade a beautiful
evening, darling," the girl said, playing her role quietly, "do you want to
go check the girls before you unzip me?"
                         "You were the princess of the ball," the handsome
young husband said into her hair, leaving Tina for a few moments.  The girl
caught her dad's eye in the mirror and beamed a shy smile of thanks.  They
might someday coin a term, "Playpen Brave", for the look he gave her back.
It was illegal, immoral, and thoroughly indecent, and it beat the average
back seat by about ten million miles, so there was nothing downcast in his
countenance, rather, intellect being what it is, just courage greatly
enhanced by the beauty and grace of the tableau which played slowly on the
young adult's return from checking on the couple's sleeping daughters.

                         I've used this line before, but developments seem
to favor using it again.  Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the
novel...
                         Who should arrive but Queenie's notorious thirteen
year old cousin.  A very bad girl, from many reports.  A tall, slim total
wildcat, willowy and flat chested as a child, but with the look of several
women.  Noah was very curt.  He's from a church group in Indiana which has
handled the adoption of three of Daisy's kids.  We `met' under strained
circumstances, longish story, when I was evicting Shirley, Rhageedha's
mother, for laziness below and beneath any call of duty.  He showed up with
a stove and gas tank, after I'd asked her to leave several times (she had a
perfectly good place to go), and I finally had to blow my stack.
Interesting variant on Christianity, which one assumes he espouses.  I've
probably spent four thousand dollars, one thing and another, keeping Daisy,
four kids, and five dogs not only off the street, where they were headed,
but fed, clothed, booked and in school; cooking, cleaning, and supervising
homework to the tune of some hundreds of hours, without so much as hinting
at anything illicit with any of them.  One would think that might merit a
nod of respect and a civil hello, instead of an `uh'.  Alex, my landlord,
is a former YMCA officer, diplomat, and lay clergyman; I've been perfectly
frank with him about what I believe and write, and he doesn't seem to mind.
Detective writers don't kill (except Agatha Christie, who apparently tried
once), and science fiction writers don't fly rockets.  Airline pilots and
deep-sea divers very rarely write successful stories of flying and
underwater drama, and so on.  Being a novelist is being an artist, and
there is no more connection than there is with a real sunflower and one
rendered at the hand of Vincent Van Gogh.  In fact, he got it about right,
because there is no less connection, either.

                         So the uptight moralizing preacher, or, maybe he
was just tired at the end of a long day, and the shoot with both hips
thirteen-year-old, wicked as they come, all playing out in real time.

                         By the way, since we've got enough pots boiling to
stand back from the stove for a moment, I mentioned cutting my own hair.
I've been doing this for thirty-odd years, have been to a barber three
times in as many decades.  While I was out shopping with Jose one time, I
found a neat little two-piece comb gizmo that holds two razor blades.  I
think I made a mistake, once, but otherwise get slick razor cuts that last
for two or three months, where a trim at the barber seems to last about as
many days.  Several people here have asked who my `stylist' was -- sorry --
and I tried to cut Linden's hair once, with zero success, so it's an
idiosyncratic thing.  The handle on my beloved comb device broke today, but
it's just as effective without it, so should last a few more years.
Actually, the biggest challenge is to avoid nicking yourself on the razors
while you work, especially, your ears.  I've trimmed with a Bic razor, but
it takes three times longer.  I don't even need a mirror, which brings up
an interesting story I saw at three in the morning on CNN.  It was a
feature on blind barbers in India.  Super idea.  That's the kind of
excellent thinking shown once, and never repeated so that we may learn more
about Israel.

                         Interesting thought concerning Girl X, my new
tenant.  If she's as promiscuous as legend has it, why is she not more
developed?  My sister was active with my brother from the age of eight or
nine, and she matured very early and fully.  Audrey, of "Stonington
Stories", was active with her older brother, and she also developed when
she was eleven or so.  Then again, the girl in red, because I was just
downstairs, may have aids.  Bad answer.  Shook hands with Noah, seems very
nice.  We should be friends, or something, having more than a bit in
common, but it's a strangish world here at the brink of the rain forest.
Why, I do believe, people have written books about it.

                         Anyway, a great Sunday, and fitting payoff to
hundreds of lesser namesakes.  I think it should be abolished; the
loneliness and treading water much more damaging than anything to do with
the church is beneficial.

                         Her name is Kara, and she is wild looking as
tigers.  Totally intriguing.  Just what Samantha and Queenie need for a
little playmate.

                         I should reference here, that Sim managed
crediting me some weed.  Wow, in debt to my drug habit.  Five dollars.
Will I make it through the crises?  I mention it, apropos of I know not
what, because I think it makes no difference in my work, whatever.  The
time I'll know is at two tomorrow morning, when I'm passing the ten
thousand word mark after a long day of domestic activity.  I try to expound
on this, because of the staggering statistics and fiscal and psychological
cost to the nation, but find it difficult, because there is so little to
say.  I think a good analogy is as follows: Getting stoned while flying a
light aircraft under VFR conditions would probably make you a slightly
better pilot.  The key here is that pot makes you more attentive to what
you know.  You'd be more attuned to your check list, to balance your fuel
load, to waypoints and radio changes.  On the other hand, flying in
instruments might not be a good idea.  Because you are more attentive to
what you know, you tend to block new, unfamiliar information.  A good
pilot, flying familiar instrument procedures, would probably execute with
more precision and forethought, but an amateur, bombarded with strange
situations, a specific example would be back-course holding after a
missed-approach, might be less capable than a stone sober pilot of equal
talent and experience.  I can give another specific example, this time
something that happened to me, personally.  I was driving from once house
to another in Concord.  Margaret Alcock, a magna cum laude graduate of
B.U., and long-time girlfriend, was with me.  We got half a minute or so
into our trip and she started laughing.  I had the wipers on, and it wasn't
raining.  Again, this was a byproduct of being attentive; I was listening
to her, and at the time it just didn't seem very important whether the
wipers were on, or not.  That would be an extreme reaction to smoking
marijuana.  Having said that, I should also note that I think many things
to do with the computer might be difficult to accomplish with a buzz on.
On the other hand, if you were checking code you'd already written, it
might, again, by making you more attentive, help you find a bug.  In
temporary summary, "Consumer Reports", hands-down the most fastidious
possible mass-market publication, gave marijuana all green lights, pointing
out the ripping bias of publications such as "The Reader's Digest."  I have
a specific memory along this line.  A radio column by Paul Harvey who
claimed pot was five times more lethal than cigarettes because the smokers
held the gasses in their lungs for an extended period of time.  He
neglected to say that a healthy pot smokers consumes one, perhaps two
`cigarettes' a day, and that there has never been the remotest link between
marijuana and lung disease of any kind.  Jamaicans are born and bred on it,
with zero impact, aside from the political machinery which harasses and
entangles them.

                         I acknowledge the home-wrecking impact, but its
source is the high cost of the product, not its narcotic affect which is
akin to coffee, and about one percent of amyl nitrate, poppers, which are
sold legally in many locations, even Dubuque.  My solution is to have
distribution State controlled, with the handicapped handling the
merchandise to the greatest extent possible.  That it cost ten dollars for
ten joints, and that there be some form of rationing similar for that used
for strategic products in wartime.  I wasted away my youth reading, and
offer it as an alternative, while pointing out that down time is down time,
and in excess breeds its own very obvious results.

                         Her name is Kayla.  She personifies the pedophiles
dream, tall, sleek, and as flat chested as a boy, and wearing a training
bra.  Her eyes and especially her nose are East Indian, very dramatic, and
she has an exaggerated African lower lip that is worth the price of the
ticket of and by itself.  She seems very mild, attentive and friendly.  Let
me give you an example of `attentive'.  One burner on my stove puts out too
much heat to cook tortillas.  When I showed her this, she actually bent
over and looked, asking me to adjust the flame twice.  The same scenario
with Samantha or Queenie would result in a `yeah-yeah' from the bedroom,
where the stereo is.  Nice to know there's one girl here who actually might
not burn down the place.  As mentioned, Dangriga is a thin crescent on the
verge of a trackless wilderness, so the local idea of a vixen might be as
mild tempered and graceful as the prototypical girl-next-door, what with
jaguars to set the standard.  She and Samantha seem made for each other,
so, chances are, I'll retire happily to my fantasy world, hands to myself,
watch the sacred word-count soar (as I said, hands to myself), and try,
from time to time, to remember I'm in the second act of my seventh freaking
novel.

                         Given a choice, would I treat them all as
daughters; never an impure thought?  Get real, but the answer is pretty
mild thoughts, and thoughts, only.  But there is no chance.  In the first
place, I'm due for somebody, and, while I'm not legally a king needing an
heir for his throne, there is that nagging million plus Belize dollars
which have to go to somebody.  In the second place, this is no playground
for young girls.  The aids rate is high and getting higher, plus the whole
list of other STDs.  Alternative relationships may be illegal and immoral,
but traditional ones are outright deadly.  I am for starting a restricted
sex club as a practical scheme simply because the religious approach tends
to be easily-forgotten theory, and is only applicable to a small percentage
of especially devoted, which always means wealthy, families.  Yes, a strict
church-girl upbringing provides a good chance of physical and moral purity
until marriage.  Yes, vast numbers of girls do not get a church-girl
upbringing.  Yes, yes, yes, the second act.

                         "Tina, sweetie," Gregg whispered as he undid the
clasp on the little black dress, "Gracie's on top of the blanket, and she
didn't wear her top."
                         "That's the third time, darling," the girl
replied, her voice low and husky as she fell into her improv, "so I don't
think you have to torment yourself in regards to your daughter's feelings
about you."
                         "I shouldn't be having the feelings I do,
darling," the adult whispered as he took town the child's auburn tresses,
"I love you so much I'd never want anything to even be a hiccup in what we
have with each other."

                         "I love you, too," Tina said, "but remember, I was
a nine year old with a cute dad, too, and I thought he was the living end,
and the day I noticed I was starting to develop, the first thing of all was
I wanted to show him.  And, guess what, you happened to be a drop-dead dad.
I'd worry about her if she wasn't attracted to you, and if you weren't
attracted by her, I'd start asking for recommendations of mental health
experts."

                         "I keep thinking, `How can you be just a wife,'"
Gregg whispered, "you're so much more.  Ward Cleaver or Mike Brady wouldn't
know what to do with you."
                         "Well," the girl responded, "Al Bundy would keep
me in shoes, and Tim Allen would keep my toaster working, so there are
useful references, too."
                         "Still," the man said, his voice again serious, "
do you think your daughter is old enough to be flirting as much as she
does?"
                         "Yes, darling," the girl said, "and, since the
subjects has reared its beautiful head, I'm going to tell you that when I
was nine I did more than flirt with my dad; more than just show him my
little pansy-size nipples.  If Gracie has the same feelings as I, and I'm
sure she not only has them, but has had them for the last few months, and
will continue to have them well into the future, I want her to have the
same extreme and rare privilege I had, and that was learning with a man I
both respected and adored.  If you think you can buy your daughter, and
Pammy, when she's a couple of years older, one stitch more, for any amount
of money, then you have a world of shopping ahead of you."

                         "Oh, darling," the young man whispered as he
leaned over her slim body, pulling down the zipper on her dress, kissing
her shoulder the instant they were naked.  "Was he gentle with you?"
                         "Beautifully gentle," Tina replied, standing
slowly, so her husband could undo her training bra, "just as you'll be with
your Gracie."
                         "Oh, baby," the man whispered into her neck, her
dress falling to the floor.
                         "Let me tell you, darling," the girl whispered
over her right shoulder as the man's gentle hands found her tender, white
belly, "I don't want it to be any kind of secret and I only waited because
I wanted to be sure of Gracie."
                         "If you want to keep it private, that's okay,"
Gregg whispered, "as long as you're with me, the past means nothing."
                         "I don't," Tina said, "just the opposite.  I want
to share every moment with you, one-third for you, and another third so I
can relive what happened that first time in your hands and on your bed, and
the final third, so you can teach Gracie the same way Daddy taught me, and
Pammy as soon as she's interested."

                         "I'm very lucky you picked me at the dance
tonight," Gregg whispered.
                         "I'm very lucky to have such a father," the girl
whispered back, "Daddy."
                         "Oh, angel," he murmured, "teach me."
                         "Yes, love," the ten year old responded.  "We were
playing marbles.  It was a rainy day, and I invited him up to the attic to
play on the carpet, with a circle, instead of a pot."

                         "What were you wearing, darling?" the new father
asked.
                         "A sweat shirt and jeans," the girl said, turning
to unbutton the silk robe of the male standing close behind her, "I didn't
want him to get suspicious.  Naturally, it was a little hot in the attic,
so that gave me a chance to take them off without spooking him.  But that
was after we'd been playing for awhile."

                         Now, they weren't there to play childish games,
"Play Pen" though it might have been called.  Management was serious in
providing alternative vectors for long-term loving relationships, with a
healthy dash of wanton carnality thrown in on the theory that, whether he
saw it or not, the knowledge that a father's daughter or a brother's kid
sister bucking frantically in the strong arms of an athletic young male,
and the girl's returning flushed, throbbing and soaking wet to her alpha
male, was an aphrodisiac of lasting quality that could not help but make a
good relationship significantly better, so, no, marbles were not provided.
There was however, tinfoil, and, improvising, Gregg and Tina were able to
enact a simulated game of marbles with balls of the foil.  It was perhaps a
bit like playing pool on a golf green, but the game, itself, was of
secondary importance.  Pretend.
                         Tina, in her tiny bra and panties rolled her
ersatz marble toward a sheet of notepaper.  Gregg, naked, his distended
penis jutting almost seven inches down from his waist, took his turn.
                         "Show me how you hold it, Daddy," the girl said in
a soft, husky voice after they'd played a few minutes.  She sidled next to
the tall athletic Japanese American male.
                         There may be different grips for golf clubs and
tennis rackets, and if there aren't, billions are being wasted each year on
false lore, but, in marbles, there is only one.  The father should have
been suspicious, but he was a good man, so he brought his daughter gently
beneath him so as to take her right hand in his own.

                         "Daddy, isn't it hot up here?" the girl asked.
                         "Yes, darling, it is a little," Gregg role-played.
                         "Daddy?" the girl said, her voice now very soft.
                         "Yes, sweetheart?" the man said to the girl
underneath his powerful chest.
                         "Would you just die of embarrassment if I took off
my sweatshirt?"
                         "Are you wearing a blouse?" Gregg asked.
                         "No, Daddy," Tina said, her voice now a whisper as
she and her first lover played their game at the foot of the bed, their
witnesses positioned for a good view, "but Mom bought me a bra yesterday,
so I won't be bare chested."
                         "You're growing up," the young man temporized,
kissing the head under his chin.
                         "Daddy," the girl responded, "we had a long talk,
and she said I could show it to you if I wanted to, and I do, Daddy,
besides, it's hot up here, and I like playing with you, and I don't want to
go back downstairs.  Mom's visiting Granddad, so this is our chance to
really be alone together.  Please."

                         "It's not to happen," the man whispered.
                         "Daddy's aren't meant to molest their girls," the
girl acknowledged, "but I want you to look at me.  Look the word up in the
dictionary, but not now, it means bother, annoy, interfere with, or
disturb.  It also means attack, and who, I would ask you, Daddy, is
attacking who?"  She didn't bite him hard, but she did bite him, growling
softly.

                         "Your mom really said that?" Gregg asked, nicely
catching a tone half way bemusement and wonder.
                         "She knows how I feel about you," the girl
replied, "and she thinks it's dead cute.  `A great way to keep you very
happy and very at home,' to quote her."

                         "Darling, I would love to see you," the male
rasped, letting the child from under him so she could mime pulling a heavy
shirt over her head and kneel in from of him, as he knelt close in from of
her.
                         "Take yours off, too, Daddy, so I won't be
embarrassed," the girl said.  Gregg copied her charade.  "Oh, Daddy," she
whispered, "you're beautiful."
                         "Baby," the man whispered softly, as her hands
found his, guiding him to her face, then down her slim neck, finally
leaving him (calling off the attack) to find his face, his neck, and his
powerful shoulders.
                         "Daddy," the girl said softly, "take me to my
bed."
                         "I love you very much, my darling daughter," the
man said, rising, picking up the seventy pound child, and lying her on the
nearby bed as her father and the other males moved to their original
positions, but now kneeling adjacent the low Asian sleeping mat.  Tina
laced her fingers behind her neck and arched in display, her long, slim
legs demurely together.  Gregg knelt at her right side, looking down into
her huge brown eyes.

                         "It won't interfere with Mom," the girl whispered
to her stag, "that's the biggest danger of incest.  A daughter coming
between husband wife with her youth.  Corrupting the marriage with secrecy,
manipulation, and a private agenda."
                         "Will you share out bed?" the man asked.
                         "Yes, Daddy," the child said, "and here is a
secret, she wants another baby as soon as possible, so I get to hold you
both while it's happening.  Pretty sexy, eh?"

                         "Incomprehensible," Gregg whispered in agreement,
adding: "but what about you angel.  I can see your nipples bulging against
your bra, and last I knew I was a very potent male."
                         "Mom's wild about the idea of the two of us being
pregnant together," the ten year old answered, "but she says it's probably
just a fantasy.  The biggest secret of all is that I'm Granddad's baby, his
child, so your gift of family love will be my child as soon as I'm mature
enough to give her to you, safely, probably when I'm twelve years old, if
we go to a special clinic in Switzerland."

                         "I still have every feeling of incest with you,"
Gregg said, "you are as much more a daughter as you were more a wife."
                         "And I know your seed will be rich with taboo and
sin, Daddy," Tina said, "that a filthy wickedness will be mine when you
whisper to me what you whisper to Mom."

                         "I will tell you," Gregg promised, finally leaning
to molest the child at his knees.  He started at her heaving flanks, both
his gentle hands covering the soft whiteness of her belly, then moving down
to the band of her tiny pink panties and pulling them down slightly in
front.  "Oh, love," he whispered, finding a silky trace of blond hair,
"you're more mature than I thought."
                         "Daddy," the girl responded, her voice tender and
soft, "if it happens, the Group will give me RU-486, but we'll be able to
share it for a month.  They're very practical about such things, feeling,
on a one-time basis, the sacrifice of a salamander is an acceptable price
to pay for a very special few weeks between a father and his growing girl."

                         Gregg's gentle fondling moved from the girl's
belly to her slim chest.  His fingers slipped beneath her training bra as
he stared into her eyes.  "That feels beautiful," the child whispered up at
him.
                         "It feels nice to me, too," the young man said,
"but, honestly, darling, I think I could mount your brown eyes on
toothpicks and love you just as much as I do now."
                         "Maybe tomorrow," the honey smiled, moving her
tiny hands to her delicate chest and pulling up the wispy silk covering her
rose-bud breasts.  Gregg bent and found her with his mouth, her hands
running through his athlete's trim, pulling him gently to her.  He kissed
and sucked for a long time, then his lips traveled at her bidding to her
young mouth and she murmured welcome.  "Gracie's old enough for this," she
whispered, "just as I was with Dad."

                         "Yes, darling," he said, somehow keeping up with
the shift in stories, generations, motifs, relationships, preferences,
attitudes, and secret hopes and forbidden desires.
                         "Take everything off," she said, lifting her hips.
The man's right hand left her tender young right nipple and slid slowly to
her arching loins.  He peeled her pink silk over her knees, and, as she
gently kicked them free, he removed her bra.  The instant her panties were
clear, Tina spread her legs wide.  Gregg straddled her right leg, coming to
rest on his knees between her ten-year-old thighs.  He dropped over her on
his muscular forearms, and the girl brought her knees high on his now
heaving and sweating flanks, her arms also encircling the powerful body
poised above her own juvenile frame.  Harry knelt at the couple's waist,
and guided the man to his daughter.  When the female felt it was right she
whispered, "Yes," to Gregg, and, still in Harry's hand, he began thrusting
against her wetness and her yielding softness.

                         "I like your hand on me," Gregg whispered to
Harry.  Bisexuality was assumed, much like sanity, as a Play Pen
imperative, but it was nice to be welcomed.  Harry half mounted Gregg,
continuing to guide the young adult as he thrust gently between their
coupling bodies.  Tina gazed up at her father in wonder, and her right hand
gripped his sweating shoulder.  "Oh, Dad," she whispered, "you're really
letting him get inside me."

                         "Are you okay?" he rasped in response.  She
nodded, smiling shyly, her hand squeezing his shoulder in reassurance.  The
father released her daughter's handsome young partner, and rose partially
on his knees.  Gregg sensed Harry's rapidly increasing tension and rose
high on his arms.  "He's going to cum on you," he said to the little girl.
Forest held the girl's head so she was comfortable looking down between her
body and Gregg's.  Her father's big circumcised penis was rigid and almost
motionless, circumcised, and pulsing hotly.  "Yes, Daddy," the girl
whispered, to grunts from both the males.  "Daddy," she said, "Gregg's
cuming inside me.  Show me."  "Yes, baby," he whispered and in moments he
was beginning to wet her.  "It's getting harder," she panted.  "Yes,
darling," the father said, his own ejaculation quickly becoming hard, fast,
and uncontrollable.  Forest and the sailors joined the couple, masturbating
and ejaculating heavily over the child's bare chest and pretty face.  As
Gregg began shaking uncontrollably on his rigid arms, the Australians
helped him gently from the girl, and Forest let the girl's head lie back on
her pillow, and helped the panting, sweating Harry between his daughter's
slick thighs.  He fisted his friend into her, sensing when the father was
against his daughter's hymen.  "Yes, Daddy," the girl hissed, lurching to
him, the sailor's holding her widely spread legs.  "Oh, love," the man
whispered as he penetrated with a single stabbing thrust.  Her eyes filled
with tears which he immediately licked away.

                         For a minute they remained tense and unmoving at
the waist.  Harry lowered himself fully on the child, wanting to look into
her beautiful eyes, but unable to resist the sensation of her slick young
chest and her swollen nipples against his own heaving, athletic chest.  He
kissed her, then rose again, because the child was avid in her gaze.
Forest again raised her head, and the father proceeded to take his daughter
with gentle, deliberate strokes, quickly mounting to his hilt, than setting
a strong, fast rhythm and her slender arms gripped his flanks and her
fingers raked his back.  The sailors freed her long, slim legs and they
circled his plunging thighs, pulling him as she, helped by her bedmates,
lunged and bucked hard and fast in response.  "Oh, yes," the girl moaned,
as she truly lost her virginity and responded to what was happening inside
her, happily letting the long wave curl slowly to the shelving beach, then
hover in loving delight until it crashed, sending her into a full, howling
seizure as her head lolled and her body turned to stone, then to jelly.
Harry froze, fully mounted, welcoming his child back with gentle kisses,
then, as she eased herself tentatively to her, found her exactly the young
and avid athlete he'd brought her up to be, and again mastered her for ten
minutes before a second stuttering wave of climaxes engulfed her, leaving
her limp and ragged beneath him with barely energy to coo happily as he
began cumming in her.

                         Gregg invited Forest and the Australians to stay,
and Harry nodded gratefully as he gathered his wet, naked child, and, slick
with sperm, himself, carried her across the softly lit courtyard to their
bungalow, where he made love to her through the long night.


                         CHAPTER SIXTEEN


                         Kayla night and Kayla day.  Vixen of the dark to
school girl of the light.  Very nice, very sweet; hair done nicely, sans
the red dress and training bra.  A cute pet, but, alas, gone already as she
was just here for the one night.  I quizzed Queenie about her, wondering
why the big reputation, and she said the girl liked to play too much.  I
can hear a sigh of about the density of a tornado from ten or twenty
million American homes beset with surly, rebellious malcontents.  What
would a daughter that's too playful bring on the open market, to the
nearest million?  She'll be welcomed any time, on any basis; good kid.  In
the meantime, Queenie's cleaned up the kitchen twice in a row, which is, in
the words of Pat Norton, on Tech TV, scary.  Samantha spent two hours in
bed with me, trying to convince me to go to the bank today, instead of
waiting until mid-morning tomorrow, when my funds should be credit to my
account.  Very sweet, very, very funny, and living proof that cute is
something you don't try to be.  She was refused, although there one chance
in four the money is there as it's sometimes sent on the fourteenth if the
fifteenth falls on the weekend.  It's nice to have something to talk about,
and I believe you get maximum flavor from a chicken if you wait a month for
it.  Anyway, that was the major subject of conversation, which will give
you some idea of life in poverty gulch.  Chicken is a big deal.  So I'm
told, you can get a girl for half a bird.  Elston and Tonton know every
place in town that sells, them, where they come from, how they are
packaged, who has fresh and frozen, and what they cost (about
one-seventy-five, U.S., a pound).  Big smiles at just the mention of the
C-word.  I think I'll try chicken a la king.  It was, next to chow mein,
the dread of the cafeteria menu for some fifteen years of my life, but,
made with cream sauce, instead of institutional who-know-what and corn
starch, it might pass.  We aced out the month with plenty of everything
except powdered creamer for the tea, so score a good grade on fuel
management, the pilot's number one absolute responsibility.  (Can't have
too much or you'll bend the pipes that hold the wheels when you land.)

                         Being a legend in one's own mind brings up the
specter of cult status.  While this is something I'd rather avoid, seeing
what Edgar Cayce did to my cousin Alec, it's not up for the god to
determine how he is revered.  In case it does happen, I have a couple of
trivia items for the deepest of the most deeply imbued, moronic sods.  A
question could go: How does the unearthly one use his telephone.  There are
two answers, seeing as how I'm still offline in the hardwired sense.  I use
the base of the phone to prop the door of my bedroom/studio open just wide
enough for the cats, but still closed to give me some privacy when the kids
come up to make breakfast (if I've been working all night and am sleeping)
It's perfect size and easy to pick up.  I use the handset to throw at the
cats when they start scratching the linoleum under my bed, something that
can go on for ten minutes as their infinitesimal brains try to cope with
modern living.  The cord allows me to retrieve the missile for a second
shot.  It worked so well that now I just have to growl and they scat.
That's how I use my telephone.

                         Kidding, if I was, aside, one of the rare
privileges of living in an untrammeled society is being able to keep as
many as eleven house lions.  The vet bills, alone, in the States would run
to the thousands of dollars, and here there are no vets.  Add kitty litter
and I could literally support a family on the cost of a few pets.  Here the
whole gang, now, I think, for one never knows for sure with an open-door
policy, seven animals costs about two dollars a day, and yes, I tried using
the copious supplies of natural sand around my house, but it just added to
the mess, and my present system, while yielding of its highly unpleasant
couple of minutes each day with spatula, cold, brown oatmeal, and plastic
dish, is absolutely free, as well as inspiring spot-on housekeeping.  In
spite of their remarkable stupidity in some areas, the animals have picked
the easiest and most convenient possible waste area, and if they hadn't, if
they just went willy-nilly anywhere, anytime, they'd be living outside.
They make mistakes but are over ninety-nine percent consistent.  Good kitty
kitties.  I never think of less than an art collection.  They have
exquisitely beautiful faces, I don't know what could exceed them.  They
are, in the main, very affectionate with each other, and marvelously gentle
at throwing a five day old kitten a foot in the air.  My big tiger, a
perfect and huge tom, seems to have gone for good.  He was missing for
first a day, then, awhile later, for two days, and awhile later three days,
and it's now been a week.  Superb animal, probably seven or eight pounds,
perfect health, and he ever came back with any kind of scars.  I have
another very big, coal black tom, his brother, but they rarely fought, and
the tiger was by far the heavier of the two.  Probably seduced by cooking
chicken -- I better watch out or Samantha will be next -- or sardines.

                         Money again.  What does it look like?  How does it
feel?  It's been two weeks or something like that.  From here on, famous
last words, it should be a cake walk.  Everything is paid for except five
dollars weed and a few dollars for cigarettes, and the carrying expenses
fall well within my thousand- plus dollar income.  Of course, there will be
all those chickens, but even so things like furnishing and fixing up should
begin to proceed.  I'm half appalled I don't want to be back on the cable.
I miss, very much, Chief Inspector Morse on our BBC outlet, as well as "Law
and Order" and "NYPD Blue".  There were never enough Bundies or Golden
Girls, but I loved what there were.  The documentary channels kept me
engaged for eight years, and were of enormous review value, as well as
delineating the real Churchill, among others, but there does come a point
when the diminishing returns turn them into time wasters.  I miss Peter
Jennings, my archetype person in the American media.  (Jackie Chan, as old
readers know, is my ultimate person, period.)  I miss "Vacation", but am
thrilled at its monumental status, though often rudely cut by Hebrews, as a
classic.  That's a pretty pitiful handful off a baseline of sixty channels
times eighteen hours a day (sound often off but closed-captioning always
on) times eight years.  Most of it, way, way over ninety eight percent, is
penny-dreadful.  I'll admit things improved dramatically with the demise of
the nauseating black psychic, but Everest is a big pile of rubble, and most
of it seems to survive.  WGN for example.  I was captive of it in Mexico,
with only eight channels ('82 -- '87) but probably did not watch a single
connected hour in the whole time I had cable here.  Most others were equal
wastes, and it's possible the "Odyssey" channel was actually worse.  The
very worst, even exceeding the Oprah wanna-bes in pure loathsomeness, was
all children's programming, save "Pappyland" with Mike Caliglio (sp) as
Pappy Drewit, which gets a solid B-plus.  If you want total and absolute as
adjectives for national shame, children's television, produced very largely
by those of Jewish background, is the place to stick them.  And it could do
so much; teach energetically and vividly, instead of one variation of
squalling puppet after another in a manic kaleidoscope that is toxic.  Do
you hear me?  Toxic. It is a giant step toward the end of times and its
perpetrators should be dropped by parachute in Newfoundland.

                         I should bestir myself and look up and read the
article on the New Novel.  I do wonder if I started it.  The new novel is
plot light, because after September Eleventh, plots become silly.  It is
free ranging, like "Independence Day", but has included perhaps a quarter
non-fiction material, including autobiography.  It is character intense and
superbly crafted.  It is easy to write and made available either free on
the net or at low cost.  It is uncensored, giving the abused or misused
equal opportunity to respond with their own work.  It takes over from
television in five to ten years, providing, per hour, approximately ten
times the former medium's input.  I don't claim to have invented it,
feeling it a predictable next step, but will take credit for stabilizing
it, much as great composers of the classic era stabilized the symphony and
concerto.  This is how you do it, and be generous, leave it to your
grandchildren to try the next step.

                         Writers may shake their heads.  "So you say," they
intone, meaning I'm being a bit glib by calling it easy to write.  It is.
No clever twists and turns.  That should add years to the life of the
brain, by itself.  No heavy research.  That can bog a novelist down for
years and bankrupt him.  No advisors, editors, consultants, or help of any
kind.  All these make it easy.  The computer is as much an improvement over
the typewriter as quill and paper were over chisel and granite.  The major
Web archives are priceless sources of sample material, largely unedited and
of all qualities.  The writer should understand that you may learn as much
from bad examples as good ones, especially in respect to the fine balance
of overstatement and understatement essential to perfect work.  So yes,
relatively easy, though remaining by far the most difficult of art forms.
(In my life I've known a number of people who could draw, photograph, and
sculpt very nicely, but never one who could write a short story, or a
single chapter of a compelling work.  In the U.S. today, there are probably
no more than twenty or thirty good novelists, and, save myself, nothing
approaching a great one.  Now who wants to play?  But, again, watch out for
that overstatement.  Most of the stories on the archives are nicely turned
out and eminently readable.  Cartoons have their distinct place in the
scheme of things, and the saner half of the population would rather look at
the journeyman's art than Picasso's.)

                         Did I just trash myself?  I've had my share of
lucky breaks on this manuscript, so perhaps it's time I stuck my foot in
it.  After all, somebody's got call me on something, or I'll stop just
thinking I'm a god and go wafting off on the breeze.  If Samantha gets wind
of it, count yourself out ten percent, as being on the receiving end of
your tithes, donations, contributions and gifts would suit her to a tee.
Look at it this way: what price can you put on teaching a girl to add?

                         The Seventeenth has just arrived.  Supporting
eight or ten people on twenty five grand a year, with monthly allotments,
means Christmas twelve times a year.  Last month I got the pressure cooker
and a skirt and blouse for Samantha, a few other odds and ends, with school
expenses leaving nothing after the basics and food.  I had vague thoughts
of replacing the camera, but Samantha has been so good and low key I'll
wait until April, and treat her to something in the meantime.  In the same
meantime, it's come time to go through the taxing ritual of converting
everything to Plain Text files, keeping chapters and files in order, and
attaching them to e-mails, then hanging out at Malcolm's for an hour to
upload about one point three meg of text, or 224,000 words, even for me, a
big session.


                         TEMP. FILE END 12/17/02



                         It's Christmas bonus time.  Clicked to log on at
Malcolm's, no modem.  Seven days in the shop, with all kinds of registry
problems, and finally a reinstall of ME, bringing us to Christmas Eve.  Now
I'm meant to upload on Boxing Day, Dec. 26, but after the rent is paid,
I'll have a dollar until the bank opens on Friday, so no cab fare, putting
the probable date at the twenty-seventh.

                         I spent my impromptu and ad hoc Christmas vacation
cooking, nagging the place into shape, and reading Shell Scott books by
Richard S. Prather, trying not to be jealous of him for his excellent
editor, while hoping to goodness he had one.  He is a wonderful writer,
probably more deserving of John D. MacDonald's place in the relatively
recent literary spotlight than Mr. MacDonald does (with his early paperback
originals, and the Travis McGee series, not so much "Condominium", with its
inevitable hurricane.  So, we carry on, bonus-wise, and I think it might be
neat to be published a few days after the main holiday, when folks are
getting a little bored with the whole thing and looking to the Web as that
which bores thee the least of all.

                         Addictions.  Tea.  I finally scored some Lipton
decaf, but it's delicious and head-and-shoulders above Red Rose and all the
others.  I'm up to six cups a day, and catch myself making a cup while the
kettle's still warm from the last.  Since every mug contains two heaping
tablespoons (or whatever they are) of sugar, and one of creamer, this is
not on my diet, but I've still lost a few more pounds and pretty close to
the final excess inch.  Samantha now says I need for fat, but the stuff is
tricky and hard to lose, so she'll have to take me as god made me.

                         Kayla was back for a day.  She freaked out over my
no-toilet-paper regimen.  Cute, but I reminded her that hospital workers
toil up to their elbows in worse than my (usually) white sock with handy
sink for washing.

                         The computer is terrific after its time in the
shop.  The case is rusting, so someday I'm going to have to replace it, but
for the moment it's sizzling, except the mouse won't scroll in the down
direction.  The world's smallest problem.

                         How have the muses done over the layoff?  I don't
know, having never given them a contiguous week of liberty, whether they'll
return avid and ready to boogie, or lethargic and rebellious at the
merciless demands made on their mystical noggins.

                         Another bootleg product, this time "Encarta".  I
thought it needed a CD, but it seems to have plenty of stuff on the hard
drive.  The articles are kind of funny, showing the slavishness of even a
giant like Microsoft to political correctness.  They read like press
releases from the land of milk and honey, but it's useful for spelling and
an overview.  I think the graphics are overabundant, but I'm a writer and
any picture costs me a thousand words.  The maps, on the other hand, are
quite pretty, and one can even zoom in for marginally useful detail.  I
don't know how much it costs, in other words, how much I've stolen, this
time, though, to be fair to myself, it appeared on my screen unbeknownst to
me, maybe a Christmas gift from the shop, or, dare I think it, payment for
reading so far in ye olde novelle If this is true, and I'd be frightfully
too embarrassed to ask, why, I've made my first fiction sale, setting off
one of those neat little traps in life, because I've always promised myself
I wouldn't write porn for money.

                         No redeeming artistic, literary, or social
qualities.  On the other hand, if these characteristics are laid on with a
trowel, are they `redeeming', in the first place?  If so, where does that
leave the salacious material?  Since I've just mentioned political
correctness I might observe that this is my execution of the concept, for,
instead of going in amongst Dancer and Prancer and Comet and Vixen with a
leather whip in a leather glove, I stir them into action with
pseudo-literary mumbo-jumbo.  This has the instant effect of getting them
into their various harnesses and pulling the sleigh, largely, I'm sad to
say, acting out a desire not to coast along in the vehicle.  (They probably
would rather be whipped than ride along with me, but I've never asked.)

                         If you're standing upright, your head doesn't have
enough in it to be a novelist.  I've copped to a dozen deviations
necessitated my chosen craft, but perhaps bad posture is a stretch.  I also
rationalize a lot, and that fits, as well, the fly in the ointment being
that I am a great artist, but if it's not pure rationalization, there
should be at least some in the mix, otherwise, I'll end up in a wheelchair
licking lollipops held between my knees.

                         Christmas dinner tomorrow with Alex, my landlord,
and "three teetotaling retired missionaries."  It's a bit of a shock to
realize I haven't spoken to three white people in the last eight years.  If
that doesn't convince you the Net is the biggest circus to hit any burg,
anywhere, ever, than nothing will.  But it's true.  Malcolm, Alex and Donna
are the only three Americans or Europeans I've spoken with since moving
here, eight years ago.  Now, three at one time as if I'd suddenly arrived
at a clearing in the heart of Africa.  Dennis Franz is entirely right in
"The People's Guide to Mexico" when he points out that the worst culture
shock of any trip is returning to the crazy excess and waste of the U.S.A.
Four whites, and I'll make five.  Who knew so many had survived?  How much
can I tell about Samantha, about my career?  Will they have heard of Nifty?
As a conservative, I'm against all forms of pensions and benefits beyond
the almighty paycheck, and these are all four, pensioners.  My initial
problem is whether or not to tease Alex about not inviting Samantha.  I
wonder if even Emily Post or Helen Gurley Brown yield up anything for the
clueless when it comes to dealing with a couple two generations apart from
each other.  If tracking down bogus CDs would make an opera, maybe this can
be the foundation of a new forum of etiquette I can think of an entry for
the first page.  It works this way, for every inch your waist is over
thirty-two inches, add ten years to the age of the girl it's acceptable to
be seen with.  This leaves open the question of where the measurement
against age should start, but perhaps I can provide guidance.  My waist is
thirty-three inches, and Samantha just turned fifteen.  If that doesn't
leave you speaking with forkless tongue I'll have to dig under the seat for
that leather glove.

                         Now you get to catch your real holiday gift, for
lo it came to pass that on the very eve of the return of Sloggo, the
dauntless transistor set, clappeth was I and verily rent asunder by ye olde
flu, wham, bam, thank you ma'am.  Though I spent '95 and '96 in bed with
acute phlebitis, had one attack of shingles and three serious (to me) bout
of heartburn, I haven't lost an hour or spent a dollar on medicine in about
five years.  Then, Christmas Eve, an almighty cough, and malaise of the
overcooked-noodle variety.  Everything but sleep.  What happens next is it
is Christmas and Alex is pulling up in front of the house in his museum
quality old Ford pickup truck with colossal eight cylinder engine.  We
adjourn to his digs at Southern Foreshore, where dinner and his retired
missionary guests await.  There are probably no more than a dozen steps
leading up to his front verandah, but they look like a hundred and a dozen.
That's the flu, in case anyone out there hasn't had the pleasure.  Make it.
Sit on the far side of the table, against the wall, hoping no on will ask
me to move anywhere, for anything.  Belizeans do holiday dinners as poorly
as everything else, so there are excess mountains of lukewarm ham and
turkey, huge containers of lukewarm salad, piles of lukewarm rolls, and two
huge cakes, that didn't have to be any particular temperature to be crummy.
Only the cranberry sauce, lukewarm, was edible.  My hopes of being left
alone were quickly dashed as I was summoned to duty at the big dead bird
and equipped a dull knife and an incredibly flimsy serving fork.
"Gee-whiz, It's Christmas," murmured me to myself as I began sawing and
stabbing.  Now let me set the perspective here; I am no fan of my late
mother, her toxins poisoned her to death thirty-four years younger than her
mother died, but, in spite of being an abysmally lazy and robotic cook
throughout the year, she did Thanksgiving to a masterful tee.  Everything
piping hot or ice cold, and stuffing -- twice a year, count the fingers --
that I could have eaten as an exclusive diet for twenty years, any day of
the week.  One turkey (ham at Easter, Salmon on The Fourth), carved
fifteen-minutes out of the oven.  No garlic or spices, lot of cream and
butter, everything infuriating because if she could do this, why didn't
she, at least once a month or so?  Both my grandmothers put on equally
wonderful meals, or, at least, their wonderful cooks did.  So, yes,
snobbery rears its ugly head, though I don't ever recall an ice swan, a
status symbol amongst the class conscious.  Limp fork and two-dollar knife,
wielded with the last calories of your extraordinary hero, prevail over
over-cooked, cold, tough, bird, and a plate of road-kill evolves.  I remain
on my feet, instead of crashing to the floor, in anticipation of the
retired missionaries, whom I assume to be Presbyterians, and who are
expected any moment.  I reclaim my chair against the wall, hoping I look
sick enough not to be asked to do anything, and make stabs at scattering
food around my plate, feeling thankful for the flu which gives me a great
excuse not to eat anything.  Even the wonderful-looking potato salad is
dull and warm, and the stuffing is nothing but over-spiced breadcrumbs.
                         -
                         Now the cry goes forth that our retired
missionaries are in sight (poor sods), and I breath a sigh of relief which
damn near turns out to be my last oxygenated earthly experience, for the
retired missionaries are Elder Frick and Elder Frack, age twenty, just
finishing (i.e., retiring from) their two-year proselytizing `call' for The
Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.  And I still
have ninety percent of my food on my plate, having only eaten the skin of
the turkey and most of the cranberry sauce.  You would hardly think such a
scene could go almost immediately from bad to worse, but never
underestimate the flu.  Turns out they're both from The California
Republic.  There are crummy Mormons galore, but the true embodiment of
arrogance and fathomless ignorance is undoubtedly the California Mormon.

                         They wouldn't drink the iced tea because of the
caffeine, how ignorant and arrogant is that?  They were witless parrots on
and on with their Elder this and Elder that, calling Alex's wife Sister
perhaps fifty times in the half hour they graced our humble home with the
presence of their being.  By an act of mercy I would interpret as divine,
other humble lodgings sought their `ness', and Absolute Frick and Ultimate
Frack, with a dozen final Sisters, each, let it be noted, slowly but
actually departed.  Ninety percent of the food was still there when Sister
Leslie pulled off a real miracle, offering me a heavily laced eggnog, which
was my first alcohol in two years.  Blessed Sister.

                         Alex is in his seventies, from far northwestern
Canada.  We were finally able to get on to railroads, hydro projects,
wilderness mining ventures, and the long list of things that make our usual
twice a month visits a pleasure, at least to me.  We do grate a little
because he has , a, the Scotts view of the English, and, b, the Candadian's
view of America (as Imperialist -- imperialist ).  I find this bothersome,
due to its stereotypical nature, in a man who is University educated,
well-read, and who spent twenty years with the Y, then had a second long
career with Canadian diplomatic corps.  You have to read a lot when you're
young so what you're born with doesn't weight you down.  Of course, this
isn't particularly applicable to Alex, as he's retired on good pensions (he
owns four nice houses in town), but the principle is widely applicable, and
can be devastating, if, for example, you bring up your belief in
Creationism at dinner with a new client.  In any event we get along pretty
well, and I was able to keep myself at least partially in check
vis-à-vis the ludicrous Mormons, only allowing as how it would take five
hundred of Smith's salamander tribe to equal a single Mennonite.  With this
he agreed, though I have a nagging feeling his wife is a fellow traveler (I
mean so many Sister, so fast must portend some otherworldly), so I hope I
don't get evicted for big mouth disease -- it happened once before (at
"Friendly Jungle"), which is the reason I'm an artist rather than a big
economic turkey.

                         Of course, all this happened while I had the flu,
and, to be sure I had a full life-stress-testing event, the massive V-8 in
the totally Belizean Ford refused not only to start, but even to click with
promise.  That knocked off a few years, and in an instant or two, I was
sixteen, once again grappling with balky hood release, balkier safety
catch, pliers, rusty pliers, and sluggish terminal clamps.  Jiggling didn't
help, so it was the whole treatment, with, luckily, a file so when the
clamps finally came off the posts, I was able to get bright metal all
around in a couple of minutes.  All four times a sensible-sized engine then
started with a quick twist of the key, and we were homeward bound over the
fiendishly uncomfortable byways of the PUP's Dangriga.  (I'm all for rough
back streets to keep vehicle speeds down, but, somewhere, god, there must
be a limit.  In fact, this is how I now pick a cab in town.  I sit on the
steps of the shop across from the Starlight restaurant, and listen.  How
much reverberation and heavy grinding is there coming from the front end of
an approaching vehicle?  Given the state of the roads, does such-and-such a
vehicle sound as if it could make it the mile and change to my house?  Two
or three typically go by, then I yell Taxi, and am on my way, occasionally
in a tight, late-model Mitsubishi, or the like.

                         By three, I was home, and not only still alive,
but able to go a second, and ten a third night, slightly feverish and
restless, without a minute's sleep.  Seventy two hours, plus, no sleep,
whatever, and the strange thing was, I felt pretty darn good, the whole
time.  If I'd had to work at an ordinary job, I would have not only been
able to do so, but I would have been able to drive, for example, three
days, nonstop.  (clear across the country).  Other benefits.  Remember that
inch that made thirty-three?  Gone.  One bowl of Won Ton soup in the same
time period.  Smoking and drinking?  A three-day hiatus on each could get a
wanna-be quitter over the initial hump.  And the recovery.  Slept maybe six
hour last night, and even though Mormons are nothing to write about, the
keyboard's clicking as ever, and I'd half-bet on a ten-thousand-word day.
Bouncing back quickly, like wounds which heel quickly, is a sign of overall
fitness.  If they could ever harness a mild flue in a reliable injection,
it would have significant medical possibilities for dieting, remaining
awake (if not exactly at the top of your form, I managed to forget my pin
number of five years, and am even now constantly hitting the Windows key
instead of the right shift key, something I rarely do under normal
circumstances, but these notwithstanding, alert enough to function in
non-critical areas), or addiction withdrawal.  Fevered thinking becomes
pinpoint obsessional, with your mind constantly trying to order minutia,
like soldiers behind a dummy, but, given time, might yield something
besides itself.  There is a great passage in "Tom Cringle's Log" in which
Michael Scott has Tom recovering from a nearly fatal bout of tropic fever,
and, well healed, commenting that the agony of the disease was a fair price
to pay for the pleasure of recovery.  I remember for almost three years
envying anyone I saw on television who could walk, to say nothing of run,
and now I can click off a mile or so at least at a half-normal pace and
haul a fifty-pound sack of rice up my long, steep stairs at one go.  Of all
my medical woes, heartburn was far and away the worst, and I haven't had a
twinge in five years.  This may be because I raised the head of my bed six
inches above the foot, as the medical encyclopedia suggested, or some other
factors.  I had it, heartburn, once in the early eighties, then four times
in '95 and '96, and no trace since.  Never knew why it came, or went, but
just know that it's a ghastly malady, hardly the semi-joke of the
taxi-driver, pastrami-on-rye commercial.

                         All of which is to say, your Christmas-bonus essay
has been cut by three sick-days, or, say, 25,000 words, proving Santa,
also, works in mysterious ways.

                         Stupendously bleak holiday weather, half a flu of
and by itself.  Windy, squally, gray, and rainy with temperatures in the
too-low seventies.  Three white squalls, yesterday, alone. No John Canoe.
No Chikanari.  Lots of soggy tourists on every block.  Even thoughts of the
islands, usually fairy dust and hot magic, send shivers down my spine.  The
Caribbean can be as cold and dismal a body of water as any, largely because
few voyagers are equipped with heavy foul-weather gear, di rigor in
northern latitudes

                         Malcolm told me about the big Powerball payoff, so
if anyone is cynical enough envision America as a nation of fat people
waiting in line and otherwise hogtying pretty much everything for a free
pot of money, they, because the new winner was personable and charming,
two-hundred-eighty million in free publicity, have seen nothing, yet.
Malcolm sells some six or eight gambling devices, so he's admittedly not
impartial, and, like all chatterboxes feathering their nests off the worst
of all addictions, points to the tax aspect, smooth as a bishop
rationalizing his Town Car.  I think of it differently, in terms of the
books and magazine subscriptions not purchased for the kids, but then, I
would.  It makes you, my distinctly not beloved homeland, appear as a comic
send up of and overdrawn clown.  All belly, no brains.  And, of course,
with big-tent correctness ruling every niche and outpost of official
everything, what it shows, in the end, is the fallacy of your gods of past
and present, all gods, everywhere, and the equally utter failure of
anything to do with the lunatic doctrine of democracy.  Might be a good
time to cry, "Remember Haiti!" in honor of Philippe who proved the power of
the disgruntled iconoclast class of society, based on the acts of Sam Adams
and John Hancock.  Haiti, you see, didn't happen to have oil and coal in
any equivalent of Pennsylvania, so the brigands liberty and freedom became
exactly what Haiti has been for over two hundred years, and remains,
though, before 1789 it was, according to Michael Scott, probably the
fairest of all places for all colors and all classes of all places on
earth.  Isn't there wonder in the torch of Liberty?  Sometimes I wonder.
What I'm sure is of is that you will be finding out in due time.  And let
me state my parameters here.  For one thing, I absolutely recognize the
fact that we may have no more idea of what the next twenty years will
bring, than the citizen of 1900 knew of the paving, cars, electricity,
elevators, steel, bridges, highways, and dams of 1920.  With hindsight,
it's easy to see the driving forces for the following Roaring Twenties,
while, with the present situation, conditions are the opposite, and
computers, a fifteen year dynamic of dizzying magnitude as a hundred
million household bought machines valued and two to three thousand dollars
each, are now close to profitless, though still attractive to consumers
because of speed, features, and all that yummy bootleg software, so, in
reality, we are at the end not only of a boom, but the very Industrial
Revolution, itself, leaving one to wonder what will be the driving force
between now and 2020.  Every third man a Powerball agent, as every third
man was a spy in East Germany and is in any self-respecting,
counter-revolutionary-wary Communist country?  As far as I can see, this,
and the preparation and sale of dietary books are the only games left in
town.  It's a little wearing to know my macaroni and cheese with hot dogs
diet might unravel the very fabric of the American future, thus killing
every civilized human on the planet, but, to repeat the Eliot refrain:
"Talent does what it can, genius does what it must."

                         I was going to read "Silas Marner" while the
computer was in the shop, but couldn't make it through all Shell Scott
books, and then I was too sick to read unless someone paid me, so it's
still on the unread, at least recently, list.

                         The Prather books are special fun for an ex-bus
driver who knows the city and county of Los Angeles like the back of his
hand.  I read Bronson, and I can almost call the rest of the stops.  My
first run was Hollywood, and my second, probably the most exotic run in the
USA.  Sunday morning from Downtown, out Sunset to PCH, and back, including
the campus.  Those were the part-time days when I got off at noon on
Sunday, and didn't report back until Thursday afternoon -- thus the big
bike year.  Both the vocation and avocation were cornucopias of neat
stories from huge skid marks, to a dead horse in the corral, that no one
would ever read, unless, perchance, said stories were part and parcel of an
excessively macho literary superstar's autobiography.  Perchance, also,
it's a rainy and bleaker than bleak, which I happen to like, day, and,
also, that I prefer to wait until tomorrow to trot Sloggo once again to
Malcolm, and dare the gods to deny me access a second time.  All of this
mindful that Jose and I have just heard Tina's story of Canada, and he is
now panting lividly, hot in my arms while the pretty, brown-eyed ten year
old is trying not to wriggle and buck because Jose is such an unintentional
beauty and having him inside her is the best feeling of her life, each hour
merely adding the her finding and re-finding herself as a one-day woman.

                         Now, you'd think that having reminded us that
there is much more to come, I'd reset the fictional stage, though Jose and
Tina are certainly real enough, and get hacking at those 780,000-odd
remaining words.  Here's a conundrum: oops, Sim just dropped by with and
amazingly fat, fresh ounce of sticky sinsemilla bud, on which I'd
squandered $7.50 in U.S. funds from our lean reserve until January third,
and the puzzle slipped my mind.  Well, it was probably some sarcastic slant
on something, and, since I could have been the target as easily as the next
fellow, we'll let it slide.

                         Big problem booting this morning, old tricks that
apparently withstood the re-install.  That means la machina al demon
demonio will stay on all night, I hope, purring me to sleep.

                         "Dimensions of Laziness."  I awoke challenging
myself to come up with a sure-fire million hardcover title.  That's what I
came up with.  I sit astride my Herculean literary/artistic steed because
it puts my butt in contact with the saddle.  My aunt and uncle had two
toasters in their house, one manual, one automatic.  One morning my uncle
absently dropped the bread into the manual one, in a moment realized his
mistake, and removed the bread, dropping into the automatic Toastmaster.  I
have my "Word" icon back (Queenie somehow disabled this task bar, and I've
been without it for a couple of months), and I will spend several seconds
with my needs-cleaning mouse putting the cursor over the little "W" rather
than double-clicking the fat desktop icon.  My career is predicated on an
ability to spend a normal twenty-three out of twenty-four hours flat on my
back, monitor at my right hip, keyboard at my waist.  Any trace of energy
or enterprising engagement with the ying and yang of life couldn't help
costing me a thousand words a day, and even a trip to the bathroom costs a
cool hundred.  So, one dimension of laziness is extreme motivation.  I knew
from the age of two years that I wanted to do something in my life that I
could do in bed.  I could read in bed, and have to admit that was helpful
in showing the way.  The joke is, up until recently, it was so impractical
to compose long drafts while bedridden, doing so would have been a burden.
Trying to use a portable typewriter as I use my keyboard would be tedious
and slow; better to sit (even if in bed).  I could have used my Commodore
64 keyboard in bed, when I wrote "The Pirates", but have to admit to simply
never thinking of it, and, if I had, I would have viewed it as a little
hedonistic for an old combat stooge like myself.  Fact is, if I hadn't been
well and properly nailed by phlebitis, I'd probably be putting in six hours
a day at chair and desk, to the present day, robbing us, get out the
towels, of twelve hours a day of productive time.  Because I touch type
well, the interface between man and machine disappears to the extent it
can, which, combined with physical comfort, to the maximum possible, makes
ten-thousand-word days not only possible, but fairly common.  If you are a
writer, any shade or stripe, and take one piece of advice in your life, get
your computer in bed with you, a desktop model, not a laptop, too heavy (or
use a laptop with an aux. keyboard).  Twelve free hours a day.  I would
caution that if you have to do something fast and accurate, in burst mode,
so to speak, you would want to be at a chair and desk, but to blow your
mind with twenty pages where you used to do six, try it my way.  The muses
love to be coddled.  Coddle them.

                         If laziness has drawbacks, I'm not aware of them.
I was at the reading and thinking stage when I was married, and my
"inactivity" led me to discover my wife was playing both ends against the
middle, a characteristic which led to infinite freedom to read and think,
which hardly seemed lazy enough, so I started dithering at a little Royal
portable, and that was just inactive enough to fill out the bill, though I
have to admit I bought ribbons by the box and had demolished the little
typewriter in six months.  I went on to wear out the keyboard on the
Commodore in two years, and also overused a Brother electronic typewriter
to the point I could only use it for envelopes.  Too lazy to do anything on
earth but, a, maintain some semblance of housekeeping, b, have six or eight
friends, c, read, d, think, e, travel, and, f, write.

                         Laziness at its most esoteric is the province of
the artistic virtuoso who won't lift a finger to produce anything other
than the very best humanly possible.  If there is any psychic energy
expended it is along the line of grabbing gods by the hair of their heads
and hauling them off the hillside, so there is room for you to be more than
human, conveniently able to do more than is humanly possible.  Of course, a
comfy work station helps here, too.

                         There is a certain inevitable literary beauty to
an essay on laziness.  It tells its tale by being short.

                         If there were a market beyond a few thousand sales
for light fiscal comedy, I'd sketch the last six months of 2002.  I kept
body and soul, times ten, together, but by the skin of my teeth and am
ending the year with fifty dollars to my name.  My quandary, at the moment,
is whether to risk a ten dollar taxi ride into Malcolm's, to upload these
files, or wait until the Third, when I'll, a least for a few days, be able
to buy my own cab.  It's the holidays, so I may take a chance, though David
might want to scrutinize the manuscript, making the point moot.  Also, who
knows with Malcolm.  I'm likely to find him off his feed, and he enjoys
displaying to the world precisely why it is the pommy Brits have been run
off one turf after another, legacies of outstanding civil and industrial
achievements, notwithstanding.  Everyone should have such problems, as the
Jews say.  The nice thing about laziness and the single writer is that if
I'm too slack to take a taxi and take a chance, why, I'll just lie here and
keep typing.  Win win.

                         Halitosis came up in conversation; probably one of
the kids wanting mouthwash.  Here's my viewpoint.  In my life, I've known
one person, Bob Fruguli, one-time police chief of Marshfield, Mass., who
had bad breath.  I drove a bus in South Central for over three years, and
not only don't remember anyone ever having notably bad breath, but, with
one outrageous exception, don't remember anyone smelling of anything
particular.  I peg the waste factor promoted by the Lever Brothers at over
ninety percent.  The hot water wasted on incessant bathing, alone, would
completely finance a dozen small countries, with a medium-size one thrown
in for good measure.  I haven't bathed in any sense of the word is six
years.  I ask Samantha and other if I smell okay, and they always say yes.
Of course, living in the tropics helps here, because perspiration is more
or less chronics, so, just by toweling off, you prevent the gray buildup
associated with the perennially unwashed.

                         The Richard S. Prather books are an interesting
time capsule.  Reading stories published in the early Fifties, I found only
one idiosyncrasy that dated the work: when Shell "grinds the gears" of his
Cadillac.  That put me to wondering when the first automatics became
available, somewhere right about then.  I remember Gran had a lending car,
a '53 Chevy with a two-speed Powerglide, universally known as a shush pump.
On the same note, I love the old Perry Masons; the great dignity of the
conservative era, plainly evident on every Los Angeles street, and replaced
with graffiti, vandalism, and litter almost everywhere.  Political
correctness, if nothing else, is a vicious and inclusive eyesore.  How many
bus taggers would you have to cane, as they do in Singapore, to stop the
few hundred ruining the civilized ambience of the megatropolis?  My guess
is two or three.  On this subject I'm a bit schizoid, because the only
neighborhoods that ever attracted me in L.A. were around the Watts Towers,
where the Sanfords maintained their junkyard.  I love Dangriga, because
it's trashy to the point of art.

                         Looks like my used-car buddy, who inspired this
story, in the first place, is down, out, and bust.  I've been trying to run
into him to thank him for setting my needle in the groove, entirely
unintentional though I'm sure it was.  The last time I saw him he was
puffing a cigarette inside Kuylen's hardware store, then, a week or two
later, this bastion of the community was closed and locked.  I owe, also,
thanks to Susie So, a Chinese little-miss-princess who nixed any
involvement I might have had in the fishing show project at the extreme
outset.  Obviously a lot of losers involved, and one stupendous winner.
The whole place is a micky-mouse carnival, but, on the bright side, Belize
is more pet than parasite, and who'd want to live in a world without the
original "Temptation Island"?  The camel driver running the place kissing
Weirdy Beardy's ass in Havana probably does help keep the States engaged to
a greater extent than it might otherwise be, while reminding all thoughtful
people of the comic-book nature of uneducated masses and their
biggest-flag-wins mentality.  Frick and Frack of the Mormon persuasion
illustrate one side of the coin, and tolerance by the public of a local
windbag knows as a Said Musa, provides a sharp image for the other side.
These are play people, and you can't really call them people, because they
are unread, indoctrinated, probably by a pamphlet somewhere along the way,
to the point of being very insane and highly destructive; a rag empire on a
cotton foundation, with enough rhetoric along the way to fill the skies
forever.  One simply must be a humorist under such circumstances, because
how else does one mute the thunder of approaching doom?  Somewhere is the
nation's future is a billion dollar lottery payout, but the infinite trick
will be living long enough to see it.

                         I enjoy literary housekeeping, just like a few
hours a week of the real thing.  Tidying up loose ends, crossing the last
of the t's and at least trying to get a dot over tag-end-Charlie i's.
E.B. White, in his otherwise sophomoric book with Strunk, does prompt the
writer to say everything, and it's a good point.  It's awfully easy to fall
into the trap, especially in the world's laziest profession, of assuming
because something is self-evident to you, the writer, it will be to your
reader, and leave it out.  This might be something as prosaic as a phone
number, in a letter, or a mercifully-intended silence on Mormons in a more
significant work.  White it right.  Be sure you say everything.  He doesn't
include suggestions on leaving stuff out to fit everything in, but then, he
can't write your copy for you, either.  Looking back on "The Pirates", I
can't remember omitting anything, while it seems that in the million words
I've published on the Net, I've only said half of what's on my mind.  Part
of this is the fact that I'm lazy, don't want to go through the hassle of
finding another publisher, so I fully lard my manuscripts with scenes
fitting Nifty's extremely tolerant requirements.  This does not result in a
hundred percent interface, and probably tries David's patience, but, book
by book, does get most of the things worth saying in print.

                         False impressions.  Erroneous perceptions.  I had
a good example last week.  The water pipe burst at a neighbor's down the
street, flooding same.  I looked out and assumed it had rained in the
night, in fact, remember being somewhat surprised because the rain
invariably wakes me up, and I lie awake listening to it, feeling as snug as
I always feel smug.  I think I'd even heard, the previous day, that the
mower had clipped a pipe.  Everything in the area was dry, except a hundred
feet of my own street.  None of this made any difference, I saw the water,
and assumed it had rained, despite significant, if passive, evidence to the
contrary.  Such insignificant idée fixee become very critical in the
field of aviation -- false assumptions.  Obviously, I never fell victim of
one, but I did, on my bike once, and it would have meant a crash in a
plane.  I was crossing the Baja from Enemata to San Philippe, something
over 120 miles.  At the mid point was the one Pemex facility, a
glass-topped contraption with a hand pump, circa 1930, but it only
dispensed Nova, which my Honda did not care for in the least.  So, I
stopped, and put in half a gallon (two liters), then went on my way.  In my
mind, I'd refueled, and that was that.  Next day I got drunk on margaritas
and decided to see how fast the bike would go.  I saddled up and throttled
up, but before I even got to one-twenty, I ran out of fuel.  By the time I
was able to hustle a quart of gas, I'd sobered up enough to realize the
machine would undoubtedly go faster in fifth gear than in sixth, but by
that time I lacked the initiative to find out just how fast eighty-three
horsepower could propel a vehicle weight under five hundred pounds.
Anyhow, the story fits because half-doing something is not doing it, and
may amount to not doing it at all.

                         I'm wondering about the word count on "Creative
Camp" of the banal-sounding -- guess again -- title It topped out at 1,303
kilobytes, and, I thought, 385,000 words.  This story is approaching the
same byte count, at only 230,000 words, so, again, a false impression.  I
don't think I'm under any misapprehension in declaring sometime in the next
day or two, I'll have written the longest Internet novel, and thus be able
to claim first and second place, with "Blissy's Song" and "The Tarzan
Mushroom Hunters" good candidates for third and fourth place.  Someday it
would be nice to not only be in the top ten, but to be the entire top ten.
(Beware the monstrous ego, for a slave of you it will gladly make.)  Since
it's a subject of more than passing interest, it would be nice to know,
just out of curiosity, what other long-ball fiction, written exclusively
for the World Wide Web, is out and about.

                         One bummer on the re-install is that it cleaned
out my spell check dictionary.  I wonder if there's a "Save Changes to
Dictionary" button.  One of those everyone-should-have problems.  While on
ultra minutia, I should also mention my ten dollar keyboard, which still
responds like new, many millions of characters, to say nothing of three
years, down the road.  The markings have completely worn off seven keys,
and half off on three others, I live funky, in spite of my housekeeping
efforts, with six cats, and have never cleaned it, other than wiping off
tobacco residue.  My monitor began acting glitchy a couple of months ago,
so now I leave it on all the time, and it's back to its flawless self in
spite of its near twenty-thousand hours of use.  The sound is back, sort
of; my Sierra pool demo sounded great for half an hour, then signed off to
dummyland.  Perhaps it's the fifteen dollar sound card the shop installed
to replace my apparently defective 128 brand-name card.  The modem is back
online, that's the crucial thing, and I've yet to even try the printer, so
who knows about that.  All in all, a machine with ten percent of Sloggo's
capacity, but with its stove bolt reliability, would be impressive.  It's
nice to pay homage and express faith, and, if it's for a machine, not a
leader, that's the way it is.  Once in awhile something teaches you that
you had no idea of what perfect could be.  General Motors cars tend to be
that way, and of course, the late-model PC.  Samantha fits the bill on the
human scale, which is fortuitous, least I be mistaken for a motor-brained
meathead.

                         Hideous post-Christmas Sunday.  At this rate, I
wouldn't dare take the machine out for fear of flooding it.  We've
undoubtedly had more violent weather in the last six months than in my
previous twelve years living in Dangriga, combined.  If you want the lush
green of the tropics, this is how it's paid for.  Then you need your yard
chopped every couple of weeks, and that costs more.  Is it all worth it?
Yea, though I ponder, I know not, for, forsooth, one would have to be bent
of mind and weak of loins to wish tarrying a moment elsewhere.  To find is
not to travel.  Wish the same could be said of fishing, but to troll is
often not to catch. (or they'd call it "catching")

                         Behold, the sun.  "Hold the sun," is what one
normally wants to say in the Caribbean, but after five days, it's welcome.
I think things are green enough, and watching snowy egrets landing and
taking off from the big field just to the east confirms it.  I suppose,
with a complete open choice, I'd live in Ireland.  All that green and gross
weather.  Just my thing.  Samantha as a bursting lily-skinned colleen, oh
my-my.  Speaking of which, she is becoming more aggressive every day,
teaching herself, with no help from me, the finer point of being a
temptress and covering all the prerequisites for Wanton 101, in the
process.  If I can ever catch my breath, I'll explain to her that getting
an older guy ready is the same as getting a young guy ready for the third
or fourth time (if memory serves); a skill set well worth developing for
use in her thirties, when I'm gone, and she may be interested in the
good-old younger set.  That's for all-night sessions, though, as nooners
and quick afternoon pokes were never my thing

                         I think I've made a small area newspaper which
wonders, in print, about teen girls giving their bodies to MATURE men.
Would the writer have the girls give themselves to immature men?  How about
boys?  The only chance most girls have in this town is to find someone like
me that gives a rat's ass about more than their ass.  Not the way it should
be, but the way it largely is, and even so begging the question as to what
a girl who can't multiply five times five has to offer besides her body.

                         One advantage to a forty-two year age differential
you might not have thought of is that if one wants to concentrate, say, for
instance, he's writing a long novel, and he suggests to his wife she might
want to go out and play wither her friends, off she goes, happy as a clam
on quahog day.  Samantha's gone buyinshop with Elston, and probably half
the considerable neighborhood, and it should be at least a few years before
I have to worry about her attaching herself to one of the neighborhood gin
mills.

                         We are born with the right instincts, but god
neuters them, and, in the process, turns a bovine species of slob into
warmongering antilovers.  Surviving this poltroon leaves one facing women,
and their love of defects.  "The Hundred Worst Things about Him?  Join our
nationwide survey."  "Is One Secret Too Many?  Find out what our leading
contributors think."  "His Past / Your Future.  Cautionary tales from our
readers."  "This Month's Losers Winner.  Our worst of the year."  "What If
He Ever Fights Back?  Advice from the manufacturers of Kevlar and Bell
helmets."  "Is His Eternal Memorial Big Enough for the Two of You?  More
expert advice."  "Keeping his Fortune Forever.  Five top psychics report."
"Can You Trust Even His Mother?  You may wish to skip this one."  "A
Microscope for Your Marriage?  Mary Blake chimes in with razor focus and
laser-splitting, cell-by-cell insight."  "Is Tyne Daley Simply It All?
Last year's survey reviewed."  "Whose Waistline Is It, Anyway?  Sometimes
sharing can be a good thing."  "Don't Tend, Pretend.  Medical experts on
avoiding his kid."  "How Low Can He Go?  Tips to identify and exploit
thresholds, compiled by staff."  And, finally: "How Woe Can You Go?
Five-thousand words from `Ma'am Overboard's' dynamic hall-of-fame couple,
Anne Marie Fairchild and former-husband, Lawyer Tom Cruise, authors of
`Art, Schmart: Trading talent for land can work for more than just your
realtor', subject: Selling number one to number two.".  That's just the
index of everywoman's ideal periodical, a single month out of the year.
God, Adam and Eve, and women.  Exclude mothers, and it's still overkill in
the misery department sufficient to curb natural instincts.  Fault finding
and grudge holding; long memories and short books-I-have-read lists.  I
keep thinking of Samantha as the ultimate girl, perfume to pop shots, but
it's gradually dawning on my overworked brain she may well be the only
girl.  She even makes love like an eager boy, which is why afternoon
delights are sacrificed for the approaching all night.  And on top of it
all, I'm supposedly getting my feet wet on a million-word literary
colossus.

                         Sun gone.  It was only out for an hour.  I think
one spring in Dubuque, we went for three months without solar intervention.

                         I wonder what the incest factor with Samantha
amounts to.  We've never spent a night, and very few days, under the same
roof.  She has a natural, living, breathing father.  Yet she is very much a
girl of my own creation, how the hell else could she be so perfect?
Sometimes there does seem to be sufficient justice floating around out
there; I was dealt twos in the mother and sister hands and drew another
when it came to a wife, but now it's my turn as trick boss and I've
shuffled the ace of hearts neatly just where I want it.  Principally, this
means she's lighthearted, and I'm teaching her to be conscientious while
remaining conscious of not becoming too conscientious, and especially
conscious of not expecting me to be conscientious.  Working it any other
way is likely to be confusing, because light-heartedness can't be taught or
bought, it is a natural state, or it's not.  So, starting with fair and
sunny, most of the time, we work toward monetary discipline and overall
reliability, which can be taught, achieving a perfection so flawless even
the imperfections are cute.

                         Back-to-back three-thousand word days.  Must be
the season, a time to drift along, dreaming and taking things as they come
-- who has time to work?  Cleaning house for the new year.  Wouldn't want
to forget an addendum to the laziness list.  Frick and Frack and their
proselytizing con-game, answers-to-call ilk.  Truth to tell, I've lived in
this town twelve years, I'm virtually always home, and, though I see
white-shirt-and-tie twins routinely, but a single pair has darkened my
doorway.  They must have a secret napping bungalow, or, if they're bright,
they merely exchange residences at eight a.m., then switch back at four in
the afternoon.  If memory serves, Alex said two people showed for their
Christmas service.  Talk about cost of sales!  I'll give the noodle-brained
elders credit on two counts.  First, they did seem to speak fast Spanish,
though it may have just been a few ready phrases (they were speaking to a
six year old), and, second, they are shinier and more chipper, having had
two show up for their principal annual service, than I am as number one
artist of all time.  It's a little daunting to think what might happen to
oil equities if Button One or Button Two ever succeeded at anything; the
energy released would topple Kerr McGee and Exxon, and cold fusion would go
on the books as fact, not urban legend.  Leave us save our lives by not
holding our breaths in anticipation.

                         Try remembering when you have an inclination to
dismiss me as a raving tyrant cum Looney Tune that you are supplying a, the
coffin, b, the nails, and, c, the hammer.  If you were living in such a
manner as to, so to speak, supply other tools and materials, I have little
doubt you'd find me effervescent without being fizzy, bubbling, and
thoroughly delightful, with a lovely bright aftertaste.  You must allow
yourself to be punished by your gods, for, otherwise, they are obviously
meaningless (I mean look where defying, even passively, this doctrine has
left you).  Of course, there are wonderful gods.  Allah, for example,
saideth unto you, "Alight, my tired ones, alight.  Alight from your camels
and rest upon the great softness of my sand.  Five times each day you shall
do this in my name, and don't let me catch you napping, tee-hee."  What a
fellow!  Then, needless to say, there's Yahweh, unutterable of name, by the
logic of the sophomore, yet this syllable-less creation behooves of his
faithful that they wear huge eyeglasses and mink hats, sized as the mill
wheel is sized, so all may know of their wealth and their stylish
inclinations.  Competition like that, where does a mere literary deity
turn?  To the next page, one would suppose; anyway, that's my plan.

                         I will see you folks next year, when, fear not,
Jose, Tina, Rick, Nancy, Rob, Allen, and a large supporting cast will
return, and your life will begin again.

 TEMP. FILE END 12/30/02

 :Posted by Thomas C. Emerson, Dangriga

 xxx