Never, part 2

Artemis

            God he’s fine! Sandy. I bet that’s short for Alexander. The great. Seems he thought so, anyway. A boyfriend would be nice. But not a kid who thinks he’s the great one. No way. Still, he is very very fine. He’s gorgeous.

            He talked my ear off that night we met at the party in Pushkin. “So where you from, Temi?”

            “We live in Pittsburgh. But I went to school in New York—a Catholic school for girls. Run by nuns. Booooring! Some good kids there, though.”

            “I’m a public-school kid. We live in a tiny town in mid nowhere. The closest city is . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . Scranton. Scranton! And that’s like seventy miles away.”

            I laughed. “Not much to do, I guess. You should try a Catholic school for girls!”

            “Hmmm . . . that sounds pretty alluring, don’t you know. How’d you end up in this school, coming from a private education and all?”

            “Well.” I hesitated. How much did I want to tell this dude I just met? “I like it here. It’s big. I can disappear if I want to. I can choose to disappear if I want to. Exactly the opposite of my high school. And it has so many different things to choose from. I have no idea what to major in and want to experiment as much as possible. Those nuns gave us a good grounding in the basics but left huge gaps in what’s possible to learn and do. Do you know what you want to do?” Turn the spotlight on him.

            Sandy did not hesitate. “I’m going to be a psychologist. I thought I’d be a doctor like my dad. He’s the only doctor in our town, you know. But the brain’s where it’s at nowadays. I’ve got it all planned out. Anyway, you want to dance before the night is done?”

            He grabbed my hand and pulled me out where a thousand kids were boogying the night away. He didn’t dance very well. Uncoordinated and a little clumsy, which was strange cause he walked with such assurance. But he was having fun, and I was having fun, and we got on, especially when we couldn’t talk because of the dancing. I lost track of Ellen and my friends from the dorm, Lonnie and Naomi. Who cared. I was in college and dancing with the hottest guy in the place. I think maybe that all-girls school left me lusting for male bodies. Yeah.

            Sandy walked with me back to Hemingway. He wanted to come up to the room and I said sure, why not. He had to sign in with the guy at the front desk of the building—boys’ dorms you didn’t have to do that, but we girls had to be protected. Right. At least the guy at the desk, Jake, was nice. Funny. He was a student, but older, maybe early twenties, like he’d been out in the world for a while. He had a little mustache. Cute.

            We got to my room, and Ellen was there, with some guy she’d met at the dance, Peter. We sat around talking. Peter was a sophomore, an art major. Ellen seemed to like him. They got closer and closer sitting on her bed. Maybe time to get out for a while, I thought.

            “Hey, Sandy,” I said, “want to show me your room?” I am so subtle.

            “Ah, sure, sure. Let’s go see if my roomie is in. Probably stoned out of his mind.”

            Tennyson was on the other side of the FUB, so we walked through Faulkner. There were some kids playing a piano—Sandy waved at one of them, “Hey, Eric,” he said—and hanging out, others playing cards or eating something at the café in the building, but we kept going on to Tennyson. Fifth floor. Sandy’s room was just around the corner from the elevator, and we went in. And there was his roommate. I remembered meeting him at the dance, but I’d forgotten his name.

            “Hey, Artie, what’s up,” said Sandy. Forgetting wasn’t such a bad thing.

            “I am.” The reply came with a wave in my direction. “You’re Temi, right?”

            “Yep.” Artie didn’t really look at me. His eyes wandered all over the place, only glancing askance at me every now and then. Insecure, shy, naïve, I thought to myself.

            “So what ya doing, roomie?” Sandy’s tone was fake buddy-buddy. He seemed to think he had to keep the conversational ball going.

            “Well I just smoked some hash,” said Artie. “Want some?”

            Before Sandy could reply, I said, “Jesus H, what about the RA?”

            “Not to worry, Tim’s cool,” Sandy said. “Would you like a toke or two, Temi?”

            “I’ve never done hash, you know, just some pot. Didn’t do anything for me. But sure, I’ll try it.”

            Artie brought out a little pipe and crumbled something into it. “It’s red Lebanese,” he said, still looking down. “Pretty good. And don’t worry about the high. It’s mellow. Not the hyper electric stuff, like kief, you know. You’ll like it.” He kept his eyes on the pipe, only still in the glancing mode as far as I was concerned. He handed me the pipe and said, “You’re the guest, so do it up for us.”

            Artie lit a match and looked at it as he held it to the bowl of the pipe. I put the business end in my mouth and sucked in a cloud of smoke. It made me cough and out the smoke went right away. “That’s what always happens when I smoke dope,” I said.

            “Well no wonder you never got high,” Artie muttered. And then, “Here, pass me the pipe and I’ll see if I can show you how to avoid coughing and spilling out all that good smoke.” I figured he just wanted to smoke the stuff himself, so I really wasn’t going to pay much attention to what he was doing. Teach me how to smoke—really! Until I noticed the way that he inhaled the smoke, slowly but deeply, and then held it. I thought that was neat. I could do it that way and see what happened.

            “Pass it back. Let me try your trick.” This time I didn’t cough. I held the smoke as I’d seen Artie do it.

            “Good job,” Artie said, and now he was looking at me. He smiled. It was a very sweet smile. In fact Artie was sweet all around. He was no fine stud like Sandy, that’s for sure. But he seemed . . . I don’t know . . . understanding, cool. And he was cute.

            “Hey,” interrupted Sandy, “how about passing it over this way!” I handed the pipe over to him and he toked, then passed it back to Artie, who then passed it back to me.

            By the third toke I was beginning to feel very good. I was actually getting high, I thought. Then I said it, “I think I’m getting high.”

            “Hurray!” cheered Artie. “Like it?”

            “Give me a minute. But yes, I think so.”

            Artie got up and went to a shelf where some records stood. “We need music.” He picked out Magical Mystery Tour and put it on a sad little record player.

            “I see your scorn, Temi, but the sound isn’t as bad as the machine looks—trust me.”

            “It’s not half bad,” Sandy agreed. “I forgot to bring my stereo. My parents promised to mail it up to me, though.” Who forgets to bring their stereo to college, I asked myself.

            “Lucky man with the caring parental unit,” said Artie, smiling as he put the needle on the vinyl.

            Artie put on the second side of the album. We listened to “Hello Goodbye,” and Artie started talking.

            “That’s like where we are right now, isn’t it—except backwards. You know, goodbye to the old life, hello to the new one. Thank the good god in whom I don’t believe!”

            Acting surprised, Sandy asked, “You don’t believe in God?” I could hear the lower case and the upper case in what the two guys said. I wasn’t sure about my own beliefs. That Catholic girls’ school, in fact my whole life from birth through this moment, assumed not just that there was a God, but that the God was a good Catholic. Not Eastern Orthodox, which always puzzled me. But there’s no accounting for these things. Those nuns made sure that we were catechized, that we prayed, that we went to chapel every single solitary boring day. But boredom didn’t seem to me a good cause for not believing. I just didn’t know.

            “No, no divinity to shape my ends, thanks,”[1] said Artie. He looked down at his behind. “What, you think it needs shaping?” I broke out laughing. Sandy not so much. Some silent minutes passed by. Although it coulda been a silent ten seconds. Who knew. Time was distorting badly for me.

            By this point “Strawberry Fields” was playing. Artie picked up again. “You know, like the song says, if there’s nothing to get hung about, then it’s hard to be someone. I want to be someone.”

            “What the hell do you mean,” demanded Sandy. “What the hell.”

            I interrupted. “Yeah, explain yourself young man.” I was enjoying the whole thing. Artie was funny. Sandy seemed more than a little peeved, though.

            “Explanations are hard for me. I know what I know, but my little world has let me go, and I see things . . . I don’t know, differently, like from the bottom of the sea.[2] What does it mean to have nothing to get hung about or that everything all works out so it doesn’t matter much? I hear that as being Strawberry Fields, you know, in a safe measly little world where nothing is real and some protective barrier keeps you far far far from reality. In the hand of god, I sorta mean. But that’s not real! Reality ain’t some safe space.”

            “You mean that Strawberry Fields is like a way for them to talk about God?” demanded Sandy.

            “Not exactly, no. It’s just my idea that god means comfort and safety for almost everyone who believes, a blankie to keep us safe and warm. Comfort is maybe a nice thing but not the real thing. Insulation is great in attics, but winter still roars like a lion. Listen, we’re in ‘Penny Lane’ now—the barber, banker, fireman, nurse, all those folks—how real are their lives? And yeah, I know they’re fictions of Paul’s imagination. At least the nurse sees that she’s in a play. And the little kids—love the little kids laughing. Seems to me they laugh because the damned banker is so fucking self-satisfied with what he’s got. Baby he’s a rich man! Yay for him.”

            “I see what you mean about comfort,” I said. “When my cousin died last year the only thing I could do was turn to God, to pray that he was in heaven. Strawberry Fields, I guess. But what’s wrong with comfort when you need it?”

            Sandy broke in. “None of that makes sense. God is not comfort. He is a righteous God. He gives us direction for what’s right to do and what’s not right to do. He overwhelms us with his righteousness and with his power. He is fearsome, not comforting.”

            “Yeah, well. I don’t like the stepdad either,” said Artie. I started to chuckle but a look from Sandy killed it. “You know, I always thought that ‘All Your Need Is Love’ was about what we lack—yeah, I still think that, but maybe it’s also about what that god you told us about lacks. And sure, I know about the infinite love of giving the only begotten son to die for us. But Jesus H—that had to happen in the story because god made it so in the story. Makes me think of the stepfather in some unheard of fit of kindness giving me five bucks to go to a movie but telling me which movie to see. Jerk. I think comfort is good, essential even, Temi. But not if it hides reality. I’m sorry you lost your cousin, and I’m glad you were comforted for your loss. But your cousin is lost. Sorry. That sounded harsh. Sorry.”

            I could see that Sandy was getting angrier and angrier and angrier. So I went back to what Artie had said before he turned to the nastiness of god. “How come you think ‘All You Need Is Love’ is about what we lack? I mean, the song says we have everything, you know, and that love is the way to all that.” I’d never gotten into discussions like this, ever. Beatles songs or any other songs were just . . . just songs. I wasn’t convinced by what Artie said, but I was liking the talk, the ideas, reaching into lyrics I’d never thought much about and finding something to think about. Back in English class we sometimes got into discussions like this. But that was about literature, and here it was about pop music lyrics. I was also feeling a little sorry for Sandy.

            “C’mon, Temi. What does the song say? There’s self-defeating statement after statement. Nothing you can do that can’t be done. Think about that. What does it say? If it can’t be done then you can’t do it, so if you can do it then it can be done. Donovan says that happiness—nothing to get hung about, dontchaknow—runs in a circular motion.[3]Well, ‘All You Need Is Love’ runs in a circular motion! All of it! Except it gives a way out. The only exit from that circle so you can learn how to be you in time—the only thing is love. That’s what’s missing, that’s what you lack, that’s what you need. To me ‘need’ and ‘lack’ are the same thing. Add ‘want’ too. What you lack is love and so you need it because you’re stuck in the circular motion of sappy happiness, what already is and what already can be done and sung and felt and you want a way out of it all. Move beyond that? You need love for chrissake.”

            “That’s nonsense,” Sandy yelled—well, not quite yelled, but louder than everything else that we’d been saying. “The song is clear—all you need to do all that can be done is love. Period.”

            “Yeah, ok. Different strokes.”

            Artie had been pretty sharp and lively during the rapping.[4] He didn’t seem so shy any more. Definitely not withdrawn. But now he lowered his eyes again, mumbled something, then said he was going to go out to Faulkner to get something to eat. The munchies, he giggled. And off he went.

            As soon as the door closed, “Lord he’s full of shit,” said Sandy. “What crap—and anyway, why should we pay any attention at all to what the Beatles say about anything? What do they know that’s so special? And good lord almighty what weird interpretations of those lyrics!”

            I didn’t respond. I didn’t think that Artie was full of shit or that the way he understood those songs was strange or weird or wrong. I just had never thought about any of this stuff and had to think about it. Right now, I didn’t know. By this point I was more than a little tired and droopy. The high had gone away. I was ready to go back to my room. I hoped that Ellen and Peter were ok with that. But I had to go back.

            When I said I was going to go, Sandy seemed put out. I thought maybe he’d had something in mind for the rest of the night. But I wasn’t ready for anything else. He was nice looking. A little bit of the stick up the butt maybe, a little bit full of himself. But OK to be with. Still, I’d just met him. And it wasn’t even a date, just an accident of the party. I wasn’t going to pick him for a boyfriend right now, anyways. And if he thought that a few dances at a party meant sex . . . well, not so much, dude.

            He didn’t offer to take me back to my room. That was . . . OK. But I wondered if he was miffed. What a strange little word, “miffed.” Anyways, Hemingway was close enough. I felt safe on campus. Maybe that was dumb of me, but I did. Not a big deal. But still, why hadn’t he even asked if I wanted company up to Hemingway? When I came out of the room, I saw Artie down the hall coming out of another room.

            “Hey Artie—good night!”

            “Oh, Temi. Yeah. Good night. It was nice talking with you.” Again he hadn’t been looking at me. But then he looked up and did a double take. “Sandy’s not taking you back?”

            “Nah. It’s only over at Hemingway.”

            “Still. I tell you what. I’m headed over to the FUB anyway. I’ll walk you back at least that far.”

            “OK. Just don’t feel obliged to be a nice guy or something.”

            “Me? A nice guy? Fat chance!” He looked at me when he said that.

            When we got to Faulkner Artie opened the door for me, let me go in first. And then he looked around to see if the café was still open. It was. I’d thought it was later than it really was. “Are you a little munchified?” he asked. He looked at me again.

            “Starving,” I said.

            “Come on. I’ll treat you to whatever they have. I got that hypothetical stepfather five bucks burning a hole in my pocket.”

            I had to laugh. “OK,” I said.

            We got a couple of slices of flaky pastry. Artie got a hot tea, and I got some water.

            “Just water?” he asked. “I mean, my five bucks will stretch to something else, you know. Maybe not molten pearls in gold sauce, but something.”

            “I don’t want any caffeine,” I said, “and what else is there? Milk? Nah. I don’t really like hot chocolate. I’d get a tea, but I’ve never had any and anyway tea has caffeine too.”

            “Not a whole lot of caffeine. Are you worried it’ll keep you awake? Cause the red leb will get you past that problem pronto.”

            “Yeah. Still, water’s fine. It’s my favorite drink, actually.”

            “I love water too. But with this pastry I want— need? lack?—something hot. I don’t much like coffee. In fact, I loathe coffee. The stepfather is addicted to the stuff. He makes three or four pots every day and drinks that shit constantly. He’s addicted to it. If he doesn’t drink it for a day or two, he gets headaches, withdrawal symptoms I call them. It’s pathetic. He’s pathetic. He can beat up on my mother—not physically cause he can do such a bang-up job messing with her mind. But that’s about all he has going for him. He can depress his wife and make her schizoid. Hurray for him.”

            “Hmmm . . . I guess you don’t much like your stepfather—maybe less than you like god!”

            “You could say that. I guess you did say that. And you’re right. The man’s an asshole. He thinks he’s the king of the little universe he commands in the house. And he does it with glee. A fucking tyrant. Sorry about the language, Temi. A sore spot, you know.”

            “Yeah, I see that. I know I’m being nosy, but how’d he end up in your life, anyway?”

            “Like any stepfather—my mother married him.”

            “I guess. I won’t nose any further.”

            “Not to worry. It’s not a secret. Before I got here to school I would never have said anything about him—hell, about anything at all. I wouldn’t have talked to you, or Sandy, or anyone. I wouldn’t have even looked at you because that might have made you look at me and maybe conversation would follow and who knows how to converse. I still find it hard to look at you. I mean, you’re great to look at but . . . oh fuck it. But like I said about getting out of Strawberry Fields, I’ve sort of found myself. Or I’m on the road there, anyway. All I lack is love, I guess. The friends I’ve made in four days, five days, they’re love. I now have things to get hung about. So I can look at you—now and then. And I can talk. Dylan says I talk too much. He should know cause he practices it so much. Talking that is.”

            I ignored the needing love thing. I didn’t know him well enough to tell how he meant it—just the friends he’d made?—and didn’t want to find out. “You know, Artie, you say you’ve never talked like this, and I have to say I’ve never taken song lyrics so seriously. It’s a new thing for me, entirely. And I’ve never been in any conversations remotely like the one we’ve been having.”

            “Sorry about all that stuff in the room. I know I was making Sandy uncomfortable—damned angry, it looked like. Funny how some theists get angry and other theists, like Dylan my buddy, get curious. And I have no doubt that you were bored out of your skull with all that god talk. But you know, I’ve decided that after all that silence in my high school years I’ll just speak what’s on my mind and to hell with the consequences. I’ve got to be me![5] Sandy’s a big boy. He can deal with it. I hope you did, anyway.”

            “Big boy indeed. And nossir not bored. And yessir I dealt with it.” I stopped. And then, “Forgive me for saying it, but you two are like Mutt and Jeff.”

            “He’s the mutt, then?”

            I laughed. “Yeah, I guess so. But you know I’m pretty short stuff myself, so I can speak about shortness without insult.”

            “Insult? Nah. Insult would be to give me tips on how to get taller. I yam what I yam. Popeye, that’s me, not Jeff. Just gimme some spinach and watch out![6] Anyway, what about you? Do you get along ok with your parents?”

            “More or less. They sent me off to boarding school with a bunch of nuns, so we didn’t have the daily rub to worry about. I know why they sent me away—good intentions and all. I’ll confess—oh father confessor!” I batted my eyes at him. He laughed. “It was all those boys ogling me from the time I hit puberty. Mom and dad wanted me safe. And to tell the truth, those kids were more than icky. I did not mind moving away from them. But I wish I’d stayed at home. I feel a little uprooted. I wish I knew my parents and my brothers better. Still, I’m liking it here.” The strange thing was that I didn’t mind a little self-revelation with Artie. With Sandy, not so much.

            “Me too. On both counts. Uprooted and liking it. Oh my—English is such a hard language. I mean that I like it here and that I like being uprooted.”

            We’d finished the pastry and the drinks. We got up to go. Artie offered to take me all the way to Hemingway, but I said I’d be OK. We said our good nights and went our separate ways. I was more than a little surprised by how Artie had opened up. He actually looked at me all the time we talked. And he was being so nice. I guess. . . . No. I won’t guess. But I didn’t feel any pressure. Not a hint of the predatory in him. Unlike Sandy. I know what Sandy wants, jealous god watching over him or not.

---

[1] Maybe this one doesn’t require a reference, but just in case, it’s from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

[2] There are two here, from Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced,” with a twist.

[3] In Donovan’s song, “Happiness Runs.”

[4] For contemporary readers: “rapping” used to mean the endless talk people indulge when they’re loose and in good company.

[5] That’s from Walter Marks’s “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” I know it from Sammy Davis, Jr.’s cover.

[6] Spinach powered Popeye’s muscles the way neutrons power atomic bombs.

Never, part 1

Artie

            We stood in my dorm room, in the narrow slot between the two narrow single beds on either side of the equally narrow room. The doorway and built-in desks and closets, all in the same light brown fake wood paneling color, were to my left, the window to my right, facing out to the quad around which the four towers stood. I faced my roommate Sandy’s bed. Sandy was not there, thank god. She was, Artemis. Nothing else occupied the room, and as far as I was concerned nothing mattered other than her in front of me. I reached out to touch her face, to stroke it gently. I caressed her earlobe. Her head came down. In pleasure, I hoped. I took the movement as permission to continue, and with that ok in my eyes I cupped her face in both hands, moving my fingers on either side of her eyes, tracing her lips, moving down to her chin, her neck.

            She hummed—I don’t know what else to call it. Not a groan or a sigh, but something high pitched carried on top of an almost guttural exhalation. She reached for my face with her hands, brought my face up to hers, kissed me. It was a whisper of a kiss at first, but then she pressed more, opened her lips, licked my lips until they too opened. Our tongues came together, slipping over and under each other.

            We hugged so fiercely that even immaterial spirit would not have fit between us. I combed my fingers through her hair, the beautiful shoulder length chestnut hair that I had ogled for weeks. She turned her head upwards so I could kiss her neck and work my way down to the space at the top of her blouse where the breasts began to show above the rib cage. Her hands were at my waist, holding me close to her. And then down to my butt the hands came, grasping me tightly, forcing me even closer.

            We had met mid-week during a so-called orientation week that was so lackadaisical that most new students managed to avoid the boring official events. Instead we roamed a campus still missing all the upper-class kids, and we went to some of the big welcome-to-college parties hosted by the dormitory areas. It was at one of those, in Pushkin Halls, at what seemed a mile from our own dorms in Eliot Halls, that we met. She roomed in Hemingway Hall. I roomed in Tennyson. We went to the same dining hall, in Faulkner Union Building, the FUB. I had seen her—how could I not see that beauty?—in the dining hall and in the FUB but had not met her until that evening at Pushkin. She was gorgeous. I first noticed her hair. Then I saw the rest of her. She was small, about five foot three or four, with a body and face sculpted by Praxiteles. They say Praxiteles used Phryne to model the beauty of Aphrodite. Our Artemis would have served him as model for his Artemis, the goddess. We’ll never know, though. Praxiteles’s Artemis was lost long ago. Our Artemis was Greek, third generation American, with a face that would have launched whole carrier battle groups of ships.[1]

            She did not see me, not beyond saying hi when Ellen, her roommate, introduced us. Ellen had met Sandy already, and Sandy was the reason the introduction happened at all. Sandy was handsome in the easy, public way handsome people are: six feet two with eyes of blue, a good eight or nine inches taller than I was and many shades lighter than my mud-brown eyes, with thick blond curls that fell below his ears. I had very fine, very straight, very uninteresting light brown hair, still cut to meet the standards of the McDonald’s where I’d worked until school started. His arms were arms. My arms would’ve been spaghetti, except that moving furniture for the stepfather made them more like fettuccine. Something to be thankful for. He was comfortable in his own skin, unconsciously strutting when he walked, able to small talk with anyone, especially girls. I was introverted, not exactly the smoothest talker, shy as a tarsier in daylight, especially around women. I had been on one date in my life, and that had been for the senior prom at my high school. Some classmates in calculus class thought it would be funny to coerce me into going with a girl in the class whom I barely knew, Laurie. I was too shy to know anyone, male or female and too inept to sidestep the coercion.

            Laurie discovered the depths of my shyness on that long prom evening. She wanted to dance and partake of some of the hooch that kids had sneaked into the place. I sat and when my sitting became conspicuous, I crept into a hidden corner of the room and observed. At least I gave Laurie the chance to go off with some of her friends and to dance with other guys and to enjoy herself. Towards the end of my evening’s ordeal, I saw that Laurie had drunk so much of the liquor that she was woozy, more than woozy. Positively reeling. She was on the verge of upchucking when I got to her and eased her down next to a big old pot with a sickly palm-ish plant struggling to survive. Into the pot she deposited her dinner and munchies and lots of liquid. And then I stayed by her, bringing her water, wiping her sweaty face with some napkins, trying to get her as comfortable as I could. She never thanked me. Well, why should she.

            Sandy and Artemis, Temi as she called herself, danced and talked all evening. I was not surprised. People would say they made a cute couple. And they did make a cute couple. I knew Temi was far far beyond my orbit. A shining star in the freshman firmament.[2] And Sandy was the man to hitch his wagon to it.

            That was OK with me. Really. Truly. I had spent my high school years in not so splendid isolation. My shyness contributed, but then the shyness did not grow automatically from the dead soil of my personality. The stepfather that my mother graced me with helped. There was no way that I could make friends with anyone when I’d have to have them meet so nasty a man, so deeply into control that he kept tabs of the number of crackers in a sleeve of Saltines to see how many I had eaten. He had an easy time controlling my mother. He ground her down into nervous breakdown after nervous breakdown. With me he did not, maybe could not go so far, even though he used controlling me as a weapon against her. If I bucked him in the slightest, she suffered even more . He kept me isolated, under his thumb, often working for him in his home business fixing furniture. For no money, of course. He had moved us, first from Miami and then from the diverse inner city of Harrisburg to an all-WASP suburb when I was in eleventh grade. I barely knew the kids in the school. Put strangers under the stepfather’s thumb?[3] Even if the stepfather had allowed such a thing as guests, I could not possibly bring a friend to that house. I had no friends.

            I took advantage of the isolation in my own way. I’d always been a good student. The stepfather’s sequestration of poor old me turned me positively studious. When not working for the stepfather or at the McDonald’s, I spent my evenings and weekends doing homework and studying ahead and reading book after book, from Thucydides to Zinn and from Beo to Virginia Woolf, and more. I love math. In my senior year calculus class, I dazzled the teacher, Dr. Saunders, when I solved a problem that neither he nor any of his students for the last decade or two had been able to crack. He asked me to write out the solution on the blackboard. I took all the blackboard space, two broad panels worth, to display my achievement. And then a kid in the class, Rick, as popular and well-liked a boy as Biff Loman himself,[4] pointed out an error in a specific line. I’d written five, but it should have been seven. It was not a terrible thing. The solution still worked fine. I’d always been terrible at arithmetic.

            I’d call my studying dedication, except it was more like a response to despair. It was the only thing I could do that the stepfather could not or would not stop. It was also my future. Thanks to my schoolwork, I got a full-ride scholarship to the biggest, baddest state school in Pennsylvania. I thought of applying to ivies, but . . . too rich a broth for me, I thought. College too my stepfather could not stop. Nor could the manager at the McDonald’s. Near my last day there, he sidled up to me, put his arm around my shoulders—I shuddered but stood still—and whispered in my ear, “You don’t really want to go to college, do you? Why don’t you stay here and become an assistant manager?” I smiled. “Over my dead body.”

            College broke the isolation. Suddenly I had whole dorm buildings full of friends. On my first day in the dorm, as soon as the parents went away, I searched for and found someone, Bert, who would sell me some dope. That was one step in my rebellion against the stepfather’s imprisonment. I scored a big chunk of red Lebanese hash. And then Bert and I got as high as we could. The smell wafting through the floor in the dorm brought other kids in. By the time the dining hall opened for dinner, I had a high dozen new friends. Shyness? It just disappeared.

            Fortunately the RA in our dorm house, Tim, had a blind nose to such goings on. And anyways he liked to grease social interactions. That first Friday we were up at school, at the end of so-called orientation, a couple of days after the party at Pushkin, and the weekend before classes started, he hosted his own party in our dorm house’s common room, with a huge vat of hundred proof something or other to serve our needs. I had never had any alcohol at all in my whole life. Not even a sip of beer. That night I made up for it . . . and woke up the next morning in a bathroom stall with puke all over me. I remembered Laurie at the prom. I never got drunk again.

            Anyway, whether or not Temi was within my orbit, I told myself I did not need, wasn’t ready for a girlfriend. What I needed, I thought, was time and space to be the adolescent guy that I’d never been allowed to be. If I had luck and charisma—what a thought!—that might include some casual sex now and then, but it was hanging out with the guys that I’d missed in high school, and that’s what I longed for. Bert and I became good friends, and not just because he had a constant supply of good smoke. He was fun to be around and play cards with or just talk. He could tell a good joke, but had a serious side too. Sandy, my roomie, was OK. Not really. He was not really a friend and had horrible interests. He seemed full of himself and his manly beauty. He was for sure determined to get into as many girls’ panties as he could. I could understand the desire, but the way he thought of women bothered me. He also wanted to get into a fraternity. I’m not sure which was more important to him, panties or frats, but suspected the frat was top of the list. He would start rushing as soon as he could. I despised the very idea of a fraternity, from its inane selectivity to its vision of women as objects to screw. Never close, Sandy and I fractured completely when his true nature became obvious.

            Two older guys in our house, Dylan and Jake, roomed together. We used to mock Dylan mercilessly when he turned twenty-five. “You’re a quarter century old, man!” Jake was a few years younger. Dylan and Jake had served in the armed forces, in Vietnam. Thanks to Uncle Sam’s bounty, college was their way back into civilian life. They both became great friends. Dylan especially was a solid mate. We spent a lot of time together, playing cards, going to movies, sitting around and talking talking talking. Dylan was a philosophy major. Some of the talking got intense. We argued a lot about god. He was a theist. I was an atheist. Battles ensued.

            There were some little brown tablets of mescaline circulating the campus, and Dylan and I availed ourselves of those tabs as often as we could. The psychedelic experience brought me close to transcendence many times. Dylan insisted that what I called transcendence was really the presence of god. I demurred. Jake had an old-fashioned school-house clock on the wall above his bed. He’d taken the hands off, though. Right in the middle of the clock Jake had pasted a Mickey Mouse face. I grokked.[5] I saw clearly the absurd relativity of time thanks to that clock. Dylan insisted that what I grokked was god’s divine point of view, situated outside of time. I demurred. One night Dylan and I started climbing trees on campus. Sitting in the crotch of a huge magnolia, I melded with the life of the tree, with of all of nature. Dylan insisted that that sense of oneness was my coming close to god. I demurred. And then that sunset across the fields to the north of Eliot Halls. One slender cloud blazed with the light of the setting sun, golden and red and orange and even green. And verily it was the finger of god himself beckoning me to follow, Dylan insisted. I demurred.

            Not every trip was so heavy with significance. One night Dylan and I came across a little mound of dirt next to a dorm building, Baldwin Hall, one of the four dorm towers in our corner of Eliot. It was not huge. In fact, calling it a mound is an exaggeration. But we spent hours trying to get to the top of the little bulge in the ground. Halfway we’d get, and then slide right back down. Start over and the same thing. Over and over and over. We laughed so hard that we rolled on the ground laughing. One excuse: it was damned cold and the mound was covered with ice. Miraculously, no officious campus cop intervened. On another evening, walking through campus, we saw a flock of birds, I think they were swifts, dropping down to roost in the chimney of one of the campus buildings. They formed a perfect, beautiful spiral, the narrow end disappearing into the brick top of the chimney and the wide end winding inward, tightening and tightening as it went down into the chimney. That was just gorgeous. Our school had a pretty good gymnastics team, and hosted many excellent teams, including the USSR’s national team. Dylan and I, and other folks we knew, would take our mescaline and go to the meets. Lordy lordy lordy—talk about gorgeous! It gave “happy trails” a very exciting new meaning.

            There was also a lot of inanity. After dinner sometimes thirty or forty or fifty of us would gather on the court outside the FUB and play volleyball, however many were there divided equally, more or less as the psyche moved us, on two sides. Most of us were either tripping or very very high. Playing volleyball with one real and a myriad phantom polychromatic psychedelic balls was a hoot and a half.

            I was learning to be a friend, to have friends, to value friends. I was having a great time doing so. The bros were enough for me.

---

[1] I’ve made so many references to cultural artifacts, sometimes as in this case a slant reference, changing the terms of the passage I refer to, and often without acknowledging them in the text, that I feel obliged to note when I do. Here Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus is in the background.

[2] Paraphrased from that wonderful movie, Singing in the Rain.

[3] The Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb” in my mind.

[4] As in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

[5] The key word in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

Camaroneros to the Rescue

It was only four days after my seventh birthday that the rebels entered Havana in 1959. I didn't know much about the war beyond what I'd experienced living in a fairly small city on the south coast of the island.

 

Cienfuegos, my home town, had experienced a battle, really not even a skirmish, when I was five years old. I knew that much, and knew that the planes that bombed us were sent by the government of Fulgencio Batista. And I knew the uncomfortable feeling when we drove down a highway and had the government's battery of gun emplacements trained on our car until we went around a curve. So I thought that maybe Fidel's eviction of Batista would mean we would not be bombed or shot at by the government. That was a good thing, I was sure.

 

But my family clearly thought otherwise. Even before Fidel's conquest of Havana they, and my extended family—uncles and aunts, cousins, grandparents—all had scared me with the idea that the change in government meant a change of life. The only hope, they said, was an American intervention.

 

That summer after the victory of the Revolution we all went off to Varadero, the gorgeous barrier-island beach where we spent summers swimming and swimming some more. That year we rented a house perched on a bluff right above the beach. The water was marvelously transparent, and the shallow sea made Varadero's sand seem to go on and on for miles into the Straits of Florida.

 

One afternoon, when I was sitting up on the porch that overlooked the beach, I saw a huge fish, a shark, swimming up to within a yard or so of the beach, passing so near to a couple of men that, from where I sat, I was sure the shark's rough skin must have rubbed against their legs. And then the shark swam back out into the Straits.

 

Directly north of us, almost exactly one hundred miles away, I knew, was Marathon Key, half-way down the chain of cays that brought the US, the source of our salvation as my family insisted, so very close.

 

On a beautiful, mild, dead calm evening, as the whole family sat on the veranda at the rear of the house, we saw off in the distance a line of lights coming down from the north.

 

The invasion fleet, my uncle said. The marines are coming!

 

Everyone on the porch grew more and more agitated. Back in Cienfuegos we had been targets; now we'd be at the forefront of liberation. Yay!

 

And then the lights simply moved easterly. It was no invasion fleet, just the camaroneros, the shrimpers out to harvest the shrimp run.

Do What You Must

He came to see me because his life seemed to be too much for him. His mother wanted him to be practical, his father wanted him to do what he had done, his brother laughed at him because he was too smart for his own good, his sister mocked him because he was as pretty as she. What do I do, how do I deal with all the voices that just do not come together into any sense at all, he asked.

 

I said, wait and think it through, feel it through. What are you passionate about? What do you really love? hate? What are you just middling warm or cold about? I had a student once whose parents demanded that he major in accounting. He hated accounting. He despised the classes he had to take. He was so bad at it that at age 19 already he had ulcers and hypertension and just nerves shot to shit. But his parents insisted, and he persevered, barely passing classes, failing the CPA exam, then finally becoming a performance artist and living happily ever after—as far as I know, anyway.

 

The moral is simple but hard to keep in mind. This too will pass. This does not define you or your future or your life. If like that student you feel obliged to pay attention to what others tell you to do, do it if you must but know that in the end you must do whatever you are comfortable with. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

 

But how do I reconcile the different voices, he asked. How do I satisfy such contrary opinions?

 

You don’t, I responded. The only important voice in all this is your own. Look in your heart and act from what you feel. Will your parents be disappointed? Maybe, maybe not. As for your siblings, tell bro and sis to go to hell. It’s your life, not theirs.

 

The boy nodded as I spoke then turned and left my office. He graduated. He left town. Three years later, I saw him walking hand in hand with his boyfriend. They looked happy.

No Balm in Gilead

I see posts from folks in younger generations lamenting the shortcomings of the older generation, that is to say, the Boomers—of which, for the sake of full disclosure, I am one. From what I can gather, much of the lamentation is more than warranted. The cost of living makes it almost impossible for kids newly become adults to get ahead in this country. The political divisions that pit us vs. them are so deep that many of us, and not just the younger folks, despair of moving beyond them and into a more perfect union. The state of the school systems in all the states is so abysmal that I, for one, despair of ever having a well-educated citizenry. The price of even the most routine medical procedure beggars us all—or if not the procedure itself, then hedging against illness with unaffordable insurance.

 

And then I think back to when I was a youngster encountering the myriad problems of the last century. Many of those memories are vivid. The unfettered expression of American apartheid in the water-fountain signs that specified this one for whites only, that one for Negroes; the tar-paper shotgun shacks along the highway with hopeless, despairing families barefoot on the front steps; the burning cities and the National Guard everywhere; the debacle of Chicago ‘68, when the whole world was watching a police riot against demonstrators exercising their constitutional right to assemble and petition; the thousands and thousands of kids drafted into and killed in an armed force battling in a senseless neo-colonial war; the corrupt and corrupting politics of Tricky Dicky and his minions in the White House and, finally, in the Department of Justice.

 

It’s true that the economic realities back then were very different from what they are now. Still, although I cannot speak for anyone else, from my own experience the differences are not as large as it appears. I recognize that I’m not the best avatar of my generation’s coming into the working world. I was in school until I was thirty years old, and so I expected to struggle and be financially marginal. Still, even when I finally became a worker, I never ever lived in a house anywhere near the median price nationwide. Indeed, when my wife and I finally bought a house, it was a row house in a poor city, the cost of which was at best a quarter of the median price of housing in America. Even now, after so many years of working and fully retired, we live in a house that’s about one half the median price of housing, which we can afford because we still reside in that same poor city. The one thing that seems to me very unfair in current social reality is the cost of college. The increase in those costs is absurd and obscene.

 

At any rate, the crisis in early twenty-first century America does not seem to me unique or unusual. Here’s the second verse from Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers,” which reflects the realities of 1969:

 

One generation got old

One generation got soul

This generation got no destination to hold

Pick up the cry

 

Would a young person in 2026, when I’m writing this, recognize the sentiment? I think so. What underlies those lines is an experience of social reality very much parallel to current events, from racism to economic inequality and from exorbitant military budgets to the destruction of the planet by pollution, heat, plastics.

 

As is common in the language of our 21^st century contemporaries, the Airplane focused on generational differences. Back then I did as well. I remember the “don’t trust anyone over thirty” mantra, for instance. The people who got us deeper and deeper into the Vietnam War morass were all of them part of that generation that got old. The most recalcitrant of the recalcitrant racists were all of them part of that generation that got old. The despicable leaders who brought the National Guard to foreclose on all legitimate protest against authoritarianism were all of them part of that generation that got old.

 

And then a little bit of reflection. When the Little Rock Nine came to their Central High School classes, it was not that older generation that stood in their way. Their coevals did. When the National Guard soldiers shot and killed students in Jackson State and in Kent State, they were not members of that older generation. They were the students’ coevals. When the Chicago police beat the hell out of demonstrators at the Democratic Convention, they were, for the most part, not part of that older generation. They were the demonstrators’ coevals.

 

The same is true in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The people who bore those tiki-torches in Charlottesville were not Boomers. Only about 40% of people who support our current authoritarian president are Boomers. Most of the tech bros who govern our economic, political, social realities are not Boomers. Zuckerberg isn’t. Musk isn’t. Page and Brin aren’t. Bezos is, but just barely.

 

My point? Blaming a generation for the problems we face, whether we do that in 1969 or in 2026, is just wrong. I’ll acknowledge that the older one gets the less flexible one’s attitudes become. But the “young whippersnappers are fucking up the world” point of view is as common as the “damned Boomers have screwed us over” point of view, I think. As far as I can see, though, it’s not generational differences that create the messes we experience, in 2026 or in 1969. On the contrary, the culprits are the people who hold power, regardless of their generational affiliation. I’ll concede a very important point. Given that older people have had more time to accrue the resources that produce that kind of controlling power, there’s no doubt that older generations have an undue influence on the way the society is organized. Still, I maintain that it’s not the fact that they’re old that makes the difference, but rather the fact that they have power, derived from wealth or social status or whatever resource empowers them.

 

If I’m right about this, that it’s not generational differences per se but rather the accumulation of power among a set of people that produces the circumstances that agitated 1969 as much as 2026, then it follows that the key question to ask is whether it’s possible to forestall such accumulation. As I’ve suggested, in the way that societies are currently organized, older generations do elaborate power for themselves simply because longevity allows for the accumulation of the resources that produce power. But, again, it’s not simply longevity and old age that are at issue. Is such accumulation inevitable? Is it preventable?

 

The current crop of tech bros is informative. Up until some discrete point in their lives, those bros were generally speaking on the progressive side of things. My sense is that the switch to a right-wing political stance came as the Biden presidency and democratic congressional folks exerted pressure to regulate the expansion of the bros’ enterprises. It was then, in 2022 and 2023, that the bros experienced efforts to rein in the increasingly monopolistic practices of corporations like Meta and Google while at the same time the government tried to exercise its trust-busting authority. Those government initiatives coincided with the 2024 election, so that the hitherto Democrat-leaning bros became part of the Trump campaign. The most notorious case of support for Trump is Elon Musk, of course, who having voted for Obama and Hilary Clinton and then for Biden in 2020, now contributed near three hundred million dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

 

The switch is not relevant to the primary question I asked, however. Sure there’s no doubt that plutocrats who want to generate even more wealth would not support politicians who seek to constrain their businesses by pursuing antitrust and anti-monopolistic actions against those businesses. But the power was there before the switch took place. The issue I’m trying to figure out is whether it’s inevitable for any society, under any political or economic arrangement, to produce differences in wealth and status that lead to the kinds of social and economic disparities that agitated 1969 and continue to agitate 2026.

 

Is it possible to have an entirely egalitarian society, in other words?

 

As I see it, history suggests that such egalitarianism is not possible. Whether it’s aristocrats in a latifundist system or monarchs in a feudal system or nation states in a mercantilist system or straightforwardly capitalist enterprises, every society on the planet has produced the kind of disparity in wealth and status that engenders an accumulation of power in the hands of the very few at the expense of deep inequalities and inequities.

 

Revolution seems to do no good. The American Revolution is said to be the exception, but Washington Irving saw the fallacy of that assertion when he made Rip Van Winkle wake up to a newly created United States where the only notable difference was that the George III Inn had become the George Washington Inn. The French Revolution? The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Revolution? All of them reproduce the same disparities, and therefore the same inequities, as existed before the revolutionary “transformation.” Before and after, it turns out, are the same.

 

Marx dreamt of an utterly egalitarian society. But in practice the societies ostensibly predicated on Marxist principles produce even more disparity in power than any other system, with the exception, perhaps, of absolute monarchy. The ruling cadres in Cuba does not suffer the same painful daily existence that the ordinary Cuban does. The same goes for any other country that has laid claim to being “communist.” The argument goes that all such countries are not really communist but rather were working towards communism via the state capitalism that they actually practiced. OK. Marx’s dream remains a dream, and one regular feature of dreams is that they are not reality.

 

Is it the case, then, that a truly egalitarian society is impossible? Hobbes’s vision of the world before and after the creation of a social contract certainly suggests that such a society is absolutely not possible. Before the institution of the great Leviathan, local centers of power come into being in the “state of nature,” where every individual is in battle against every other individual. Might makes right, as they say, and the more might one person has, the more inequities there are. After the institution of the great Leviathan, that imagined creature becomes the “mortal God,” wielding unchecked authority and power as he wills. Society gains a surcease of the eternal war of each against all, but at the cost of even a hint of equity or egalitarianism.

 

At this point I’m reminded of two passages from the works of very different playwrights. In Julius Cæsar Shakespeare has Cassius say that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” I’d substitute “humans” for “underlings” because, it seems to me, the condition that leads to the disparities of 1969 and 2026 are simply a consequence of our humanity. The second passage comes from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where Didi comments, “There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.” It’s the generational difference, we say. Or it’s the economic system, we say. Or it’s the political arrangements of this or that particular society, we say. But Didi knows that it’s our very own feet, our very own selves, the fact that we’re human, that’s the problem.

 

Is there then no solution? I think not. A fantasy might suggest that the solution could come from being governed by an artificial intelligence programmed to ensure that no one group elaborates power for itself. I find that fantasy even more dismaying than Hobbes’s Leviathan. Ultimately, I’m afraid, there is no balm in Gilead. We can fret our hour on the stage of life, conspire to overthrow the oppressive system, battle against the forces that keep us down and out. And then we come back to where we started.

 

There’s “progress” of sorts, to be sure. I would not want to be a peasant in 13th Century China or Germany or Ghana or Cusco. I acknowledge fully that the average worker in the 21st century works longer and possibly harder than the average worker in the 13th century. But the conditions of life in the 13th century are spine-chilling for someone raised in the 20th and now living in the 21st century. The progress does not come in the reduction of the differences in power that produce our discontent, but rather in the padding that makes the discontent less noticeable. And here again I acknowledge fully that when the padding fails to disguise the discontent, the result is France in 1789 or Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1959 or. . . . I’m afraid that the United States is now at a point where the padding is getting mighty thin.

 

Again, there is no balm in Gilead.

Writing Accomplished

I’ve written myself into emptiness. Over the last year or so, I’ve produced about five hundred and eighty or so pages of prose. Some of those pages include photographs and pictures, so it’s not all my prose. But still, subtract fifty pages and it’s still a hell of a lot of writing. All of it has been in the retrospective mode. The document with all the images is what I think of as a memoir, which I’ve titled Still Don’t Know What I’ve Been Searching For. It takes seven chapters to complete, one for each place that I’ve lived, from Cienfuegos, Cuba to Miami to Harrisburg to State College, Pennsylvania to Cambridge to Carlinville, Illinois and finally to Reading, Pennsylvania. Seventy-four years of experiences. Like all memoirs, it’s only a partial account of what I experienced. Anything more would take another seventy-four years to complete. It’s also partial insofar as I leave out some things and focus only on events and people who seem to me significant, for whatever reason. I have no intention of doing anything with the document beyond maybe sending chapters to Carlos, my son, so he can get some sense of why his father is so strange a human being. I don’t know how interesting it would be for anyone else, or even for him.

 

The second bit of writing that I’ve done, this one all in the last month, is a fiction, which I’ve titled Never. It's long enough to be a novel, but I hesitate to call it that because it sounds ambitious and pretentious. It’s a fiction. The idea is loosely based on my experiences in the first term of my undergraduate career at Penn State. I don’t mention the school by name in the fiction, but it’s obvious what I mean. The characters in the story are also transparent. I change names, of course, and none of the characters are copies of real human beings. But the intent of the representation is, to me who wrote it at least, self-evident. I suspect that anyone who was around with me in those olden days of yore would be able to figure out the relationship between the fictional characters and real people.

 

The curious thing about writing the fiction was that the whole thing just came out of me without any effort on my part. It poured out like Coleridge’s ceaseless turmoil seething. I’d sit at my laptop and open the document, and the story just came. Even when I took time off from the laptop the story insisted on issuing forth. I’d be in the basement exercising, as I’m in the habit of doing because otherwise my whole body would simply atrophy, and in mid weight-lift ideas, events, dialogues would come into my brain and I would have to stop the lifting and type out an email to myself on the downstairs laptop recording whatever my brain had concocted. The same happened sometimes as I was walking around the neighborhood, also something I do to prevent physical atrophy. Without a laptop handy to type out an email, I would start the recorder app on my iPhone and speak what had flowed out of my mind.

 

The direction of the narrative took its own course as well. I was certain that the narrative would end up sad, verging on tragic. Instead it went in the opposite direction. A happy ending, verging on sappy rather than tragic. That part of it, at least, did not track with my experiences in that first year of college. Not that what I lived through back then was tragic in any sense. It was sad only insofar as something that had seemed precious came to an end, entirely because of my own stupidity I might add. But the fiction did not want to go there. It took a turn that, honestly, I could not have predicted—again, without any planning or pre-plotting on my part. It just happened because that’s the way the play lay, to paraphrase Perdita in A Winter’s Tale. That has never happened to me before. Hell, I’ve never written a fiction before, so there’s never been any time when what came out in my writing was not directed by my rational mind.

 

It’s true that I’ve often said to myself that I don’t know what I think about some subject or topic until I’ve written my way into it. But that is not at all the same thing as I experienced with this fiction. Writing my way to knowing what I think about something is a quite deliberate, rational process. Writing simply helps me think my way through to a conclusion. If I’m then going to turn what I’ve worked out for myself into an essay for publication or for presentation at a conference, I will begin the formal writing with the conclusion I’ve reached more or less as the thesis that I will argue. With the fiction none of that ratiocination took place. It just happened.

 

I remember reading many times comments from authors who said that their writing worked in that way, that it just came to pass as if the writer were transcribing something produced by someone else. Joan Didion has a wonderful essay, “Why I Write,” that traces out exactly that phenomenon as she experienced it in writing two of her major works. Her conclusion in the essay, her answer to its title, is that she writes in order to discover what happens. I’m no Joan Didion, but I now see exactly what she meant.

 

I have no intention of doing anything with Never. I did forward it, all two-hundred and ninety-six pages of it, to my wife. She hasn’t read it yet. I suspect that she’ll find it not just sappy but silly. That’s ok. I have no ambition to be a novelist nor of publishing what I’ve written. But I am curious what she will say about the dialogue. I think I’ve done that ok. It’s something I never thought I could do. I’ll be happy if she doesn’t hate the dialogue.

The Strangest Dream

All the talking heads are going on about the midterm elections as if they were going to proceed as elections have always proceeded since 1788. I had a nightmare last night, which I’m afraid may turn into our reality come November.

 

I dreamt that the Speaker of the House and the president pro tem of the Senate refused to accept the votes of states and districts where democrats won. I dreamt that when people gathered to protest that action, the leader of the executive branch declared a state of emergency and nationalized and deployed the National Guard to protect Congress. Not that the demonstrations were violent—nothing at all like January of 2021. But there were crowds jeering and cheering, and that set off the executive branch.

 

I dreamt that when the demonstrators persisted in exercising their right to peaceably assemble, the National Guard was ordered to fire on the crowd. Many of the Guardsmen refused to follow the order, but many did. And to ensure that orders would be followed, the executive deployed regular Army troops in support of the “loyal” National Guards troops.

 

I dreamt that at the Pentagon all the top brass that objected to the orders from the executive were not just dismissed but imprisoned. Armed guards were posted in the Pentagon to ensure that there’d be no response from any recalcitrant officer.

 

I dreamt that the House and Senate leadership appointed their own choice of representatives and senators. I dreamt that representatives and senators who objected to what was being done were jailed, declared traitors by the executive, and hanged, their chairs given over to people appointed by the leadership.

 

I dreamt that when finally a case came to the courts, the SCOTUS decreed that under the theory of a unitary executive, everything that had happened was entirely constitutional.