Feuilleton 3 of 20 draft # 3.0

- ALMOST COMPLETE NOW - THANK YOU FOR BEING PATIENT . . .

As Jackson crossed the room to leave

he felt the dark roving eyes beautiful Sophia Loren tracking with him from her cover photograph

on the shiny LIFE magazine cover, lying flat on the seat of the chair in the bedroom where he had

last left it.  The photo on the cover was much more professional than the photo of Jackson and his

brother and father, taken by his mother – at the picnic.

…………………………………………………

Feuilleton 3 of 20

FUTURE PRESENT - PICNIC REMEMBERED

            “DAD!”

Jackson heard his son Mason through the glow now.   A worried sad voice.  Must make his son happy, the way Jackson’s mother had made him happy.  His eyes opened to see his son's adult face.  Jackson assured himself that this was not just some previsualization with those sun screen Sim Lenses, or other digi-tools that his sons had tried to get him to use for years now.  Jackson had loved the advances of technology so much in the beginning, but as it began to cause people to make choices he disagreed with he began to shy away from it.  Had not backed away far enough.  Even as the seductive interfaces emerged from CHINDIA that linked the real physical world with the digital world through our tactile seeing, hearing, touch in a new sixth sense sort of way, he hesitated.  But now, now he forced his old cracked lips to form word-sounds to respond to his son.

            Jackson Kelley could only manage to say, “DA.”

Jackson watched his son's head move slowly through the glowing path of sunlight, his reddish complexion growing darker in the silhouette against the sun as he tried to understand what Jackson was trying to tell him.  When his son's head passed the bright center of light, his head stayed dark.  Dark shape of his son's head and shoulders now showed his own father?  His own father as a young man even younger than his sons.  Less than 30 years of age in those slower times, sitting on a blanket in 1954 for a late morning picnic.  Jackson’s heart filled up quickly as he looked at the vital smiling, olive skinned young man with thick dark wavy Brylcream’d hair.  The man who was his father when Jackson was only six years old was now lying down on a scratchy blanket in the brightly lit woods of Michigan.  Jackson’s own brother, rambunctious two year old Cleveland, was crawling and jumping about on the blanket.

Jackson, himself 6 years old, joined father and Cleveland the youngest son while mother, a little heavier and a little older now but still very happy, held the camera to take the film photograph of all her “Men” together.

            “Move together now, closer, closer – that’s right – O.K., smile now boys . . .”

Her picture would show two sons looking directly into the lens of the camera held by their mother, but the

father, smiling his devilish grin from ear to ear, was looking off to the left while hanging onto the smaller son.

Keep him from roaming off the blanket. Father's face showed his energy and drive. Forceful eyes still

held happy promise of futures to come. Dark hairy forearms exposed as he stretched out on the picnic 


blanket keeping the one son by his side while holding the other directly on the blanket.  The posture of father's face and body said “OPTIMISM & CONFIDENCE”.  The father’s pose and belief in himself was in high contrast to the growth of evil right alongside their lives.  Jackson’s father was now working in a Detroit city strangled by the growing opposing forces of unions and gangsters.  The human ability to organize and combine was producing transnational organic crime germination .  Where racism and elitism slowed social progress in the legit world, criminals of foresight were already rising above all that for greed, for greed and more.

But at this picnic right now, this had not affected his father yet.   Back in the places where he worked the LATRINALIA in the men’s latrines in the old city remained normal in their daily conveyance of sex and hate.  There was little or no POLITICAL mark-making in spite of upcoming elections.   Even if the devil had made all other graffiti artists deface common areas of the workplace in their own ways, there were definitely no SATANICslogans or symbols to be found anywhere, yet.  The father was glad to be out of the city here with his young sons and wife, his family. The two small young boys each had their own individual look.  Jackson’s was one of cautious cheerfulness while his brother focused an intensity and fascination beyond his years.  Little Cleveland stared right into the old Brownie camera lens. 

About four years later their father used the same camera to take a family picture of the two boys, standing in those same Michigan woods. This time the two boys were posed alone.  Standing in front of a tall birch bark tree that had a small captured dead black bat nailed to the tree, wings spread apart, with the small bat body about five feet off the ground. The roaming bat had been snagged flying inside the cabin by the father using his fishing net earlier that morning.  In this picture, Jackson was the older, taller boy on the right with bright Michigan sunshine behind him.  The strong back light eroding the edges of that first of many straw cowboy hats Jackson would wear.  He was holding a pellet air rifle at the ready.  In front of this Trophy Tree with the dead bat Jackson was about ten years old now.  His younger brother Cleveland stood on the left side of the picture next to his older brother. The size difference between the two boys was so great that his little brother's cheek only came up to the height of the rifle stock of the BB gun held almost aggressively in the right hand of older brother Jackson. The younger one was wearing a matching straw cowboy hat, a little too large for his head. Cleveland stared into the camera lens with that same gathered intensity.  Cleveland was dark olive skinned with matching dark family hair.  Jackson was lighter, with pale white skin and red hair. When he was young others would not stop looking at Jackson and his gleaming dark copper red hair.  When Jackson was growing up - before they all began ignoring him – other kids would not leave him alone at all.  He was the target of all their mean childhood persecution.  It seemed no one was more VISIBLE than a pale-skinned red head with freckles on skin that blushed so hot and red and bright that the very visual difference made them feel uneasy enough to taunt and punish.  Just to be better than him.  Jackson was beginning to understand why peoples and nations that were regarded as less than they actually were all felt the way they did.  He did not understand or even anticipate the already quietly existing drive toward nonhuman development and control.  Jackson did not see it coming.  He thought he knew how others felt.  In fact, the others were sure they all knew how they felt too.  But they were all wrong. Their feelings had been and were still being manipulated.  All were being manipulated toward a new end - or a new beginning.

………………………………………………………………

FUTURE PRESENT - BACK ON THE CEMENT- like a billy goat.

Jackson Kelley did not know why he had been attacked – why he was laying there, dying.  In

those brief moments when the searing throb settled into muffled pain he smiled.  Lips tight

together causing the soul-patch tuft of unruly white hairs under his lower lip to protrude outward

from his bearded face like a billy goat.  Jackson knew that both he and his scraggly old beard

were different, but he thought back.  How things changed and shifted across time.  He had grown

up during that time when being DIFFERENTbegan to take on some new value.  He went ahead

and made love not war.  Older still, Jackson had married and fathered brand new young ones.

But all this led to a furiously fast fading away. The women Jackson encountered no longer 
flirted, if they even saw him at all.  He'd always wondered about INVISIBILITY.  That old traditional legendary comic book super-power of true INVISIBILITY - now that he seemed to have it thrust upon him so completely he thought that maybe it was not all that it had been previously cracked up to be.  Many years later Jackson met up with an old friend of his from Texas.  The two of them met in an identically cloned format restaurant of an identically cloned format hotel on the December outskirts of a frozen Canadian city.  The friend was visiting briefly.  As they sat talking about their lives and where they both were now, the friend brought to Jackson’s attention a simple fact that he had somehow missed along the way.  There were less of them now.   Many of those men that were like them had already aged and dropped dead in their grey haired plump beer belly tracks - and were now entirely gone from this cruel cruel world. 

So, just by sheer force of (or lack of) numbers, he once again found himself becoming VISIBLEto those women that had not really been able to see him at all for decades.  People could see him more clearly now.  So life became more complicated again. 

Never happy, Jackson began to long for the earlier days - all the way back to the old black and white days.  He could still sometimes see in black and white, the lack of true color being due to those old black and white photographic prints he remembered better than the actual full color events themselves.  Jackson Kelley and his younger brother in that particular old photograph, in front of the Michigan Trophy Tree with a small dead bat, wings spread and stretched across the bark of the tree.  The little brother ten years old, standing on the left side right next to his four year older brother.  The BB gun held aggressively in Jackson’s right hand.  The smiling younger boy wearing his matching black and white straw cowboy hat, too large for his young head. Jackson and his younger brother, Cleveland, were kids growing up at the same time experiencing things together.  They had a unique bond of communication for a long time, even as they aged differently in two distinctly separate directions.  This aging and remembering was happening in high contrast to the growth of evil trickling around their lives.  The ancient human evil grew well in the contaminated American soil of  Detroit.  The miserable left out groups, disenfranchised. Even the already enfranchised that were wildly wayward; all gave birth to or joined up with the growing and thriving alternate cash world of the gangs.  Jackson and Cleveland’s parents did all they could to keep a distance from this for their small family. 

The small happy young lives progressed in the sunny world of  this family that appeared to be - that wished to be - a normal tv sitcom family.  All around them the stinking rooted evil flowered, noticed once in a while on the evening news or the daily newspaper - mostly talked about by the cops off duty.  Even then only the father heard them.  The two young sons did not know any police at all, back then.  Only the men’s room walls told some of it.  The LATRINALIA in the latrines was now beyond the usual sex and violence. Further into POLITICAL as hostilities toward real or suspected Communists flared again.  There was badly drawn pornography.  This was all long ago, with very little that had any SATANIC aspect to it at all.

Jackson and his younger brother Cleveland grew there at the same time experiencing these

things together.  Their unique bond of communication lasted for a long time – right though

the bent nails and into the copper pennies.

…………………………………………………………………..

1960’s  -  INTERIOR WORK BENCH - bent nails & copper pennies

The two brothers shared experiences like the bent nails.  Their maternal grandfather who lived in nearby Dearborn Michigan, just a bicycle ride away from their new suburban Detroit home, kept a work shop in his small racially segregated Dearborn home.  When the two young boys pedaled their bikes to visit they were living in a protected land, a vacuum that barely heard the goings-on outside it. But the turmoil in the outside world swirled without them knowing or even hearing much about it.  A full spin of the globe over in China Mr. Mao Zedong began his Cultural Revolution.  As young Jackson and his brother Cleveland pedaled their bikes along the freshly paved roads in Michigan.

            ( “Easy for these two kids, not like those urchins overseas.  That fat slob Mao over in 
                China saying bourgeois elements getting into government trying to restore old capitalism           
                 in his invented country of China.  Bloated Mao saying "revisionists" must be removed.         
                The way he got the military, the urban workers, and the Communist Party leadership itself      
                 to persecute itself – amazing . . .”)

                        (“ Yeh, mass killing purges for them poor bastards accused of deviating 
                            from hispath.  Same damned time Mao's personality cult grew even more popular. 
                            This Cultural Revolution was screwin’ up China bad. Millions persecuted 
                            - torture, rape, imprisonment, seizure of all their self earned personal stuff.” )

                                    (“ Why yes, and many historical relics and artifacts destroyed don’t 
                                        you know. Cultural and religious sites ransacked too – barbarians!”) 

                                                (  “But you don’t know – you don’t know how they had to fight                                                   
                                                     with Themselves, with Mao, with the Nationalists and Chiang, 
                                                     how they all had to fight the Japanese who were brutally taking 
                                                     China away from them - killing all of them.” )

None of this news ever reached Jackson and his brother, Cleveland.  Neither did the news of the Six-Day War in the “Middle East”.  The two boys did not know about any tension between Israel and its neighbors, nor how hot war began with Israel launching surprise air strikes against Arab forces.  No, life continued placid and child-like at their home back in Michigan.  Jackson and Cleveland did not know of the swift and decisive Israeli victory, with Israel taking the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Jackson never heard about this at all, for years.  It wasn’t until a smoking dark eyed girl on the stoned streets of San Francisco gave Jackson his first brief history education on Palestinians in those ‘swinging sixties’.  She was lovely.

The men’s rest room walls and stalls evolved LATRINALIA to include more POLITICAL now, and some SATANIC artwork snuck in on both sides of the JEWISH question. But no one thought the conflict would drag on - except maybe the PALESTINIANS -  and Jackson and his brother Cleveland had never even seen nor heard of them yet. 

            (“Hey, opinions still divided on Israel's attack - aggression or preemptive defensive                 
              strike….they don’t know, we don’t know)

                        (“ Right right right, but 1000 Israelis were killed, 4000 wounded.  
                            Arab casualties far greater. 15,000 Egyptian soldiers killed, wounded, 
                            missing in action. And the Jordanian losses 6,000.  Syrians, 1000 killed, 
                            another 300 captured.”)

There was no talk about dead people in the middle east, nor about bourgeois in China, nor even any kind of notion of preemptive strikes out where the two young Kelley boys rode their bicycles.

Just bent nails and, later, copper pennies. Their grandfather had old dented coffee cans full of them – the bent nails, back when things were much more physical.  The bent nails were all stockpiled waiting for corrective tapping and banging by discolored paint chipped hammers that rested on the aging wooden workbench within their grandfather’s house. These were nails used once already, pulled from their previous fastening tasks.  Pulled and saved for re-use. A habit fostered by their grandfather after living through the “Dirty Thirties” poverty of the depression era of the 1930’s in the prairies of Canada that he so often reminded them of.  The stories of lack and deprivation seemed like scary fantasy stories in these days of plenty in the United States.  Jackson stood with his little brother Cleveland in this stuffy basement space that their grandfather kept as his repair shop. There was that scent. Aroma, fragrance, because you couldn’t really call it just a smell.  Some ambiguously blended combination of oils in wood, decaying painted grainy surfaces, metal grit, and dust on oily tools and fittings. The scent was visible.  Jackson and his brother used to frequent this part of the grandparents’ house when their parents took them for visits.  In other parts of their grandparent’s house, the young attention of the two boys bounced to the big new Sylvania Television in the living room on the main floor of the house, with its bright and adjustable lighting in the surrounding luminescent plastic frame that bordered the big old curved picture tube encased in its heavy wooden cabinet.  Easily bored, the boys’ attention shifted to the grandfather’s old 1930’s crank handled black metal mechanical adding machine and its heavy neighboring black metal device, an old manual Royal typewriter on the table in the bedroom, and then finally, over and down the stairs to grandfather’s repair shop area. Aging doors, window frames, mostly chipped and wooden, all leaning, lying, stacked and waiting for their recall into duty on one of their grandfather’s aging downtown apartment buildings that were all bordering on derelict.  As he grew older Jackson thought that something must have happened at one of those old rundown buildings that caused his cute old grandmother to move out of his grandfather’s bedroom, though she always said it was just because she liked to get up early and he liked to sleep in.  Down there in the grandfather’s work room were metal shapes and gadgets mixed with all possible kinds of screws, nails, washers, nuts, bolts, spools of wire, and the old bent nails.

Their grandfather used to get little Jackson and his brother Cleveland to help with the always waiting nail straightening chore. It was innocent and useful busy work for two restless young boys who felt as though they were really WORKING in this place with its worn nicked wooden and scratched metal surfaces lit by dusty window sun rays full of microscopic oil-and-dust specs, or by the bare low watt electric light bulb which cast slender threads of brightness in barely perceptible woven patterns on all those Granpar surfaces.  Granpar - that’s what he called himself. That’s all that was left of his English accent.  The two young boys loved, respected, and feared this big man with his odd old stories that did not seem to align with the squeaky clean and newly dynamic straight 1950’s.  The boys’ father always spoke derisively about these nail straightening chores given to them by their grandfather.

            “Why can’t he just go out and buy some NEW nails from the hardware store?”

           

            “Why keep all this old stuff around?” their dad would say to their mother.

They did not know. It didn’t make sense and their dad said so too. But they were both glad the old 

cans of bent and twisted nails were there, waiting for them in that oil-wood-metal-dust place.

Besides, it saved Granpar money. That’s why he did it. He had told them so. When Jackson was
older, years later and far away with his own young family, they told him Granpar had died of a hyper agitated phone call with a Detroit tenant on the line who had been constantly delinquent in her rent payment.  Old Granpar Charlie’s poor little Granma-wife-Alice from Halifax Nova Scotia stood by watching him change colors to a deep red purple then drop the phone and heavily hit the kitchen floor with his large old solid body.  Jackson thought of those nails waiting for him and his brother.  Those squealing nails that had been noisily tortured out of even older wooden panels and framing timbers - now ready again for correction and re-employment.  Thrift.  Jackson learned the definition of it, but not the habit.  And while normal people went about their normal ways few were really aware that an alternate world, a criminal world, was developing in America at an even faster pace.  Evil as a business and a way of life was there right alongside their lives.  The up and coming evil ones never seemed to sweat the small stuff.  They never seemed to have to worry about the small change.  Small change.

In 1990 Jackson had his own growing family far away in always sunny southern California.  He had just completed his depressingly repetitive accounting of their monthly budget.  In his frustration he knew once again that he could not spend any more money because of their always too large and too dependably consistent over-spent debt.  And this was long before the great crashes of 2008 when U.S. President Bush appeared on television with that new, blood-drained blank and frightened “Deer-In-The-Headlights” expression of raw fear and surprise on his Texan face.

Jackson thought of those old oil-wood-metal-dust smells from his grandfather’s place as Jackson gathered up all the old pennies he could find in the house.  The old pennies smelled the same. On one of those very hot Los Angeles summer days he wanted one of the few things that would really cool him down in that hot, hot desert place. He wanted a cold Slurpee drink from the local 7-11 corner store. So he gathered all those dirty old aromatic copper pennies. All the aging dark and discolored copper pennies he could find.  He missed pennies.  No one used them now but they were not extinct yet.  Pennies had helped make purchases more precise and convenient.  Pennies taught him how to use a pencil eraser to rub clean the true gleaming copper color of each old penny that lay under the grimy dull dark patina from thousands of hands holding the coins.

Jackson paid the Los Angeles 7-11 man from Pakistan the price for the cold Slurpee completely with his horde of pennies, all pennies. The brain-freezingly cold Slurpee was shockingly delicious. He could feel his molten core body temperature dropping as he glugged it down.  That was before he switched from Slurpee’s to those cold Smoothies made of bananas, peaches, yogurt, and things like ginseng that became fashionable in Southern California.  It was years before things switched from being physical, tangible, and mechanical to being virtual, digital, and mostly untouchable.  The days of the last change from the Industrial revolution to the Digital revolution.  He missed pennies and those older days as each member of each older generation misses what they have lost.

Jackson missed his younger brother Cleveland too, wearing the straw cowboy hat, just a little too

large for his head.  How his little brother had stared into the lens with that look of gathered

intensity and fascination.   How he could really use some help from his little brother right now. 

Jackson had to let his mind wander free.  It went towards women.

……………………………………………………………………………

FUTURE PRESENT – OLD MAN’S FACE - Thoughts of love should help, right?

Lovers and wives - thoughts of lovers and wives filled Jackson, prostrate pancake flat now but looking up.  His aching weight shifted, stretched out on the slab of rough concrete.  Jackson’s shirt and pants pulled tight against the increasing pain in his torso when he tried to move.  Thoughts of warm love helped.  Jackson wanted to remember right through the awareness that he’d been attacked by someone that wanted him to leave the land of living humans that Jackson had tried so damned hard to fit into. Thoughts and memories of love helped.  Love hurts and heals at the same time.  Jackson never tried to understand love.  Many old colleagues, friends, and others he ran with as a youth had theorized, explained, over analyzed love to him as good or bad or an unavoidable thing.  But Jackson Kelley could not grasp love.  He imagined that love never entered his mind at all, but that love took over his heart and his stomach, and maybe his legs. Jackson clearly remembered the first time he felt this sensation strongly. 1961 Jackson was looking through the high, small suburban Detroit bathroom window in the red brick house he grew up in.  When he looked through that window it was a bland view of a bland solid brick rectangle, about eight short feet away his window. This view was made up of more bland bricks, but gray bricks this time. The gray brick outside the bathroom window was the next door neighbor’s house.  Mr. Jack Privanda.  The Privanda’s house, eight short feet away from his bathroom window, had those long skinny bricks that architects called for when they were being Modern back then.  But usually only in the front of the house as the rest of the house had brick veneer that was normally proportioned and cheaply made, but still gray in an attempt to match the Modern bricks that showed their face to the newly paved residential street in 1950’s Livinio, Michigan, that clean new suburb of old Detroit.

Life in Livinio was calm, clean, and quiet.  Not like the dirty, noisy upheaval of older Detroit

nearby.  The neighbor, Mr.Privanda, had a niece that came over to visit from time to time.  In the

summer of the year Jackson Kelley was to turn eleven, she seemed to be around a lot more than

usual.  Mr. and Mrs. Privanda were friendly people. They were always individually nice to him. 

He could not ever remember seeing them together at the same time. When Jackson saw her, the girl, the niece, she was also on her own. And Jackson fell immediately deeply hopelessly in love. 

He was beside himself.  He lost his appetite.  He never ate very much before anyway, but now he could eat nothing at all.  Jackson felt happy and sad and alive and dead all at the same time. Butterflies in the stomach did not describe this feeling he had.  It felt as if his whole body was filled with warm blood that was effervescent, bubbling up and through him.  His brain would not work.  He felt very brave.  Nothing could stop him.  It was uniquely exhilarating.  She, the girl, the niece, she was more. She was much more than she was.

When Jackson looked at her from across the front lawn to the smooth, white ribbon of new cement

side walk where she stood and walked slowly his peripheral viewing shut down completely.  She

filled his field of vision entirely. The surrounding trim of manicured suburban lawn at her feet, the

foreground of  the front yard with its Michigan version of Kentucky Blue Grass planted and fertilized and growing with its small metal hose fed mechanical water sprinkler filtering droplets that caught the softly diffusing light of the summer sun.  The background of the wide still-white cement street that had not been there long enough to get the gray-brown-black oil and exhaust stains from all of the 1950’s gasoline vehicles that drove at the speed limit out to the larger streets at the end of its straight stretch … all of this fell away… gone.

She filled the total width of his field of vision.  This girl, several years older than him with all of her hesitating height and self conscious lack of grace, the most beautiful female he had ever seen. 

His heart sounded more strongly now than when he had looked at Sophia Loren on the cover of LIFE magazine. That had always been his favorite until now.  The color photograph had eyes that followed you across the room.  Even when the magazine was lying on that table in the corner of the

room, she looked straight at you.  But this girl, when her eyes met his, they had stolen his eleven

year old boy soul instantly.

She had curved, rounded, beautifully inset eyes with lids that covered and uncovered the sparkling

wetness of her gaze at him.  She was long thin … bony even.  She had an uneven cut to her hair. 

She wore summer clothing, bright shorts, a light cotton top, and lots of long limbed skin from the

edges of her clothes to her hands and to her feet. Her voice was soft down, was velvet, and was

brook-water happy with sun flecked glints. He was completely outside himself.

They never even held hands.  He never even once thought that this wonderful life would go the way of Romeo and Juliet, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, of old pages in old books with

neglected bindings.  He was just beside himself in his deep eleven year old love.

But now Jackson stretched his aging fingers, tried to lift his old arm up to weaker eyes.  Even though his body was cold on the warm pavement his eyes closed against the strong flash of sunlight above him.  With his eyes closed and small wet tears forcing themselves between his closed eyelashes Jackson recalled a tiny baby coming home from the hospital with theirmother and father in the bulbous old used 1952 Chevrolet family car.  Young Jackson and his little brother Cleveland looked at each other when they heard the burbling cute noises coming from the wriggling bundle that was their new sister.  She was a good child, happy.  While all siblings have different sets of positive and negative traits, this new sister was one that made everyone happy.  She was just happy.  Not too many years later the second new sister was born and came home in the same way in a different car.  While everyone was happy that the score was now tied with three males and three females in the house, the youngest was not as continuously happy.  In fact she behaved much more like a normal child with very unruly, noisy, and complaining moments that balanced against the happy cheery times.  But they all harmonized.  Families are amazing.

Jackson really did not get to know his two sisters very well as they were growing.  He ended up leaving home for the world too soon, before they had even become who they were going to be.  Jackson missed the opportunity to be with them, to know them.  He would just have to make do with the time that was left.  But it was such a sorry waste.  And now?  Well, maybe now there was no time left at all.  How could he even try to reach them now? - reach them right through the sharpening evil that had put him down, so far away from them?  His old eyes squinted and  looked at where he was.  He looked around at all the marked up walls near him.  Walls and poles and even ground slabs – all marked and cut.  Not with the insulting or lasciviously alluring marks of old, but with this confusingly evolved mix of bathroom LATRINALIA, nonpartisan POLITICAL, deep cut STENCIL, all to show us their art-marks whether we liked it or not.  All of this feeling like the indecipherable profusion of styles were struggling to speak to the SATANIC - to those crazy sick bastards. 

            “Sick Bastards”, Jackson thought.  Hell, his own brother might think Jackson was a sick bastard himself after all that was happening today - a stupid crazy sick bastard.

……………………………………………………………………………………

FUTURE PRESENT - VEHICLE DASHBOARD CAMERAentering surface route traffic.

Today in the present warm late morning sunshine Jackson’s brother Cleveland once again had that

intense look on his face as he spoke into his invisible dashboard telephone while driving into town.

            “near 3rd and Miramar, north of the 110……ok..right…...got it.”

Cleveland Kelley, almost as old as the damaged Jackson Kelley laying on the cement across L.A., pulled off the freeway, heading back into town from up north. Cleveland’s face still carried the genetic intensity, but time surrounded it with what used to be called “character”.  The square set symmetrical facial features edged and bordered with west coast sun-leathering, but looking very alive for a man his age. Four years younger than his older brother and though he had surpassed him many times in many ways, he still felt the concern and care of a younger little brother for Jackson.  After the two of them had gone their separate ways in life they remained connected through images and sound. The two of them would exchange pictures and music over the years and even when Jackson’s source of new things seemed to dry up, Cleveland continued to send his brother recorded music – at first on cassette audio tapes, then cd’s, and then with cloud files.  Cleveland was always about ten years ahead of Jackson in musical awareness and taste, but each decade Jackson caught up or at least liked to think that he did.

            “What has that dumb motherfucker done THIS time?” Cleveland said out loud to himself as his vehicle slowed a bit, entering the surface route traffic.   He was about ten minutes traffic time from the location phoned to him by his nephews, his brother's sons.  In the slowed traffic, he selected an old song that he and Jackson used to listen to when riding these streets in this same Angeleno area many years before.  He touched the surface and gestured with his fingers to play the selection and RL BURNSIDE sang out his “BAD LUCK CITY” with all its similarities to the music of Older West Africa, using the same chords and holding that repeating bass, giving that hypnotic feel . . . all punctuated by RL breaking into his sad and sorry falsetto briefly, at the ends of his long notes.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxk-fX0hI04  

Back when Cleveland drove his dented old Japanese gas powered pickup and Jackson was his front seat passenger on these same streets this music came violently right into and through their listening bodies courtesy of the overblown sound system Cleveland had installed in the dashboard of the old vehicle in the last century.  The big bass reproduction was so powerful Jackson could feel the sound rip right through his guts and echo in his dental fillings as it passed upwards and right through him.

Now the older sun-wrinkled version of his younger brother in a newer this-century vehicle 


activated the nonphysical phone again and triggered two calls. The first call went to the Police,
because Cleveland always thought they were slower. The second call went to a person that was both a gang source and the mother of the convict Cleveland had just visited and interviewed up north. The second call connected with the woman, just a little younger than Cleveland. She hadn't seen nor heard from him in over a month. 

            “Hello Mrs. Fahtel, good to talk to you again.” he said respectfully.        

             “Whachoowahn,  yohwhuthaired honk?” she teased back in a girlish way, this woman in her sixties. Cleveland laughed quietly but genuinely into the nonexistent phone receiver as he made a left turn into a block of tightly packed homeless people in their crappy corrugated pressboard suburb, a new unintentional semi-residential squatter layer spread over the broken aging rarely commercial facade of the street.     
    

            “What makes you think I want something?  He smiled into his end of the conversation.                

With steel reinforced humor she said,

            “Caus’two thangs, honk......fuss, I jus’hear y'back from my son AGIN,  up north….and      

            numero two, y'all ain’nebba call this ole black elder lady lessn you beon to,

            or afTAH, sumpin.”                

           

            “You have me all wrong.”  Cleveland grinned, “I just love to hear the sound of your voice.”

- and he really did.               

             “Sheeeeiiit” she replied, then repeated. “ Whatchoo’wahn?”

The smile faded from Cleveland’s face as he said,

            “Cutfitti slots and yard talk say there's some squeeze, some sort of pressure on the             populations ... do you feel it?  Do you know about it?”

 Cleveland asked her sincerely, but he thought he already knew the answer. He had stayed liquid in,

and connected to the ebb, flow, and evolution of the world of gangs ….. and as of late, certainly

most importantly, their relationships to corporate business.  Cleveland felt he knew what was taking place. But, same as all those years ago when he was a reporter, he needed some real confirmation, some solid verification from a trusted source.  The old black elder lady was as trusted a source as he had ever had.  Mrs. Fahtel hymn-sang the last part of the old driving song by Wayne Martin on Boozoo Bajou Juke Joint  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG4ZomD4byo  as she played the white caller out further and further.      
              

            “Right, Yeah…..so what IS the change? And where's it coming from?”  Cleveland pushed. 

Cleveland was now driving past the last of the broken homeless on this street, as he entered an

empty zone. A place where no one stayed much.  The occasional uninformed person walked out

there on foot, or a singular speeding bicyclist, or sometimes a stray gang-ride or tag cut, but mostly

empty.  A place with no prey to feed on, no crops to harvest.  Mrs. Fahtel spat back slow but 


frustrated and forceful into the call,

            “Y'all jus wanna know’tALL, doncha?  How OLD y’boy?  Doncha’ebber learn?     Sheeiiit...Pressure be comin'down sames’always and ebber...comes down from up, doan it?         .....sheeit..................lakh always’bin.”

Cleveland could see her in his mind's eye, sharper now than his real set of eyes ever were.

She wasn't teasing or smiling.  He could feel a hard frown on a polished mahogany face.         

            “Down from where?  Mrs.Fahtel?” he pushed again, “Comes down from where?              

                   

            “From th’muhfuckn MONEY – fooohl”

She hung up, disconnected, cut the link. His hunches had almost always been right. The whole idea of hunches still bothered him though.  Those many hunches served him in the past as a reporter for the city paper before change really did change almost everything, but he still mistrusted those feelings.  Her quick anger confirmed his feeling though.

The squeeze was causing friction, and making the heat.  His stupid older brother may have just put his sorry ass into one of those hot spots, the dumb son of a bitch, he thought.  It was all so much wider and deeper now.  The gangs were being more and more like one big gang now. One serious machine.  Transnational with digital linkage and orchestrated actions.  Cleveland made a right turn, stopped, and retriggered the call to the police number.  Cleveland stared into the deep purple-gray shadows cast by the yellow sun onto white cracking adobe walls with multi-color tags and cuts in front of his vehicle as he called.

…………………………………………………

FUTURE PRESENT - sounds of sliding and clicking

Something could almost be seen in the very dark space in between the buildings. The dark corners and recesses bordered 3rd and Miramar.  Majed Faraj and his sister Zorah stayed back in the deeper core shadows to remain unseen. The 15 year old girl hissed at the 14 year old boy, visible only by the slight oil shine on dark golden skin.           

            “Get’yass’BACK”  Zorah commanded in a ragged whisper.

Majed just looked at her. They were both “pages” for the group. They were to do the low work. They were to be silent and obey.  Majed remained silent, but eased deeper into the complete darkness between the tall structures. The oil shine skin highlights eclipsed out as he moved back.  There was nothing to be seen, and only slight scuffling and mechanical sounds to be heard in the dark spaces.  Majed had seen his sister Zorah reacting to things all his young life.  Zorah now seemed to feel that their missions, that HER mission, was the most important thing in her life.  This was a change, Majed knew, from the earlier days when love was the most important to her.  Majed missed that.  He missed his sister with her warm heart of gold that loved him and loved life itself.  Things had hardened now.

Out in the sunlight, warmer toward noon, old Jackson Kelley's red son, Mason, lifted his

father’s head and shoulders slightly.  This caused Jackson’s old hand to slide off his prone

abdomen and drop the short distance to the rough pavement.  Jackson felt the limp flesh land on the hard surface.  Jackson wondered what day it was. The warm rough concrete texture under his resting fingertips - and recent memories of both Canada Day and the Yankee Doodle 4^th floating in Jackson’s head for some unknown reason, told him it was sometime in the hot July summertime.

Yes, sometime in the summer. Dates of years, dates of specific days …both used to mean

so much to Jackson.   He could never remember them.  He would write them down or mark them clearly on the paper calendars he had used back then. 

The small distant oil shine skin highlights reappeared ahead in the dark shadows as the boy slowly leaned outward into the sun rays again.  The slight scuffling and mechanical sounds ceased as the boy’s sister Zorah completed the charge up of the unit he had used on the old white man.  She reloaded and locked the small unit with a slightly louder alloy slide and click.  Majed moved slowly, nervously, weaving in and out of the light shafts.  The sounds of quiet multiple echoes of sliding and clicking of the alloyed hand unit were distinct and heard by all present in this space.

The slide and clicking gives way to A FASTER CLICKETY-CLACKING…… accompanied by rapidly pulsing haloed white light, lighting up the walls with the younger 1D sigtags, surrounded by 2D throwups, fading off as the light almost reached up to the Giraffiti sprayed high.  The sounds gave an abstract music theme to generations of GANG TAGGINGused for nation building, for hitup boundaries, roll calls, years old memorials, even a few more serious current 187 death threats.  SATANIC?, no, not specifically - but the combined feeling belonged to the devil.

FASTER AND FASTER, CLICKETY-CLACKING……

…………………………………………………………………………………………………