You don’t network at Thanksgiving dinners for the homeless

(Fiction Based on Real Events by Kay Ebeling )
(still being edited)
*

"Mom, that's the third time that same car has gone by.  They're looking at us. Mom, wake up." 

I stirred from what sleep one gets when parked under a street light. 

"Mom, there they are again. Let's get out of here."

"No, Lucy, this has to be a safe place. We're right across the street from a city park."

"Mom, there they are again and this time they are slowing down."

She was right, the car headlight approaching did seem menacing, coming up slowly, like a predator cruising on asphalt looking for prey. I realized only then that the car was likely full of guys out in middle of the night looking for someone vulnerable to rob or worse, like us.

The key was in the ignition so I pulled out of the parking space fast.  We squealed through the flat blocks south of Hollywood Boulevard and they were following us. So I approached a stop sign, went through the intersection, then, as the predator with headlights followed, I made a fast U turn and got on another street going a different direction. When we made our way up to the boulevard, there were too many people around for their pursuit to continue. We were safe.

"I don't get it," I said as we pulled up to a curb. "That's a city park, we should be safe there." 

"Mom, city parks are where the gangs are.  I tried to tell you."

I thought a minute and said, "We should go back to our old neighborhood."

For the next few weeks we slept in our car about a half block from where we had been living when a landlord stormed into the apartment determined to get us to move. She threatened calls to child services when Lucy and I didn't make any more noise than any mom and preteen daughter. She claimed she had evidence of criminal behavior, and "I will use it if I have to." She was knocking on the door harassing us several times a day until I finally caved and gave thirty days notice to move.   
*

For three years we'd lived in that apartment on Franklin near Cahuenga in what was once a cherry part of town, so the structures are elegant but old and affordable to a single mom.  

The day we moved in the guys across the hall were carrying furniture out, not looking happy.  I improvised a line about them moving out just as we were moving in. 

"Just wait," he countered. "After about three years they'll start making it so awful for you here, you will have no choice but to move out."

"Why would they do that?"

"Rent control.  They can't raise the rent unless the apartment is vacant."

"Oh come on," I said. "That sassy black lady landlord Summer isn’t going to throw a single mom and her daughter out onto the streets."

But Summer did.  Almost to the calendar date three years after our move-in, the campaign to get us to move out began. 
... (More needed here. what she did has to be worse and describe her more)
The black former disco dancer now building manager would put 3 day "fix or quit" notices on the door almost every day for things that made no sense to me. She'd claimed the noise my 14 year old daughter made with her friends in the afternoon was causing neighbors to complain. The harassment got so bad, I finally just turned in a 30 days notice with a vague memory of the conversation I had the day we moved in.  "Don't worry, we'll find another place that's better," I told Lucy. 

I didn't realize how much the rental market had changed in three years.  In neighborhoods where there used to be "Now Renting" signs begging for tenants, they now had waiting lists. When you applied, instead of feeling welcome and that you were about to move into a new home, managers eyed you with suspicious and asked about source of income and credit rating, then mentioned there were a dozen other applicants for the same apartment with a look that said, and you aren’t going to come out on top. 

About 28 days after serving her our 30 days' notice, Summer stood outside our door asking when we were going to be out of the apartment.  I said, We haven’t found a place, we need to stay another month, and she said, "No you can't. This apartment is rented you have to get out so we can get it ready for the new tenants."

As the guy who bought my dad's old desk was carrying it out, he said, "Look I found this."  It was a "Happy Thanksgiving" card I'd sent my parents twenty years ago that had gotten lodged in the back of a drawer.

"Oh yeah," I said and was stunned.

"Kinda strange," he said, "since Thanksgiving is next week."

"Yeah."

*

First place we stayed after we lost our apartment was a hotel in our neighborhood that had a large sign advertising weekly rates.  I was shocked at how dirty it was so went out and bought cleaning supplies then unpacked my professional quality camera that I had not used much lately.  I took several pictures of the motel room, of dead bugs and human detritus in the corners, when I got to the bathtub, I gave out a shocked moan that brought Lucy into the room.

"Why are you taking pictures of that?" she asked.

"Evidence. I'm collecting evidence, this is a health hazard, how can they rent a motel room in this condition?"

She laughed.  "This is what motels for homeless people are like, I tried to tell you." 

Next day I was steaming wrinkles out of a pair of jeans and Lucy asked, "Where are you going, mom?"

"To the free Thanksgiving dinner for homeless people."

"Why? We've got food."

"I need to network."

"Mom, homeless people don’t network."

"Well I do and I'm homeless."

Her current boyfriend sat on the floor legs crossed yoga style in front of her.  They looked at each other and laughed.

"Okay, mom you go network with the homeless, maybe you can sign up some PR clients." 

They laughed and laughed as I put on a last touch of makeup and went out the door saying, "Yeah you laugh, but I'm going to find a way to get us back into a home. You guys can sit there doing nothing all day long about this, I'm not."

"Mom, this isn’t going to work.  Mom.  Mom." She called out to me as I walked down the motel hallway, but I ignored her, certain all I needed to do was circulate at this dinner for homeless people and find out where they stay, how they get through the day, see if a couple other single moms want to combine forces and "we can rent a mansion, have you seen all the empty mansions" I said out loud as I drove my twenty year old Ford to Presbyterian Church where they were feeding the homeless that day.

I came back a few hours later stunned, disappointed.  "I didn't say a word to anyone," I told Lucy when I got back to the motel room. "No one wanted to talk. I kept trying to strike up a conversation with the people near me and no one wanted to talk."
(Describe the room more. It was SILENT. People eating and not making eye contact or saying a word. Me with my briefcase dressed for success... )

*

Sleeping on the street in our car began to feel normal. Some days we'd stay in motels, and when the cash ran out, we'd find a place to park the car in a different spot to sleep, not in our old block, but close enough to feel like home.  All night there were loud sounds , helicopters going overhead, airplanes, sirens. But the streets north of Hollywood Boulevard were quieter than most.  
I got so used to the sounds and feelings that come with sleeping in a car on the street that they became soothing. Mornings, I'd hear "runners" from the studios drive up to different houses on the block to drop off "Pages" that were to be shot that day or copies of the morning's trade papers Variety and Reporter. The sound of their cars pulling up, double parking, and footsteps as they trotted up to front doors and back served as an alarm clock for me. We'd wake up and get out of the neighborhood before sunrise.

I had a battery operated AM radio and I'd listen to Art Bell on his show "Coast to Coast," describing spiritual or technological phenomena such as rays of light that could be UFOs or… just weird phenomena that were the topics of his show.

During those weeks, Bell would play an audio tape that he'd been sent of the noise that is supposedly way down miles deep in the earth under Siberia. It was a sound of thousands of humans in a massive crowd echoing with what sounded like howls and screams but it could just be a jumble of human voices, thousands of them.

Wow, writing this story today in 2019 I went to YouTube and found it so here it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvnxeX2SQso

show.

About this website

YOUTUBE.COM

SOUNDS OF HELL???

Taken from an audio clip of Art Bell's popular radio show, Coast to Coast AM, I created a video on the creepy sounds of hell. Decide for yourself if you beli...

Like

I know I heard Art Bell's voice as I half-slept through the night say the words in audio above:

Art Bell: I have a clean copy of it now and I warn you, this could scare you.: He tells of a man who collected audio tapes and things from the super natural.  He'd copied one that was called "the sounds of Hell from Siberia."

Bell read from the email: "I suggest you warn the listeners in advance so they have the option to turn the radio off for thirty seconds while it plays.  It is true and I for one wish it wasn’t."

Then he'd play the audio, and I'd sit behind my steering wheel under the street light listening to the sound of what seems like humans howling in hell while Lucy slept in the passenger seat. 

*

The weeks we slept in our car just off Franklin Avenue in Hollywood because it almost felt like home, I'd listen to those deep Earth voices in the "Sounds of Hell" recording on Coast to Coast AM and wonder what we were going to do next. 

Kay Ebeling

-ke

Democracy was a Great Idea but it did not work bk most humans are not willing to do the work.
sad but true

Accepting Reality: This is life in a nation that lost decades of war

I Do Not Believe we will be able to get rid of Trump bk he was installed by the guys who came out on top after decades of insane unneeded American-caused wars.
Trump manipulated topic and place of impeachment and now he's taking advantage of weaknesses in hearings that are based on his manipulations...
I think Trump and whoever pulls his strings are manipulating this whole thing. Dems did what they could but too slow and too late, they should have used Mueller Report when it came out, should have done the work of explaining it to Americans who don't have time for all that reading, unfortunately. Instead Dems are going "But what about Russia" now and It's Not Working...
I'm not depressed or angry, I'm accepting reality.
USA lost the twelve or so wars it started for no real reason since WW2
get over it and deal
that's my truth and i'm sticking to it

*

In 2008, a first thing Obama did as President was try to get Congress to investigate Fox News.
He Got Shot Down SO Bad. If only repubs had worked with him.
Now USA is swarming with people who are like zombies. Instead of listening to their own countrymen in their own government, they embrace everything that's said on a cable news station where pundits are college dropouts and chicks in short skirts, getting 7-figure salaries to read scripts.
We should have stopped the misinformation in USA decades ago.
Now... I don't know how we recover from this. I see no signs of leadership emerging or ANYONE willing to face what has happened here.
USA lost a war that took place on television.
Because USA did not fight back.
Wow.
I am not defeated or unhappy, just facing reality, and reading up on life in 3rd world oppressive regimes as that's what life in USA will be soon.
onward

Kay Ebeling

Just now · 

This is life in a country that has lost several wars in a row and now the bad guys are taking over. Adam Schiff worked so hard, throwing pearls before swine. The zombies WANT a dictator to rule them, and perhaps that's what works best as most humans are, face it, too stupid to self govern.
Wow I sound angry, instead I feel released... hmm

FICTION: Love and Loss in a Bus Shelter

By Kay Ebeling (segueing from journalism to fiction, still being edited)

*

Dick Schmidt really came to Tahoe to relax, to treat his PTSD after decades of prolonged trauma. He was a Vietnam vet who'd lived through homelessness on Los Angeles streets.  When he finally got into shelter, for the first time in his life he met with psychologists and faced the truth, that his being molested by a Catholic priest as an altar boy in the 1950s had as much to do with his current dysfunction as three combat tours in Southeast Asia.

In 2003, the California legislature opened a one year window to file lawsuits about sex molestation in institutions even though the statute of limitations was long passed. That law resulted in about two thousand lawsuits re pedophile priests in Catholic archdioceses during that one year in Southern California alone.

At Dick's shelter a social worker knew about the opportunity to sue, so connected Dick with the lead law firm and he joined this stream of lawsuits, filing his against the Archdiocese of Rosarito, a group of tiny parishes along the Mexican border east of San Diego where he'd lived as a child.  

For the next six years, Dick went from shelters to transitional housing. An inability to stay sober would land him back on the streets. As he aged, the act of sleeping on sidewalks became more painful. His PTSD kept him isolated as he shouted and threw things when someone approached him.

However, now and then he'd join demonstrations with a group called CSRP, Catholic Survivors of Rape by Priests, where he'd meet other "survivors" many of whom had periods of addiction and homelessness themselves.  Once in a while he'd go home with a fellow survivor, but inevitably he'd end up back on the L.A. streets. 
*

However by attending those demonstrations, Dick learned that more than a thousand people in L.A. and San Diego had filed suit in that one year window and many were getting settlements in the six and even seven figure range.  Dick testified in a deposition about things Father Rodrigo did to him in the rectory. He had a black and white photograph of him standing uncomfortably close to the priest, in altar boy garb, his nine-old boy eyes almost pleading for help through tears. His lawyers assured him evidence like that is a big help.

The other survivors assured him, when you get that settlement, your whole attitude will change. "You'll be able to exhale," were words used by several pedophile priest victims.  So Dick thought it was just a matter of time until he experienced justice and had enough cash to, after legal fees, maybe buy a condo.

However, through some quirk of international law, one archdiocese in California was able to remove itself from the thousands of lawsuits that went through superior courts throughout the state, the archdiocese of Rosarito.

So instead of getting a six figure settlement as he anticipated for more than six years, he got zero, zip, Dick got a polite letter from the law firm explaining he owes them for expenses incurred.  His friends from SCRP stopped returning his calls.   

Dick Schmidt did get a nice package from the archdiocese of Rosarito: brochures about their parishes, inviting him to come join them to pray and heal.  He tore the papers apart and in a rage caused so much damage at the friend's house where he was staying that within hours he was back on the street.

Dick downslided again.  He was already raw because the last years of filing a lawsuit and answering corporate defense attorney questioning under oath about being anal raped by a priest at age nine had dug up physical pain he'd forgotten, he actually re-felt the pain as he sat in the law firm meeting rooms.  He'd smell the rectory and Father Rodrigo's body fluids when he heard church bells.

Plus the years of dealing with lawyers anticipating a large cash payout caused Dick to stuff down memories of Vietnam.  Once sleeping on top of a tarp with another tarp over him in a crevice under the bridge where the 101 crosses Sunset Boulevard, a car crash over head had him screaming at top of his lungs for a good 30 seconds. His fellow rough-sleepers squirmed under their lumps of cover, but no one wondered at Dick screaming there under the bridge.

Then a pretty girl walked up. The hair close to her roots was blond, the ends had been dyed red several months back, now all of it was pulled into braids at the side of her face like a Finnish teenager. She had milky blue eyes that probably looked stoned even when she was not high on drugs, which from her appearance had not been for a while. Her clothes were torn, she wore a tattered  bathrobe as a coat, but something about the way she stood straight, with the robe's sash tied around her waist, gave a hint of a time when she may have once lived in a middle class home with a heater and regular baths.
*

Her name was Lucy.  After they hung out in the parking lot of Hollywood Presbyterian Church for a few hours, Lucy asked Dick for help.  It was for him the first time he'd been treated as a human being with potential in months.

Lucy asked Dick to hitchhike with her to South Lake Tahoe where her mom was going to help her get into a drug rehab and he would really mellow out by that big lake where "you just absorb the blue and Chill," Lucy said.  

He wondered, "You've only known me a few hours."

"I'm a good judge of character," she snorted.  Her nose was slightly inflamed where a nose piercing had gone bad.  Someone a few years back paid thousands to get those teeth straightened but now they showed signs of decay and recent neglect. Her lips were thick as if shot with botox, if she were cleaned up and made over, she could work in a law office or a film production company.  But here she was instead, leaning on a fence, inhaling smoke from a makeshift fentanyl pipe.

"It's such a wonderful drug," she gushed and melted into his arms.

*
The plan was for them to travel to Tahoe without running out of fentanyl along the way. "I know a guy in Fresno just in case," she said, "but I'm scared once I fall off the freeway in Fresno, I'll never get back on.  It'd be better to go up the coast highway, Highway One, it'll take longer but it's better to hitchhike on surface roads."

Somehow this angelic little junkie in her late twenties, who looked as if she could be the Hollywood beauty guys fantasize about if she took a bath regularly, got Dick to agree to this hair brained trip.

They packed backpacks and used their monthly General Relief cash to buy as much opiate as possible. Dick fell in love at the bus shelter as Lucy "spanged" more cash from strangers  while they waited for an express bus to Pacific Coast Highway (aka Highway One) where they started north.

It took less time than they thought it would to get to Tahoe. Outside Sacramento one ride got them right to the entrance to the senior housing where Lucy's mom lived.

But Dick was not allowed to stay there. Lucy explained only family members could be overnight guests and closed the door leaving him in the hallway with his bundles, at least he'd had a shower there.  It was the last he'd have for a while.

Dick was now sixty two years old, homeless and painfully kicking the opiate that was in the pipe Lucy kept putting in his face on the trip north.  He was now in a strange town where it was about to start snowing and every hotel room was full at double the normal price even the slummy weeklies and there was no General Relief to supplement his Social Security check and the only place that feeds and helps homeless people is "one of those damn Catholic Churches" that he couldn't even walk near without having a PTSD reaction.

"I've been so cold at night," Dick commented to the guy next to him as they packed up from a night of sleep in the city run "warm room." "When I sleep outside, this tarp is supposed to be a windshield but man did my bones freeze-"

"That's what happens when you move to the mountains," the "mountain man" hollered over his shoulder as he walked away, and Dick realized, being homeless ain't no social club.

He spent a brutal winter spending most nights in an abandoned shack.  One night he even crawled into a hollow tree, but soon realized he was not itching, he was covered in bugs, and jumped out rolling in the snow to get what looked like termites off his clothes and skin. But Dick made it through a winter in Tahoe and began to feel like he'd accomplished something.
*

When summer came, he took to riding the bus.  Plus, when one is unsheltered, many hours of a day are spent just doing essentials. It took two weeks to find a replacement pair of shoes as he kept having to return to different agencies and fill out forms then sit in waiting rooms of different charities that "coordinated" getting shoes for the homeless. It was easy to find brand new socks though. Agencies handed them out like cookies, as when you never bathe, you have to at least change to clean socks or you get awful infections on your feet.

Dick spent a lot of time riding the bus from one end of town to the other just to pass the days, especially when the sun did not set until 9 PM in mid summer.  It's hard to find a place to hide in the daylight. 

One of the main stops on Route #50 was a redwood structure near the senior apartment building where he'd dropped off Lucy.  One day when he felt cleaner than most, he walked into the building and asked about Lucy and her mother, hearing, "that druggie nearly got her mother thrown out of subsidized housing." Several ladies in the lobby volunteered in excitement: "She went down to Carson or Reno, there's plenty of drug addicts living there," then they glared at Dick realizing he might be one himself.

Dick thought of going down the mountain to look for Lucy. 

But something about surviving that winter in the shack gave him a new strength.  Plus his PTSD symptoms had never been better. Lucy had been right. The serenity of Tahoe, compared to everywhere he'd ever lived, was helping him to heal. Just sitting on the lake and "absorbing the blue" as she had called it was bringing down his blood pressure.  Irritations that used to make him flare into a rage now barely affected him.

He felt he was finally, FINALLY, starting to heal from a lifetime of external attacks on his nervous system.  Now as he approached mid sixties, he deserved peace and quiet, even if he had to live in a tent in the woods to get it.

As summer drew to a close, Dick wondered if it was possible to sleep in that bus shelter outside the senior building.  It had a roof and four walls, a bench, and the buses stopped running at nine P-M.  Why not?

*

That's how Dick met Lola.  She was, like him, in her early sixties, a resident of the HUD building and a looker for her age, except for being a little plump.

She showed up in the little redwood bus shelter structure one morning just after the run of the number 55 and as Dick was waking up and was surprised to find Dick sleeping there. It was winter, still dark. 

At first she was scared, then realized she needed a smoke. She pulled out her pipe and said to him, "See that's a HUD building so technically weed is still illegal there," she smoked.  "Hope you don't mind." 
"Hell no," he said. 
And a kind of friendship developed there in the late night hours in the bus shelter, although it was always too dark to actually see each others' faces. 
"I have to come out here to smoke my medicine," she said, "I have PTSD from being a crime victim, and I've been using medical cannabis since it first became available in the nineties."

"Wow, I have PTSD too," he said. "Vietnam vet, 'nuff said." 

"Well," she said looking at his tattered condition, "My rent is subsidized, so I'm glad to share my medicine with you.  Here this pipe is packed with pure indica, it will help."  She reached in her bag then handed him a fresh packed little pipe and one inhalation changed his perspective for a long time to follow.

Lola came out to the bus shelter often and shared her indica with Dick as she knew it helped him sleep in what was not a real comfortable place.

*

Lola had woven a story from her life that Dick was not sure was true.  It came up one day when she casually mentioned dropping an envelope with 180 dollars cash in it, and did not seem very upset about losing that much money.

She said, "It's hard to care if someone steals five dollars from you when you've been robbed of one point five million dollars." She took a hit on her pipe and did not say another word until she had held in every millimeter of the smoke then seemed to contradict herself.  "At these prices who exhales," she joked. "I'm the opposite of Bill Clinton, I never exhale."
They laughed like people laugh when they've just smoked some weed. 

"One point five million dollars?" Dick then asked, and like her, inhaled and held in his hit of the sixty five dollar an eighth-ounce weed, as if he exhaled it, Lola would get angry at him for "Wasting it getting the birds high."

While cleaning gunk out of the pipe with a nail file, Lola told this story. 

"There ain't no FDIC protection from a red headed woman."

"Huh?"

"A red headed woman moved in on my father in 1995. Then she kept me and my sisters from being able to visit, classic separation tactic of an abusive spouse. When she finally left, there was nothing left."

"How did she get his money?"

"You know," she shook her head, "what is most pathetic is how easy it was, how she took advantage of a unique opportunity in time."

Lola refilled then inhaled from the pipe.

"It was when ATM's first came out.  She was sitting in his house keeping the rest of us away, when the bank sent a brand new first time ever ATM card in the mail.  My dad age ninety had no idea what it was. So she just went to the bank, over and over again over a period of time, and withdrew amounts of cash." Lola inhaled. "Well then she went to Vegas and withdrew a whole shitload."

"Wouldn't the bank raise red flags?"

"No, no one even noticed, because Red had moved in on my dad and was intercepting his phone calls and mail."

"Gosh, it was easy then."

"Well not for long. At one point they were closing in on her, this DA in Orange County named Dick was keeping me informed. Then Red disappeared."

"Disappeared?"

"They found her a few weeks later, in Las Vegas, on the floor of a high rollers' hotel suite, in a coma. And there was no cash left, all the money was gone."

"Wow."

"Yeah so now after waiting five years on a waiting list, I live in this low income housing, and I grew up in Newport Beach and San Marino.  I'd do anything to get out of here. I don't even know how to be poor."

"Hah, I could show you."

She looked at him, offered him her pipe but he said he'd had enough. 

She said, "I really don’t like it.  I don't want to be poor anymore." Then seeing how much worse off Dick was she added, "Why don’t you apply to move in here?" she asked. "I think since you're a Vietnam vet you would go up to the top of the waiting list, or closer to the top, and get in within a year." 

He said, "How do I apply for this place?"
"Just inside," and she started to elaborate in her answer, then stopped, and seemed to make up her mind about something in that moment. 
*

Next day Dick cleaned up, went to the senior apartment building office, and filled out an application, and sure enough, his being a Vietnam vet put him at the top of the waiting list.

He took to sleeping in the bus shelter outside while he waited to be able to move in to the building, but Lola stopped joining him there.

Weeks later Dick was moving in when he saw Lola again. 

She looked different.  She had lost at least twenty pounds, and from her smile, even from a distance you could see she apparently got new teeth. Only then did he see she must be Lucy's mom. She was getting into a limousine that was picking her up from the back entrance of the low income senior apartment building.

The ladies in the lobby later told him that Lola is now dating a man she met in Reno, who picks her up often to spend the night at his mountain villa near the Mark Zuckerberg mansion.

Dick often looked for Lola around the building and even encountered her twice at the trash dumpster.  
She didn't seem to recognize him.

-

Impeachment displays US dark underbelly.

As I cheer on impeachment hearings, I realize that I'm cheering on sale of deadly weapons to Ukraine, and I've been a pacifist my whole life, even while serving in the Navy. I initially wanted Trump out of office because of his ties to Russia. Now, through a kind of back door control of current events, the impeachment hearings are publicizing this dark side of U.S. foreign policy: When USA says "foreign aid", it often means ammunition.

I wonder why the impeachment did not focus on everything Trump has done to aide Russia. Instead the entire globe is today being treated to a display of USA's financial aid to nations being mostly destructive.

Javelins. Hmm. Since when am I promoting javelins?

I think even these hearings are more information warfare, bk they have been sidelined to show the world the US is a weapons provider claiming to come in peace.

hmm

JAVELIN

Designer Texas Instruments and Martin Marietta

(now Raytheon and Lockheed Martin)

Designed June 1989

Manufacturer Raytheon and Lockheed Martin

Unit cost US$174,000 (missile only, FY2019)[4]

Produced 1996–present

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin

Produced 1996–present

About this website

EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

FGM-148 Javelin - Wikipedia

The FGM-148 Javelin is an American man-portable fire-and-forget anti-tank missile fielded to replace the M47 Dragon anti-tank missile in US service.[7] It uses automatic infrared guidance that allows the user to seek cover immediately after launch, as opposed to wire-guided systems, like the Dragon,...

Like

-ke

Life in the Soviet States of America begins

In my town, they started replacing a four-mile stretch of sidewalk four years ago and they have not finished yet.  The main street through town US 50 has been cut to one lane each way as a result, making commerce and just life in general frustrating for four summers and this year it's getting especially strange as we approach winter 2019.

Now that the four-mile stretch is complete, it seems that instead of bringing the project to an end, they are going back to rebuild some of the first sidewalk they replaced, and the roads are still closed.  It's as if they are just going to keep rebuilding and rebuilding the sidewalk, just to keep this particular group of construction workers employed.  When I ride by them, inside a bus crawling in traffic, I watch them and they are working with all the enthusiasm of little kids forced to stay outside and dig a garden when they'd rather be on the couch. They're slow moving, a couple guys will be standing around talking while one guy appears to be hacking at the asphalt with a stick, but as you observe, nothing seems to be getting done.

My first thought is of Communist Russia.  I remember people I'd meet who got out of the USSR saying that nothing there ever got done right.  There'd be a hundred people working on something getting paid a good wage yet nothing got done.

They'd just live with the incompetency and joke about it, with a shot of harsh vodka.

That's life in the USA now too. 

FICTION: New CEO of Christian Sex Assault Solutions served 8 years for murder

*

(Fiction by Kay Ebeling segueing 
from journalism to fiction; 
this is still in editing)

*

When she strides into the offices of Christian Sex Assault Solutions in Euphoria, Kansas, Sally Birdwell calls out to busy workers based on their clothes: "You, red sweater, empty this trash can" or by their appearance- "Hey bald spot, shouldn't you be wearing a jacket" even though many of these "underlings" have worked for the non profit since long before she came in as CEO six months ago.  

Sally Birdwell built her career on sex, crime, and a very public recovery, so her arrival in Euphoria came with great fanfare and news crews from CNN and Fox News and several media outlets not often seen in Kansas. Birdwell first became famous while serving an eight-year prison term for a crime lifted from the plot of Strangers on a Train. She murdered her husband's wife while he murdered her husband, while keeping their own affair secret, an almost perfect crime. 
Within weeks of arriving at women's correctional Birdwell endeared herself to prison staff by identifying herself as a pedophile "survivor" and announcing that everything she did wrong in her life was a result of being molested at age six by a Catholic priest. 
She started a weekly Bible study and her transition from sinner to saint raised eyebrows.  Those freewheeling scripture classes segued into Christian self improvement courses for the lady convicts.  Birdwell also earned a degree in non profit business management and as her release date approached, she started sending out resumes.

So ten years after the murder of two innocent persons at her behest, Sally Birdwell now runs Christian Sex Assault Solutions in Euphoria Kansas.  

When you meet the new CEO, you think she has a motor running under her skin instead of a heart.  She announces her arrival in a room with loud catcalls to whoever is present and sweeping gestures.  She dresses in bright flashy colors, loud, like her voice. Since she was a little girl she'd used this technique of bowling someone over as they approached her, so no one ever gets too close.

Sally's initial effect on men was palpable. One could often see electric sparks of sexual attraction between Sally and a particular kind of human of the male sex who became her focus.

Clergymen. If Sally encountered a clergy man, her focus became so intense, the man of the cloth could barely resist.  

You see, Sally's first sexual experience was at age six at the fingertips of a Catholic priest, in the woods outside her home near Chicago in the 1970s.  The priest aroused the little girl, then left her lying in the leaves feeling an overwhelming need for him to continue.  The priest had scampered back to the party her parents were throwing in their backyard and Sally went through the rest of her life trying to find someone to finish what he started. She did not consciously remember why, but whenever she met a man of the cloth, she could not keep herself from seducing him.

So as soon as Sally Birdwell wandered into St. Boniface Church of the Rapture in Interruptus Kansas and saw Reverend Thomas Horne, she knew she had to have him. Her endorphins at first encounter with him were so demanding that when Pastor Tom first looked at her face, he was lost as well. It was a power greater than both of them.

Under the influence of Sally, this prayerful man who had spent his entire life studying scripture and preparing for a career in ministry ended up murdering Sally's husband so he could be with Sally Birdwell, a murder so sloppy and emotional, he got caught.  Sally on the other hand planned her murder of his wife with such precision, it was determined to be an accident, and since it involved a pastor's wife in Kansas, no law enforcement agency wanted to stir up local fundamentalist Christian anger by investigating.

Soon after his wife's death, but before his arrest, Pastor Tom was spending the night with Sally Birdwell who had a mysterious suitcase full of hundred dollar bills in bundles in her closet. She explained it belonged to the husband Tom had just killed but did not explain where her dead husband had gotten such a fortune. Sally kept the suitcase nearby, dipping into it for expenses, and Tom noticed the stacks of bills were getting low fast. 

Suddenly Sally agreed to marry Pastor Tom. Just as suddenly, she took out an insurance policy on his life, enough time in advance of his demise to not raise alarms, she thought. But a few neighbors in their Kansas town noticed. The insurance check arrived just as new questions rose about the death of Tom's wife. Just as Sally was moving out of the country, she was arrested for the murder of Pastor Tom Horne ahd conspiracy in the murder of his wife, a taxi pulled up to take her to the airport at the same time as the sheriff. Her rapid planned relocation to Spain helped convince the jury she was guilty. 

While Sally was in prison, a blogger from Los Angeles showed up to interview her. So Sally's story ended up on a blog that covered pedophile priest crimes around the world.  The post went viral and soon several news groups came to interview Sally Birdwell as a "victim" of child sex assault in the Catholic Church. A law firm took on her appeal pro bono arguing that if she had not been sexually molested as a child by a priest, Sally Birdwell would never have committed the crimes that landed her in prison.  The convicted murderer Birdwell became a kind of cause celebre.

So upon her release, several advocates for women's rights and child sex assault survivors lobbied non profits to hire the paroled felon.

Last week Christian Sex Assault Solutions of Interruptus Kansas decided Sally Birdwell, with her miraculous transformation in prison and as a child sex abuse victim at the hands of a Catholic priest, was the ideal candidate for CEO of this non profit that helps survivors of child sex abuse find recovery through Jesus and active membership in a fundamentalist church, including unpaid internships.

Within days the Board of Directors wondered if they made a mistake in hiring the somewhat abrasive and empowered siren convict, but news outlets across the world had run with her story. So in spite of the strange actions Birdwell has taken since coming in as executive director- putting children in prison like rooms instead of daycare, ending clothing subsidies and instead forcing the clients to purchase clothes she "designed"-  they kept her on the job, repairing damage she did with behind the scenes settlements and placations.

So for six months things ran smoothly at Christian Sex Assault Solutions, until Sally Birdwell met the Mayor of Euphoria Kansas, a former Catholic priest who had left the clergy to become a politician, attaching himself to Donald Trump and the political movement that took place in the United States along with his presidency. 

The electricity between the Sally and the Mayor was enough to start small fires.

She looked at him and felt sexual arousal like she'd never known existed. Her entire being emanated longing.  It was the first time she'd experienced raw power in a man. She knew the limitless erotica one could milk out of a sexual encounter in a church, she'd been doing that since she was a teenager. The connection between God and sex had led her through compulsions and criminal behavior for years.

Now this charisma in front of her in the Mayor was something she'd never before witnessed. Not only did this clergyman / politician carry the energy of God's power, he also put out a raw political / spiritual force that was why he won elections.  Like many in the USA, the Mayor of Euphoria Kansas embraced the Ayn Rand philosophy of selfishness, libertarianism, and the "Prosperity Gospel."  Now approaching Sally Birdwell in a campaign receiving line, the mayor of Euphoria Kansas emanated all the political and spiritual dynamism that kept him winning elections.

Sally caught his eye, and the Mayor rarely looked away again.  Soon he told reporters and friends he was divorcing his third wife because the only thing that had been missing in his life all these years was Sally. 

"Now we can start fires together," he proclaimed. And they did.