The King of Montana

Call the Police to Bring Me My Jacket by Mark Anthony Given

2017-06-19T08:32:00.002-07:00

Roses are red, violets are blue. I'm not Schizophrenic, and neither am I...

THE OLD GUY I look after went to ER. He was discharged with medicine for mild pneumonia after a couple of hours. He left his cheap brown fleece jacket in the ER. He called up there this morning and asked whoever answered the phone if she could have "The Police," bring his coat to him. "They did it before," he implored her. Some young lady with red hair driving a red car just brought him his jacket. She said she forgot about until she got home and went all the way back to work and brought the old geezer his beloved brown coat. That, my friends, is a GREAT HOSPITAL!! St. Peters Hospital in Helena, Montana.

I TOLD HIM to call up there and see if they have it and we'll drive up there and retrieve it. He said, "They will bring it to me."
I said,
"Your crazy, (and he is) just find out if it there and we'll go get it."
"The police will bring it to me."
"What?"
"They ain't got time to help an old coot get his jacket back."
"You'll see."
I had to remind myself, the is "Montana," and he was

"The King of Montana."

To be continued....

9:30 AM 6/19/2017

Smile by Mark Anthony Given

2016-07-15T13:32:00.003-07:00

____________________________________

Use your smile to change the world don't let the world change your smile.

____________________________________

SMILE TO YOURSELF when nobody's around; just you, all alone, a slight smile to yourself know one will ever see. I read of a scientific study in the Seventies that held that by just smiling, the arraignment of over one-hundred muscles release a drop of happy juice into your bloodstream so I decided to try it. I was hitchhiking across country in 1977 and smiled at people like a lunatic, but after a while decided to tone it down and just smile to myself. That inner secret just between me and myself nobody will ever know.....

AFTER A WHILE I began to force myself to just bust out laughing for no particular reason, to try an accelerate the process... and I still do. Bust out a small laugh and then maintain the smile as long as possible. Smiles are infectious; people start smiling back at you and you get an instant charge of happiness transmitted from Soul to Soul like secret knowledge passed between humans the first time they Kiss.... and Smile at the same time...

ABOUT three weeks, BAM! I started busteing out of bed like a spring chicken hopping the fence out back with nobody around and happiness was upon my like a coat of warm sunshine from the inside out...

IT FREAKING WORKED!!!

I had created my own Happiness!!!

_____________________________

Smile! It Could Make You Happier

Making an emotional face—or suppressing one—influences your feelings

We smile because we are happy, and we frown because we are sad. But does the causal arrow point in the other direction, too? A spate of recent studies of botox recipients and others suggests that our emotions are reinforced—perhaps even driven—by their corresponding facial expressions.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smile-it-could-make-you-happier/

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My Foster Home Harem by Mark Anthony Given

2016-04-25T14:53:00.004-07:00

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not. -Mark Twain

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YOU KNOW how at old folks homes they have someone on the staff who is in charge of rounding up all the old geezers and making them play stupid games and bounce beach balls off each other's head? That was my job and I loved it. Four Square out in the street, teether ball, soccer, softball, they even had a basketball board tied to a tree and commercial grade children's swings we would dare each other to fly over a fence, through standing trees and land in the neighbor's yard, twelve, fifteen feet away over a six foot fence! I'd be in charge of ten or fifteen kids, the older girls took care of the babies inside, I knew it was a charmed life.... I really did.
I WAS the only boy with twelve girls in a foster home in Tampa, Florida in 1969. In hindsight, it seems everyone was the products of momentary bouts of pleasure and soon thereafter forgot about, just like me. The Hillsborough County Florida Emergency Children's Shelter was my house: 2742 Kelly Road just one block from beautiful Tampa Bay and two or three miles from the Beach Boulevard Entrance to MacDill Air Force Base, down Bay Shore Boulevard, where we did all our shopping at the half price PX.
Besides the dozen at a time foster children my foster home was a constant flow of small children in various stages of disrepair; four or five children under six or seven left on a small fishing boat sunburnt to toast, all drunk from beer the only liquid on the boat and everyone ate up inside with Tapeworms... Just babies.... Even at twelve years old the only boy and twelve girls, most of them already fornicating, besides having to mow big yards and take out the garbage a lot, I had a demanding night schedule....

I WANTED to be a Writer. After I read Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Fin," probably the first of over three hundred books I have read, I knew that's all I wanted to do. Once I knew what the word "Satire," meant, that's all I ever wanted to do. I also had read somewhere that my maybe all-time favorite writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, would sit around in cafes and restaurants and steal snips of people's conversation. I remember thinking to myself; now that is something I can do: Hang around and steal shit that will never be missed...

TWELVE WAYWARD foster girls: four knockouts, a couple good looking, four so, so, and four butt ugly. Eight or nine to eighteen when they made you leave, and I had a shill in the cadre for any backroom dealing I needed to know about; my little sister Faye. My Foster Home Harem; one of the older Knockouts named "Barbra," took it upon herself to organize my weekly night schedule where one girl each night would instruct me in the finer points of "Making Out, i.e., "French Kissing," and the hand dexterity of a brain surgeon in removing training bras...

DEBORAH WADE was the house slut. She was ten or twelve and I was working on my Tenderfoot Badge in the Boy Scouts when she molested me or we molested each other; I'll have to check the Florida Statute on that. Either way; two foster kids fucking has to be a crime...

I BET I planned this rendezvous for a week. I have always been hesitant to write about my magical childhood because I didn't think anyone would believe it. Now I just don't care. And you're not going to believe this either...

DEBORAH WADE like me was in the upper echelon of our little Foster Home Harem and in that, her bedroom like mine was in the main house. Our rooms were separated by a bathroom and the master bedroom where the house parents slept. Their bedroom was the only area off limits to all and I had only been in there a time or two to get my ass shined for some grave offense or another. Drop your drawers, bend over and start counting and try not ball like a baby because everyone else was listening. Because space was limited I shared a room with a seventy-year-old brother of the house mother. He ignored me and I ignored him. Deborah too had a roommate: An eighty something-year-old woman I think she was invalid; but she liked to watch....

I NEVER liked creeping around at night when people were supposed to be sleeping, so we crept around in broad daylight right under their nose. This is the time of "Clocking the Block," I wrote about here. I rushed home from school every day and did my homework to watch The Man From U.N.C.L.E., T.H.E. Cat (Thomas Heward Edward Cat, professional burglar), so all the sneaking around was a blast.

The series preceded the 1968–1970 ABC television series It Takes a Thief,

which was also about a cat burglar who used his skills for good.

_________________________

But I got to tell you; the fifteen or so feet down the hall from each other was like crossing a modern-day laser security system with both foster parents and that big ass leather belt hanging behind the door...

THE RUMOUR that Debbie was a slut was only because she acted so much more mature than all the rest of us, and she had striking features between pretty and really pretty. She was also a Ward of the State like the rest of us because her father fucked her like she was his girlfriend until he was sent to prison and then she was with us. I was there probably five years and she was there for most of that. We were always in charge of a dozen or so kids to keep them occupied and not thinking about all the bad stuff awaiting us in the days and years ahead...

7:07 AM 4/27/2017

#‎MARKANTHONYGIVEN‬ #MYFOSTERHOMEHAREM #‎reallifeheist‬ ‪#‎HASHTAHGS‬ ‪#‎ODCITY‬

‪#‎anotherhotgrand‬ ‪#‎727BOURBONSTREET‬ ‪#‎MYAPPOINTMENTWITHTHEDEVIL‬ ‪#‎thedopefeignshuffle‬

‪#‎dopesickangel‬ ‪#‎ONLYNEWORLEANS‬ ‪#‎THEKINGOFMONTANA‬ ‪#‎NAGINSSURRENDER‬ ‪#‎MYTRUECRIME‬ ‪#‎HOMELESSINHEAVEN‬

‪#‎THEREALDRUGSTORECOWBOY‬

The One Man Tourist Attraction by Mark Anthony Given

2016-02-27T09:46:00.000-07:00

I'm going back to Montana, and I don't care if I ever leave. -C.M. Russell

I took that photo in Pray, Montana

______________________________________

IT'S NINE hundred miles across the High Line of Montana, and I wore out several bicycles and dozens of tires. The beautiful stretches of endless miles of soft rolling hills and flaming hemorrhoids, you figure out pretty quick why it's called, "The Big Sky Country," or "The Last Best Place." In the middle of summer, it doesn't get dark 'till ten o'clock at night and even then the trillions of stars you can work on your car in the driveway all night long or even paint your house in the middle of the night...

Even your photographs look better and everything a little crisper because there is no pollution in the sky. Dead silence and bright clear nights a hundred miles out in the middle of Nowhere, Montana a hundred yards off the road, just me and the critters.... People from remote ranch and farm house's with twenty-three-mile driveways see you coming for hours before you see them and time it to check their mail when you go bye, and you start talking like you bumped into each other at the post office....

MILES AND MILES of

Hail Mary, Full of Grace...

I tried to focus my concentration on completing Seven Hail Mary's without stopping. Somewhere around mile marker two forty; I got one right, and, was only able to do it again a couple times after that. And no, I'm not Catholic and it didn't help the hominoids one bit....

Grizzly Gulch, Montana on top of two kilns. My campsite was directly across there.

I WAS PRAYING for a blowout after I got done with my three hundredths Hail Mary for the day. There's nothing like a minor traffic mishap to set into motion the Chaos of Everything. Whenever I got tired of riding or my ass was set alight from that skinny seat, whichever came first, I didn't have some hot young chick to stick out her bare leg to flag down traffic but I had the next best thing. The universal sign of distress on seven continents, I spun that sum bitch "Belly Up," with the two tires sticking straight in the air and it's never failed, and everybody knew what that meant. Within minutes some Good Samaritan trying to get laid would pull over. First contender some ole hippy broad who was a complete knockout in her day and had two giant harry ass dogs in a Subaru with cloth interior slap full of dog hair. It would take a Montana snowstorm or pouring rain to get me in that car. She tried to persuade me to tie the bike on her roof rack and climb in with inviting eyes. I have been used to people looking at me like I was desert since I was a kid and she paused just a moment too long, eye level with my crotch. Fortunately, my bungy cords were out of sight in the side pocket of my backpack. Out of sight, out of mind.
ROLLING HILLS and asphalt mile after mile the occasional bad smell of a dead animal the biggest obstacle is the sheer ability and then desire. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak is right. I once rode for eighteen hours from Zootown (Missoulla) to Deer Lodge, Montana, about ten o'clock at night my legs locked up, frozen and refused to budge. Didn't hurt, just wouldn't budge, I propped up against a fence in a small triangle city park across from an Albertson, crawled on top of my sleeping back, took an aspirin and went fast asleep. Woke up right on the four am city park watering schedule by a pop-up sprinkler I was laying on top of and was barely out of range of the other sprinklers, I went back to sleep, what the hell I'm wet already and can't move anyway. Twenty minutes later I felt water flooding into somewhere and on its way up here...

I MET A JACKHORSE that day. Just off Interstate 90 service road heading into town, I saw several horses a hundred yards off the road watching me. When got parallel to them I called them over liked I talked to every horse I encountered.

"Heah, man!

Come over here I want to ask you something."

I pulled my bike over and stood there demanding they come over there at once. When that didn't work I whipped out my trusty bag of fresh fruit I kept hanging off my handlebars. I never left town without fresh fruit for a hundred miles... Probably had a few cheap granola bars too. They all came up but one and we walked up with them just stopped about forty yards off and just watched. There was something unusual about him but I couldn't tell until he finally walked up to the fence where several other horses were already chewing on something. He walked right up in the middle of them and he towered over all of us and he had ears like a Donkey he was always trying to get to stand straight up like the other horses but they obviously too big to stand up long... He seemed to be a little embarrassed by it and his giant size...

TO BE CONTINUED...

975 Words

COPYRIGHT 2016 by Mark Anthony Given
All Rights Reserved 28 USC 1746 Public Law: Pub. L. 94-553 (Oct. 19, 1976)
U.S. Statutes at Large: 90 Stat. 2541
9:43 AM 2/27/2016

#CHAOSOFTHINGS #THEONEMANTOURISTATTRACTION
#OSCARSOWHITE #MARKANTHONYGIVEN #REALLIFEHEIST #STEALINGOSCAR #MEANDMYMONSTER #THEKINGOFMONTANA #DOPESICKANGEL #ANOTHERHOTGRAND #COLORMEUP #ODCITY #COPONTHECOMPOUND #727BOURBONSTREET #ONLYNEWORLEANS
#MYAPPOINTMENTWITHTHEDEVIL #THEDOPEFEINGSHUFFLE #ONLYINNEWORLEANS #PARADISEMONTANA
#ascreechandabang #montanadiaries #markgivendesignsunlimited #homelessinheaven #asianandlonely #hotcheckandaprayer #myfamousfelons #brandnewme #pouringrain #theautograph #onewrongword #bustinscripts

__________________________________

The Burley Beat Down by Mark Anthony Given

2015-08-26T17:44:00.002-07:00

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Float like a butterfly and sting like a Bee.

The hands can't hit what the eyes can't see. -Muhamad Ali

_______________________________________

               YOU EVER BEEN beat up by an old man? It was my worst fear next to getting stabbed, was to be beat up by a pissed off old man taking out years of pent-up frustration on all my hopes and dreams. It's a pain that doesn't go away... The backroom was full again of hanger on's and wannabe's and tension was high and in the excitement, I didn't notice the faint sound of squeaky old and unattended rusty wheels coming down the hall and stop every few feet, leaving the air pregnant with impending doom. Others heard it and the room began to empty one at a time until I was all alone and the sound got louder as it got closer I could hear the grumpy bastard snorting and grunting his disapproval at life in general as he made his appointed rounds.
                I STARTED looking around for a way out, anything, but there was nothing so I jumped off the table and started pushing everything against the walls and then wrapped my hands again with the old tapes on the floor to beat this old bastards ass. They say that when God closes one door in your life he opens another.   Sometimes he opens a window....
                 SUDDENLY the door flew wide open and I was in full tilt fight or flight mode with my whole career on the line and I was gonna knock this old bastard slap-out. I expected to see him coming at me swaying back and forth like a canny boxer but all I saw was an old man's ass back bent over an uncooperative ancient mop bucket with all four wheels trying to go in three different directions. Mumbling and cussing obscenities he gave the side of it a swift kick in the ass and all its wheels lined up in the same direction long enough to drag it in the nearest corner. He didn't pay any attention to me and went about his business as if I wasn't there.....
                 AFTER a few minutes with his back to me he say's,

                "Pretty boy, why did you want to be a boxer?"

He had been moving around back and forth to his buggy with bottles and brooms sitting outside the door and passed by me a time or two and I must have let my guard down because the next thing I knew the bony bastard had me like a swarm of hot bees. It happened so fast he had my head in a vice and had me bent sideways and just as fast released me and pushed me off him with his body at the same time. I flew back a step or two and I was trying to figure out what just happened when I felt a drop of blood flowing out the top of my right eyebrow.
                  HE HAD HIS back to me at a small sink, rinsing his hands or washing something off.   He turned and walked straight too me and without stopping cold cocked me or something because all I know the next thing I knew I was being bandaged up by a trainer and my manager standing over me smiling like he was looking at his first child.

"That Burley does great work! Look at you! You look like you just climbed out of the ring with Mike Tyson. That's more like it! So what's the 'News? What did he tell you?"

He said something about 'Pretty Boy....."

THAT'S IT! "Pretty Boy Roy!! That's your new name!!!

That's the news.....

#MARKANTHONYGIVEN #REALLIFEHEIST #THEKINGOFMONTANA #PRETTYBOYROY
#WRITER #AUTHOR #NEWWRITER #NEWSTORY #BOXINGSTORIES

____________________

Article 2(4) of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works

1:41 PM 8/27/2015

__________________

THE GOLDEN PENNY by Mark Anthony Given

2015-08-22T07:47:00.004-07:00

I busted a mirror in my house and I'm supposed to have seven years bad luck,

but my lawyer thinks he can get me five.- Steven Wright

_______________________________

I WAS SITTING in a greasy spoon in Houma, Louisiana on a two-week crew change waiting to go back offshore to ODECO Charlie where I was a roughneck. Probably had a hangover from hell sucking on the tried and true Southern Ice Tea and Cornbread remedy and I was fingering the quarter, two dimes and a penny laying on the table in front of me. Like a lot of people, I checked the dates on each and I notice this penny looks funny and on closer inspection, I see that right down the shoulder of Lincoln was the date 1963 D. Right under his chin was 1963 D. A double stamped penny! They are very rare, have you ever seen one?

I LIKED to fell out of my chair! All my life and when I was a kid I remember seeing in the back of Comic books the double stamped 1955 Dime, and for like $500.000.00! I looked around in the all but empty storefront restaurant and the room started spinning and it was all I could do to keep from passing out with excitement. My door to fortune had arrived! A normal double stamp coin, like the 1955 dime is only slight amiss. This thing had the date stamped on it twice clear as day! On the back was perfectly normal except a couple of the letters in the United States at the top were askew. I started looking around, this was before the show "PUNKED," but I was sure someone was going to pop out of nowhere any second now and tell me I was still poor and pathetic and I had to go back to work in the morning like everybody else...

HALFWAY down the next block a guy I knew from going in and out of there for several months ran an Army Navy Surplus store. I went down there and showed it to him and he pointed to his brand new emerald green Chevy Monte Carlo with T tops and crushed velour interior sitting on the curb in front of the store, and said, I'll give you that car for it, right now..... I think he might have seen a few of the comic books too....

SMALL TOWN on a Sunday afternoon a hundred miles to the New Orleans Public Library this was 1977 or '78. Said there were two coin dealers in this little town and he happened to know one person lived about five blocks from here. He called him and I after I knocked on his front door he leads me next door to a garage fashioned into a legitimate coin dealer, stamps, and stuff. He got behind his counter and after he looked at it for just a moment or two he fell back in his chair and stared at the floor shaking his head in disbelief.

"Why couldn't I find something like this?"

I think he was talking to himself because he never looked up. He went into this long list of how poor and pitiful he was with his big fine house and fancy car repossessed any moment to hear him tell it. I actually thought for a moment of giving it to him he poured it on so thick until I remembered that fleabag hotel I was living in and roughnecking in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and my girlfriend back in New York fucking all my friends... and I came to my senses.

In a moment of clarity when he seen I wasn't having any of it, said if it was his, he would photograph it, place an Ad in COIN WORLD magazine and that people all over the world would start bidding on it. That was good advice....

I HAD to go back offshore the next day and getting myself to that rig knowing I had to stay on there for weeks was a milestone in my adult development. I never showed it to anyone, I tossed and turned laying out grand architectural designs of mansions by the sea, complete staff of Philippine girls who couldn't speak English. A fleet of luxury cars and restaurant bills. You would be surprised how far you can stretch a half a million dollars.....

1:23 PM 8/28/2015

To be continued....

Article 2(4) of the Berne Convention for the Protection

of Literary and Artistic Works

5:05 PM 8/27/2015

Copyright 2015 by Mark Anthony Given
All Rights Reserved 28 USC 1746, Invoking 90 Stat. 2541 and
Article 2(4) of the Berne Convention for the Protection
of Literary and Artistic Works

Burley Brings The News by Mark Anthony Given

2015-08-01T18:05:00.002-07:00

_____________________________

A man ain't supposed to be pretty....

_____________________________

           FIRST FIGHT I WON I was nineteen I trained for eighteen months and knocked the guy out in the first round. Fighting out of #GLEASONS both New York and Miami on the undercard of some bingo hall in the outskirts of who knows where for the next year or so. Finally made some decent money, a couple grand which was a lot of money for a guy who trained all day and ate peanut butter and Sardines and day old fruit. The press had been badgering me all day because I had an Irish name with a nose that went one way and left hook that went the other. Actually they confused my name with some famous fighter from a bygone era but as long as I won it didn't seam to matter. Gleason's was five dollars a day and I slept in a broom closet in the back. They didn't even know I was there.
           THE BACKROOM is packed with staff and ass kisser's the promoter burst into the room immediately after the fight, clears the room and when were alone he says to me; "Great work kid. You got a real future in this business but you got one fatal flaw."
           He walks around making sure no one else is around and says,
          "A man ain't supposed to be pretty....."
          "OK." I was waiting for him to explain but he just stared at me with sad old watery eyes almost with a hint of pity and just shook his head and looked away at the floor, like his mind was made up.
          Finally he leans in and say's
         "Burly will be here for the news..."
         He looked at me real earnestly to make sure I heard him right and gauge my reaction.
          I WAS STILL PUMPED up from winning and waiting to see that paycheck come out his inside top pocket with my name on it followed by a bunch of numbers... I'm grinning like I knew what he meant..
         "Hell, yeah!," I said and I reach out to shake his hand but he just turned around and left.
        MY MANAGER BURST in as soon as he leaves and say's,
       "Burley's got the news!"
He looked completely surprised and slightly worried...
       "You got the check?" I asked excitedly...
          "Fuck no!" All he said was "Burley's bringing the 'news,"   ....

         "What the fuck does that mean? He started spinning around the room rubbing his head and staring at the floor like he was looking into an ocean. Finally I blurted out:
         "He said I was pretty! I didn't know I was pretty!"
         "Pretty? Oh, no! He said you was pretty?
         "Yep."
         "Your fucked. That's why he ran off everybody 'for he talked to you and all the press until tomorrow's event...

"He always does all the press at one time......" I knew.
"Your fucked! Did I mention that?" He let that set in. "You ever recognize that ancient old bastard that sets up and takes down the ring at every event? "That old bastard?" I said.

            "What about him?"
            "That's Burley....."
            "What?"
            "And he's bringing the news.....
            "WHAT NEW'S I already won the fight?"
           He was bent over the examination table I was sitting on, he was still looking at the ocean for answers.
           "No you idiot. Only a handful of guys in boxing know about this and your fixing to find out why. That promoter is from the old school and so is Burley. He can't have you go in front of the camera's and Live press tomorrow here in tomorrow.
          "Why can't they do it here tonight?
         "There's a hockey game in six hours but I'm afraid your going to miss that too...
        "So what's that mean?" I got to fight a sixty year old man now? The fucking janitor?" I said incredulously.
       "There's no fighting to it, you idiot. He's just going to touch you up a little for the camera's tomorrow.... 'Look at you! You don't have a scratch on you. That's not good for business. And all these pictures will be used to promote your next fight...
         I THOUGHT I was in an episode of the Twilight-Zone. I just won my first pro fight by KO now I got too get beat up by a senior citizen because I was too pretty....
         EVERYBODY KNEW BURLEY had been a prize fighter back in the fifties and was said to have a mean knockout punch. He was all bent over but big and rawboned farm boy from a small town in Montana. I once asked him how many people he knocked out....
"Knocked out or just beat'em-up real bad?"
"Awww.... either.....
"Thirty!" Just that fast, mater of factly like he kept count.
I let that sink in a minute and said, "You remember any of them?"
"Nope." Like he was done talking.....

To be continued.....

7:27 PM 8/1/2015

#ALLRIGHTSRESERVED

Montana Mentally Disabled Senior Citizen Defrauded

2014-12-30T16:38:00.002-07:00

The purpose of government is to do what you yourself

are unable to do. -Abraham Lincoln

Lincare and Frontier Home Health and Hospice of Helena, Montana are defrauding Medicare and United States Taxpayers

WHEN BURLEY DAHL was released from St. Peter's Hospital late last year, various health care professionals visited him. Burley told Frontier Home Health and Hospice (I was sitting right next to him and invoking Title 28 U.S.C. 1746 (Federal Perjury Statute)), he did not want any device that Medicare did not pay for and, because he was on Medicare Part D, he did not want to pay any Co-Payment. Angela Skolud RN assured him there would be no out of pocket expense to him, and the paper he signed circled only Medicare, leading him to believe he would not have any out of pocket expense.

We live at Stewart Homes in Helena, Montana and Property Manager Sharon Southern can verify how long I have been here helping Burley. I used her business card to cover up Burley's Medicare Number.

Frontier Home Health and Hospice should not be doing business with Lincare

"In the first investigation, OIG alleged that from 1993 to 2000 Lincare engaged in a nationwide scheme to pay physicians kickbacks to refer their patients to the company and gave referring physicians items like sporting and entertainment tickets, gift certificates, rounds of golf, golf equipment, fishing trips, meals, advertising expenses, office equipment and medical equipment.

The kickbacks were disguised as payments for supposed consulting agreements, such as medical director agreements, OIG said. OIG also alleged that Lincare violated the physician self-referral law by accepting referrals from parties to the illegal consulting agreements." http://www.homecaremag.com/mag/medical_lincare_settles_probes

BECAUSE of Burley's mental impairment and physical disability he has a Social Security Payment Payee, provided by Family Out Reach, Inc., for which he pays $39.00 a month, has dementia, and does not have the mental capacity to enter in contractual obligation, he, Medicare and United States taxpayers was swindled and defrauded by Frontier Home Health and Hospice and convicted Lincare. I personally contacted Frontier Home Health and Hospice to complain by phone and was told they would get back to me after they reviewed the file, they never did. How many other Montana senior citizens have been defrauded in this manner?

FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS a year to rent a "adaptive device" you can purchase at a thrift store for five or ten dollars....

$481.00 a year to rent this bath chair!

"Three additional investigations involved allegations that in periods ranging from 1995 through 2004, Lincare inappropriately sought reimbursement under Medicare and other government health care programs, or otherwise violated federal health care laws."

http://www.homecaremag.com/mag/medical_lincare_settles_probes#sthash.hvKFmaML.dpuf

The Bull Dagger's Brawl by Mark Anthony Given

2014-06-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

________________________________

When I was younger I could remember anything;
whether it happened or not... -Mark Twain
________________________________

WHEN I WAS A KID living in New York there was a Lesbian Bar on the corner, I think it was a Social Club, where they have to buzz you in, but this place had a screen door/metal door where you could see right in in the summer. For some adolescent reason, me and my buddies would have to initiate any new member to our little gang of wannabes, we would make them go to the corner bar and knock on the door of "Bull Dagger's," and holler, "Can I use the Men's Room?" And we'd all run off laughing our ass off....
THEM BULL DAGGER'S didn't have any sense of humor because about the third time we did it, a whole gang of them piled out the bar and headed up the street holler about me, I guess they thought I was the ringleader. Ugly ass woman with crew cuts dressed like stevedores and janitors and construction workers marching up the street towards us and I imagined all manner of vile and despicable things this bunch had planned for me. I didn't know if the wanted to suck my dick or ream my ass, but I didn't want to find out and I thought I heard my mother calling me and ran in the house. I was probably thirteen...

THE BULL DAGGER'S BRAWL had convened on my front porch swinging pool sticks and half-empty whiskey bottles and demanding my hide but they made the fatal mistake of interrupting my mother's small glass of Genesee Beer and Jeopardy TV game show. She made them wait until the Double Jeopardy was over and a commercial came on before confronting them standing at her front door with a massive dose of motherly love.
I COULDN'T HEAR to good from under my third-floor bedroom's bed in the fetal position but I know I heard something about the "The Problem." Turns out there are few "Problem's," in New York that can't be resolved by a sudden vacation to Florida for a few months. And when you get back home there's a whole new 'lot of idiots to contend with...
I think they call it the

"Foorrrgeettaaabbooouuttiittt!!!!

Two Chinese Jews by Mark Anthony Given

2013-12-10T19:12:00.002-07:00

TWO JEWS IN A CHINESE RESTAURANT. Hiram and Hershel. Hiram say's to Hershel; "You know they got Jew's all over the world; Russian Jews, German Jews, Polish Jews, I wonder if they have any Chinese Jews" Hershel says, "You know what? I never thought of that. Let's ask the waiter." They call the waiter over, "You know they got Jew's all over the world; Russian Jews, German Jews, Polish Jews. Do they have any Chinese Jews" Chinese waiter say's, "Me no know, let me go ask the cook!" He comes back after a few minutes, "No Chinese Jews! We got Orange Jew, Grape Jew and Tomato Jew!

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(Joke by a famous comic I can't think of that makes me laugh every time I think of it. I once told upon meeting a group of people in a restaurant; you could have heard pin drop until that punch line...)

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Dime Bag Dishwasher by Mark Anthony Given

2013-09-19T16:37:00.001-07:00

America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.
Everywhere else is Cleveland. -Tennessee Williams

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THE ANDREW JACKSON Restaurant on the sixth block of Royal Street was smack in the middle of the New Orleans French Quarter, and all they served was steamed food. A Handful of dishes and a couple of salads and real New Orleans French Bread and a dessert or two, in a little patio off the street. Maybe ten or twelve tables and only open at night. The line every night was from the street down a wall of an antique store to the patio area for run of the mill "Tourist Food." The owner was pulling down 30k a night with a staff of five or six. If you are a restaurant worker and can't find a job in the French Quarter, there's no use looking anywhere else. Got to be three-hundred restaurants. I know I can cook and will blow your socks off with just the ordinary stuff you got in your kitchen....every night of the week. I worked in nearly twenty restaurants and have quit jobs just because I didn't like the way you talk to me. I can, and have went door to door, restaurant to restaurant either 10:30 AM or 2:30 PM when they have time to talk to you, and I'll get turned down three or four times and Bingo! Walk into a place that someone just quit or fired, and you can either do it or you can't. Good Food, like Good Writing, can't be faked.

LIKE MOST restaurants I happen to be in, I was there wining and dining some hot young hopeful, and something about the place made me want to work there. But not this time. I was going door to door and bamboozled my way into the Head Chef position just by showing up at the right time. Like every other French Quarter restaurant, the staff is all Black, they all know each other, the dishwasher's slinging Dime Bag's, at least one the waitresses or Cooks got Cocaine, several of them are already drunk when they get to work, and they all want my job.

FIRST NIGHT ON THE JOB I walk in there early, familiarize where everything is at. Introduce myself, tell them I'm not changing nothing, I'm from "Gentilly," I tell them, which explains the New York accent, which is out by the Lakefront area. As soon as I see them gang up on break, after a few minutes I run up in them where I know I can talk privately to them, I think we were in one of the big walking freezer because there are no alley's behind the place like most restaurants. Anyway, I walk in there and pull out a joint and fire it up, the owners aren't there, I'm in charge, and I tell them:

"Look," 'I can walk into any restaurant and get a job any day of the week if they need you they need you. Go to the next place. I just want to learn these Recipes, eat these peoples food, drink all their beer and have some damn fun! Whatever your job is, stay with it, let's work together. Show me how these dishes are supposed to look and I will jump in wherever I'm needed. After this, try not and "Break," all at the same time. If you disappear for a few minutes, I don't care. Just don't leave me "In the Weed's," don't get me in trouble,

and

'Oh, and try not and Rob the place blind,"

I said with a wink....

A COUPLE of them hot Mulatto waitresses were eyeing me all night like I was the desert, but I knew better than fraternize with the help, it never ends well. The New Orleans French Quarter restaurant scene "Rush," is over by ten-thirty at night, nobody wanted to set on them hard ass metal patio furniture with a tablecloth on it unless they were already drunk. One of the owners or his flunkies showed up to grab all the cash. I told the guy who looked like he wanted my job the most, to make sure the place got cleaned and then made it around the corner to "Johnny White's," across from Pat O'Brien's on Saint Peter to my appointed bar stool way in the back to try and keep an eye on this grimy town....

978 Words

COPYRIGHT 2016 by Mark Anthony Given
All Rights Reserved 28 USC 1746 Public Law: Pub. L. 94-553 (Oct. 19, 1976)
U.S. Statutes at Large: 90 Stat. 2541
9:43 AM 2/27/2016

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reposted at http://thekindnessofstrangers.blogspot.com

The Game by Mark Anthony Given

2013-03-14T08:25:00.003-07:00

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People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.-Rogers Hornsby
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I READ ONE HUNDRED AND twenty volumes of United States Supreme court cases because I thought it was the most efficient use of my time doing five years in federal prison for bank fraud back in the 1980's. To be a great writer you have to read great writers and while legal writing is not exactly classic literature, occasionally a work of art emerges and this case is one of them. In one of the histories of the United States Supreme Court I read that the Justices drew straws to decide who would write the opinion for the high court. One of the two biggest baseball fanatics won, Justice Harold Blackmun and Justice Potter Stewart shared an obsessive following of baseball. In one oral argument on October 10, 1973, Stewart passed Blackmun a note that read, "V.P. AGNEW JUST RESIGNED!! METS 2 REDS 0." If you love baseball you will love this case.

Mr. Justice BLACKMUN delivered the opinion of the Court.

For the third time in 50 years the Court is asked specifically to rule that professional baseball's reserve system is within the reach of the federal antitrust laws.1 Collateral issues of state law and of federal labor policy are also advanced.

* The Game

It is a century and a quarter since the New York Nine defeated the Knickerbockers 23 to 1 on Hoboken's Elysian Fields June 19, 1846, with Alexander Jay Cartwright as the instigator and the umpire. The teams were amateur, but the contest marked a significant date in baseball's beginnings. That early game led ultimately to the development of professional baseball and its tightly organized structure.

The Cincinnati Red Stockings came into existence in 1869 upon an outpouring of local pride. With only one Cincinnatian on the payroll, this professional team traveled over 11,000 miles that summer, winning 56 games and tying one. Shortly thereafter, on St. Patrick's Day in 1871, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players was founded and the professional league was born.

The ensuing colorful days are well known. The ardent follower and the student of baseball know of General Abner Doubleday; the formation of the National League in 1876; Chicago's supremacy in the first year's competition under the leadership of Al Spalding and with Cap Anson at third base; the formation of the American Association and then of the Union Association in the 1880's; the introduction of Sunday baseball; interleague warfare with cut-rate admission prices and player raiding; the development of the reserve 'clause'; the emergence in 1885 of the Brotherhood of Professional Ball Players, and in 1890 of the Players League; the appearance of the American League, or 'junior circuit,' in 1901, rising from the minor Western Association; the first World Series in 1903, disruption in 1904, and the Series' resumption in 1905; the short-lived Federal League on the majors' scene during World War I years; the troublesome and discouraging episode of the 1919 Series; the home run ball; the shifting of franchises; the expansion of the leagues; the installation in 1965 of the major league draft of potential new players; and the formation of the Major League Baseball Players Association in 1966.2

Then there are the many names, celebrated for one reason or another, that have sparked the diamond and its environs and that have provided tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparisons, and for conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Henry Chadwick, Eddie Collins, Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Hooper, Goose Goslin, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Joe McCarthy, John McGraw, Deacon Phillippe, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Tommy Leach, Big Ed Delahanty, Davy Jones, Germany Schaefer, King Kelly, Big Dan Brouthers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Wee Willie Keeler, Big Ed Walsh, Jimmy Austin, Fred Snodgrass, Satchel Paige, Hugh Jennings, Fred Merkle, Iron Man McGinnity, Three-Finger Brown, Harry and Stan Coveleski, Connie Mack, Al Bridwell, Red Ruffing, Amos Rusie, Cy Young, Smokey Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Chief Bender, Bill Klem, Hans Lobert, Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker, Roy Campanella, Miller Huggins, Rube Bressler, Dazzy Vance, Edd Roush, Bill Wambsganss, Clark Griffith, Branch Rickey, Frank Chance, Cap Anson, Nap Lajoie, Sad Sam Jones, Bob O'Farrell, Lefty O'Doul, Bobby Veach, Willie Kamm, Heinie Groh, Lloyd and Paul Waner, Stuffy McInnis, Charles Comiskey, Roger Bresnahan, Bill Dickey, Zack Wheat, George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, Eppa Rixey, Harry Heilmann, Fred Clarke, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Pie Traynor, Rube Waddell, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Old Hoss Radbourne, Moe Berg, Rabbit Maranville, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove.3 The list seems endless.

And one recalls the appropriate reference to the 'World Serious,' attributed to Ring Lardner, Sr.; Ernest L. Thayer's 'Casey at the Bat';4 the ring of 'Tinker to Evers to Chance';5 and all the other happenings, habits, and superstitions about and around baseball that made it the 'national pastime' or, depending upon the point of view, 'the great American tragedy.'6

The Petitioner

The petitioner, Curtis Charles Flood, born in 1938, began his major league career in 1956 when he signed a contract with the Cincinnati Reds for a salary of $4,000 for the season. He had no attorney or agent to advise him on that occasion. He was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals before the 1958 season. Flood rose to fame as a center fielder with the Cardinals during the years 1958—1969. In those 12 seasons he compiled a batting average of .293. His best offensive season was 1967 when he achieved .335. He was .301 or better in six of the 12 St. Louis years. He participated in the 1964, 1967, and 1968 World Series. He played errorless ball in the field in 1966, and once enjoyed 223 consecutive errorless games. Flood has received seven Golden Glove Awards. He was co-captain of his team from 1965—1969. He ranks among the 10 major league outfielders possessing the highest lifetime fielding averages.

Flood's St. Louis compensation for the years shown was:

These figures do not include any so-called fringe benefits or World Series shares.

But at the age of 31, in October 1969, Flood was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies of the National League in a multi-player transaction. He was not consulted about the trade. He was informed by telephone and received formal notice only after the deal had been consummated. In December he complained to the Commissioner of Baseball and asked that he be made a free agent and be placed at liberty to strike his own bargain with any other major league team. His request was denied.

Flood then instituted this antitrust suit in January 1970 in federal court for the Southern District of New York. The defendants (although not all were named in each cause of action) were the Commissioner of Baseball, the presidents of the two major leagues, and the 24 major league clubs. In general, the complaint charged violations of the federal antitrust laws and civil rights statutes, violation of state statutes and the common law, and the imposition of a form of peonage and involuntary servitude contrary to the Thirteenth Amendment and 42 U.S.C. 1994, 18 U.S.C. § 1581, and 29 U.S.C. 102 and 103. Petitioner sought declaratory and injunctive relief and treble damages.

Flood declined to play for Philadelphia in 1970, despite a $100,000 salary offer, and he sat out the year. After the season was concluded, Philadelphia sold its rights to Flood to the Washington Senators. Washington and the petitioner were able to come to terms for 1971 at a salary of $110,000.8 Flood started the season but, apparently because he was dissatisfied with his performance, he left the Washington club on April 27, early in the campaign. He has not played baseball since then.

FLOOD v. KUHN, 407 U.S. 258 (1972)

407 U.S. 258

This case resulyed in the "Free Agency," of professional atheletes.

Freemesser's Bar by Mark Anthony Given

2013-03-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

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We got divorcees and a big bouncer manAn old jukebox and a real bad band
We got waitresses and we got barflie. A dumb-ass and a wise-guy
If you get too drunk just sleep out in your car. I Love This Bar, Toby Keith
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FREEMESSER’S ON CLINTON AVENUE SOUTH in Rochester, New York, was a neighborhood bar owned by an old Guiney, Frank Costa's, and had been there for years. Smack in the heart of "Swilburg," now a mixed neighborhood before entering the suburbs, but once an enclave of Irish and German potatoes farmers. There were no bar stools, you had to stand up and women could not drink at the bar, but would come to the door of the back room to be served. I got busted by my parole officer for a dirty UA and locked up in the Monroe County Jail for a month or two. While I was in there, I had my girlfriend pick up my last paycheck and take it to Frank to cash and pay my bar Tab.

FRANK WOULD HAVE Frank Guesford or someone drive him home about six o'clock at night because he was tired and too drunk to drive, so if you seen him in there after Six, something was going on. A wedding, a funeral, a party for Fire Fighters, Roofers Union, whatever. I walked in there about seven at night and the place was at full tilt, but still only twelve or fifteen people, which was a lot in a little corner bar. As soon as Frank seen me come in the door he pointed at me and hollered across the whole Bar, "There's that son of a bitch! I been in business twenty years and never had anyone send me money from jail! Drink's on the house kid!" You would have thought I gave him first Grand Son they way he treated me after that.

Cowgirl Up! By Mark Anthony Given

2013-02-27T10:13:00.001-07:00

Cowgirl Up! The further adventures of a modern day Irish Rabbi in Montana

SO I PLACED THIS AD on Craigslist:

TYPIST GIRLFRIEND:

Need Hot young girlfriend who can type: aspiring
screenwriter with too high standards.

HALF A DOZEN spammers right 'off the bat and out of the Blue, a jewel stumbles out. Says she fits all the credentials’ by sworn oath (I been fooled before by two-hundred pound plus women with girl next door profile picture and spin a yarn as far as the front door opens and, Bam! Back to Reality!

“Oh, I thought you wouldn’t mind

a few extra pounds,”

“I gained a few pounds since that

picture was taken.”

I have heard it all. I made this one recite the federal perjury statute (28 USC 1746), and reveal her mother’s maiden name so I had no choice but to pull out Old Stumbling Block #2: (And it works like a charm): Jeigermeister and T-Bone Steak at this roadside steakhouse halfway to the North Entrance of the Yellowstone National Park, between Livingston and Gardiner, Montana sit’s a real roadhouse/steakhouse/cowboy Beat’em Up Bar, called the Old Saloon and Livery Stable Steakhouse, out in the middle of nowhere. A place where even if they do call the law (which nobody wants to do by the way), you still have nearly a half hour to keep fighting or get some yonder.

CONTESTANT #338 was 28, her name was Honey Providence but when she got warmed up, she wasn't always sweet and slippery..... Way outside my known limitations but she invoked the rare “Hot Ass Under 30 Rule," and I figured I’d weed her out like Culling Sheep in Montana, except you got to give ‘em a running head start before you kick their hind legs out from under them, it’s always more memorable finale that way, she ain’t gonna remember anything of this tomorrow anyway. Black hair (Not a good sign), built like a brick shit house at about a “Buck 10,” (110 lbs.), drop-dead gorgeous and dumber than a box of rocks.
HALF THE ALL wood place was a dining area where patrons sit inside true horse stables draped in fake ferns alone dining table with candlelight and lanterns and old ranch saddles on the wall. Couple little hot young go-getter waitress’s buzzing around. The place gets packed for about an hour and then settles down every evening. I used to live a half a mile away and walked to work. Someone told me they needed a cook and I showed up Monday morning at ten am to get the job with resume and line of bullshit in hand, and walked right into the middle of a burglary investigation. I noticed all the cop cars there but I was steamed up to get the job and barged in there and handed the manager Bonnie Wood my papers. She pointed to the fresh gouges in the floor where someone had dragged the safe to the front door and then the back door. They all gave me the once over but when they seen I was applying for a job they ignored me. She gave me the job later that day or the next. Knocking out a hundred or so steaks a night was a piece of cake if I could keep the waitresses off the poker machines and drinking pink Chambliss in clear plastic Dixie Cups all night.

That's it...

WHEN WE walked in the Old Saloon and Livery Stable Saloon in Emigrant in Pray, Montana, about ten pm on a summer Friday night, it was packed and in full swing, as I knew it would be. It had been nearly ten years since I worked there but I just knew someone would recognize me but it didn’t matter. They weren’t watching me anyway when from behind me appeared every young man’s (and apparently old man) dream and every mother’s nightmare. Expensive denim slinging ass from front to back and side to side; I swore I saw every head in their turn when she shifted her right ass cheek to miss the left side of that regulation pool table on the way to the Phillies Room and a heart or two skipped a beat. When she came back out and knocked back two Jeigermeister’s I had waiting for her, I felt the air in the room change from “Who’s getting their ass beat tonight to who’s getting lucky," and smiles all around. I'm not good in crowds and I don't like drunks either, but, I had to find out if Contestant was a keeper or a lush. I pulled my old penitentiary bad boy routine on them by just staring at the floor like it contained the secrets of the universe and mumbling shit like I was fix’n to start barroom brawl by myself…

SHE WAS flitting around like a school girl at her first night at Summer Camp, playing pool and dancing with complete strangers. I posted up in the far corner where I could put my back to the wall and watch the front door and the back door and check for shanks out of habit. Other than my overtly dangerous demeanor, when people saw I just one of the guys that ain’t got time for nobody or nothing; Miss me with the dumb shit, small talk, weather, fishing nothing; I seen 100 nights in this sad country bar and I got a hair-trigger temper. Besides, my heads rocking, I’m having a good time, just don’t fuck with me. I get mad real easy and I’m stone sober. We were halfway into Steaks and fries when the Jagermeister must have kicked in because,

THAT'S WHEN shit started heading south. Right out of the Blue, this crazy half drunk broad slams her damn drink on the bar and announces, “When I drink, everybody drinks!” What the hell? Fifteen minutes later drunk fuck’s were swig’n right out of the $20 pitchers of beer and the bartender is looking concerned. Right in the middle of our $22 dollar succulent t-Bone Steaks and fries we ate in the Bar, this party animal jumps up and holler’s

“When I eat, everybody eats!”

Oh, Lord, I seen the dishwasher jump up and grab a waitress smock and ticket book and I knew we was in for a long night. The waitress was getting worked, I seen her ticket book peeled half in half with orders she hadn’t even turned in. Fuck me; I couldn’t get far enough back in that corner by the door. My only saving grace was this giant Moose head hanging over the potbelly stove in the middle of the little dining area, adjacent to the bar blocking my view of half the participants. I was instinctually counting the steps to the front door when this crazy bitch slams her shot glass down on the end of the bar and the damn jukebox skipped or stopped or something, because the next thing I knew it was deathly quiet in there and the whole room’s head shifted from her to me by the door after she hollered,

“When I pay, everybody pay’s!!”

WHAT THE HELL! She done wrung up four hundred dollars worth of food and drink and I wasn’t about to pay for all this. Apparently neither was she because when she seen them all looking at me she made a run for it, the length of the whole bar and out the door and the screen door slammed and I thought it might be my turn to exit Stage Left. I bolted for the front door too and was glad I had sense enough to park way out back before I realized there was only one way out of there unless I wanted to do a little midnight off- roading.

A Gentile who Studies the Torah is as Great as the High Priest

2013-01-12T15:28:00.000-07:00

THE HIGHEST IDEAL OF YOUNG and old and of small and great was the study of the Law, thus forming a basis for that indomitable eagerness of the Jewish people for education and that unquenchable thirst for knowledge which still characterize them. "As the child must satisfy its hunger day by day, so must the grown man busy himself with the Torah each hour" (Yer. Ber. ch. ix.). The mishnah (Pe'ah i.) incorporated in the daily prayer declares that the study of the Law transcends all things, being greater than the rescue of human life, than the building of the Temple, and than the honor of father and mother (Meg. 16b). It is of more value than the offering of daily sacrifice ('Er. 63b); a single day devoted to the Torah outweighs 1,000 sacrifices (Shab. 30a; comp. Men. 100a); while the fable of the Fish and the Fox, in which the latter seeks to entice the former to dry land, declares Israel can live only in the Law as fish can live only in the ocean. Whoever separates himself from the Torah dies forthwith ('Ab. Zarah 3b); for fire consumes him, and he falls into hell (B. B. 79a); while God weeps over one who might have occupied himself with it but neglected to do so (?ag. 5b). The study must be unselfish: "One should study the Torah with self-denial, even at the sacrifice of one's life; and in the very hour before death one should devote himself to this duty" (So?ah 21b; Ber. 63b; Shab. 83b). "Whoever uses the crown of the Torah shall be destroyed" (Ned. 62a). All, even the lepers and the unclean, were required to study the Law (Ber. 22a), while it was the duty of every one to read the entire weekly lesson twice (Ber. 8a); and the oldest benediction was the one spoken over the Torah (ib. 11b). Prophylactic power also is ascribed to it: it gives protection against suffering (ib. 5a), against sickness ('Er. 54b), and against oppression in the Messianic time (Sanh. 98b); so that it may be said that "the Torah protects all the world" (Sanh. 99b; comp. Ber. 31a). The following sayings may be cited as particularly instructive in this respect: "A Gentile who studies the Torah is as great as the high priest" (B. ?. 38a). "The practise of all the laws of the Pentateuch is worth less than the study of the scriptures of it" (Yer. Pe'ah i.), a conclusive refutation of the current view of the Nomism of the Jewish faith. After these citations it becomes readily intelligible that, according to the Talmudic view, "God Himself sits and studies the Torah" ('Ab. Zarah 3b).

The Mechanic by Mark Anthony Given

2013-01-05T10:31:00.003-07:00

I spent 90% of my money on women and drink; the rest I wasted. -George Best

EVERY PRO BLACKJACK PLAYER PLAYS at least two hands at once, it just doubles everything and it isn’t any harder. Ideally I want to be at the $25 blackjack table playing at least two hands (I could play the whole table), for 20 minutes at 4 o’clock in the morning and be in and out with a grand or so in less time than that. I’ll never forget the look on the faces of several Pit Bosses huddled together covering their mouths so I couldn’t read their lips. When this thing is working on all fours it should be win one, lose one, 25$ bet lost, bet $50 win: I got my $25 back and made $25. After less than 10 minutes I’m up $700 and still making the same bet! They are pulling their hair out because they never seen this. Every five minutes I get interrupted to be offered a “Players Card” or “dinner for you and a guest”, on and on they want me in their system to monitor what the hell I’m doing. I got the same story for them every time; I’m on my way to the airport, I’ll see you next time….”4/18/2011 10:43:34 AM They never seen a grown man in a $1,000 dress suit mix all his different colored/denomination chips together in a pile, and keep playing with them like a kindergarten child. I do that so they can’t keep a running count of how bad I’m spanking their ass, seaming at will. If I am the only one at the table they can look at the dealer’s bank and get a exact count. Every two or three minutes you will see me pocket a few big denomination chips. Drinking bottled water or hot chocolate and no smoking I could blend in to woodwork if I wasn’t walking out of there with their money. Nine hands and right at the eight minute mark the dealer gets a tap on the shoulder and they switch dealers to right the rhythm in the casinos favor. It doesn’t work against guys like me. At the Seventeen minute mark they switch the dealer again and it’s some old hippy hangover from the Seventies with hippy beads and tie die shit. Every time she scoops up the cards for no apparent reason she will reach over and tap the table to signal a new hand. Her mojo doesn’t work either, even after 6 straight loses I bet 7, 8, 7 and recouped every dime not counting the double down on the second 7 bet.

THAT’S WHEN THEY BRING OUT THE MECHANIC, usually a real lucky Irishman like myself, but you can usually tell the Mechanic because he has thirty or forty grand of jewels trying to blind me with his bling. I can beat him but twenty five minutes is my limit because my concentration starts to fail, I’m up almost a grand. “Color me up.” That’s my mantra….the dealer takes his time because the last thing they want is for me to leave but I know you haven’t won a dime until you make it to the parking lot. I never even stop at the Tellers cage to cash in the chips, there’s no hurry there always open I mosey out of there just in time to see a Supervisor step off the elevator 50 feet away with a couple of minions heading straight at me. They look at me like a lab specimen as I walk by and act like I never even notice them. Straight thru the front door past valet parking and head straight out into the fresh air with a slight smile on my face as I walk like I know where I am going, but I’m just trying to shake the adrenalin rush off like a small line of coke without the jitters…

Everybody Wants Something by Mark Anthony Given

2012-12-17T18:36:00.001-07:00

In The Land of the Blind, The One Eyed Man is King.

I HAD A JAMAICAN DRUG LORD doing a Life Sentence without possibility of parole for running a string of crack houses from Florida to Maryland, come to see me at the Inmate Law Library at FCI Marrianna, Florida, when I was doing a five year sentence for federal bank fraud, and had already sent half a dozen guys either to back to court or straight to the streets. If there is Royalty in Jail, the Jailhouse Lawyer is King when you start sending people to the house. Somebody recommended him to me and I forget what he wanted to know, but after we were done he asked me what I charged to look at his case. I told him I didn't want anything, I didn't charge people. He told me that was impossible, that everyone wants something, even God want's something. Not me, if I get you on the streets, then you owe me... What does God want, by the way.... He was less than thrity years old and would never see another day of Freedom. Dred Locks and Gold teeth and a perpetual smile he said, "Obedience."

Faith Begins Where Understanding Ends by Mark Anthony Given

2012-12-17T09:19:00.000-07:00

THE NEED TO KNOW is what makes us human, our ability to reason and communicate sets us apart in this world. The tragic incident at Any-town, Connecticut, underscores the limits of human understanding. Even if we knew everything there is to know about what happened you would still not know why. I tried to get my head around such a tragedy, and for me it always comes back to Torah. It has been said that Faith begins where Understanding ends. The Talmud says that if there were no evil in the world there
would be no opportunity to do good. I believe that until a individual obtains the age of reason, probably past elementary school, they reserve a level of divinity that should they die, for any
reason, go straight to heaven. The Psalms say that if you live your life correctly you will have no fear and indeed, welcome death. But what words can't do is fill the emptiness in the parents heart. Aristotle said that Pain is Nature's Cure, and we all know that takes time. -All Glory to God.

I Almost Got Murdered by a Homicidal Maniac by Mark Anthony Given

2012-11-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book. -Ernest Hemingway

CHAPTER ONE:

THE TERREBONNE PARISH PRISON AIN'T NO JOKE! I thought I was in the bowels of Bolivia or anyplace in South America where everything is constantly sweating from humidity and dank and dark and scary. Six metal bunks literally chained to riveted walls like in a boiler room, where up to twenty modern day dregs of society, mostly blacks, were held. Day and night the door swung open constantly admitting another miscreant, who nearly all exclaimed ,“Are you kidding me? There’s no room!” After some giant Black guy snatched me off the top rack in the middle of the night and told he wasn’t sleeping on the damn floor, I found my way under the bottom bunk in the back and tried to disappear in the awful place. Maybe twelve feet by twenty feet with a low metal ceiling with rows of rivets joined the metal, and looked like you were in a ship or underground somewhere. Twenty or thirty years of grime, the shower was nearly a half inch of grime and just a few dim lights completed the South American prison ambience.

I WAS REALLY ON the second floor jail of the Municipal Complex and Courthouse in Houma, Louisiana at the end of 1979, doing two years for being stupid. At least six weeks in this pit of misery I still remember as the worst six weeks of my life. The whole time I was in there I heard it was “Blood Alley,” in the regular population and more than a few inmates would rather be in there than in “The Back,” it was that damn bad.

MY FIRST NIGHT IN THERE I got my jeans and my tennis shoes stolen and woke up sleeping on the floor in the large day room because of overcrowding by a group of eight or ten young black guys whipping bars of soap at people sleeping… Fortunately I didn’t have to get up and get my ass beat because a long simmering feud erupted by two of the large bulls in there. One of them wasn’t real bright, and looked like an old country mule, kinda narrow between the eyes and the blank stare of pure ignorance, and grew up on a sugar plantation and had scars on his head from a lifetime of bad decisions. In for murder and about six ‘three, two hundred and forty pounds he had what I was told was a, “Star in his Eye.” A slight glean of madness in his eyes that when he looked right at you was like a twinkling of sharp knife in the sun that set a chill down your spine. He had a sick disdainful grin on his face like he was just dying for you to say the wrong thing so he could punch you in the face. The other guy was real friendly and had been all over the world in the Navy, about five ten maybe thirty years old from the “Malphemein Projects in New Orleans who was caught robbing jewelry stores and on his way to Angola, America’s bloodiest prison now and then, for a fresh fifteen year sentence. I had spoken to him only briefly in the chow line after I recognized his distinct New Orleans accent that sounded a like Winton Marsalis. Once he seen them messing with me, he may have intervened on my behalf.

I HAD NO IDEA what they were ‘beefing about and could only understand three or four of every ten words of their bastardazation of the English language, a mix of ghetto slang and New Orleans mumbo jumbo, where they will just make up shit on the fly just to get everyone else to laugh at the other guy. After a few hours of arguing intensely, I determined they just didn’t like each other. I kept my head in the King James Version of the Bible and prayed and was glad they were otherwise occupied. I remember I read the first ten chapters and because of its three contradicting and over lapping accounts and style, I was more confused than when I started….

THREE OR FOUR WEEKS later I got moved to the Trustee Dorm with short timers and was placed in charge of the kitchen after a week or so, by telling the Captain on his daily walk through, I was the chef at “Commander’s Palace,” or the “Court of Two Sisters’ in the French Quarter in New Orleans, and I knocked out a private batch for the Brass to take home of “Seafood Bisque,” I was Golden….having rough necked on the oil rigs I knew the lingo and South Louisiana and New York accents are very similar and after living down there a year or so, you’re talking screwy too.. Ahhhhh eeeEEE!!

SIX WEEKS OF HELL in that holding tank the size of your garage and another month of “Being in the Back,” it was called, a place you didn’t want to be if you were weak. I been in jail from one end of this country to the other but take my word for it, no place comes close to “Down the Bayou,” jail time. The “Trustee,” dorm was about the size of a small house with twenty or so fuck ups doings small sentences or “Sitting out Fines,” usually under a month. Every jail I been in there is almost always one bad ass and this place had a rare breed called a “Sabine Indian,” and everyone from Pascagoula, Mississippi, to Sabine Pass, Texas, the first little hamlet right on the Gulf when you cross into Texas from Louisiana, knows who they are. They look like a cross between an Indian and a light skin Black person and usually ugly as sin and like to party, fuck and fight, in that order.

THIS WAS THE BIGGEST bastard in there and I was glad he too like the cook, vanished soon after I appeared. Being in charge of all the food and feeding sixty or seventy people in a large institution kitchen with walk in coolers and freezers, five or six chosen helpers, it was a cakewalk. My only memory of it is emptying a couple dozen boxes of Quaker Oatmeal, two pieces of toast, an Orange, a small carton of 2% percent and done. It Couldn’t be easier. Feed’em just enough all week and throw down on Sunday with some Fried Chicken and Potato Salad and Baked Beans and I could coast all week again. Chicken on Sunday in the South is what keeps the Planet’s aligned. Before I get to the part where I almost get murdered by a certified homicidal maniac, and now that I got you by the tongue, let me tell you about accidentally on purpose getting locked in to the Women’s Jail cell and having every mans fantasy come true. Did I tell you I was born with a Star on My Ass?

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BEING A GOOD COOK DOWN SOUTH is like a passport to rooms you would otherwise never get into. After a few weeks of smooth running I walked around that place like was the Sheriff I had so much Juice! If I wanted to go to “The Back,” to deliver trays I had guys begging me to ask for them, and if they had any special skills and minor problems, I could make it happen. I placed guys in place of everything and spent my days pumping iron or running track, smoking pot and trying to figure out a way into that Women’s Wing. After a several months of studying the movements of everything I could see I found a crack in the seams of their little Mayberry RFD operation.

ON THE WEEKEND’s nearly all the “Trustee’s, ”went home and the complex was a ghost town, maybe bring in a dunk or two every few hours. Seventy lost souls and three Barney Fife’s who were more concerned with filling their lunch boxes with food out of the kitchen than heeding the desperate screams of some poor soul getting his ass reamed, “In the Back.” This was before the “all seeing video camera” and “Inmate Classification,” and you’d find your ass in there on a shoplifting first offense with a guy killed a librarian for “Over Due Book Money!” If you had a problem you went and banged on the metal door and hollered for “The Man.”

EVERY HILLBILLY JAIL I been in has at least one real life “Barney Fife,” and instead of doing their year or two in the jail before making it to patrol, they never leave. They are usually related to a high ranking member of the Sheriff’s Office and are appointed the simplest tasks, like the weekend shift. I have no idea what his name was but he was a half black, half CoonAss, light skinned goofy bastard who was always smiling with a couple of Gold teeth, and would love to get locked in the Women’s Wing himself. I was roughneck’n on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico out of Houma, Louisiana, but I didn’t have a local address so I couldn’t go anywhere on the weekends. There was a man there doing a life sentence without parole for killing another man in a drunken dispute, who stayed out at the Motor Pool and had been there nearly twenty years. Went home every weekend in his own patrol car! You think I’m kidding you? Everything is ass backwards and completely possible in Louisiana…

I DON’T KNOW IF ANYONE has ever tried to murder you with their bare hands but it don’t take long and I will get to it directly, but one other unusual incident occurred there as I now recall. After at least a month in that twelve by twenty steel holding area, I don’t even know what to call it, it was so unusual, and especially twenty feet away was a huge gymnasium completely empty like enclosed parking garage I later ran around a zillion times. Small work out area with weights where I could go anytime I wanted. Suffice it to say I would have joined ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den’ to get out of there. But what “Classification, ”they did have of inmates included a traditional well placed rectal exam by the most lecherous looking doctor you ever seen. The low point of low points came standing in line with nearly a dozen other hopeful’s that had been sufficiently humbled and ever ready for anal coronation. Fiftyish, thin, dark hair and greasy skin, after every penetration he would stand back quickly in approval and pull off his latex gloves and throw them in the nearby open garbage can with satisfaction and look at the line getting smaller, his only visible sign of disappointment.

HIS COCONSPIRATOR was a woman his age that had a hurried routine manner about her like they did this every day and she couldn’t wait for a cigarette break. A small line of grown men waiting to get another man to stick his big finger in your ass for reason why, you knew not. I tried to quietly assure the stern women I was prepared to waive the necessary procedure and would sign anything she had to that effect. She said I couldn’t be “Classified,” without it, and would have to go back in to Purgatory. I waited my turn with my mind searching a million escape hatches and was about to pull the last ditch “heart attack,”routine on them when I found myself bent over the business end of an examination table and my drawers at my feet. I had this ragging desire to spin around try and break this creeps jaw and fight my way out of there like in the movie “Rambo,” when with a dab of trusty KY Jelly, in and out in two seconds and it was over, really never felt anything. It was all I could do get thru that place and Dante’s “Inferno,” come to mind, in The Seventh Circle of Hell, human transgressor’s found themselves standing tippy-toe up to their necks in huge vats of excrement, and all new arrivals were warned, “Don’t make wave’s!” A sudden burst of fresh air and hope came over me finally getting out of that God awful place. The light was so dim in there I couldn’t read, and anyplace I can’t read is a living hell for me.

EVERY SUNDAY WAS VISITING DAY so even though they were under staffed, they would have eight or ten fifteen minute visits in the early afternoon and another five or six a few hours after dinner. Probably the quietest time of the week, Sunday afternoon, and I had this planned like the Man From U.N.C.L.E., and it went off like a charm! I even did a little dry run, and it went like this…

YOU AIN’T HAD NO PUSSY until you had sex in a prison bunk chained to a wall with someone else’s hot young shoplifting wife, half way thru a thirty day sentence, with a couple spectators waiting their turn! Two hot young white girls Barney Fife was absolutely enthralled with, and an older black woman with no teeth that looked like she could suck a Golf Ball through a garden hose, and another heavy set black women who remained hope full. We always saved the Women’s Wing for last when serving chow because we could then spend more time there, and it was closest to the kitchen. When the big metal door was swung open it revealed all the women animated just for a few minutes of attention. Two cells back to back with four metal bunks in each, but they all stayed in the front cell for some reason. The girls would immediately grab our hands and pull it between their legs making their intentions clear. I would always busy myself handing out the trays and paying individual attention to them allowing Barney to get real wound up.

“We need Banana’s and Milk, Come’on Barney,” (I don’t remember his real name).

He lost track of me and closed the door with me in the empty cell where he couldn’t see into, and went to the kitchen to get the girls what they wanted. Some of them actually had ice cream brought up there and kept in the kitchen freezer! This was just a dry run, I seen my little plan would succeed but, knew he would be right back. He came right back and I slipped out the door as soon as he opened it and said,” “What are you doing? You locked me in here! I almost got torn limb for limb!” They all laughed. He would have been in more trouble than me and never said anything.

DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM the Women’s Wing was the Isolation Cells reserved for the unruly, sometimes called Administrative Segregation, where you’re usually being punished for some institution infraction or Protective Custody and, the criminally insane. This place is made out of old light brown ceramic looking blocks with concrete floors and heavy metal encased doorways. When you threw open this door big enough to stretcher someone out of, you looked down this concrete hall with three or four steel doors with small windows and heavy cast iron food shoots, usually kept open for fresh air.

THE FIRST THING THE DEPUTY told me was to stay away from “that guy,” pointing to the very last cell before you would turn a corner and then another and another three or four identical cells back to back but no way back out. There was hardly ever anyone back there for some reason, except this guy in the cell on the end. I think he had been in there for years, I am not kidding you. They keep his light out but I squatted down to see the poor bastard and it looked like looking into the Depth of Human Misery, just a skeleton of a man like you’d see on a deserted island with clothes worn right off his body and tattered everywhere. Somewhere around fifty with a scraggly beard and skinny and the whole area reeked of slow death and decay. I would always stay away like I was told too and every time I brought him his tray I would try and engage him with some open ended remark or how he was doing but he never said a word and looked at me like he had been backed into a corner and was on the verge of murder with paranoid fright of a truly disturbed individual. Not a drop of reason with this poor soul.

CHAPTER TWO: REDBONE

I WAS IN THERE MAYBE TEN months and seen dozens of people come and go and when “Redbone,” showed up, she caused quite a stir. Twenty two and looked like a Mullato Whitney Houston, and carried herself like she was the Ghetto Paris Hilton. I guess she was a big-time crack dealer in a small town and got her ass in a jam and became the lynchpin in a big Parish wide drug prosecution. A few of the defendant’s had won parts of their appeal and had to be retried and, men doing Life Sentence’s who’s whole life depended on “Redbone’s,” mercurial memory. They were trying the men separately and the prosecution figured out early, Redbone’s memory was a lot more consistent when she got the little things she wanted… and she wanted me.

Being in the “Deep South,” “Down the Bayou,” in a little hillbilly town and being one of maybe three White guys in a jail full of some of the dumbest people you ever met on the planet… Probably the most senseless, dumbest and brutalist crimes I ever encountered in my near dozen jails I been in. As sad as this is, this is a true story.

After sleeping on the floor in the day room for about a week, I moved into a cell with Johnny Creole. They just called him “Creole,” and he was like everyone’s kid brother. He was nineteen about the color of walnut and looked like the kid most likely to succeed. I noticed he had a Black’s Law Dictionary and my heart warmed over with thoughts of memorizing arcane Latin words and salvaging something of value out of this miserable time in my life. I always thought I had more balls than brains and decided to work on that. He was all smiles to see me for some reason and I felt like he was a kid from down the block until right before we fell I asleep I asked him what he did to get in there. He flipped on a little pencil night light he obtained somehow in his nearly three years since his arrest and fumbled around in his stack of legal papers until he found a tattered folder and handed it to me and I made myself comfortable reading what I thought was some “Who Done It.”

Very first newspaper clipping, the oldest one in 25 point newspaper Type fell out on my chest,

“LOCAL MAN CHARGED IN BRUTAL LIBRARIAN’S DEATH FOR OVERDUE BOOK $”!!

Did I mention I had found the “Down the Bayou Twilight Zone?”

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IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT in the Bayou Jungle and the animals were at rest when someone would start banging the hell out the metal wall with his cup or foot, anything to wake up his celli or the guy next door so he would wake up and turn over to stop snoring… The lone deputy stopped by the cell on his nightly walk through and asked if I was alright, I was white as a sheet and didn’t sleep a wink that night. He had pulled that routine on others I am sure and probably relished scaring the hell out me. The day they picked a jury for his trial the prosecution placed ‘Ole Creole,” in a Conference Room next to the Court Room with his family and they leaned on him for days to plead guilty to spare the Librarian’s family the ordeal, and offered him 50 years to plead guilty and, and even before DNA although he claimed he didn’t do it, the evidence said otherwise and at the last minute he caved… Later that night I asked him what happened and he told me he couldn’t do a Fifty-year sentence and he told that judge that after sentencing and the judge told him,

“Just do what you can, Creole.”

I CAN’T TELL YOU the sense of dread I felt going in “The Back,” the first time. Being in the “Deep South,” “Down the Bayou,” in a little hillbilly town, and being one of maybe three White guys in a jail full of some of the dangerous, dumbest people you ever met on the planet and, these aren’t regular people; these are usually violent felons caught doing awful things in desperate situations, it’s scary, I don’t know how else to tell you. But I do suspect the fear I felt, kept my senses on full alert and as I was let into the Block, I could tell they were waiting on me, they knew by the way the shadow crept down the far wall of their cell the afternoon before, the way there was more activity in one part of the building, a million little things you would never notice until you have twenty four hours a day to watch every move it makes for months at a time, and breath everything about it.

THE MAIN DUDE, the one that stole my sneakers and jeans the first night I was in there, was at the end of the range I had to walk down to get to the Day Room where fifteen or so sore losers was eyeing me like a JC Penny’s Catalog of things they wanted. I didn’t know it then but this coal black killer turned out to be Redbone’s “Baby’s Daddy,” and I couldn’t think of a better way to pay him back for ripping me off while I was sleeping, than to fuck his old lady and him to find out about it.

I WAS CARRYING MY BEDROLL with two old itchy dark green Army Blankets with holes in it and stained white sheets that smelled like they had been washed in Simple Green. I headed straight down into them and made them get out of my way just by walking thru them, and seeing at least six other people sleeping on the floor, I knew I wasn’t getting a cell anytime soon. I made it to the far corner out of the way in the caged area inside of what looked like and office building from the outside except the thin slice of windows around the building. Completely concrete and three quarter inch rebar floor to ceiling, like a metal cage inside and almost the size of the building except for a catwalk for the Deputy’s to walk around and check on us, but I never seen them back there, you were on your own. Two twelve foot metal picnic tables bolted to the floor and a blaring old TV with all the knobs missing, sitting just outside the bars on the catwalk on a Milk crate. As scared as I was, they’d never know it because I knew from being in juvenile homes in Florida with all Black people when I was a kid, that like animals, if they sensed even a hint of fear, I’d get run over in there, but if you will fight, they will leave you alone and it doesn’t matter if you win or lose as long as you go down swinging…

I left my bed rolled up and set down against the bars on the rolled up skinny cloth mattress and just sat there staring straight ahead to a blank spot on the wall and tried to blank all this out of my mind. A little trick I learned when was a kid, I kinda just zone everything out by not looking at anything directly or focus my attention on anything in my immediate area, but remain on high alert. I know I looked like I was ready to knock somebody’s ass out that fucked with me. I didn’t give a fuck what color they were. And if I did have to fight one of these animals it would be a fight until I was unconscious so maybe I could get a Morphine drip out of this sorry state of affairs, maybe eat some wax beans and pinch nurses on the ass.

THERE IS NO FAKING IT, you’ll either fight or you won’t, and somebody is sure to “Check,” you, just for the exercise or they want to go to the “Hole,” just to have some alone time. I didn’t just come from the streets, I was coming from another parish prison and been in jail a year or so and you got a whole different demeanor about you. I was jacked from exercising and was ready to dust it up with a couple of them, because they are probably not going to let you win, unless you can beat up fifteen guys. The rubber meets the road standing at the “Shoot,” to get your food tray three times a day. There are people in there that will eat you, never mind your food, but food was always, next to the television the main source of fighting. If they take your food, they’re coming for ass next….. Standing in line they could feel it coming off me, standing straight up, chest out, just pulsating anger at the whole world, I secretly hoped someone would try me, I had so much pent up anger. It was kinda of confusing because I could never understand exactly why I was so mad or who I was mad at. I guess I was mad at myself. I’d usually grab the orange and the little carton of Milk and hand it to one of the Bulls in there a couple of times a week, to show respect for the “Program.” Besides, hunger keeps you alert and focused.

I KNOW YA’LL ARE WAITING on me to get to part about nearly getting Murdered by a Homicidal Maniac, but all in due course, first we have to get to the juicy part…. The reason I happened to know so much about the affairs of the heart of Killer Black and Redbone, as it were, is I was the conduit of their heated Note’s or Letter’s that had to be delivered about forty of the most difficult feet in love lorn history, from The Back to the Women’s cell. They had been separated since she went to prison years before, Redbone and Killer Black, I don’t remember his name but he had the unusual features of a star twenty year old first year college athlete, with all white features but Black as Pirates Alley in the French Quarter of New Orleans at four in the morning in the off season….

He told me right to my face, after I was gracious enough to jeopardize my trustee status for him by delivery the notes, that he hated White People but he liked me. I didn’t like him one bit, I was scared to death of him and was glad they had that three quarter inch Rebar between us. I remember that sly grin on his face like he knew something you didn’t know, but would never make eye contact for longer than a fraction of a second, and shift his eyes to the floor like we were conspirators. He was a killer; I could smell it on him. Danger reeked from this poor wretched bastard like garlic from a fat Italian. He was one of the few people I met in jail that I truly hoped would never get out, I get a chill just thinking about one of the fraction of a seconds he did look into my eyes. Much like the senseless Librarian Murder, he did something equally stupid but I don’t remember now. I remember he was real smart and asked real important questions in a child like manner once he seen I was a little smart. It occurred to me then that but for being born and raised in squalid conditions in a row of one room shacks on a sugar plantation, and raised by a father who he always envisioned with a bottle of cheap wine and causing trouble, this kid could have been doctor or something…

REDBONE WANTED some White Bone, having been incarcerated nearly five years at the Louisiana State Women’s Prison at St. Gabriel, Louisiana, about an hour up the Interstate from New Orleans, right before you got to Baton Rouge. She was excited to be near her family and had all day visits on the weekends if she wanted them and was gone all the time, probably visiting Grand Juries for another round of Indictments before Elections. In the South, about a month before Elections they round up all the petty dealers and Warrants they been setting on as a show of effective law enforcement. One Parish Sheriff was with his Chief of Police recording names off the headstones in a rural cemetery in Louisiana to pad the election and the Sun was starting to come up in the East. The Chief told the Sheriff they had to go it was getting light. The Sheriff was offended, “Why, the rest of people have the right to Vote too!”

Why they wouldn’t just hand her off into local custody I don’t know, maybe because she had a Fifty year sentence or something, everything is unusual down there, but like a celebrity, she had her own Louisiana State Correctional Officers at her side everywhere she went, except when she was back in her cell after five or six o’clock in the evening. I’m going to try and give you a sense of this girl. You ever met someone when they are talking to you it’s as if no one else in the entire world exists, it’s just you two? You’re completely absorbed in every little hair out of place, to an errant fiber to the smell of their clothes. Nothing escapes you and it’s hard to pay attention to what they are saying you are so absorbed in them? Some people got it like that. Small frame like she was still a teenager with soft luxurious light brown skin like she had a great tan with rare, light blue eyes. Right next to the iron locked door to the Women’s Wing just forty feet from the Control Desk was a small, eye level ten by ten thick glass window into the women’s cell area, but had been painted over, but if you scratched it, you could see into it. The Deputy’s knew about it, sometimes there was a piece of paper taped over it, sometime they would run me off, sometime they wouldn’t. Right below that were holes in the metal wall about the size of a dime and just big enough to slip a rolled up note or letter and a joint or two back the other way. It’s amazing how all that works. Inmates are so ingenious that if you placed one on a telephone with cigarettes and another on another pole one hundred yards away with matches, they will be smoking by morning…..

HIMBABY’S I.Q. LEVEL HOVERED around room temperature on a warm day but he would have to do. He had his own cell in the Isolation cells because he couldn’t be in the population. He looked just like a young Diana Ross at about nineteen or twenty but could have been thirty five and never came out of the closet was because he was never in it. He thought and acted like a girl since he was a child and they started calling him “Himbaby,” when they could no longer tell them apart. He had been in that jail so many times over the years he was part of the furniture and would be at his cell in the morning when I brought trays to beg me to let him help me in the kitchen. I usually would find something for him to do and he would do well just long ‘enough to get out of my sight and get in “The Back,” where the action was. Usually on Sunday when most of the Trustees have all gone home and it’s me and maybe two or three others to feed sixty or seventy people, and serve them and wash all the…. That’s why they have good administrators, to make all that get done effortlessly….

I HAD THIS THING PLANNED like Watergate and would work like a charm, but I needed someone to get the cart full of empty food trays back to the kitchen, who when the cop locked the door and say’s, “Where’s Mark,?” he say’s “He went to the kitchen to get something.” And at that moment he glances at his watch, it’s 4:44 in the afternoon and he gets off in fifteen minutes, his next thought is getting out of this building in a few minutes and the sound of his pickup truck pulling out of here, locks the door and he’s done for the day. He turns around and heads for Control to clock out and the rusty old cart heads to the kitchen where a couple of drunks manning the pots and pan bin, would pick fly shit out of pepper to be able to smoke cigarettes, which they can’t do in “The Back.”

IT TOOK ME THREE WEEKS to get in her pants, three long weeks of her starring between my legs like she was looking at Mom’s Apple Pie.

I WOKE UP in the middle of the night on the top bunk with a real young black kid on the bottom bunk, I felt safer on the top where I could kick someone’s head off if I had too. Everyone else in there knew him as “Monster,” he was so ugly, I am not kidding you. This kid didn’t just get beat with the “Ugly Stick,” he got brutalized and stained. The Blackest person you ever saw with Pigmy features but normal height and the saddest part he was a good kid, just not real bright. One day I seen him with all this white powder drying on his face and he told me he heard that if he rubbed Ajax on his face like Noxzema at night, it would lighten his skin. I tried to tell him that wouldn’t work and after a few days the top layers of his skin was peeling off in white flakes and I couldn’t convince him it wasn’t working….

THE REASON I TELL you about this is this little scary bastard Monster is because he scarred me so bad, I’ll never forget it. Dead quite at night, except snoring and fat people farting, and occasional toilet flush. From somewhere out of the darkness and barely awake, laying on my back and I hear someone and it sounds like they are right next to me, below my shoulder whispering up to me in broken sentences that didn’t make any sense. Tell me I’m dreaming, who the fucks whispering and after a minute I sat up in bed on the metal bunk and thin mattress with just enough light coming from outside the cell, and sure enough, it’s that crazy Monster! He had already scarred me earlier by pounding the back of his head on his mattress for like ten minutes to fall asleep. Gentle little tapping on his pillow until it would slow down like his battery was running low, come to a complete stop, and off to sleep he would go, only to start whispering to who knows who in the middle of the night, and make you wonder if you were going to ever make it out of there alive.

HE WAS THE TOWN DRUNK before he became a deputy sheriff he had been locked up so many times. Joe LeBlanc was a spitting image of Barney Fife in Mayberry RFD, with his ill fitting clothes, gun belt to one side because his clothes was falling off him, he was so skinny. There are probably five hundred “Le Blanc’s”in a phone book with only three thousand people in it in Napoleonville, Louisiana, and Joe was related to all of them. When he wasn’t patrolling the range of our little six cell block, with the 911 operator at the end of the block watching us through two sets of bars and three inch security glass, or running to the hospital on the end of town to get “Trays,” where the meals were prepared, he was the town dog catcher. Before I made it to Purgatory or otherwise known as the Terrebonne Parish Prison, I was in the Assumption Parish Prison in Napoleonville for over a year where I was first apprehended in a felony stop in a stolen car with stolen checks. I was doing a year and made Trustee the day I was sentenced when the night before Joe Eastwood showed up in front of my cell at two o’clock in the morning to do a Felony Wake Up. As soon as the electronically controlled door popped in the middle of the night I awoke and could hear he was drunk immediately. He’s talking on his handheld Motorola police radio, “Control, Open A Block, please,” and Control is six feet away on the other side of the security glass looking at him, like ‘this is a bad idea….

HE HAD A BIG German Sheppard on a leash in one hand and loaded .45 in the other and made a bee line for my cell. I was already on my feet but the idiot says,

“Freeze, Don’t Move! On your feet Higgins (I gave ‘em some bullshit name, but it showed up on my FBI RAP Sheet later).”

“Joe, you drunken fuck, what are you doing waking me up? Does your mother know where you’re at?”

He was about thirty years old and he didn’t want to hear that but I was trying to piss him off so he would discharge that gun in the jail, and he’d be in there with me.

“Joe, Traffic One, you better come out.”

You are not supposed to bring a loaded gun into a cell block area, Control would lose her job too and “Traffic,” in Police Code means he’s got a phone call, probably from the Chief of Police or the Sheriff, fix’n to chew his ass out.

JOE WAS TO DRUNK to care, his real purpose back there was show me his shiny new top of the line police belt and holster and like some people like football, Joe loved everything law enforcement and especially it’s ornaments. As soon as I made Trustee I was his right hand man for the next ten months and lived the life of Riley after I started scaling the wall in the hall in front of the Chief of Police’s Office, through a drop ceiling and over a little rise, lift up and move another drop ceiling panel and land right in front of two or three giant Evidence Lockers that were never locked.

SLAP FULL OF YEARS of drug bust and police raids, mostly guns but several One Gallon Gator Lock bags of bagged up ounces of pot, and enough pharmaceuticals last "A Year And A Day." The place was a museum on the weekends and most days, and as Trustee I came and went pretty much whenever wanted. That’s what I left before I wound up in Purgatory and from Purgatory to every man’s dream when I accidentally on purpose got locked in the Women’s Jail with Redbone who looked like Beyonce’s little sister…

THE DAY I GOT SENTENCED to One Year and a Day in the Assumption Parrish Prison in Napoleonville, Louisiana, I was made Trustee even though I had an outstanding felony warrant for auto theft, burglary and grand larceny, in the neighboring Parish of Terrebonne. After I explained to the hillbilly sheriff that pointing a loaded weapon at another individual is Attempted murder under Louisiana Napoleonic Code and that I wanted to prosecute the drunken Sherriff to the fullest extent of the law. That despite neither Deputy LeBlanc’s no doubt extensive training nor the ancient Code still used, nor the modern day Statute provided for a Felony Wake Up Call of a Pretrial Detainee and I wanted to lodge an official Police Report. He was standing right outside my Cell door and all the other Inmate could here and he had his Police Captain and Secretary with him and Joe standing nearby in the same clothes he had on the night before, hung over looking like he just got caught fingering the pooch….

(Page 32 Words: 6860 7/26/2013 12:14:33 PM)

I HAD ALREADY PLANNED OUT in my head what I what do if someone grabbed be out of their cell food shoot, and that's exactly what I did when this psychotic old decrepit bastard grabbed me by the throat in a fucking death grip! I'm not kidding you. I've never looked death in the eye because I couldn't see him with his entire arm stretched out of the little six by eighteen inch metal door with a heavy metal door propped flat out like a tray. I guess I never seen pure crazy up close and thought I could talk to him, and one day without thinking, I squatted down ask asked him if he needed anything. This crazy bastard grabbed me so fast I was stunned but not ready to die. I grabbed his entire arm in a bear hug like I was going to try and pull him out of there, and just dropped to the floor with all my weight on his arm and he let go and started screaming. This guy had a bony hand like an old decrepit Man dug into my throat and I had no question he wanted to murder me......absolutely terrifying, and then I was pissed. I taunted him to stick his arm out again and when he did I kicked the bottom of that open heavy metal shoot as hard as I could and should have broke his arm if it didn't. Every time I went back there after that I cussed that bastard out.

AFTER SIX WEEKS OF LIVING HELL in that small holding cell a few weeks in "The Back," the rest was all gravy. I worked out and ran track and one day after probably none months of a two year sentence they called me to the Sheriff’s Office and his secretary gave me a Twenty Dollar Bill and told me my time was up. I was twenty years old and had already been living on the streets since I was twelve years old. I Hitchhiked to California and back, ‘Roughnecked in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana and West Texas, See Swamp People, and head Chef at a major French Quarter Restaurant, (The Andrew Jackson on Royal Street). I walked out of there less than an hour later and headed straight to the white sandy beaches of Biloxi, Mississippi, where there were lots of restaurant's and I could always sleep on the Rental Catamaran's on the beach with a couple hotel towels under the Stars all year round...12:40 PM 9/19/2013

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The Autograph by Mark Anthony Given

2012-08-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department

store and he asked for my autograph.-Shirley Temple

I WAS STANDING OUTSIDE at the side door of the Old Armory near Ebor City in downtown Tampa, Florida when I was eight or nine years old being jostled by a few other kids, waiting for an autograph from any Wrestler that came out the door. I had some, even real Big Stars, Wahoo McDaniel, Eddie Graham, Dusty Rhoads even Harley Race; he was probably meaner outside the ring than he was in it. I even waited until nearly everyone left and it was getting late, I had to go home, I begged every trick in the book to my oldest sister who was manning an Old Rambler Station Wagon full of similar kids waiting on me.

THE FADED PINK STUCCO looking fire door swung open and the biggest bastard in a Sport Coat and a beige mask on I'd ever seen came out and right up to me as I was standing in his way. The bright Florida Sun was coming over his shoulder was blurring everything but his outline. Dumbstruck and terrified at the same time, I remember I was shaking like a leaf and reached up to him with my pencil and paper an poured on all the little kid charm I could muster.

"Can I have your autograph Mr. X?"

I don't remember if that who it was but it could have been. The big bastard all but run me over and said,

"Get out my light kid!"

And sauntered past like he was late for dinner.

I DREAMED ABOUT THAT several times in the following months, and all these years later I can still see the Big Masked Bastard coming thru the door with his mask still on. Scared the hell out of me and I may have even missed a few events after that.... But I always went back...

Firecracker In A Cat's Ass

2012-05-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

-Vincent Van Gogh

I HAVEN’T FELT THIS GOOD SINCE I was 11 years old and bought my first Sting Ray Bicycle with bright yellow Banana Seat and Chrome Sissy Bar extending well over my head with the money I made mowing yards. Must have been shortly after the movie Easy Rider because that is when Sissy Bars were sold at Kmart. When I pulled out of the drive and headed up Kelly Road I walked to school every morning, the early morning Florida summer air was sweet and the sun was hot an all of sudden the world sped up to about 12-14 mph of pure possibility at every turn. I just knew that with a little luck and three or four attempts I could catch the new girl on the block peering out the window at the Coolest Kid in Town passing by on his way to another amazing adventure. Like maybe the time about then I was out in the woods which were really just a patch of undisturbed earth between sub divisions, this kid with us at our “Fort,” stuck a lit Firecracker in a cat’s ass and it ran off and burn down half a sub divsion and 20 acres… I just knew one of them rat bastards could not keep their mouth shut but believe it or not the knock at the door I dreaded for weeks never came. I did not do it mind you, but being right there I was probably in a lot of trouble…. Man the stuff I did…

The Catastrophe of Success by Tennessee Williams

2012-03-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it... Success is shy - it won't come out while you're watching. -Tennessee Williams

THIS WINTER MARKED THE THIRD anniversary of the Chicago opening of “The Glass Menagerie,” an event that terminated one part of my life and began another about as different in all external circumstances as could well be imagined. I was snatched out of virtual oblivion and thrust into sudden prominence, and from the precarious tenancy of furnished rooms about the country I was removed to a suite in a first-class Manhattan hotel. My experience was not unique. Success has often come that abruptly into the lives of Americans. The Cinderella story is our favorite national myth, the cornerstone of the film industry if not of the Democracy itself. I have seen it enacted on the screen so often that I was now inclined to yawn at it, not with disbelief but with an attitude of Who Cares! Anyone with such beautiful teeth and hair as the screen protagonist of such a story was bound to have a good time one way or another, and you could bet your bottom dollar and all the tea in China that one would be caught dead or alive at any meeting involving a social conscience.

No, my experience was not exceptional, but neither was it quite ordinary, and if you are willing to accept the somewhat eclectic proposition that I had not been writing with such an experience in mind and many people are not willing to believe that a playwright is interested in anything but popular success—there may be some point in comparing the two estates.

The sort of life that I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.

I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arms still thrashing and my lungs still grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last.

I sat down and looked about me and was suddenly very depressed. I thought to myself, this is just a period of adjustment. Tomorrow morning, I will wake up in this first-class hotel suite above the discreet hum of an East Side boulevard and I will appreciate its elegance and luxuriate in its comforts and know that I have arrived at our American plan of Olympus. Tomorrow morning when I look at the green satin sofa I will fall in love with it. It is only temporarily that the green satin looks like slime on stagnant water.

But in the morning the inoffensive little sofa looked more revolting than the night before and I was already getting too fat for the $125 suit which a fashionable acquaintance had selected for me. In the suite things began to break accidentally. An arm came off the sofa. Cigarette burns appeared on the polished surface of the furniture. Windows were left open and a rain storm flooded the suite But the maid always put it straight and the patience of the management was inexhaustible. Late parties could not offend them seriously. Nothing short of demolition bomb seemed to bother my neighbors.

I lived on room service. But in this, too, there was a disenchantment. Some time between the moment when I ordered dinner over the phone and when it was rolled into my living room like a corpse on a rubber-wheeled table, I lost all interest in it. Once I ordered a sirloin steak and a chocolate sundae, but everything was so cunningly disguised on the table that I mistook the chocolate sauce for gravy and poured it over the sirloin steak.

Of course all this was the more trivial aspect of a spiritual dislocation that began to manifest itself in far more disturbing ways. I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded as if they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable. Sincerity and kindliness seemed to have gone out of my friends’ voices. I suspected them of hypocrisy. I stopped calling them, stopped seeing them. I was impatient of what I took to be inane flattery.

I got so sick of hearing people say, “I loved your play!” that I could not say thank you any more. I choked on the words and turned rudely away from the usually sincere person. I no longer felt any pride in the play itself but began to dislike it, probably because I felt too lifeless inside ever to create another. I was walking around dead in my shoes and I knew it but there were no friends I knew or trusted sufficiently, at that time, to take them aside and tell them what was the matter.

This curious condition persisted about three months, till late spring, when I decided to have another eye operation mainly because of the excuses it gave me to withdraw from the world behind a gauze mask. It was my fourth eye operation, and perhaps I should explain that I had been afflicted for about five years with a cataract on my left eye which required a series of needling operations and finally an operation on the muscle of the eye. (The eye is still in my head. So much for that.)

Well, the gauze mask served a purpose. While I was resting in the hospital the friends whom I had neglected or affronted in one way or another began to call on me and now that I was in pain and darkness, unpleasant mutation which I had suspected earlier in the season had now disappeared and they sounded now as they had used to sound in the lamented days of my obscurity. Once more they were sincere and kindly voices with the ring of truth in them and that quality of understanding for which I had originally sought them out.

As far as my physical vision was concerned, this last operation was only relatively successful (although it left me with an apparently clear black pupil in the right position, or nearly so) but in another, figurative way, it had served a much deeper purpose.

When the gauze mask was removed I found myself in a readjusted world. I checked out of the handsome suite at the first-class hotel, packed my papers and a few incidental belongings and left for Mexico, an elemental country where you can quickly forget the false dignities and conceits imposed by success, a country where vagrants innocent as children curl up to sleep on the pavements and human voices, especially when their language is not familiar to the ear, are soft as birdsâ€™. My public self, that artifice of mirrors, did not exist here and so my natural being was resumed.

Then, as a final act of restoration, I settled for a while at Chapala to work on a play called “The Poker Night,” which later became “A Streetcar Named Desire.” It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable.

For me a convenient place to work is a remote place among strangers where there is good swimming. But life should require a certain minimal effort. You should not have too many people waiting on you, you should have to do most things for yourself. Hotel service is embarrassing. Maids, waiters, bellhops, porters and so forth are the most embarrassing people in the world for they continually remind you of inequities which we accept as the proper thing. The sight of an ancient woman, gasping and wheezing as she drags a heavy pail of water down a hotel corridor to mop up the mess of some drunken overprivileged guest, is one that sickens and weighs upon the heart and withers it with shame for this world in which it is not only tolerated but regarded as proof positive that the wheels of Democracy are functioning as they should without interference from above or below. Nobody should have to clean up anybody else’s mess in this world. It is terribly bad for both parties, but probably worse for the one receiving the service.

I have been corrupted as much as anyone else by the vast number of menial services which our society has grown to expect and depend on. We should do for ourselves or let the machines do for us, the glorious technology that is supposed to be the new light of the world. We are like a man who has bought up a great amount of equipment for a camping trip, who has the canoe and the tent and the fishing lines and the axe and the guns, the mackinaw and the blankets, but who now, when all the preparations and the provisions are piled expertly together, is suddenly too timid to set out on the journey but remains where he was yesterday and the day before and the day before that, looking suspiciously through white lace curtains at the clear sky he distrusts. Our great technology is a God-given chance for adventure and for progress which we are afraid to attempt. Our ideas and our ideals remain exactly what they were and where they were three centuries ago. No. I beg your pardon. It is no longer safe for man to even declare them!

This is a long excursion from a small theme into a large one which I did not intend to make, so let me go back to what I was saying before.

This is an oversimplification. One does not escape that easily from the seduction of an effete way of life. You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will not continue my life as it was before this thing, Success, happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to—-why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies.

You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you “have a name” is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own violation— and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success!

It is never altogether too late, unless you embrace the Bitch Goddess, as William James called her, with both arms and find in her smothering caresses exactly what the homesick little boy in you always wanted, absolute protection and utter effortlessness. Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist, if that’s what you are or were intended to be. Ask, anyone who has experienced the kind of success I am talking about— What good is it? Perhaps to get an honest answer you will have to give him a shot of truth serum but the word he will finally groan is unprintable in genteel publications.

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that’s dynamic and expressive—that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life—live!” That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

Need Work, No Handouts, Further Adventures of an Irish Baptist Rabbi in Montana, by Mark Anthony Given

2012-03-17T12:05:00.002-07:00

___________________________

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. -Thomas A. Edison

_________________________________

ONE MONTH AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA on August 29, 2005, I hitch hiked from Montana to Mississippi because I knew there was plenty of work down there. It took nearly two weeks because I won't hitch hike at night, it is just too dangerous....Half an hour before dark I will find a spot usually next to a Wallmart Super Store or Truck Stop but it really doesn’t matter. I quit worrying about where I will sleep tonight; with a little brains and good intention, that will take care of itself.

THERE WAS ALWAYS a group of Mexicans waiting at the gates or entrance of all the Home Depot's down south. There were about ten when I walked up there and seen the sign lying in the dirt with nice black block lettering, "NEED WORK NO HANDOUTS." That's all it said on about a 20x24 cardboard. Roofing trucks and Concrete crews would pull up and groups of men would disappear. I had seen the sign the night before, before jumping in a brand new enclosed trailer and crashing until right before daylight and went across the street to a Waffle House and got some cardboard out of the trash (They separate the trash from recyclable cardboard) and made me a nice sign right there on the breakfast table. In less than twenty minutes of standing there everyone was gone but me. Shorts, construction boots, military haircut and a big Go Cup of black coffee. Traffic was bumper to bumper after Hurricane Katrina and they stayed open 24 hours a day for the first few months, and there was only one way in and one way out, everyone had to go right by me coming and going. A stone throw from the biggest interstate interchange I-10 and Highway 49.

FIRST WEEK OF OCTOBER isn't that hot, nights are cool, but sleeping on the ground anywhere down south takes a lot of balls; rattlesnakes, fire ants, 4" cockroaches, Moccasin's, Mosquitoes....it isn’t for everybody and because there are so many other people sleeping outside/homeless people, it is a challenge. But I loved it! I didn't think it of being homeless one bit. In the Great North West you see folks hitch hiking, hiking frequently, they are not "homeless." I thought I was "camping out," and just surviving it was its own reward... I still do. I carried a full backpack with sleeping bag and lightweight tent, long johns, mosquito spray, oatmeal and sardines...extra socks and a Leatherman, fishing line, magnifying glass...one of the early foster homes I was in, the father was a Scout Master and I was an Eagle Scout at 11 years old and I practiced mastering different Knots while other kids my age were watching cartoons....

TOP OF THE LINE EVERYTHING: I scoured the thrift stores of the North West for; Patagonia, Columbia, Solomon hiking Boots, Oakley Thump's, North Face -20 sleeping bag, two sets of rain gear....I hold out for the best. I love the feeling of everywhere I went, I was totally self contained not needing anything from anybody. There was a Hampton Inn right next door where I would spend my days off soaking in their Sauna and pool in the back. They never even knew I was there...

                OLD MAN IN A PICKUP TRUCK in a oilfield Driller's jumpsuit on, probably 65, pulls out of line up to me behind a gas station and leans out his window, spits tobacco on the ground and pulls forward a few more feet until we were parallel, "You ever lay any Tile, boy?" "Oh, yeah, hell yeah," I told him. I'd bullshit my self into nearly any job, if I thought I could do it and it wasn't to dangerous. I bull shitted my way into rough necking in the oil field. You show me how to do it, how to drive it, I can probably do it, and with a little practice master it..."Well, you want to come help me? We were on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but there was no mistaking his South Louisiana "Coonass," or "Cajun," severe accent. A real funny, rhythmic language and from my years in the oil field I knew these characters well. Loved to laugh and party, down to earth people everybody loves. "How much does it pay?" "What's your rate, you get paid by the hour?" "You got somewhere I can get cleaned up there? Where is it?" "I'm a few blocks from the beach in here in Gulf Port." He said.
     "Well look, I can help you do it but I can't do it myself."
     "No, I got the material I'm all ready to go. I'm just old and I can't do all that."
      "Ok," I said, so I'm the muscle and you’re the brains?" "Right, right," he said.   I told him what I told nearly everyone I worked for:
       "Ok, well you’re the Boss and I'm nothing."
      "Yeah, that's right," they would usually reply.
      "Well,” that makes you the Boss of Nothing!" That would usually break the ice...   "I get paid 12$ an hour, cash at the end of the day."
        "I can do that, come on and get in, throw your pack in the back." I wound up living in his beautiful nearly new motor home next to his house a few blocks off the beach under ancient oak trees for several months until wanderlust came and got me again. For twenty years everywhere I went I wanted to be somewhere else. Wanderlust is a disease of the Soul.
           NEARLY EVERY HOUSE IN HIS NEIGHBORHOOD was damaged but not his, just minor wind damage and I rebuilt his parameter fence. He hooked me up and treated me right like old friends, even after I messed up the expensive 18" Travertine Ceramic Tile floor royally! I can still see me, his old wife holding a little wheezing Chiwawa dog in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and the old man apologizing for me, standing in the center of his living room easing the tiles around with are feet to remove the nearly one inch gap between tile right dead center of the room!   But I knew there was fix'in this short of a big throw rug or a wrecking bar and a shovel.  I wanted to laugh so badly but I saved that for now as I write this. Actually I told this story to lots of folks along the way. I told the Coonass I'm not any tile setter; they are like Electricians or Dry Waller's and they all specialize in what they do. I told you I could help "you" do it, I can't do it.. He was trying to save money, how hard can it be kind of thing... He was actually very understanding about it and went to Radio Shack and got cable, crawled on his roof and run TV Cable from his house to the motor home that evening for me... I got dozens of stories like this...12:42 PM 3/17/2012

Woke Up On Ice, Further Adventures of a Irish Babtist Rabbi by Mark Anthony Given

2012-03-16T10:19:00.000-07:00

STANDING IN FRONT OF HOME DEPOT in Helena, Montana in the dead of winter flying a sign that reads "NEED WORK NO HANDOUTS,” was more for something to do than needing money, but I needed that too. I had first seen that very sign laying on the ground at the entrance of the Home Depot in Gulfport, Mississippi at Interstate 10 after Hurricane Katrina in early October 2005 and I thought, now I can fly that sign; I can't beg for money but I will beg for a job. Seeing the look n people's eyes staring at me was all the payment I needed. Pure amazement, admiration, respect, a sense of adventure. The ones I remember most are wife’s turning to their husbands or sons and saying "Why don't you do that?" I will tell you why, it takes a big set of balls that most folks ‘aint got.

A FAMILIAR FACE IN A BIG PICK UP TRUCK, pulling a trailer hauling decorative stones for his mansion on the hill outside of town. None of them stones weighed less than 50lbs and the only reason I got in was because I knew the guy, he paid cash, but I should have never got in that truck that day because having flew a sign NEED WORD NO HANDOUTS all over the United States I never did again. I already had ruptured disc in my back but now I blew out both nuts needing a double hernia operation. I could literally push them back in with one finger and it didn’t hurt all that much until after the operation.

I KNEW I COULDN’T BE IN A TENT recuperating from such surgery so after a week in a motel room I wasn't going to GOD'S LOVE Homeless Shelter for fear of infection when I ran into a guy at Cody's House who offered me his couch in Stewart Homes. First night I spent in his 1964 Dodge ragged out classic motor home parked illegally on the street in front of his house. On this blog posted it compared it to sleeping in the old shed in your back yard you keep your lawn mower in. It was the coldest night of the year January 18, 2007 at 17 below zero not counting the wind. I was actually pretty warm as long as I didn’t get out of my sleeping bags and blankets. I remember stripping down to my long johns to get in the covers and the last thing was my hands and I swear I now know they freeze dry coffee! Another three seconds I would have been ice!

NEXT NIGHT I’M ON THE COUCH sleeping warm as toast and I wake up with this lecherous bastard sneaking young boy in the back door! Twice I get woke up, I mean 15, 17 year old effeminate probably hustler's. I packed up all my shit the next day and had the neighbor Burley drive me to my camp site. Burley asked me to sleep on his couch but it was way too dirty for me. Dude was coming home right when I was leaving and he asked me why, and I told him because my religion don’t allow me to be around that kind of stuff. He says what kind of stuff, looking me right in the eyes. I said you know, and I told him what I seen and he says, they weren’t people. Huh? They weren't people. What were they I asked? "Demon's" he replied with a slight smile on his face. I say's "You can call them what you want, I know what I seen and I can't associate with you." And I never did. I live in his apartment now...

3/16/2012 11:13:21 AM

Fool Dog and The Legend of the Sun, by Mark Anthony Given

2012-01-28T14:25:00.014-07:00

A GREAT MANY YEARS AGO when the Crows were a very numerous people and the favorites of the Sun, the Sun came among them and took a Crow woman as a wife. They had a splendid lodge where the woman lived respected by the tribe and occasionally the Sun came down and dwelt with her for a time. The Sun favored the Crows because of his love for his wife and blessed them with abundance of food, corn, and buffalo and success over their enemies.

          BUT THERE WAS A FOOL-DOG among the Crows, a man who was supposed to be possessed with an evil spirit and not responsible for his conduct. He roamed about the village, doing hurt to whom he would and no one took him to task because he was a fool-dog and couldn't help it. Once when the Sun was absent from his lodge the fool-dog visited it and in spite of the tears and entreaties of the wife of the Sun, ravished her. She bore her shame in silence, but prepared herself for death. When the Sun came she confessed to him what the fool-dog had done and put herself to death before his eyes.
          THEN THE SUN WAS ANGRY with the Crows for the wrong that had been done him and the loss of his beloved wife and determined to destroy them. He caused their corn to fail,
prevented the buffalo from coming to their country and gave their enemies power over them. Then were the Crows forced to become wanderers on the earth, seeking a new home where they might have food and rest. A long time they wandered, suffered grievously from famine and in danger of total destruction, when the White Wolf who was the servant of the Sun took pity upon them' and resolved to save them. Coming among them he told them to make a pile of rice stalk and other fuel. They were then to make little pellets of meat and corn meal and throw them one by one up on the pile until the pile burst into flames when ten buffalo would arise from the midst of the flame, all of which the Crows must destroy; should one escape, he would go to the Sun and tell him what the Crows were doing, then there would be no hope for them.
          THE CROWS WERE IN DISTRESS at this, for though they could find enough meat for the sacrifice, they did not believe there was so much as a kernel of corn among them all, but at last it was ascertained that an old woman had preserved a small quantity for seed which she gladly contributed since it was to save them from starvation. Ten pellets were made, the pile of rice stalks and other fuel was gathered and while the assembled warriors stood ready with drawn bows to kill the expected buffalo, the pellets were thrown one by one up on the pile. The first produced no result, the second, the third and so on to ninth followed but no sign of flames appeared and the Crows began to despond when the tenth was tossed into the pile a bright flame burst forth, and ten well flavored buffalo galloped out of the midst of the pile. The Crows let fly a shower of arrows and the ten buffalo fell dead in their midst.
          THEN THERE WAS A FEAST and joy pervaded the camp. At the suggestion of White Wolf, the charm was repeated, the next flame producing twenty buffalo, the next thirty and so on, ten more each time till the number reached ninety, all of which the Crows destroyed, and had food in abundance. In these days the Crows did not possess either fire arms, or horses and it became difficult for them on foot and with only bows and arrows to kill the multitude of buffalo that now appeared, so that their very abundance was a source of disquiet, lest one should escape and letting the Sun kindle afresh his anger against the Crows. When the number of buffalo reached one hundred; this misfortune happened, they killed only ninety, and the one that escaped fled direct to the Sun and told him the whole story.
          THAT WAS WHEN THE SUN WAS indeed angry, but rather with the
White Wolf because he had not been a faithful servant, than with the Crows, who had showed themselves a brave people in adversity. He told White Wolf to go with the Crows and tell them that he should no more endeavor to destroy them and then condemned him to be forever a vagabond and outcast among the animals of the earth. This the Wolf has been to this day; and the Sun has never since taken a wife from among the Crows.
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From the Bradley Manuscript at the Montana Historical Society, Helena Montana.