QUICKSILVER CHRONICLES
A
story based on (some) true events
By Frances K. Woods
Copyrighted August, 2011, New Idria, CA,
by Whimsy Publishing Company/F.K. Woods
ISBN 978-1-257-98096-3
Whimsy Publishing Company, New Idria, CA
For my beautiful
mother, Elizabeth Bella Jane James Woods, who never stopped encouraging me to
write this.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE........................................................................ 9
CHAPTER 1.................................................................... 11
Flying Hot Water Heater, Destination Unknown............... 11
A Best Laid Scheme of Lead and Men........................................... 13
A Legacy of Greed.................................................................................... 19
Two Steps Backward............................................................................ 21
Of Flying Dogs and Little Orange.................................................... 25
Enumerating the Enumerators’ Visits....................................... 29
The Census-Taker Removal Device............................................. 31
Beware Us Type “A” Politicians..................................................... 33
CHAPTER 2.................................................................... 37
A Hairy Mayor’s Race........................................................................... 37
Entertaining the Troops in the Drug War................................ 39
New Idrian Politician Detection and Relief Devices.......... 41
Dirt Bikers and Their Favorite Sandwich............................... 44
Taxing Gifts of Xmas............................................................................... 46
Five-Dog New Idrian Nights............................................................. 48
Portents of Things to Come.............................................................. 51
Shedding Crocodile Tears for PG&E............................................ 53
Painting the Town Stupid................................................................... 56
Love and V-D Badlands Style........................................................... 59
Zero Tolerance and Duct Tape........................................................ 61
Pyromaniacs Anonymous, New Idria Chapter..................... 63
The Magic of Rocks and Other Gags............................................. 66
Turning Government Leftovers into Gold.............................. 70
CHAPTER 3.................................................................... 73
Highgraders................................................................................................ 73
How to Avoid Alien Abduction...................................................... 77
Budget Time in the Badlands........................................................... 79
Jet Setters of New Idria........................................................................ 82
All the World Is a Graveyard........................................................... 85
Monette.......................................................................................................... 87
It Takes a Village of Idiots.................................................................. 91
To the Moon, Alice.................................................................................. 93
Vote for Me Forever.............................................................................. 97
Forty-Four Robbers Came Knocking...................................... 100
Call Me Now for Your Free REAMIN’........................................ 104
Not Far Away Enough........................................................................ 107
CHAPTER 4................................................................. 109
All the World’s a Critic...................................................................... 111
Some Lost Texans................................................................................. 115
Georgia’s First Baby Shower........................................................ 117
A New Idrian Thanksgiving........................................................... 119
The Day We Almost Got Saved by the Government....... 122
The Sacred Cobweb............................................................................. 125
New Idria Carries the Torch......................................................... 128
Propane Tanks Are Not to Be Eaten......................................... 132
CHAPTER 5................................................................. 135
Corrupt Favoritism in the New Idrian Winter Games. 135
Invading the Wrong Hot Springs................................................ 137
The New Idrian Libertarian Rest Stop.................................... 141
High Times in the Lowlands.......................................................... 144
Road Kill and Coal Line A................................................................. 148
Jim Kirigin.................................................................................................. 154
Lawnmower Man................................................................................. 158
CHAPTER 6................................................................. 163
In the New Idrian Afterlife.............................................................. 163
Trial by Fire............................................................................................. 166
Sucker-Punched by the Patriot Act.......................................... 168
False Idol Worshipping.................................................................... 171
The Family Feud over “Patches”................................................. 173
Tribute to My Father, and All Space Heroes....................... 176
How to Ruin a Paradise.................................................................... 179
My Debut as a Buckle Bunny......................................................... 182
CHAPTER 7................................................................. 187
Splendor in the Foxtails.................................................................... 187
Out-of-This-World Health Care.................................................. 190
Tarzana and the Little Orange Cheeta...................................... 195
Idria’s Hooch Makers’ Passport Weekend........................... 198
California’s 193-Candidate Ballot.............................................. 201
For Once, Golden Silence from the Right............................... 204
New Idria’s First Annual Anti-PC Day..................................... 207
An Irreversible Trend toward Idiocy.................................... 211
Super-sized Hell.................................................................................... 213
Tasteful Entertainment.................................................................... 216
Armageddon and Penguin Poop.................................................. 218
CHAPTER 8................................................................. 223
Party for the President..................................................................... 223
Watch Your Undies.............................................................................. 226
Things We Want to See...................................................................... 228
Ordinary Negligence........................................................................... 230
Mercury for the Masses................................................................... 233
The Whimsy Mining Patriotism Contest............................... 236
The Short-lived Orange Tipi Casino......................................... 238
Broken TVs and a Nation Divided.............................................. 241
CHAPTER 9................................................................. 245
Revelations of Madness.................................................................... 245
Salvation through Perchlorate.................................................... 251
Oh Tannenbaum!................................................................................... 254
New Idria’s Not So Funny Farm.................................................. 257
The UFO Giggle Curtain..................................................................... 260
Human Chauvinism is Patriotic.................................................. 263
Global Warming: a Lefty Conspiracy....................................... 264
Our Man-made Disaster................................................................... 266
CHAPTER 10............................................................... 269
The More Believable Truth about the Orange Creek..... 269
The J.C. Penney Polyester Christmas Slacks........................ 271
Saint Jane.................................................................................................... 273
Humans Being......................................................................................... 276
Springboarding to Neptune............................................................ 277
The Magic of Neptunite and Other Gags................................. 280
EPILOGUE..................................................................... 285
PROLOGUE
My siblings and I live in our respective cabins on opposite
sides of a box canyon in the Diablo Mountains of California, but there was a
time when we all lived in trailers that were dragged onto the property, like
donkeys pulled by struggling old prospectors. Most of our land is vertical, a
landscape of rusty sandstone dotted with a few tenacious pine trees, shrub oak,
manzanita, and a spattering of hardy chaparral. The old abandoned trailers are
still perched on the precious flat spots of this hilly expanse, surrounded by a
carpet of mummified foxtail grass: the bane of dogs and boon to Hollister
veterinarians. Hollister is the “county seat,” sixty-three bumpy, curvy miles and
one hundred and one minutes away to the north.
I am the lucky one. My cabin has a
brook-side view on “bottom-level,” a mere twenty feet away from the obscenely
gurgling San Carlos Creek, which runs year-round. It glows orange from the iron
sulfide that comes with acid mine drainage, a byproduct that flows from the
tunnels of the mining ghost town of New Idria, about half a mile upstream from
us. But the worst element coursing through this stream is methylmercury: a
colorless, odorless organic subspecies of the mother element that makes the
dangers of a hot radioactive isotope seem as lethal as powdered sugar. Not only
is the creek poisonous, but so are the underground aquifers. So even if we
could afford to dig a well (which we have tried) it would be pointless. We haul
in our drinking water from the ranches of the flatlands in Panoche Valley, some
thirty miles down the road, and use the filtered creek water for doing dishes
and cleaning. And bathing.
Our main source of income comes from
our placer mine on San Benito Mountain. We hunt for a rare and beautiful blue gemstone
called “benitoite.” We call our humble business the Whimsy Mining Company. August 8, 2003
CHAPTER 1
Flying Hot Water Heater, Destination Unknown
Where we live
there are no handy 7-11’s or gas stations for sixty-three miles. If we run out
of bread or cigarettes, we can only hope some weekend warriors drive recklessly
on their way to the BLM outpost on San Benito Mountain for two days of hunting
and light beer drinking away from the wives, and that their provisions get so
jostled on our pot-holed roads they fall off the back of their pick-up. That’s
called salvage rights.
People ask us all the
time: “Why do you live so far away from any city?”
To
offer an answer seems absurd to me, but I can say without hesitation that we’re
still not far away enough. There are many reasons why we choose to live on the
outside. A grocery checker at Snob Hill Supermarket in Hollister saw the
address on my rubber check, and asked me, “Aren’t you scared living out
there in nowhere?”
“I
was just going to ask you the same thing about living here,” I replied.
It
gets rugged living in the far country. You have to be self-sufficient to a big
degree. For example, you can’t just tap into a municipal natural gas network.
We have to haul propane tanks up here to fuel our hot water heaters and stoves.
Or get the only propane monopoly in town to bring it up for you, and they give
you a good reaming while they’re at it.
I
had to change a spent propane tank on my hot water heater the other night when
I got home from work at about midnight. There I was, traipsing around the
foxtails and the scrub oak outside my cabin, in pantyhose and high heels, a
flashlight clamped between my knees, trying to light a wooden stick so I could
relight the pilot. The stick blew out and I let go of the pilot switch…and I
forgot that it was still blowing out gas.
I re-lit the stick and…KABLOOEY.
Burned hair, deep-fried hand. When my brother found me, I looked like a human
version of Daffy Duck after he blows himself up instead of his foe Elmer Fudd:
head burned black to a crisp with duck bill dangling on the back of neck. But
what came out of my mouth was a rendition of Yosemite Sam’s legendary
affliction with Tourette’s syndrome, without the hindrance of a Hollywood
Morality code or the FCC.
The
next day, on my way to a Doc-In-A-Box urgent care facility in Hollister, I
stopped at the one spot of civilization in these badlands: the Panoche Inn, our
only beer saloon and community center, about thirty miles down the road from
Whimsy Mining. The locals went wild when they saw my mangled, still smoking
hand, which by then had grown massive pillow-like burn blisters.
Proprietor
Harry Lopez asked me what time it happened. Yup, he said. That’s the very
moment he heard a very loud four-letter expletive echo all the way down the
Griswold Canyon and reverberate past his establishment.
“You should put some
butter on that paw!” said one neighbor, a foreman at the Spanish Cattle
Company.
“We ran out of butter,” I
said. “But if you let me borrow some, I’ll add some chopped garlic.”
A
five-year-old cowboy named Dustin Zorba very seriously advised me that the only
thing to do was to take a chaw of chewin’ tobaccy and spit the black juice on
the burn.
I love that bar. Its
patrons certainly mean well, which is far more than I can say for neighbors who
live much closer to us.
San Carlos Creek Update:
When I blew up the hot water heater, it went flying into the stratosphere like
a chubby rocket. We don’t know where the airborne projectile landed. But I hear
tell that someone living about ten miles downstream heard an unDogly THUD
shortly after the big blow. He said when he checked the San Carlos the next
morning, a new landmark was standing sentry in the middle of the creek on his ranch. He said it was a
large, cylindrical object that looked suspiciously like an abused hot water
heater, covered in orange mud.
A Best Laid Scheme of Lead and Men
Though I’ve been
forbidden from doing it by my kinfolk, I am going to explain how the James
family came to land in New Idria, California, in 1982.
It all has to do
with my brother, Oliver Perry James.
In
1976 we lived in downtown San José, known by some curmudgeons as the Armpit of
the San Francisco Bay Area.
About
ten of us (we had five boarders) lived in an old Queen Anne style Victorian
that was later razed and became the parking lot for the Children’s Discovery
Museum. After that, my family lived in another old Queen Anne, this time
underneath the 280 Freeway on Second Street. The omnipresent traffic above
sounded like the crashing of ocean waves. We thought of rush hour as the coming
and going of the seaside tides.
My
name is Georgia James. I was a mariachi violinist playing every night until 2
a.m., or sometimes 6 a.m., depending on how blotto and lavish the clients were.
The few people who know about this past life of mine like to remind me that I
was the first Anglo female in North America to become a full-fledged professional
mariachi, and it makes me think back to those halcyon days of having to beat my
male compañeros
over the head with either a cheap bow or a profane tongue lashing when they
behaved badly macho toward me. I was immersed in the music and the culture, but
my overall quest was to make lots of money. I didn’t, but I always had a little
cold hard cash on me. I earned my living that way for some nineteen years,
playing six days a week for nightclub radio shows, weddings, parties,
Americanized Mexican restaurants – we would play anywhere for any occasion. The
best gigs were with a renowned ballet
folklorico, called Los Lupeños
de San José. We were their “house band,” so to speak. Because of this talented
group of dancers, I was able to travel throughout the American southwest and
Mexico, on tour with my mariachi, performing for enthusiastic audiences. It
sure beat the hell out of trying to make money playing classical music, which
would really mean teaching petulant upscale children what they could care less
about.
It
was a charmed life, mixed with bouts of Hell.
My
older sister by three years, Monette, is a free spirit, played cello, and when
she got out of high school she, too, wanted to make as much money as she could.
She went to work in a pre-boom Silicon Valley computer components maker, at the
time when the contraptions were big huge clunkers as big as a walk-in closet
(the kind big huge rich people use). Monette looks like Natalie Wood, and back
in the late sixties she liked to hang around with raggedy hippie types -- and
this was when people in our quaint town of snooty Los Gatos didn’t even know
what one was. When we first moved to San José she took classes at San José
State, but ended up making oodles of money in her start-up cottage industry: writing
black market term papers.
“If
it weren’t for women, men would be in the strawberry patches,” Mo would say
from time to time.
My younger
sister by one year, Melissa, worked as a maid in hotels and wrestled with a
cash register at Woolworth’s, where the Fairmont Hotel now sits. Since we were
toddlers, and even now, people always assumed Mel and I were twins, but Mel is
the beauty. She has a noble Grecian nose, criminally large eyes, and sometimes
looks the way Joan Crawford did in her early black and white film noirs, before
the harsh eyebrow and scary lip thing of the actress’ PepsiCo days. Mel later
attended the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo to be a merchant marine sea
navigator, but opted to chuck that for a degree in ornamental horticulture from
Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. She is a mathematical whiz kid, like everyone else
in the family save me, and a botanical genius.
She
is also a virtuoso on the tambourine.
My brother, my
senior by four years, is an inventor. When we were teenagers every girl in town
continually hounded him. We are all half a century old at this point. Oliver is
a brilliant mathematician and a natural-born engineer, like our father was, and
likes to do complex math problems in his head, just for fun. Imagine that. He invented
the self-wringing mop, among other indispensable things. He and a great friend,
Jim Kirigin, invented the planet tracker before The Smithsonian came out with
their version. Thieving assholes.
My mother, Jane,
is Sicilian Italian. My father, Phineas Skinner, was Welsh/Scottish. Yes, and
it's true. It's like sticking two sticks of dynamite together, braiding the
fuses into one, lighting it like a demented arsonist, or maybe a blast-happy
miner, and yelling, “Whoopee!”
My
mother, Jane, is the glue that holds us all together throughout the course of
our lives -- when we were babies, brats, teens and troublemakers, and adult troublemakers.
She has worked relentlessly all her life. For ten years she commuted four hours
a day on Highway 101 from San Jose to San Francisco, where she also held the
glue together for a ground-breaking program called The Children-Parent Program,
which gave poor and screwed up new parents with screwed up children the
resources to cope with having kids. She was made for that job. Her bosses
wanted to canonize her.
Jane
taught us all the foibles of politics. Every time Jane and I heard a news
report about some greedy Republican scheme backfiring, or about one of them
screaming over family values and then getting caught peering under bathroom
doors in airports, she would say deadpanned, “How about that.”
My family lived
in the concrete wonderland of San Jose for fifteen years.
One
day Oliver found an ad in the San Jose Mercury News that offered two hundred
and forty-one acres of California land for a price “too good to be true.”
Looking back, with such a description one would have thought we would have
perceived an insurmountable drawback that came with the land. Nonetheless,
Oliver, my mother Jane and a few investing friends rustled up the dough and
bought the remote property. Oliver was particularly lured by the land’s famous
Franciscan Shelf sandstone rock formations. He also was intrigued by its
precarious location, directly on top of both the San Andreas and Calaveras
fault lines. He theorizes these fault lines will act as a rocking cradle and
protect us from great destruction when The Big One hits California, as we all
know it will.
Oliver
was always coming up with great ideas. On Vine Street in San Jose (the home
that was leveled so that little kids could stick their index fingers into the
ends of straw Chinese finger traps) he invented the intellectual follow-up to
the Pet Rock. It was called The Miniature Personalized Radioactive Waste
Container. These were small, one-inch tall containers made of pure lead, made
to scale to the government’s larger radioactive waste container drums and
wrapped with a snazzy orange and yellow “radioactive waste” warning label. As
long as the lead top fit snug, one could actually store a radioactive isotope
in the thing. Just the ticket in the event of a nuclear holocaust! A must-have
item, in case the nation’s head madman or politician (though I’ve yet to understand
the difference) pushes the proverbial red button. It came with a How-To booklet
in storing your isotope, which I helped write.
I remember
fondly how we converted our garage into a makeshift Pet Isotope Waste Container
factory, and we made all the boarders work continually, pouring molten lead
into miniature container molds. I must admit: we didn’t pay much attention to
OSHA workplace safety rules making those lead containers.
It
went over like the proverbial lead balloon. Oh, people loved the anti-nuke
conversation pieces. But retailers were reluctant to stock such a
“controversial” item, as they would sheepishly call it.
The
San Jose Mercury News did a story
(and I mean an hysterically exaggerated and sensationalized story) on Oliver and our company, which
we called Last Blast Endeavors. They said Oliver was “a black humorist laughing
all the way to the bank.” What erroneous cornballs!
But
New Idria held greater hopes for us. Oliver wanted to prove a theory he
formulated after reading an essay by Isaac Asimov about the effects of
potassium-40, an element that is ultimately deadly for all life forms, and one
found in all organic matter. It appears that potassium-40 is what makes all
life start to die the moment after it peaks in its prime: for humans this is
when they hit about 27; for fruit flies it’s about their twelfth hour. Oliver
figured if he could get rid of potassium-40 in everything he ate and drank, and
then combined that with ridding his life of cosmic rays (the hot junk that is
constantly bombarding us from that gas ball called the Sun) he could halt the
aging process. Possibly even reverse it!
What
better way to do that than by boring tunnels into the sandstone mountainsides
of the New Idrian landscape? His plan was to shelter himself inside the tunnels
of the geologically famous Franciscan Shelf strata, becoming completely
nocturnal. That would be a cinch since he already was a night owl. During the
day the sandstone would shield him with two hundred feet of insulation that
would effectively block the UV rays. He would grow food hydroponically, in
little water tubes inside the tunnels which would be strung throughout with
fluorescent lamps, to avoid consuming any potassium-40 from food grown in the
regular but tainted soil all around him.
In
1981 Oliver pitched his scheme to the county Board of Supervisors, since he
needed the county’s permission to perform this grand experiment. With his
unusually large forehead and intense gaze under dark lashes, his fascinating
theory presented deadpanned, I have no doubt the board was intrigued.
They approved
it, too. How about that?
Yes,
of course we knew about the orange acid mine drainage from the defunct New
Idria Mercury Mine watershed, flowing like a gooey river of rotten melted
pumpkins right through the middle of the land. What we didn’t know was that the
water was deadlier than potassium-40. The water contains methylmercury, and as
mentioned, it’s one of the most lethal substances on earth, with the ability to
accumulate in any living system. Getting it out of your body is much, much
harder than, say, cleaning up a massive oil spill. Mercury poisoning makes one
lose the ability to think and talk, as it attacks the nervous system. It makes
you bump into walls, makes you look like you need a drink badly because your
hands tremble, makes you avoid people like the plague, it attacks the nervous
system and bones, makes you spit out a rotten tooth once a month, makes you
laugh uproariously at unfunny things, and it makes you salivate uncontrollably
like a dog with rabies. Then it makes you die.
Well,
we had to get a new gig, quite fast too. It didn’t make sense to try to reverse
the aging process with clean, sandstone tunnel living when our only source of
water was more of a killer than the elements we were trying to avoid. We went
into the benitoite mining business instead. Benitoite is the rarest gemstone on
earth and its color varies from light cornflower blue to cobalt-violet blue. It
is the official California state gemstone and comes from only one spot on the
globe: a four-acre plot of dirt atop San Benito Mountain, some fifteen long
wending miles south and an hour from our box canyon. Oliver staked a benitoite
placer mining claim in a half-mile stretch of the San Benito River, beneath the
main gem mine.
We placed a
mini-billboard at the entrance to the top-level driveway that reads: “Whimsy
Mining Company et al: Benitoite and other California Minerals. Rock Shop
Straight Ahead and to the Left. (Ten percent discount to all card-carrying
registered Libertarians.)”
The
driveway to the rock shop is the entrance to my home, on my side of the road
next to the San Carlos Creek.
So
for a family living we mine what should be regarded by everyone in the solar
system as the most precious gemstone on Earth, but that doesn’t mean we’re
rich. In fact, we can’t afford to keep any for ourselves. It puts some food on
the table, a little gas in our junk heaps and keeps the lights on. I supplement
this little income with another little income as a full-time reporter for
Hollister’s weekly newspaper, The Benito
Bugle-ette.
So
there you have it.
San
Carlos Creek Update: Our new sales pitch for selling bottled orange San
Carlos Creek water to infrequent but eager tourists is this: “It doesn’t have
any potassium-40.”
* * * * * * *
A Legacy of Greed
Here’s a crash
course in the history of my environment.
New
Idria was once one of the biggest producers of liquid mercury on the planet and
at the turn of the century (circa 1900) was home to about six hundred
hardworking pioneers, quicksilver miners and their families. One of the odd
things about this far-flung spot on the globe is that there are far less people
living there now than did one hundred years ago.
The
New Idria Mining District is nestled at the base of San Benito Mountain, the
tallest peak in California’s Diablo Mountain Range. The town itself is, to be
trite, a mere shadow of its former self. It is a ghost town now. Some twenty
wooden buildings – the mine rescue, the official post office, the grocery
store, the first whorehouse (later to become a miners’ dormitory), the mine
superintendent’s office, a smattering of cabins that people once called home a
century ago – all are rotting, gutted and falling down. The massive mine
retort, the industrial warehouse where they cooked cinnabar ore in ovens, is a
twisted heap of rusted metal and wood rot.
For
more than one hundred years, miners intensely worked the mountain for the red
cinnabar ore, from 1857 through the first half of the next century. The silvery
mercury coaxed out of this mountain -- called “the quick,” for quicksilver -- was
used for a growing list of up and coming technologies, primarily at first for
separating gold from its rocky quartz matrix during the California gold boom.
It was also handy in new medical techniques, in photographic development (like
tintypes), and then, more than anything, for making bombs during both World
Wars, and all the other wars in between. Mining operations in New Idria started
slowing down in the 1960s and came to a close in 1972 when the sage scientists
figured out it could kill you. But the deadly mess this endeavor left behind
never stopped flowing. When people lived and worked in the town, their fresh
water came from a reservoir far above the mining activities and was piped
several miles down into town, and then a mile further down to our property – in
olden days known as the Gonzales Saloon. Today that secondary pipeline to the
Whimsy property is gone…caved in, rusted and disintegrated. Water from the
reservoir snakes through tens of miles of honeycombed mining tunnels, and
gushes out of the bottom of the mountain from infamous Portal Ten, smack dab in
the middle of the ghost town. It flows in a bright rusty ribbon for as far as
it can, some five miles in the summer, past our land, through the Adobe Ranch
further below and then the Ashurst Ranch below that. In the winter when it
floods this acid mine drainage flows hundreds of miles east to the Mendota
Pool, to the San Joaquin River, then to the Sacramento Delta and eventually
into the San Francisco Bay.
Luckily
for those few still living in the ghost town, they have a fresh water pipeline
from the reservoir – water bereft of mercury and all the other yuck -- that
sustains them.
Lucky
for them. Hooray!
When one
initially takes in the rugged grandeur of this countryside, these foothills
look like a pastoral heaven, a make-believe exemplary slice of what California
should look like, without the dams and the pollution and the stucco hell
housing. Rolling fields of yellow oat grass are topped with rusty sandstone
cliffs at the highest levels. At the lowest points giant cottonwood trees grow
from the gullies (one of these washes hosts the trickling, sour San Carlos
Creek) and the hillsides provide a sweeping panorama of the Golden State’s
greatest asset: oak tree woodlands. In spring (if it’s not a drought year),
these woodlands are carpeted in the sort of green that almost hurts the eyes
with its electric beauty, and after the rains the green becomes awash in the
colors of a million wildflowers – as if someone took a bottomless paint can
filled with every color in the universe and tossed it all over the place.
But
the old quicksilver operation, known as the second biggest in North America
next to the Almaden Mercury Mine in San Jose, has left a legacy in its wake
that no politician or water quality bureaucrat will dare touch: a toxic run-off
that contaminates the San Carlos Creek with methylmercury (that nasty organic
form of mercury that bioaccumulates in all living organisms, including humans
and cows), gobs of iron sulfide, and a boatload of various other heavy metals
and exotic chemicals.
Because
only four people in this micro-area of the county are registered to vote, the
powers that be don’t seem to care about cleaning up the site, which was once
destined for “Superfund” designation until Presidents Bush and Cheney defunded
the Environmental Protective Agency’s Superfund Clean-up program.
The ghost town
became a failed drug rehabilitation center, called “Forward Foundation.” About
two months after we moved here in 1981, some eighty recovering addicts moved into
the dilapidated outbuildings and could be seen ambling among the run-down
crumbling mining shacks.
* * * * * * *
Two Steps Backward
The story of
Forward Foundation in its relationship to my family is one of the great
mysteries of the universe, at least to my family.
People
often wonder why we moved here with the water so polluted. The fact is we had
plenty of plans and backup plans to fix the water troubles before the ghostly
drug addicts appeared on the scene. Oliver was ready to take his backhoe up the
road and divert the stream, clean out the inoperable settling ponds, and even
install a cement “apron” to plug up the hole above town at “Hippy Falls” where
the reservoir water enters the honeycombed mountain. The water could have been
diverted around the mining mountain, and would have been as clear as glass had
he been allowed to accomplish this.
Oliver
blueprinted the work that needed to be done; all the while he was building his
own home on the Whimsy as well as his benitoite business. I became his
sidekick, his idea man, his gagman, his ad-mad man. Though I am his little
sister, I am much more like a little brother to him.
The next thing
we knew, a San Jose drug rehabilitation center was relocating into the remote
ghost town above us.
The
ranchers and farmers down the road in The Vallecitos, and further on in Panoche
Valley, were dead set against “a bunch of wasties” moving into New Idria. They
saw the venture as an invasion of their world; the entire southeast county
going to pot for the hostile takeover on the part of a so-called anti-drug
cult. They called a special meeting with the county Board of Supervisors in
Hollister to protest the prospective neighbors. No one in the entire county
wanted the bastards to move in, with the exception of one person. When asked by
the board if he had any objections to the rehab moving in next door, my brother
Oliver was honest and affable about the new neighbors who said they wanted to
rebuild the old battered town along with their battered lives: he said, “Why,
no.”
The
recovering drug users who live in New Idria proper call themselves “residents,”
and a resident either voluntarily checks him- or herself into this communal
system in the wilderness, or he or she is the unfortunate who gets busted for
holding or selling to a consenting drug-using adult. Forward Foundation is one
of the alternatives that unwitting judges give the condemned: they can choose
either Forward Foundation or prison. Oddly, quite a few of the sentenced drug
offenders choose jail, and did so even during the rehab's heyday.
Oliver had no
idea what insanity lay dormant in the mind of the leader of this drug rehab.
The director’s name, appropriately enough, is Slyron “Sly” Verga, and his
headquarters are in San Jose. I don’t know what kind of a name “Slyron” is.
That, alone, should have been a red flag to us. He is an overweight pasty man,
and the few times he visits his kingdom in New Idria wherein he walks among his
minions of recovering drug addicts like a god, he downplays his exalted role by
always wearing an old T-shirt and denim overalls. A cherry cigar perpetually
dangles and dances around the rim of his tobacco stained mouth. And though the
only sounds that ever erupt from his gullet are grunts and mumbles, his
subordinates painfully strive to listen with rapt and awe at this imperceptible
drivel as if it comes from the Oracle of Delphi. But to a few Forward
residents, the ones who eventually become escapees stealthily hiking down the
road through our property to get away, he seems to be considered a
high-functioning moron. (Well, consider that some Native American tribes
believed that the few and rare mentally retarded among them were “touched” by
the finger of their Great God, and considered sacred.) But then, we all know
that men of high power in this nation have conned many more of much better
minds.
Before the
county meeting took place, Sly had promised Oliver that he and his army of
residents would actually help him remediate the acid mine drainage, that is,
engineer, bulldoze, reshape and divert dirt and bad water, so that the
downstream water would be as good as the reservoir’s. And if that didn’t work,
they would help Oliver rebuild the old pipeline from the reservoir to the
downstream James Ranch/Whimsy Mining Co!
On
Oliver’s favorable recommendation, the county allowed Forward Foundation to
move in. After all, Oliver and the James family were the rehab’s closest
neighbors, and if they didn’t mind, why should anyone else? And the moment the
county gave its approval and banged the gavel, this strange “family” of
recovering addicts declared war against mine. At gunpoint, Oliver was forced to
turn back his backhoe. Every pipeline we laid was torn up in the middle of the
night. One time, when Oliver was passing through the rusty town on the way to
his mining claim on the county dirt road that bisects the rehab compound, the
rehabbers came out of their hovels, encircled his truck like ghouls from the
classic film Night of the Living Dead,
and then shot two of his beloved dogs to death. Just before they were murdered,
the dogs were smiling, wagging their tails, not knowing what was wrong.
From then on we
hauled in our water from clean sources on nearby ranches or from Hollister, as
we seethed and gnashed our teeth for the next twenty-five years, and learned to
never question the gut premonitions of longtime neighboring ranchers.
The rehab now
seems to be failing. I have heard from many sources, including some of the
“family residents” themselves, that every prisoner who checks in or is court-ordered
to the outpost inevitably ends up back in a city full of illegal drugs, back to
living for their favorite illicit escapism – which, in my mind, probably makes
for better therapy than any roughshod embonded cult living in a condemned toxic
ghost town could ever achieve. Now, after a quarter of a century, only half a
dozen desperate drug addicts live in the fallen settlement and currently do the
Librium-shuffle among the abandoned weatherworn outbuildings. And on Sly’s
orders, they continue to thwart our every effort to obtain clean water – water
they don’t even use.
The
underground aquifers we know are brackish with the acid mine drain-off, but it
might be possible to dig a well deep enough to get untainted water. We did try,
but getting through 500 feet of cement-like bedrock, we finally conceded, was
impossible after we broke the twentieth diamond drill bit – after drilling only
20 feet. Then our money for the project ran out. We never had enough money to
do what was really needed anyway, an estimated $20,000. Who in hell does? We
were hoping the federal Environmental Protection Agency would pitch in.
Wow.
What an asinine assumption that was.
Oliver
built an elaborate water filtration system so that we could have running tap
water for cleaning and bathing. It involves five settling tanks, two of which
are industrial two-ton ocean buoys filled with charcoal, gravel and sand. The
contraption takes the orange water from the creek, and what comes out of the
sink spigot looks almost normal, save for a drab mango-colored hue. But we
still can’t get the mercury out. Nothing can.
Scientists
from Stanford University have tested our tap water and marvel that it does
indeed contain less than half the methylmercury flowing through the creek, and
they are still attempting to explain this “phenomenon.”
* * * * * * *
Of Flying Dogs and Little Orange
The ultimate
welfare bum is a New Idrian dog. Like the biblical lilies of the field, they
spin not, nor do they toil. I have implored the gods and the afterlife powers
that be to let me come back in the next life as a New Idrian dog.
Imagine
living out your entire life with the sole ambition of urinating on as many car
tires as the world sends your way. As the humans bicker over something that
sounds like the “Pee, Gee and Hee bill,” all you have to focus on is scratching
your lower back and balls as you roll around on a crumbling adobe tiled floor.
Another fun activity is scratching deep grooves in a cabin door to make one of
the human door porters let you out. After all, that’s what the humans are there
for, besides feeding you.
For
eighteen years Oliver and I have carried on the unresolved argument over which
is the most useless: dogs or cats? Naturally, he thinks our eight cats are
entirely worthless.
“At
least the dogs bark at everything,” Oliver claims.
Yes,
they do, including the moon, but they won’t attack poachers or claim-jumpers
when you beg them to. In the presence of a grifting Benitoite thief, they are
more likely to imitate a hunting class Pointer -- indicating the exact
direction where Benitoite can be found – rather than righteously biting such
scum on the ass. Anything for a pat on the head, no matter how greasy the hand.
Lordy,
I wish I had it so easy.
Cats,
I argue, rid the property of rodents, including my brother’s greatest nemesis:
gophers. Oliver estimates these root eaters residing in Whimsy Mining’s
underworld currently outnumber us humans 6,216 to one. Do not ask me how he
acquired this specific ratio. I have acquired a fear of mathematics, unlike my
genius brother, who clacks numbers through his mind, as I mentioned, “for fun.”
“Quit
feeding the damn cats!” he roars. “That’s why they’re not catching enough of
those motherless gophers.”
So
I quit feeding the kits canned food, which prompted the little feline curs to
go after birds, even our beloved hummingbirds and brown creepers, the latter
which eat the proliferation of spiders adorning our walls when they get into
the trailers and cabins.
“Beat
the hell out of them!” Oliver ordered. “And why don’t you feed them, fer
Chrissakes!”
People
have often observed that the animals of New Idria are just as crazy as its
human residents. But I think the dogs might be crazier because they like to
wade and wallow in the orange muck of the mercury-tainted creek. Yes, of course
we give them plenty of real water, hauled up from Hollister or from the ranches
of Vallecitos or Panoche neighbors. The animals have dozens of good watering
stations on the property. Still, the dogs remind me of that old 1960’s-era
Japanese film called Attack of the
Mushroom People. Once they get a taste of the forbidden fruit (in this
case, orange water) they can never get enough and go mad-hatter nutty.
“Drop-off” dogs
are pretty much the only kind of dogs we have in our shackship. Every one has
been literally driven all the way up here to an abandoned ghost town,
sixty-three miles away from the closest town, and kicked out a vehicle by their
oh-so-bighearted former “owners.” The most horrid thing is watching these poor
pooches running after the cars that abandoned them, as if to say, “Hey! Wait!
You forgot me!” All of them, of course, find the nearby Whimsy Mining Co.,
where we feed and love them for the rest of their lives.
We
have many drop-offs: Molly Dolly (a blondish, wiry Heinz-57 mutt terrier mix);
Princess Minnie Ha Ha (Molly’s sister, a sleek bundle of black and white, kind
of a Queensland mix); Napoleon (short and pushy and adorable); Ron Paul (an
American foxhound mix who hates guns); Pork Chop (a goofy pit bull who hates to
fight); and Rocky (a handsome bull terrier). When Rocky smiles it looks like
his head cracks in half. He likes to fall asleep standing up on all fours, like
a horse, but with his head on your knee, and then he starts snoring. Then
there’s the latest drop-off, named by others as Rascal. He’s a small Schipperke
mix, black, with a tail and a mane; he’s like a ferocious black fox, and he
takes his patrols of the property very seriously. He gets pissed off easily and
can give the evil eye, just like a grudge-carrying human, if you do him wrong –
be it by forgetting to “bone” him in the morning or eating a treat in front of
him without sharing. Like selfish humans are so apt to do.
We
also saved a funny, crafty red Labrador mix, a big girl who sticks to Oliver
like glue. Hence, her Whimsy name is Shadow. A ganking crankster, her previous
so-called owner, had forgotten she existed in the same prison-apartment, so
Shadow is hypersensitive, always hungry, and abhors loud noises. But she is
indispensable as a loyal ranch protector.
Minnie
now has a stub tail. She lost the rest of it some years ago – we know not how.
But we did find it in the middle of the road leading up to the ghost town
proper. When Minnie lost her tail, she just walked home as if nothing had
happened, sporting a bloody, wagging stump where the other half of her tail had
been and a big embarrassed smile on her face.
I
blame the orange water and Forward Foundation for this kind of bizarre shit.
After
we found Minnie’s tail we buried it with full military honors, including a
six-M80 blast salute. Being miners, we kind of get a kick out of blowing up
anything that’s non-sentient.
Aliens
from Zeta Reticuli abducted Moll Doll, and it happened like this: Oliver was
visiting friends and neighbors at the Panoche Inn one night. As I mentioned,
the Panoche Inn is our only watering hole and doubles as a public community
center for the few people who live out this way. Molly had gone with Oliver for
the ride. Suddenly everyone at the Inn ran outside to view a UFO hovering on
the Panoche horizon. Of course, it’s not the first time that an alien
spacecraft has been spotted in these so-called Badlands.
But
when the show was over and the spacecraft had shot off into nowhere, Molly had
vanished. Everyone, especially Oliver, searched high and low for her for hours.
Oliver finally drove back home, alone, worried and bewildered. When he told us
what happened we were all baffled and frantic.
The
next morning, there was Molly snoozing on Oliver’s trailer porch. It was
startling. How did she travel thirty miles so fast? Where had she been? We
inspected her thoroughly for telltale alien needle marks, felt for buried
micro-receivers under the skin at the base of the neck. My sister Mel found
something suspicious, a scoop mark, but what do you do? Was it alien abduction?
Or is it the water? Have we gone mad, or has Molly – or have we all lost our
marbles?
Without
doubt, the craziest in our family of mercury-addled misfits is the orange tabby
cat, named Little Orange, born in 1989, who doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about
rust-colored water and drinks freely from the creek, despite our
discouragements. We also have a gray cat named Gray, a black cat named Blackie
and a white cat named Whitey. We are nothing if not clever around here.
Orange
is quite demented. He shuns all food I’ve ever tried to give him and prefers
his meals fresh on the hoof, still kicking. The ghastly bastard once dragged a
New Idrian jackrabbit the size of a baby hippopotamus through the cat door.
Suffice to say the mayhem this caused was worse than two highgraders fighting
over a stolen speck of benitoite, or perhaps more likely, a line of crank.
Orange hates all
other cats, but is smitten with Miss Minnie Ha Ha. The feline loves to ride in
vehicles, including the now dead 1972 Cadillac DeVille, beached upon blocks and
sitting in its non-kinetic afterlife on top level. The pupils of Orange’s eyes
are constantly dilated, like Charles Manson’s. I woke up the other day to find
him staring at me, upside-down. He was sitting on my head, smiling like
Svengali, his black evil pupils as big as dimes.
Yesterday,
I observed Orange sitting for six hours behind the frozen wheel of the
Cadillac, just staring intently into that horizon of oblivion, that Great Patch
of Blue, in the twilight of the Tumey Hills.
What
makes Orange so orange? What brings the dogs back? What makes New Idrians laugh
nonsensically at unfunny things?
The
water.
* * * * * * *
Enumerating the Enumerators’ Visits
It was just a
matter of time and we knew it would come back, like a bad rash: the federal
government’s census “enumerator.” And this time he asked specifically for me.
Thank Dog I was gone…but my brother, unfortunately for the enumerator, was
here.
How
much of our tax money, I wonder, do these guys spend driving all the way up to New
Idria -- seven times, mind you -- in order to find out our daily routines or
how much we spent on our P.G.& E. bill last year? They really asked that.
So
the welfare queen dogs were barking their heads off the other afternoon because
an interloping census taker was poking around my cabin on bottom level. Oliver
spotted him from upper level and immediately grabbed his electric bullhorn.
The
bullhorn is a remarkable device. It can play eighteen different old-time
favorite medleys, including “The Star Spangled Banner,” “Volare,” “Suwannee
River,” and “Dixie,” besides projecting a human voice into full-blown,
high-decibeled, three-part disharmonic distortion. Oliver pushed the button for
“Star Spangled Banner” and let it rip, then blasted into the mouthpiece with
deliberate enunciation.
“Drop
the lollipop and step away from the mailbox,” Oliver ordered.
Weirdly
enough, this enumerator (that is their official job title) was overjoyed to
find a life form in this backwater wasteland. He ripped up to Oliver’s cabin on
top level in his federally issued white spangled car, and exuded forth a
plethora of invasive questions: “Give me your names, how much did you pay in
electric bills last year, what time do you go to work, when do you get back
home, where does everyone sleep here, who sleeps with who, is that orange cat
who keeps spraying on my car tire listed as a dependent, what nationality are
you???”
For
the sixth time, Oliver said that all he is entitled to know is that three
people live here.
“But
what nationality are you?” the enumerator begged again.
“Human,”
Oliver said. The enumerator actually wrote that down. I realize Oliver’s answer
was arguable, but that is not the point.
“And it would
take me a year to add up a year’s worth of endless PG&E bills,” Oliver
added. “Please stop this nonsense.”
But
the census taker didn’t stop. He came back the next day, making it visit No. 7.
It was getting worrisome, especially since the government announced it would now
question neighbors and coerce them into spilling the beans about uncooperative
neighbors. They were resorting to a divide and conquer tactic, through the
policy of snitching!
During
that seventh visit, Oliver was flying around on his motorcycle checking water
lines and tanks. The census taker flagged him down like an obsessed stalker.
This time Oliver merely said, “I’m going away now. You should, too.”
Hell,
if I had been there, I would have been nicer by offering the guy a refreshing
glass of orange bubbly water. I wonder if anybody else out there is as pig
biting mad about the Census 2000 tactics as I am. These nosey parkers simply
are not on a need-to-know basis. The Constitution, as shredded as it is, calls
for only a head count of the nation’s populace every ten years.
San Carlos
Creek Update: The water is chewably orange. The federal Bureau of Land
Management has made a “good-faith effort” in launching a mass cleanup and
capping of what they call “lesser” and abandoned (small potato) mercury mines (compared
to the Mother of Them All, the New Idria Mercury Mine). They won’t touch New
Idria because a private individual owns the 868 acres there: that crackpot, Sly
Verga, of San José.
The creek
finally regurgitated a drill bit we lost two weeks ago. I found it downstream,
beached on an orange sandbar, and by then it was a twisted little hunk of steel
that looked like it had been at ground zero in Nevada, on the bull’s-eye of a
nuclear bomb-testing site. It makes a wondrous conversation piece on my windowsill.
* * * * * * *
The Census-Taker Removal Device
The Bridge Over
Troubled Water is nearing completion. It crosses the enchanting fire-colored
San Carlos Creek and leads directly to my new one-room shack. It is sixty-two
feet long, has a girth of six feet and is raised above the babbling menace
below by about nine feet. It looks like a train trestle, and in fact is
supported by creosote-soaked railroad ties we found around the mine tunnel
entrances in the ghost town. New Idrian miners once used those six-by-six beams
to build a baby railroad to transport ore from the cinnabar tunnels out to the
retort cooking facility. The spirits of the miners of yore now look at those
railroad ties as they hold up the Bridge over Troubled Water, I know, and
applaud our recycle-minded thievery.
Oliver
built this Bridge single-handedly.
Oliver
is quite entertaining when he goes into carpenter mode, as he did during bridge
erection. For some reason he claimed poetic license to act like a construction
guy when he worked on his masterpiece. He made derisive comments about my
smaller hammer to the effect that it didn’t measure up to his standards:
“What kind of
hammer is this? It’s a girl’s hammer. It’s useless,” he declared.
He wore his
jeans low like a plumber’s, revealing an unDogly crack, and he did it with
pride. Then he reveled in his work with comments such as: “Jesus was a
carpenter, don’t you know…” – a putrid hypocrisy since Oliver is just about the
biggest opponent to organized religion that I am aware of.
The
Bridge, nonetheless, is an incredible feat of architecture. Oliver claims it is
“as solid as a neutron star.” He might be right. After all, he did major in exogeology,
but skipped the final two weeks of classes before diploma time. Go figure.
And
yet, when I ponder that, I want to cheer loudly.
The
Bridge dimensions are perfect for a special booby trap we have conjured to
enforce our strict security regulations up here. Our idea is to install a
massive papier-mâché medieval-style “mace ball”: a five-foot sphere with
pointed spikes painted lead gray-black on a big papier-mâché chain. We plan to
wrap it up in the huge cottonwood tree that hugs the Bridge, and with the
triggering of an electrical mechanism, send it flying down the gangplank
whenever undesirables attempt to cross.
Picture
this: a Census 2000 enumerator is walking over the Bridge toward my front door,
and as he begins to ask, “What nationality are you? When do you leave for work?
Is your bed a single, double, queen or king?” — whoosh! He is swept
cleanly off the Bridge into the murky orange abyss below.
I
am not being sadistic. After all, papier-mâché is not going to maim anyone. But
I would love to have a hidden camera hooked up to capture the look on the
census-taker’s face when the mace ball topples him into the orange creek, a
fitting end considering the census-taker’s employer helped poison the creek by
giving federal subsidies to the New Idria Mercury Mining Company for decades,
then commandeering the outfit for munitions manufacturing to fuel its many
wars.
The
dedication date of the Bridge will be set as soon as we hear back from the
state Governor, whom we have invited for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. And there’s
another twist in this saga. Oliver and I are running for the Mayor’s seat of
New Idria. Never mind there are only four humans and a passel of dogs and cats
living in this unknown district. Oliver, who also is head of the New Idrian
Water District, is the incumbent. That’s what happens when you don’t bother
voting…at least correctly.
Both Oliver and
I are vying to be the Governor’s “host” when he arrives. We envision acting
like Big Cheeses holding oversized keys to the city as we proudly give the
dignitary a tour of our hamlet and poisoned water source.
Come visit the Whimsy
Mining Company, Governor! Watch your step, sir.
Beware Us Type “A” Politicians
We are ecstatic
with glee over the “Asshole” gaffe made by Republican presidential candidate
George W. Bush last week. In front of a massive rally of Illinois voters, he
described a certain national reporter to his running mate Dick Cheney as a
“major league asshole,” not realizing the microphone in front of where he stood
was on, that is, “hot.”
I
heard the news on the radio as I was going to work in the town of Hollister the
morning after it happened. KGO played the actual tape recording of this
momentous event over and over until I damn near drove off the road from
laughing so hard. Oh! The humanity of it all!
This,
from the self-described all-inclusive conservative who has vowed to bring
renewed morals and family values back to the White House. What does the phrase
“family values,” bandied about with such abandon, mean? To those in my family, it means bailing another
family member out of jail.
Here’s
how it went down: Bush was about to speak before a big crowd gathered at a high
school on the campaign trail, when he pointed out a reporter in the front lines
to Cheney, and said, “There’s Adam Clymer, major league asshole from the New
York Times.” In response to this well measured, thought-out appraisal, Cheney
concurred with equal deliberation as he said, “Oh yeah, big-time.”
Later,
Bush explained to a new gaggle of reporters that he’s “a plain spoken” guy.
That went over like another lead balloon. There were no takers on the horizon.
Since
his blunder, the presidential contestant has used the “plain spoken”
self-description blurb in every subsequent speech he’s made. It appears that
“plain spoken” is now a euphemism for “acceptably profane.”
The
episode not only makes us New Idrians wildly cheerful, but it also confirms
some grave doubts we had concerning Mr. Bush Jr. Before this eye opening
sound-byte of hypocrisy occurred, we couldn’t figure out if Bush were merely
aping what he thinks to be populist principle or if he’s just a moron. We now
know.
I’m
not saying Bush’s critique of the fellow was necessarily wrong. It’s not hard
to imagine that a big-league reporter might be a major-league asshole. For that
matter, a small-time reporter can be one too, or so I’ve been told.
I
don’t even object to the swear word he used. Occasionally, there is simply no
better way to describe someone. But I’m not running for President under the
pious umbrella of the religious right, with an absurd promise to bring honor
and decorum to the presidency. That would be fraudulent.
I
am, however, mapping out my campaign strategies for becoming the new Mayor of
New Idria. For years the incumbent, Oliver, has been known as the “Honorary
Mayor” of our township – or shackship, to be more precise – and everything he
says around here seems to become permanent law. Take the job of village idiot
or town drunk. I believe we should all take turns at those positions. And it’s
my turn to be Mayor.
As
Mayor, my first order of the day would be to instigate a D.A.R.E. program in
New Idria -- the acronym, of course, which stands for Drugs Are Really
Expensive.
Then
I’d like to rally support for my Cretin Re-routing and Abatement Program, known
as C.R.A.P., for short. I think New Idria and its outskirts need concrete
barriers, the kind prestigious Caucasian neighborhoods and gated communities
put up to keep out undesirables and people of color. Our barriers would keep out those who have no reverence for life,
and such a blockade would allow traffic on the county road to move in one
direction only: north to Hollister.
Before
anyone goes off half-cracked by calling me a major-league asshole, people
should know we sincerely welcome visitors to the Whimsy Mining Company – except
those who go nut-up crazy blasting their bazookas during open butterfly season,
and those who decorate the roadside with light beer cans galore, and those who
cavalierly run over our tarantulas. It’s because of such riff-raff we often
holler the popular slogan “You’re goin’ the right way!” anytime we see
motorists driving back toward civilization.
Come November,
I’m going to win all six votes in this toxic little ghost town (some of the
animals will be voting, I will make sure of that). My promise to the local
gentry will be “A dead Cadillac on blocks for every citizen!” And I shall be
plain spoken.
San
Carlos Creek Update: Oliver, whom I intend to overthrow, has called for a
community effort to clean up the hunters’ leftover drained beer cans that
litter the creek banks and roadside. No one has signed up for the duty. He is
now promising a “cooked cinnabar rock give-away” to lure volunteers. Millions
of these refuse cinnabar “clinkers” – as the miners called them – were heaped
into tailing piles as big as mountains in New Idria. Many of the orange
fist-sized rocks are slowly making their way down the creek and now line the
banks beneath The Bridge. I told Oliver I’d sooner dress up in one of those
custodial monkey suits worn by garbage sweepers in Disneyland who walk around
with little brooms and poled dust pans behind people who smoke.
I’m
hoping my irritating jabs provoke the incumbent to erupt publicly with
something like, “That Georgia James from The
Benito Bugle-ette is a minor league asshole!”
* * * * * * *
