Dear Bookbag,
After four visits in the first two days of my holiday weekend from Supervisory Special Agent Heffernan and Field Agent Anistossio and the six hour long “interview” at the FBI office below Chambers Street on Labor Day when I could have been fingering my flute to commercial soaked reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies I am a little ticked.
Every time you and Midge go to a “pool party” North Korea ups their atomic pop somewhere underground in the Pacific where all pool parties take place. I know it only made the Times this last weekend but the pop off really was the week before as if you didn’t know.
The Bureau wanted to know what an itinerant stage scribe and curriculum marm were doing at an outdoor North Korean reception in Baltimore drinking H bomb shots and Thermonuclear wine while President Trump’s and Xi Jing Ping’s pants were dropping faster than real estate prices in Seoul. I told them you two go wherever the wine is free.
Then they started asking why you two were no longer walking in the park formerly known as Robert E. Lee. I told them some hip shit hammer toe stories which they didn’t buy for a second so I went off into some Lady in the Lake Roland riff about a former Army sergeant penpalling the hotsy tot from his hometown high school and a mink pillbox virgin champagne pop what-
did you know John Ashbery died? Later. Who doesn’t love dead poets?
Supervisory Special Agent Heffernan wanted to know why you two were stirring up civil war in Korea just like you did in the United States before you started dating.
I told them I didn’t know. Was it the sushi connection? Were you tired of people cooking meat on a table? And what they do to cabbage. Or was it that fat guy who dances to the music that sounds like a cat trapped in the back of an old television? Before flat screens.
They asked about your relationship and I told the agents that maybe Midge thought she was marrying Paladin from Have Gun Will Travel but she ended up with The Rebel Johnny Yuma. Not bad really. Most women of her shoe size thought they were marrying Paul Newman or Robert Redford and ended up with Mr. Ed.
They wanted to know if you still had that journal you kept of your adventures in Postbellum Texas and if you were still a Reconstruction Beatnik in your Confederate cap and buckskin shotgun low slung Remington Beals. Then they asked if you tore down Robert E.
I told them I didn’t know. I did tell them that it wouldn’t surprise me. With Texas Ted and his grand old posse cruising back to DC, 10 gallon hats in hand and muddy boots to beg for what they voted against after Sandy nothing surprises me.
Heffernan and Anistossio eventually invited me to beat it and so I did. You probably are more Paladin today anyway. You dress really good for a straight guy. Not that I’d know. I surrendered to whatever doesn’t grab my ass every time I sit down. But I don’t miss Paladin like I miss Johnny Yuma.
Confederate ghosts spook some folks and comfort others. What statues stand for every community and generation will have to fight over themselves. There’s been a civil war over our Civil War fought left and right, North and South, in the light and shadows ever since Appomattox and sometimes it’s called civil rights. I guess it’s like our revolution. Never over. Never should be.
You ought to don your grey sky again and pony on down to Florida with a fuck it bucket. Bail out all the good folks who had their ass kicked by Irma. For all our politics and bullshit grandma and babies don’t have a color or accent when you’re pulling them out of the jaws of disaster. And whether the bronze boys are heroes or villains or North Koreans they won’t complain.
Don Arrup
Satire1
No comments:
Post a Comment