The Hermaphroditic Contortionist

By D. L. Mangles

The main theme of my novel is about redemption for the main character, but it is also about finding what divides us as citizens who as liberals and conservatives are at ever increasing odds." Mangles says. Within these pages, he challenges the prevailing jurisprudence on victimless crimes and redefines the role of the government as he believes t

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookTrail Publishing
• Release date: Nov 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637670699

D. L. Mangles

The author is a 1971 graduate of Grand Valley State University located in Allendale, Michigan who majored psychology. Since then, he has had a variety of occupations including uranium minig in the Continental Divide, part owner of a delicatessen and a subtitle teacher working in special education. He currently lives in Eastown area of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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Copyright © 2021 by D. L. Mangles.

ISBN-978-1-63767-069-9 (eBook)

ISBN-978-1-63767-070-5 (Paperback)

LCCN: 2021902764

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Author’s Introduction

Prologue

Chapter 1Payment to the Piper

Chapter 2On Slippery Ground

Chapter 3Statistics Do Not Lie; Statisticians Do

Chapter 4Two Dreams

Chapter 5Desire and Definition

Chapter 6A Meeting of the Minds

Chapter 7Three Deceptions

Chapter 8La Cucaracha

Chapter 9Hobson’s Impromptu Choice

Chapter 10Vision Quest Revisited

Chapter 11Redux

Chapter 12The Trial

About the Author

To my late wife, Cindy, who saved me,

and thus saved this book

The iniquities from antiquity are manifested

as the inequities of today.

Author’s Introduction

The idea of writing a book began somewhere around the year 2000. This was long before I had ever heard of a first term senator from Illinois or thought a multi-billionaire from New York could become the president of this country. Looking back now, it appears the American voter has been seeking a leader to believe in, who was not of the ‘old guard’ from either party. American voters were hoping for someone who could solve the multitude of our problems, while adhering to what they may not be able to define, but would know when they saw it: this concept called The American Way.

The novel I have written has been my way of showing these voters a truth which I hope will lead them down a road where our country can heal and reunite as one. This truth is found in the infancy of our founding from those early colonists, who produced our constitution under which we all live. If there is one common, descriptive characteristic we all employ, it is when we label ourselves as Americans. I can only hope the reader will understand what this means, after digesting my words. If the reader understands my polemic, then we need to add one more amendment to our Constitution to restore to us, as citizens, the freedom we should all aspire to.

Prologue

Read my crumbs of clever little phrases and vital meanderings. They compose but a morsel of an obscure history not found in the waifs and strays of today’s novels, an unrecorded inner history not worthy of the scholar’s attention.

Let the nearly great argue whether greatness is thrust upon men or whether great men seek their own appointed destiny of godlike stature. This is not a book about great men. In the historical vehicle called inevitability, those who ride in the mundane chattel compartment also seek the truth. These seekers have to shed two impediments: to see that shadows are not truths and to realize that appearances are not realities. If they can accomplish this—those who live between the titanic conflicts of their predecessors and posterity, those who survive the so-called great men of history, those who perpetuate the human race by their love for all life, and those who believe in the sanctity of grace—then they will be the inheritors of the infinite truth that will insulate their minds forever, from pretenders to the Golden Throne.

And where is this Truth to be found? In a man’s thoughts, perhaps? And where does man collect his thoughts and come to his senses? Is it in the conscious reveries of his waking daydreams or in the fecund fields of his Freudian unconsciousness? Or does truth fall from the heavens like manna when a man’s thoughts intersect with his reality in that ineffable arena called destiny? With its shadowy escort fate, does it forever wrestle with an immeasurable faculty called a man’s will?

Slowly awakening, the young man was unsure. He was unsure of the answer because he was unsure which questions would lead him to the answer. He did not even know if the dreams played out in his sleep were more real than the dreams that would soon become his reality.

Chapter

1

Payment to the Piper

Haphazardly, and without regard for the basic air safety standards that nature benevolently bestows on all its winged creatures, a solitary mosquito drifted across the stale morning air and lingered in Leslie’s bedroom. Like a glider seeking an upward-moving current of warm air or, perhaps, as a sputtering single-engine plane frantically searching for a makeshift runway on which to land, the mosquito inscribed an erratic flight pattern overhead. The winged warrior of countless disrupted backyard meditation sessions had recently dined at a favorite locale: just behind Leslie’s left earlobe. This time, however, hidden in this early morning repast, the red corpuscles had slipped the predaceous winged leech an intemperate gift. Unknown to the diminutive vampire, Leslie’s blood was substantially diluted by an abundance of Dewar’s Scotch, following a night wholly devoted to carousing and thinking in wounded revelations that ended in vagrant revelry.

This one-man bar-hopping soiree had not restricted itself to the backyard—the usual venue for Leslie’s drinking habits. It had only begun there. Instead, the nocturnal foray had reclassified the entire nightlife of the city as Leslie’s backyard. This past evening had demanded great thoughts to be culled and categorized; willpower and inner strength had to be painstakingly evaluated, catalogued, and classified.

Initially, Leslie sought a quiet atmosphere of understated decadence. But the first place of refuge proved flush with tacit stagnation, and the quiet discord that emanated from Leslie’s inner turmoil soon urged him on to a livelier environment. Once found, the next sanctuary of fermented and distilled liquids was too chaotic, however. Incessant loud talk, surging above immature music, soon drove him out. Caught in a Goldilocks syndrome of vague wants and surfeit needs, a troubling cycle commenced and Leslie became a one-man tribe, seemingly sentenced to wander the wastelands of inebriation forever. From quiet solitude to overwhelming confusion, each oasis consumed more of his diminishing mental prowess. Each scotch promised a solution, a resolution, and a homologous state of mind. Yet in the revolving finale, as Leslie laid his head upon his pillow, the recurring theme of man’s lack of foresight and his deficiency in everyday problem-solving skills doomed him to awaken to the same conundrum.

Leslie unconsciously swatted at his left ear and continued his sonorous drone. The mosquito spun away, adjusted its course in accordance with its internal gyroscope, and commenced a satisfied buzzing. The two sounds—the baritone snoring and the whiny, sibilant buzzing—welded their grating notes into an onomatopoeic chant as the forced-air furnace slowly pushed up a blast of heat to counteract the cold morning air. It was late spring in Michigan, and the intestinal ductwork of Leslie’s pre–World War II home crackled noisily as the metal arteries expanded. The fragile body of the mosquito, laden with a blood alcohol level of 0.21 percent, was blown upward by the hot, dry air coming from the register in the bare wooden floor. The insect instinctually made drastic flight decisions, but a dilemma soon arose: it could no longer manage to do two things at once. If the mosquito concentrated on keeping its wings in motion, it soon forgot both its purpose and its direction. On the other hand, if it focused on calculating a flight plan, it absentmindedly voided the flapping of its wings. In its unprecedented confusion, the winged warrior found itself at the mercy of the heat register. It was a classic confrontation of millions of years of natural selection versus blended scotch.

Even the most efficacious of gene pools would have been overwhelmed. With a final upward gush of warm air, the mosquito was promptly deposited into the ensnaring confines of a large spiderweb that had been constructed in the corner of the ceiling to take advantage of the register directly below. A common brown spider awoke from its torpor at the first hint of vibration, and eagerly went on the alert. Within seconds, the emotionless spider was glaring at the insect du jour as it struggled in vain. Everything was to the arachnid’s advantage. The now-fettered aviator, buzzing furiously, sealed its fate in a fatal tug-of-war with the silky noose. Buzz … uzzz … buzzzzz. The frantic opus reached a crescendo as the arachnid jerkily approached; then the deed was done, and the sounds in the room all gave way to Leslie’s graceless snoring.

Leslie awoke in staccato advancements of consciousness. A plumb bob of excruciating pain swayed between the cleavage of his cranial hemispheres, and an indescribable fuzziness pulsated across his closed eyelids. His first impulse for physical salvation was to consume strong coffee, but his olfactory sense failed to detect that scent. Labor would be required.

Leslie remembered his college days, when he frequently awakened at a particular fraternity house in a similar condition. Back then, he could use an oxygen tank that had been confiscated by a premed student to stifle the residual effects of alcohol. He did not have his own tank now, but perhaps several deep breaths, slowly exhaled, would accomplish the same thing. The first deep inhalation produced nothing; the second was too quick to be effective. By the time Leslie inhaled a third time, the veins surrounding his temporal lobes were screaming, No more!

Nothing in Leslie’s room provided a focal point upon which he could maroon his intoxicated state. Then he noticed the quivering cobweb dangling in the corner above his headboard. Without being aware of the process, he remanded the silky annoyance to his things-to-do list under the heading of housecleaning. This insignificant mental note became a bridge of mobility for his limbs, and as excruciating as it could be to propel one’s self to perform even the simplest of tasks—such as standing upright while experiencing the full weight of lethal alcohol poisoning—the feat was somehow accomplished, but the housekeeping reminder was forgotten.

Leslie’s first stop was the bathroom. He did not bother to aggravate his eyes further by turning on the bathroom light. Instead, he opted to apply several splashes of cold water to his face. It felt good and seemed beneficial, but at this time of the morning, he could not say what advantage it provided to which part of his being, if it were still morning, that is. He looked in the mirror as drops of water trickled off his chin. He felt older than he looked, but not wiser.

Leslie was the type of person who could either blend into the mainstream or join an obscure genre, but he lacked any unique, qualifying self-style or, as Victor Hugo would say, the force of an ideal. Leslie was above average as far as looks, but this was counterbalanced with an introverted personality. If the opposite sex were a seeker who did not require a deep conversation as foreplay, then one could say that Leslie was both physically and socially attractive.

He was more comfortable in a library than a crowd. When he graduated from college five years previously, his vocation as a teacher of English literature at the local high school had long since been a foretold destiny. Being a bibliophile, he had relegated his alter ego to living vicariously in the society of his favorite fictional heroes. He dwelt between the covers of others’ literary accomplishments, and he became the tutelary genius who befriended Winston Smith, whom he saved from loving Big Brother. He fashioned himself as the guiding companion to Larry Darrell as they sought the ultimate truth of life. But when the last page was finally read, Leslie shrank back into his comfortable, old self.

Leslie wished he could be the adventurer, the fearless explorer who ascended the highest mountains and shouted his triumphs from their summits. Wishing was all he would ever execute in such venues. If Leslie had stood at the apex of those tallest mounds, to him, the view would have only been of the depths from which he had come and of the equally dark valley that always lies on the other side from the ascent. He unknowingly avoided having his life traverse both landscapes. He could not see that every person’s life would one day return from either the mountain or the valley to rest at sea level with the final beating of his or her heart. It was as if he were living the inert life of a recluse who had shut his door to the outside world and wondered why people would ever leave their hometowns. Taking chances was not part of his intangible makeup. Even on an emotional level with his girlfriend, he was simply waiting for someone else to scribble a final script so he could live happily ever after. It was not a matter of feelings left wholly unexplored or of not believing in their relationship when listing the seesaw ledger of virtues versus defects. The ledger always tottered to the side of her purity and goodness anyway. Rather, it laid in his unconvinced judgment of himself that he truly knew of his love for Cindy, the girl he had been dating since they were both college sophomores. While he professed his love to her romantically, he still could not define a certain undiscovered annoyance about their relationship, and this confused him. Whispering sweet nothings in Cindy’s ear was just that, and Leslie kept his confusion a secret. A hundred times in a hundred arguments with himself, he still concluded she was a wonderful person who met his every need. His wants confused him. He felt comfortable with her, but there was no wanting on his behalf to move the relationship forward. He could not even say why he could not grasp that next step. Perhaps a pleasing conformity had settled upon his life. Had he hung out the Do Not Disturb sign? Did this explain the true essence of his muddled reverie? What about their relationship? Leslie’s emotions were only a hodgepodge of ersatz feelings for Cindy. When he used the word love, it always came framed in conspicuous quotation marks.

Leslie could never be classified as a dreary pessimist or a bubbling optimist. Abstaining avoidance would be the closest clinical description for his personality. The Omegan triumph for his life was unconceived, either on paper or in a grandiose illusion sponsored by his wandering mind. If he spoke in a philosophical vein, Leslie’s ideals would shed no light on his character either. For Leslie, it was not whether the glass was half-full or half-empty, instead, he was far more concerned with what the glass may or may not contain. Leslie thought that making plans could seal his fate and forever close the door of mischievous chance. He preferred to be the patient waiter, hoping that fickle Providence would someday take a place at his table. Irresolution and indecision became his motif, and his drug of choice was solitude. Coupled with this was the adage ‘never rattle the status quo’. Leslie was thus armed with the potential to be a cure for many insomniacs.

Leslie also knew that change was the only permanent structure a person could expect in life, and that for him to continue his relationship with Cindy in blissful indolence was ultimately impossible. Signs of entering the inevitable region of confrontation were creeping ever closer; stagnation was becoming yesterday’s norm. His emotional stratagem was based on not divulging too much too soon, as if the discovery of a genuine emotion akin to real love might end the give-and-take of their self-made reality. Theirs was an intimacy whose correlation would sway back and forth as if it were an election-year politician trying to garner votes from all sides. The contest was played with both guilt and praise as weapons. One may call it a game of emotional ricochet, but in reality, it was an ambiguity for both and annoying to each. Their intimacy was a pestering point of aggravation that produced an irritating itch to their coupling. The irritation was not as harmful in the daylight, but on occasion, each might awaken at midnight with bloody fingers and skin under their nails.

It was solely Leslie’s blame to shoulder. He was the one who could not commit. His idle oh-so-comfortable lifestyle was his nemesis, not the occasional confrontation with Cindy. The sooner the emotional catharsis occurred, the sooner he could break out of his cocoon and maybe, for the first time since his early college days begin to embrace and enjoy a real life again. Could he possibly change? Become a different, improved, and better man? Never be afraid again? Afraid of what? He did not even know.

As a youth, one could not say Leslie was exceedingly different from his peer group. He was just complex enough to be mildly interesting, nondescript enough to blend into the nouveau generation with whom he identified. Leslie grew up with the traditional Protestant work ethic and a working definition of what constitutes a capitalist. This economic upbringing had been socialized into his psyche by a blue-collar father who believed that hard work leads to just rewards. His father was present during the infancy of the automobile unions, although he eventually retired from a responsible position as a non-union salaried employee.

Leslie’s parents believed in a Malthusian economy of procreation; therefore, Leslie was a solitary seed. He was not spoiled with a non quid pro quo allowance. Summer was spent mowing neighbors’ lawns, and winter was for shoveling deep Michigan snow from his neighbors’ sidewalks and driveways. His teenage years were typical of any working middle-class offspring. There were the obligatory sports endeavors that produced a balanced agenda of memorable highlights and humbling moments. Leslie survived an adolescence marred with the usual awkwardness with regard to the opposite sex and a simultaneous search for the cure for acne.

Leslie’s college years coincided with the turbulence of that generation—the anti war years of the late sixties and early seventies. College introduced him to new and mystical ideas, religions, and philosophies that were only superseded by his association with other radical youths who pursued a varied course of experimental lifestyles and altered realities. Of the couples he knew in college, some moved to Morocco for the obvious advantages, some joined communes in California, and others lived on abandoned or remote areas of land or even lived in a tree house, as one eccentric couple did in one of the many canyons outside Los Angeles. All the couples eventually became transitory as permanent pairs and transient as unique individuals.

Politically, everyone (peer pressure, again) embraced socialism as if it were a lovely traditional Viennese waltz in three-quarter time. Even the professors were able to wrap the pioneer work ethic around Marxism, and students learned that equality would be achieved only when people would forsake their own goals and would take care of their fellow creatures, regardless of their worth to society.

Sounds just like living in Erewhon, doesn’t it? a fellow student said to no one in particular as Leslie exited his freshman philosophy class one spring afternoon.

Now, five years removed from the finest party of his life, Leslie was a teacher at a West Michigan high school. He taught English composition and literature, although that did not define him. Who Leslie was, had not yet evolved into the definable. He was still metamorphosing—but into what? He had never been certain of others’ beliefs, and he did not completely know his own because he had not fathered the tenets of original thinking, but rather had only adapted some here and there, based on the convenience of what sounded right at the time. His philosophy—or what he could muster as one—was like an orphanage of thoughts with no known lineage. His un-synthesized extraction of beliefs was what led to uncertainty in his relationship with Cindy, as with everything else in his life up to this point.

Uncertainty led him to role-playing games both with Cindy and with himself. He concocted different personas to present in various situations, and they became like clothing ensembles for a variety of social events. It was rather like a rich man choosing a new sports car as each one was given the cursory test drive around some imaginary friend. This affected shifts in Leslie’s personality patterns, yet any residual changes or lingering traits were eroded quickly when he donned the next persona. Nothing was permanent. It was a whimsical process at best, similar to the art of weather prediction for the great American plains. However, being an English major, and having read the majority of what are revered as the classics of literature, Leslie was able to conjure any character from his vast reservoir of fictional adventurers and fit him into a particular social venue without straining his imagination. Befitting of Leslie, if it was not a strain upon his imagination, then it was an accomplishment in itself.

However, Leslie was aware that this period in his life, if not soon remedied, would later become nothing but a compilation of regrets. Meaningless direction is fine for a young man learning about the ways of the world and himself, but for an educated soon-to-be middle-aged man, it is rather pathetic.

One summer while still in college, Leslie worked at a retirement home, where he was able to glean at least one astute lesson from a resident who lamented his misspent youth.

Regrets are life’s revenge. They serve to humble the soul, the old man said as he fluctuated between finishing a mushy green porridge and nodding off to sleep.

They make for bitter old sourpusses too, he thought, wiping gruel off the old man’s chin.

Why was Leslie so indecisive? Who was he and what did he want for his life? Did he really believe that by making a choice, it would eliminate other avenues that would never again present themselves? Would he therefore never have the opportunity to intersect with those avenues? Would the streets of chance never be crossed again? Did one selection mean that all the alternatives were gone forever?

Leslie knew that the vacillating part of his personality was founded on an assemblage of cliché convictions for the sake of convenience. Refusal to plough the virgin soil within yourself is the supreme laziness of the mind. Being this comfortable led to boredom; the ennui led to an annoying restlessness; and the quiet agitation began a coiling discomfort—thus a convolution of pervading uneasiness saturated Leslie’s subcutaneous aura.

Leslie’s concept of commitment— that is, of pledging his undying and ever-faithful love to any female—was for him like being stranded on a jagged monolith in an ocean of timelessness, passing the moments counting the waves curving over the Stygian shore. Someone who allows himself to be totally immersed in the emotion of love must be in one precarious and possibly lethal predicament, Leslie thought. Overall, one would have to say he was a normal heterosexual male: always looking for a prettier face and a more perfect body in the next female who was always just around the proverbial next corner. But that meant the current relationship was always the penultimate love of his life. If this line of thought persisted as his inner anthem, he was surely destined to live his moments as a mediocre tragedian upon life’s flickering stage.

Floundering his way back to his bedroom, Leslie retrieved his bathrobe from a hook on the bedroom door. Yawning with an exaggerated stretching of his mouth, he first massaged his closed eyes and then scratched himself vigorously in all the areas he could reach without bending. This preliminary action was designed to seduce his senses to alertness as he was about to test his motor skills. It was also a stall for time to assess (and regain, if possible) his equilibrium. Two steps past the bedroom door, he stumbled over some dirty laundry. He had somehow managed to avoid it on his way to the bathroom the first time he had ventured out of his room. It was evidence that he had been undressing as he made his way toward the horizontal plane of his bed the night before.

The kitchen, with its torturously bright, stark white fixtures, caused him to wince as a sharp pain hobnailed his brain stem. He mechanically coaxed his coffee maker to perform its sole purpose and surveyed the anonymous take-out containers that littered the counter top. With one sweeping motion of his right arm, the Styrofoam receptacles tumbled into the wastebasket.

Leslie shuffled across the living room toward the front door and stopped in front of a small writing desk with various cubbyholes and miniature drawers. His keys were on the top shelf, along with a half-filled bowl of stale Halloween candy, his favorite cracked-lens sunglasses, and an opened letter addressed to him. He reached for the letter but grabbed the sunglasses instead. He put on the sunglasses, smiling at himself for his wily ways as he opened the front door to a day overflowing with brilliant sunshine. Thank goodness for polarized shades!

Leslie reached into the mailbox to retrieve the day’s inky contact from the outside world. There was only junk mail—coupons for places and products he would never patronize or have use for, in addition to a neighborhood flyer about watching out for playing children now that school had recessed for the summer. Leslie returned the sunglasses to their place in the living room and picked up the opened letter. The morning mail joined the take-out containers, and the sound of drip-drip-drip signaled the readiness of the black elixir he so vitally needed.

The opened letter had been delivered yesterday. It was from his old college roommate, David. Leslie began to read the correspondence as if he had just received it today.

Sipping his coffee, Leslie thought of the chain reaction that the letter’s contents had set in motion yesterday. It was a microscopic example of the domino theory that had prevailed in the political mainstream in the United States in the early sixties. Instead of countries with mutual borders falling one by one into the clutches of Communism, however, this letter would cause individuals to fall into the purveyors of John Barleycorn.

The letter was short, blunt, and to the point, like the sentencing of the condemned compared to their trials:

Dear Les,

The cold hand of misfortune has touched me again. Actually, it has slapped me quite hard. Since my business associates have seen fit to take extended vacations because of my arrest, you are now the only person to whom I can turn for help. It’s time for you to make restitution as you have always promised. I need you to go to California to retrieve a load of furniture that’s waiting for me. Come to the county jail as soon as you can to talk to me.

Your needy friend,

David

P.S. Visiting hours are from 1-3 p.m.

By the time Leslie had opened the letter yesterday, he had already deduced two important clues from the envelope: he recognized the handwriting and noted the return address. These two details could only mean one thing. Leslie wondered if the antacid in his medicine cabinet was past its expiration date.

As a schoolteacher, Leslie was neither wealthy or a silver-spooned child with a trust fund. He knew the help David requested in his letter would not be for bail money. After visiting his old friend, Leslie had learned that the bail was more than twice that of any murderer the old county jail had ever accommodated. Leslie also doubted that the help requested would simply be a sympathetic ear and some moral support. David was not one to pour his heart out, and Leslie was not much interested in listening to a tearful saga, but when David used the phrase retrieve a load of furniture, Leslie instantly thought of heart monitors. A beep-beep-beeping sound came faintly from somewhere in his house.

Leslie was relatively calm as he drove to the eerie-looking brick fortress, its windows mullioned with steel bars and covered with heavy wire mesh for added security. It was well before one o’clock, the earliest one could visit, so he used this period to remember the David he had befriended in their freshman year at college.

In many ways, the two men were opposites and always would be. When it came to displaying their desire for the fairer sex, Leslie was emotionally clumsy, but for David, amorous affairs were almost second nature. Because of his inexperience, Leslie received many courtship-ending responses. With wounded dramatization, he would always try to overcorrect for the awkward situation. He was always left with a self-conscious, undeserved guilt, and an imprecise spoonerism was soon whispered in the female dormitories as his ignoble title. Leslie was not revered as a great lover; instead, he became known as a late groveler.

David, on the other hand, displayed a natural, magnetic charisma and a sophisticated type of buffoonery. The young coeds found it endearing. David’s appealing dynamic of strength veiled just enough vulnerability to arouse the maternal instincts. David was extroverted and devilishly good-looking. He was athletic, but intramural sports were the extent of his participation. There was not a single female on campus with the minimum allure that David had not ambushed with his gift for animated conversation and sweet words.

David and Leslie had been roommates for the first two years of college. Their personalities were complementary, and their morals were of a singular mold and in agreement. Theirs was a live-and-let-live way of life, and the Christian axiom of the Golden Rule steered their behavior toward others and themselves. The mutual thought process led to mutual respect, and thus, a real friendship was forged. Still, the difference in their emotional makeup was the key to their ability to maintain the balance of give-and-take. If David told a funny story, Leslie supplied the laugh track on cue. If Leslie needed someone to share the peaks and valleys in his life, or simply needed an understanding ear to appease his rare vocalizations, David was that person. On the surface, their relationship appeared as it actually was—a wonderfully working platonic relationship. It was even vaudevillian to a certain degree. For instance, David and Leslie would sometimes dredge up a private burlesque routine. David began by provoking a female acquaintance to respond to one of his intentionally artless sexual innuendoes. A positive reply was encouraging. But if she countered by calling David a smart-***, David would wag his finger and halt her profanity before she went too far. Then the two men would turn to face each other and say in unison, Better an educated gluteus maximus than an ignorant one!" The sideshow had a high frequency and a long lifeline. Neither one could remember why it was originally hilarious, but the well-conceived, staged timing usually lent itself to producing an amused smile upon the pretty face who fell into its trap, and so its history continued.

David had a propensity to attract trouble because of his participation in college pranks and other misguided mayhem. Often he was the instigator. The immature endeavors were meant to be harmless, but a trivial amount of public property was always damaged. Leslie would be recruited on Sunday mornings to pester friends to ante a portion of the bail fund needed for David’s and his cohorts’ freedom. David was a psychology major, but as he emerged from the confines of the city jail, an extemporaneous philosophy coupled with a literary and theatrical flair sprang from his lips first.

No matter how polluted life can become, he said one Sunday morning as a desk sergeant watched with disapproval, we are able at least to begin our childhood as pure as the streams flowing from the untouched, snow-covered mountains.

Now what can one surmise from this bizarre, offhanded quotation? Was it an attempt to disperse any possible condemnation upon his parents or his upbringing? Perhaps it was his attempt to utilize his field of study in his own unique way? Was he trying to synthesize an obscure link in some personality development theory that he had been formulating? Or was he just being himself: a yet-to-be-diagnosed March Hare?

Years after college, the two men were on the phone reliving the golden past when David augmented a strange, unfinished treatise by relating his thoughts on the future of their generation.

The sixties and early seventies were periods of finding your true inner self—

And Mrs. Right Now, Leslie interrupted, but the self-analysis we applied was only a way of persecuting ourselves for the perceived sins of the self-righteousness of the older generations we wanted to separate ourselves from. This will be lost in the eighties as we enter middle age. Instead of a communal utopia, the movement will transmute into a legacy of self-preservation; you know, the I’m- looking-out-for-myself-first kind of thinking. So we will be staring at right-wing stock portfolios that were born of people who gave vows of left-wing altruism.

In their sophomore year, Leslie was invited to spend Thanksgiving vacation with David’s family while his own family celebrated at his recently married aunt’s home in one of Detroit’s many suburbs. David’s suburban home lay just outside Chicago; its middle class unpretentiousness was of the same mold as Leslie’s childhood home. The streets had the same deciduous trees—maple, elm, and oak—and the neighbors carried the same placid smiles of contentment like his familiar suburbanites back in Michigan. Everything had a uniform sameness; even the street names were alike. Chestnut Boulevard intersected with Elm Street, and Lincoln Avenue paralleled Washington Avenue.

As wonderful scents from the kitchen saturated the air, everyone gathered to listen to David’s grandfather weave his stories about how life back on the family farm was such an oh-so-special time—special in the shared closeness of their family and special because they were an inclusive community based on self-subsistence. Still, his grandfather’s words conveyed a fierce individualism. The family farm was located just outside the rural community of Guthrie, Oklahoma, a place of joy and pride until a sordid visitor came to their front door: World War I. David’s grandfather pronounced it with a solemnity that only a veteran could give. He used the nomenclature The Great One to identify this war, as if it had a special finality attached to it. Others of his time had prayed that it would be the war to end all wars and that we would never again know the pain of further conflict, but that was only a delusion of hope. Mankind had not touched the bottom of Pandora’s box, yet. No matter the scale or the scope of such an irrational confrontation, people hoped that this chapter of mankind’s insanity would never affect their family, their community, or their very existence in any way. Grandpa Harold and his two younger brothers, John and David (for whom our character had been honored), joined the army just before America entered the war. All the brothers had always wished to visit some faraway place since none of them had ever traveled farther than fifty miles or so from the family farm. To them, Europe was a fairy-tale land that enticed every teenage boy who had grown up with the adventures of King Arthur, Sir Gawain, and Sir Lancelot. On cold winter days, when the farm demanded less of their time, they had played the various roles of the legendary heroes. The Three Musketeers were more to their liking than the Three Wise Men. They were three farm boys reading by a kerosene lantern in the darkness, acting out the roles of their imagined characters in the shortened daylight of cold February days in the drafty old barn that their imaginations transformed into a magical stone castle. In 1917, as they gathered at the train station to bid farewell to all the well-wishers of Guthrie, little did those three farm boys know that the baggage they were leaving behind on the train platform was their innocence. They boarded the train and joined other idealistic young warriors at boot camp. Grandpa Harold said that they thought of themselves as knights-errant, off on a Holy Crusade to destroy the evil kaiser. They were filled with the excitement of war too, but that illusion was quickly purged by the stench of death on both sides of the barbed wire. They fought in those muddy, bloody trenches of France until only Grandpa Harold was left—the lone musketeer. He no longer felt that glory and honor were so crucially important.

Grandpa Harold mustered out at the end of the war in 1918, boarded a transport ship with his two brothers’ caskets, and returned to the rich auburn soil of the family farm. Burying her two youngest sons in the American earth was the lone consolation for their grief-stricken mother, who then clung to her only surviving son until the day of her death.

The armistice was then signed, coloring the world with its false scent of everlasting peace, but the world that Grandpa Harold loved was forever changed. It was a long, long time before he could enter the old barn again and not cry as the echoes of a stolen youth rained down upon his ears.

As he finished this segment of his story, he paused. A faraway look came over his face as if he were listening to someone else telling his story. A tender sadness glimmered in his eyes until he cleared his throat, and David, who sat motionlessly by his side, recognized the cue that his grandfather was ready to continue with the next saga in his family tree.

Grandpa Harold began again with his courtship of, as he said, the prettiest girl for three counties in any direction. He quickly married her without a lengthy engagement, as was the fashion in those places and those times. What came next was a terrible curse for Oklahoma and the entire breadbasket of the country. A severe drought suddenly began to erode their land and their lives. Each day the land and their lives died a little more in the blurry haze. The land changed from a fruitful plain to a choking dust storm of an immortal duration. It was also the time of the Great Depression, and their lives, which had prospered on the once-fertile land, were slowly being pulverized by each blowing grain of sand that pricked every pore of their bodies and wore down their pioneer grit with each gust of the dry brown froth.

David had told Leslie that when he was home the previous summer, Grandpa had said that there was not much more to relate about the devastation caused by the drought and the endless winds that created the Dust Bowl. The schoolbooks contained abundant pictures that depicted how awful it had really been. That same evening, July 20, 1969, David and Grandpa Harold were watching the Apollo 11 moon landing. As Neil Armstrong first stepped down to the surface of the moon, Grandpa hollered out for his bride of over four decades to come see the momentous event unfolding on the screen.

Look, dear, he shouted with comic wit, our space boys have just landed in Oklahoma! He