From Some People Talk with God: 

Dominick found the impulse mystifying. To get up every workday and put on a uniform then go out and enforce. The job had to satisfy some yearning that Dominick lacked—the need to constantly prevail, perhaps, or to have your already poor opinion of your fellow human beings serially seconded by experience. But then he couldn’t understand gamblers either, and for a few that was an addiction. And then there was the attitude, that I’m-right-you’re-wrong assumption behind every interaction, an attitude backed up by the unilateral right to use force to prevail. As an enforcer you relied upon the threat of force, and woe to those who dared raise a hand against you. What was it they were called, back in slavery times? Overseers. Only these overseers were nominally our public servants not our private masters. And with the uniform came a certain arbitrariness in how that threat of force or confinement could be employed. Crooks could make great friends—hell, everybody broke the law—but Dominick had never met a cop he liked. Of course that was unfair, because he had always avoided their company. He could not think of another entire class of people he wanted less to do with.

                                     Bucket List

I want to belong to one of those tribes that let anyone in,

on a street where no house looks like any other house

and our furniture is trunks and pillows, borrowed carpets.

Or in a double-wide in an abandoned trailer park where

coyotes and buzzards take turns as our security guards

and when it rains it’s special and you take notice, write it

on a calendar that has no other entries, not even years or dates.

I’d like to hunt wolves with golden eagles in Mongolia.

Simmer for an hour, stirring when you think of it, the house

will smell of shallots and ginger. Ice is such a luxury.

It will be a place where everyone speaks a language that

has never been translated, where I will never understand

what everyone is laughing at and it could not matter less.

Spoon it over memories to make them savory and safe.

First of all, it’s impolite, and somehow being polite was drilled into me as an early golden rule. If offered a blindfold by your executioner, say “Yes, please. Thank you, sir (or madam as the case may be).” I was raised by women, including nuns. Only God was allowed anger, and maybe sometimes those specially anointed in His employ. Anger was disruptive. Anger was a punishable offense. The slightest spit of choler would get thee to the office.

            Secondly, wrath is one of the seven deadly sins, along with greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. Sins are bad. Sins are basic human needs that have become individually obsessive, cancerous. Being mildly put-off by being bitten by your neighbor’s dog is understandable. Breaking all the dog’s long bones and skull with your baseball bat is considered excessive.  

            Thirdly, anger is not cool. By allowing yourself to become enraged you only empower the provocateur. A bigger man would only laugh at such absurdities. Why the bitch barely broke my skin. I’ve been attacked by far more fearsome beasts. Anyway, the threat of rage is a more effective weapon than rage itself. Rampage is an ejaculation, invariably followed by detumescence.

            And besides, with whom are you really angry? With those who persecute you or with you yourself for getting yourself in the position of persecutee? Predators always attack weaknesses. Is your weakness a lack of patience or an inflated sense of self-worth? What makes you so vulnerable as to arouse your fury? Of course they’re all imbeciles, but do they deserve your ire?

            On the side of anger are its occasional cognates—impassioned and loss of temper. For what is a life without sometimes irrational passions? And what is lost when your temper is lost but a hold someone else once placed upon your emotions? I have been angry. It chews on your soul, but the pain keeps you lucid. Otherwise it is useless. But one thing is clear—there’s no point in dying pissed-off.

            Revenge is sweet. It is also said to be best served cold, which makes it ice cream or sherbet I guess. I see a lot of angry people these days. It’s like being angry is in the Bill of Rights. Americans who have more of everything than anyone else has ever had before are angry when they’re asked to share. Some folks are angry about what other folks do in private with their bodies. There are obese people angry about what they eat, idiots enraged at those who ignore them, conspiracy theorists at war with the truth.

            To be real, it seems. you must have a personal grievance (or two). Cigarette smoke, human carnivores, big box stores, immigrants, socialists, atheists, neo-Nazis, freeloaders, other people’s phobias, “them.” By their grievance you shall know them. Just saying. It’s our new America. Fight or flight? We’re just another species on the way out anyway.  

            Fear is the embryo where anger grows. We Americans are as safe as a people have ever been, but we have not lost the ancient instinct to fear. It’s like an immune system left with nothing to fight except itself. The wolf at your door is in your mind. Ask him in. It’s your neighbor, come to apologize about the dog.    

Photos: J. Enright

From left to right—Marissa DeWees, Teri Hunkin, Connie Payne, Regina Meredith. 4^th of July, 1999, my back yard in Leone, Tutuila, American Samoa. The only retail outlet in the territory with department-store pretensions had just gone out of business. For sale at next to nothing had been a rack of left-over prom dresses, all in sizes too small for Samoan high school grads. To the ladies this said party time. They also bought elastic-band black bowties for all their men. It was a great party. Give beautiful women an event to dress up for, then step back and feel their power to transform the quotidian into the transcendent.

Connie Payne

Some People Talk with God, volume two in my Dominick Chronicles series is out and available in hardcover, Kindle, and Audible books.

The past just won’t go away. Dominick likes to idle there in history’s comfortable remove, but when his mother dies and he meets the half sister he never knew he had, the past becomes more personal—and the present more dangerous.

In this sequel to New Jerusalem News, Dominick’s perpetual peregrinations are interrupted by a visit to his newfound sibling’s historic Hudson Valley estate, which is also home to a Wiccan coven. His departure is continually delayed by circumstance, brushes with the local sheriff, and the history of the place itself—a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Once again, Dominick’s quest for noninvolvement and a purely “observer’s” status is thwarted by reality. In Some People Talk with God, follow the new misadventures of this charming wanderer as he encounters an ineffable world of lovers, schemers, and fanatics.

Praise for New Jerusalem News:

“Compassionately sardonic, witty, funny, quirky and delightful . . . You’ll laugh out loud but also enjoy Dominick’s asides on class warfare, crows, the past and cold, wet, provincial New England . . .  Enright’s off and running with Dominick, and he’s terrific.”

                                                                                                —Providence Journal

Free downloads of the Audible book version to the first three blogeroos responding.

Watching old news clips this week of Muhammad Ali defending his choice to refuse to be drafted during the Vietnam War brought chills to my limbs and tears to my eyes. The definition of a hero. It also raised half-century-old memories of a time I had buried, a time when I and many of my contemporaries were publicly vilified and attacked for our opposition to that war and the draft that fed it corpses, a time when my own father and eldest brother exiled me from the family home for my stance on the war. My dad called me a Commie. My brother called me a Viet Cong.

    I remember marching in the first Fifth Avenue Peace Parade in New York, March 1966. As an organizer, I was a parade marshal, which meant I walked on the outside of our contingent, between the marchers and the hostile crowds that lined the avenue. And they were hostile. Even the police, who supposedly were there to keep the peace, hooted and screamed at us. I was shoved and punched. I was foolishly wearing my best clothes, including a baby-blue Irish wool sweater my girlfriend had just given me. The crowd was throwing things at us—eggs, trash, liquid stuff, including red paint. Throughout the march I worried about that red paint getting on my sweater. I was just 20. I was marching to save my peers from seeing their uniforms soaked in their own blood for a pointless cause, and I was worrying about paint on my sweater.

   I am not comparing myself to Ali or anyone else. I have nothing but awe and respect for the men and women who fought and died when their misleading leaders asked them to fight and die. There was nothing heroic about my low-echelon anti-war contributions. I was there for six years ; I did my part; but others did the heavy lifting. My life was not interrupted. But there were millions of us who did protest, who, before Twitter and Facebook, took to the streets, organized sit-ins and petitions, ran mimeograph machines late into the night, and counseled others on how to avoid the draft. Looking back, I am also in awe of those patriot citizens who fought on the home front against the loss of American ideals. Will history remember how virulent and vile their treatment was in the middle and late ‘60s? Ali’s story reminds us.

            A year later, in August 1967, I was the marshal for another Manhattan contingent at the first, 100,000 person March on the Pentagon in Washington. At the time I was working in the Editorial Research Library at Newsweek magazine. Before I left for D.C. I persuaded my boss at Newsweek to issue me ID as a stringer for them on the promise I’d file an eyewitness report upon my return. There are plenty of versions of that event. I was in the middle of it. I was seated cross-legged on the pavement in the inner circle when the federal marshals in their cheap suits and ties and five-foot batons started clearing out the rows of sitting protesters in front of me. It was brutal. There was blood. The red-neck marshals especially enjoyed clubbing the girls. Just behind us was a row of soldiers, National Guard, rifles fixed with bayonets, holding us in to be arrested.

By then it had been many hours since we had massed and marched across the bridge from Washington. I really had to take a piss. I knew that when the marshals reached me, clubbed me, and dragged me away I would piss my pants. I also couldn’t see the value of being beaten and arrested. I was chicken. I stood up and faced the young lieutenant in charge of the guardsmen behind me (me now not us), a young man not much older than myself whose face was pale and sweaty with fear. I showed him my Newsweek ID and said, “You’ll excuse me please.” He stepped aside and with a hand on my back pushed me through his line of troops. Behind me I heard the sound of wooden batons hitting flesh and bone as I walked away through the encompassing crowd.

   I turned in my in-depth report as promised, an eyewitness account of pacifism met with brutality. The march would be Newsweek’s cover story that week. On Thursdays just-off-the-press copies of that week’s edition were distributed to the staff. It was sort of a hallow moment as everyone stopped their usual labors to peruse the latest product. I read the printed story about the filthy rabble, these Commies and duped fellow travelers, who had demeaned the capital and were summarily dispersed by patriotic forces. What a mess they had left behind. Not a word, not a hint of my reporting was present.

            I stood up from my desk in that bevy of desks filled with fellow drones and ripped the magazine in half and threw it in the newsprint trash barrel beside my desk. I took off my gray work smock and threw it in after it. Then I put on my suit coat and left, not to return.

            Ali had opted out of the draft in 1966 for reasons as clear as anyone could make them, and he took his punishment publicly and proudly. Five years later, still undaunted, he was vindicated by the U.S. Supreme Court. For all of us in the anti-war movement he was an icon and an idol, and his death brings back those days and the memories of all those others who fought for years against that now historically reviled conflict. He was the greatest.

Poets Star Wars Bar & Grill

Ezra Pound once sent James Joyce a pair of used shoes.

Would you buy Faulkner a drink? Have tea with Emily?

Forget that the guests are all dead, would you be on time?

Oh, the company you’d keep. Bukowski vomit in the sink.

Olson vanishing into the Cape Ann fog while Neruda

warms up the waitresses with Spanish love poems.

Back at the bar Berryman and Yeats are not speaking,

staring each other down, while Heaney chortles at them.

Hemingway is passed out. Fitzgerald and Lawrence are

scheming some escape. The haiku crowd has vanished.

Over by the dart board, though, the sonneteers are still at it,

laughing it up in perfect couplets, taking their turns with

end-rhyme darts to pin down the abstract with the real.

They were here first; they’ll be the last to leave.

Usual Group at the Window Table

How in Westerns the wheels of the wagons

always spin backwards the faster they go,

how ice and flame at first touch feel the same.

Take a pint and a seat by the window.

If all my sins were confessed in Islam

my body would have no extremities.

What do you call what you want to forget?

Take a pint and a seat by the window.

There are faults in the sky that insult me,

slick birds with no wings that call themselves souls.

Without your lost beauty no one knows you.

Take a pint and a seat by the window.

    Without alternatives there can be no definitions. A black girl from Lackawanna named Diana taught me that. (Too detailed and delicate a story for here; suffice to say that it took years for me to see who was truly the brave one in that situation. Not me.)

            About that same time, in the summer of my eighteenth year, I played the part of Grumio, Servant to Petruchio, in a Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of Taming of the Shrew in Buffalo, New York—my final theatrical performance in my home town. Our venue was a truck band shell with a thrust stage on the shore of Delaware Park’s polluted lake. There were no fences, gates, or tickets—a true public performance for the inner city, open to all.

            We were playing it for laughs, and I was given the task of warming the audience up to that fact with an extra-textual piece of silent solo slapstick business to open the play.

            By the time the lights went up on opening night and I prat-fell my way onto the stage to loosen them up, the audience was invisible in the growing dark beyond the kliegs. My initial shtick got some laughs, then more as the hundreds of people sitting on the steps and embankment above the stage realized that they were being invited to laugh with the bard. When they laughed loud I would snap up attentive as if I had heard a distant unsuspected noise—more laughs—and then as I seemed to shake it out of my head and squint again into the blinding lights that hid them from me, they laughed even harder. I was doing Grumio as Red Skelton.

            By mid-routine the laughs were coming when I wanted them and I played them along. (The fine thing about comedy is that it is obvious when the audience is yours.) A yell came up from the rear of the crowd stage right, and I looked up stage-suspicious again, to laughs.

            The first rock, the size of a baseball, struck the table I was setting about two feet away from me and bounced off the flat behind me. The second rock shattered on the stage about ten feet in front of me. For the last few microseconds of their arrival I had seen both of them coming in, once they had entered the arc of the stage lights, too late to react. A frozen extended moment in my life that has yet to fully melt ensued as I awaited the next rock, more rocks to flash into visionary trajectory.

            I finished the scene, the play, the season’s run of Shrew, but I never wanted to act again. Directions are sometimes set by the actions of others. You work for concert, coordination, inter-personal non-confrontation—the way you walk down a midtown Manhattan sidewalk—but rock-throwing thugs can divert you. Perhaps I should have thanked them.

            Diana still appears in random dreams, shaking her head at me.

Before Reality Salad there was Det. Sgt. Apelu Soifua. If you would like to visit American Samoa as if you had lived there for 25 years, Apelu will show you around. If you wonder what it is like to live in a colony where the laws did not evolve from the culture but were imposed upon it, Apelu will let you listen in. If you have never had to observe and live by two often disparate sets of cultural rules, Apelu will share some laughs with you.

The Det. Sgt. Apelu Soifua Jungle Beat Mystery Series is available from Amazon.com . Join Apelu. The only visa necessary is your openness.