Around 2003 I was writing the book.  I never got around to finishing it.   Maybe one of the reasons I never finished it was the fact Mchael Powell passed out of my life after Chapter 3.

Hi Michael (Ratso, from Midnight Cowboy, always seemed more appropriate, but you lacked his charm and virtue):

It must have been Veterans Day, you commented you didn’t understand why I was allowing you to hang around or some such thing.  You claimed you never understood what I saw in you.  I almost told you that night, after you’d flitted around Sky City and the streets of Albuquerque behaving like a lunatic, approaching one stranger after another trying to sell meth to them.

You,  persuading me that morning to take you; urging me to keep in there with you, almost begging me to allow you to continue.  I’d never before observed anything in that league for human folly.  You, a man out on bond for a couple of felonies, evidently manifesting the best behavior you could muster, were an irresistible experience for any writer worth his salt.

I never made any bones about the fact I’m a writer.  When we first met I was completing a book about the lost gold mine.  You sat in my apartment one night and read part of it.  When all the refinements on that were finished, you might say I was a writer all dressed up with no place to go.  I was always surprised you never made the connection.

The study of human frailty is meat and potatoes for a writer.  You dropped into my life as a voodoo-doll on a parachute.  You reminded me of a 1950s cartoon of a Tasmanian devil.  A sort of whirlwind energy creature dedicated to breaking anything breakable, and disrupting anything disruptable.

You are one of those rare, incorrigible folks incorporating the entire catalog of human vice and frailty, and showing none of the virtue, so far as I was ever able to detect.  You stayed in my life from March 1, until a couple of weeks after Veterans’ Day without much input from me, sponging, begging, stealing, banging on my door at all hours, and generally rebuilding my enthusiasm for the project whenever it flagged.

The name of the new book is, Zombies On Boogie Street, Methamphetamine In the New Millenium.  It’s all about blasters, pathological liars, rats, snitches,  thieves, sex-addicts, stupidity; people who shoot meth and people who believe they are possessed.  Generally, in short, about the low-life scum bottom-feeders who choose to make meth their major goal in life.

You inspired a book, and you earned a major piece of it.

Three chapters, so far, although your part isn’t really finished yet.  I expect the Michael J. Powell ones will be the centerpiece.  There’s nothing in the book I didn’t see for myself, if it’s stated as fact, or that you didn’t tell me as fact.  The reader will be forewarned that that whatever came from you can be trusted only as far as you can be trusted.  Which is to say, not at all.

I do believe your assertion that you are possessed, though I don’t know much about possession by demons.  I think my readers will be as convinced of your possession as I am.  I expect they’ll be convinced some of the homicides, burglaries, rapes, robberies, and other mayhem you claim to have committed, actually happened, as well.  Even a pathological liar doesn’t lie all the time.

For a long while I really felt sorry for you.  That’s why I prepared and took food to you and your mother when you didn’t have any.  It’s why I prepared the Caisse’s Tea for you when you dreamed up the story about having a brain tumor.  I knew it was probably a lie, but figured, just in case, it couldn’t hurt.

Anyway, being around you cost a lot of money, time, and energy.  Probably most ‘normal’ people would agree that a day with you leaves a person feeling a good hot bath isn’t enough to wash off the residue you leave behind.

I’ve already done what I can to make sure some unsuspecting person doesn’t get blown away by your ‘satchell charges’, assuming they exist.  If someone does get hurt by your burying the damned things, then allowing them to stay there, dangerous as you described, responsibility will fall where it belongs.  The same applies if you actually manage to snuff me, or someone near me.  You’ll be right up there at the top of the list.

That brings me to the threats you’ve been making about me and folks I care about.  If you want to try to carry them out, it’s your call.  The widow-lady figures there’s nothing about you a .357 magnum won’t cure if you come bothering her anymore.  If you manage to harm her, or her daughter and the law doesn’t do anything, you’ll be well advised to move to Bangor, Maine, and change your name.   I intend to make certain you don’t get off without any consequences.  ‘Nuff said.

As for your intentions toward me, I just don’t give a damn.  You do what you think is best and we’ll see what happens next.  Exposing the Michael J. Powells to the world is a worthy enough job for now.  If you blow a hole in me, I’ll heave a sigh and consider it a job well done, knowing you’ll finally be off the damned streets.

See you around, Space-Monkey.

Best to you,

Jules

I’ve been through the experience enough times in my life to know how angry and involved it can get a person into matters that aren’t worth the trouble of thinking about. Cops are generally lowlifes who are attracted to the magnet of the copshop, the cameraderie of legal gangship, and not worth not fastening one’s seatbelt to offend. However, I take the attitude that one of the legitimate ways of leaving the vehicle this lifetime is in a gunfight with cops. Preferably over some matter involving a burned out bulb on the license-tag light developing into something a lot more serious because some cop feels the need to push someone around.

It came close to that last summer when I was in deep financial doodoo and got stopped by a motorcycle cop and his compadre because the license tag had expired… they pushed me around some and towed the car … cost me $100 I could ill afford… and the cop put the word out to the wrecker driver that he was gonna “get me,” watch me and stop me every time he saw the car. He hasn’t done it, so we haven’t had a gun battle. I’m pretty much indifferent to whether he does it or not, and whether we have a gun battle as a result. It’s his choice, not mine.

The Friend: You’re literally saying that we should put our lives at risk and ruin by over-reacting to minor power abuses by people and institutions?

Ergo: No. I’m not saying what anyone “should” do, or “shouldn’t do.” What other people do is no business of mine. Instead, what I’m doing is making an observation about how people handle issues that concern them, as opposed to how humans of the past (in some quarters) believed “honor” required them to handle such issues. It’s all about personal responsibility and grinding our own axes, as opposed to employing mercenaries (cops, judges, lawyers) to grind our axes for us on condition that we submit to our own axes being ground by someone else. It’s safe and convenient and the only cost, other than the fact that our mercenaries now own us, is vaguely spiritual.

On the other hand, it follows that I probably wouldn’t be a good person to sit on a jury of my “peers.” If a person’s only crime was to kill a cop I’d have to take a close look at the circumstances before I’d vote to convict. If a person was only guilty of drug abuse or prostitution I’d vote to acquit no matter what the law says. I don’t subscribe to the notion that part of my role in life demands that I become the tool of the institutions of tyranny and punishment for victimless crimes. But I do subscribe to the view expressed by a famous frontier judge, when he hanged a horse thief, but turned a man loose who’d killed a man who was threatening his family, “There are men who need killing, but there are no horses that need stealing.” I don’t believe the definition men who “need killing” is confined to lousy neighborhoods, nor are the hiding places for such men necessarily outside the institutions of “justice.” How we approach such matters, as I’ve suggested, is vaguely “spiritual.”

I spent several years trying to find new ways to frighten myself in a 1947 Cessna 140 without killing myself. Lots of hair-raisers and close calls in the left seat.

But I was with a guy who later became an airline pilot one day in his Aerocobra, him piloting, and came nearest to scaring the pants off me.

We were buzzing the house of a pilot friend during the super bowl game, lower and lower, then up, hard around and back down and over.

The guy in the house came running out and sprayed us with the water hose….. spray all over the windshield and we couldn’t see anything except out the side windows.

We had a lot of airspeed coming down so John pulled the nose up hard and up we went until the airspeed was gone gone gone and we were a couple of held-breaths from being scattered all over someones yard.

Last possible fraction of a second John kicked the rudder hard over and we reversed nose down, plane falling, not flying. Full throttle and the plane got enough fly into the wings to allow him to pull the nose up in time to knock down the television antenna, tear up the prop and send guy-wires from the antenna whipping around battering and tearing the wingtips.

We staggered back to the airport and hid the plane in John’s hanger hoping to avoid an FAA in-flight accident report.

Close enough for government work.