Category Archives: Socio-Sexual Studies

Defying Fate Is Live, and Discounted!

Showtime!

Paradox Book 3 is ready for download–and discounted to $2.99 for a limited time.

Ike has ventured out on his own, now. He’s got a great head start, but still a lot to learn. A good deal of his college years are spent helping Coach Stauchel transform the Pumas into a winning team, but he still finds time to juggle love interests (“spinning plates”), begin designing a small warp generator, and prepare to fight in WWII. Unfortunately, some of those preparations will propel him into a future conflict on American soil.

This promotion is not without its hiccups already. Some folks I was hoping would help spread the word have ghosted me. There is a mix-up with one of the promoters. And, despite the early success of the first two books in the series, getting reviews has been like getting RSVPs for a Joe Biden rally.

Nevertheless, I expect good things. The hero is an adult, now, as are my loyal readers. And there’s a nubile blonde on the cover (which I’m revealing for the first time here…I think). If Defying Fate does really well, I’ll save screenshots and share the news once the numbers are in.

Thanks to everybody who buys my books, and extra-special thanks to those who rate and/or review.

Buy it on Amazon!

Buy it everywhere else!

Paradox Chapter Reveal: Easy Times

In the previous chapter reveal, I mentioned why some chapters needed heavy tweaking and sometimes I had to write entirely new transitional chapters while making Paradox (paid link) episodic.

Here’s the new opening chapter of Book 3: Defying Fate:

We exited the church from youngest to oldest—Debbie, Lana, Wyatt, Me, Mami, and Dad. Well, it seemed to be in age order, anyway. Technically, Dad and I were the youngest, We wouldn’t be born for decades, but my mother and siblings didn’t know that.

Okay…biologically speaking: they weren’t really my parents and siblings. “Dad” was really my uncle. I was not related to Mami other than through unofficial adoption, and not related to the kids except through Dad. Confused yet? Just wait.

Other people, dressed in their Sunday finest, smiled and bid us goodbye, tipping hats or waving. Mami responded to each, cheerfully. Dad tipped his own hat and replied as if conserving the energy it took to move his mouth. Debbie would have taken off running to who-knew-where, had her older sister not held a firm grip on her hand.

We strolled across the parking lot to Dad’s yellow ’37 Cord. Dad opened the passenger door for Mami. Then came one of those fascinating feminine maneuvers she was so adept at: she whirled so that she faced away from the open door and fell slowly backwards into the seat. While on the way down, the hand not holding her purse reached around behind her and pressed against the fabric of the new dress Dad had just bought her, sweeping it over to pull taught against the back of her thighs right before her rump hit the seat. It was timed perfectly so that her hand cleared just before getting caught between the car’s seat and…ahem…her seat.

I herded the kids into the back seat behind Dad, then I climbed in behind Mami. Dad cranked the engine to life.

“Sweet music!” Wyatt exclaimed, grinning at the Cord’s bass rumble.

As with most of Dad’s vehicles, the Cord’s powertrain was far from stock, and almost 50 years anachronistic. He and I had built the engine and transmission in 1986, in a garage at Texas Station—one of Dad’s many properties scattered strategically across the post-Industrial Revolution region of the space-time continuum. He sunk it in gear and got us rolling.

Mami leaned across the front seat and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for taking us to church, my love.”

He turned his head and grinned at her.

Dad didn’t care for organized religion, But he did care for Mami, and was willing to sit through Sunday services to please her. I found myself wishing, for the thousandth time, that he would give up his other lives, his mistresses, all his mad scientist schemes, and just settle down with Mami. Keep her happy full-time.

At this point in my life, I could understand him wanting to have a life and a squeeze at every time-space coordinate. I was spinning plates of my own, by then. But if Mami was ever to find out Dad was playing house with other women, it would break her heart.

She half-turned, craned her neck, and made eye contact with Wyatt, who sat on the edge of the back seat, his hands gripping the front seat on either side of Dad’s neck.

“You are just like your father,” she said. “You both like loud things.” Then she tried to imitate the exhaust note with her voice.

My sisters giggled at her impression, but Wyatt rolled his eyes. My Spanish had improved to the point I could follow these conversations without missing anything important.

“Oh, are you too grown up for my engine noises now, Mijo? It wasn’t that long ago when you would laugh, too.” She tried some more sound effects, then turned to her daughters and declared, in English, “The only difference between men and boys is the eh-size and expense of their desired toys.”

Lana and Debbie giggled some more. Maybe they understood everything, maybe not—but they knew Mami was acting silly and teasing Wyatt.

Dad arched an eyebrow and threw a sidelong glance over his shoulder toward me. We exchanged a grin. The Cord purred along at 70 miles an hour.

“Vroom! Vroom!” Mami continued, and apparently her sound effects were never going to get old for the girls.

 

 

When we arrived at the Orange Grove, Dad parked by the front porch and asked me to put the car away. He walked around to open Mami’s door and give her a hand climbing out.

Wyatt let himself out, then held the door open for his little sisters.

As my family went inside, Dad turned back toward me as I slid behind the wheel. “Meet me at the temperature wheel when you get changed?”

I nodded, and steered the Cord over to the enormous building comprised of several garage bays and a few aircraft hangars. Bays in the building were kept locked, ostensibly to discourage any thieves who ventured all the way out to the Orange Grove to see what they could steal. The more compelling reason was that Dad kept some stuff here that had not been invented or manufactured yet. I parked and locked the swing-up garage door before strolling to the hacienda to change.

It was hot at the temperature wheel and Dad probably wouldn’t ask me to meet him there if there wasn’t some maintenance required. I dressed in my “greasies”—jeans already so stained by petroleum products that they shouldn’t be worn in public, and an equally ruined sleeveless shirt (“undershirt” at these coordinates, “muscle shirt” or “wife-beater” in the era I came from).

As I drew near to where the temperature wheel and generator (really an alternator) were housed, a rhythmic scraping/grinding noise grew more prominent in the ambience.

The outer building looked like a large barn, but once inside, it was obvious that it had no roof—flat or otherwise. All it had was a fairly narrow arch spanning from one wall to the other. The sun shone directly down into the vast space. Lining the walls were sturdy steel shelves loaded with banks of nickel-iron batteries, each larger than a footlocker. The huge alternator sat at the south end of the structure, turning quietly while providing electricity for the hacienda and the rest of the estate. Attached to the power source was a gearbox. The spinning shaft driving the gearbox extended through a hole in a small greenhouse in the center of the huge “barn.”

I entered the greenhouse and the sweltering heat blasted me. Dad was already inside, sweating buckets. What drove the shaft was the temperature wheel. The outer band of the wheel was composed of multiple airtight tanks, with pipes leading like spokes from each tank to a central hub surrounding a circular housing from which the shaft extended. The top third of the wheel extended up through a slot in the greenhouse roof, rotating under the arch across the top of the barn—so that it was always in shade, but exposed to the breeze. The bottom of the wheel sat in a metal trough full of water kept hot by the ambient heat of the greenhouse. Inside the tanks and pipes of the wheel was freon—which transformed from gas to liquid form just from a few degrees change in temperature. It was heated into light gas form down inside the greenhouse, expanding up through the pipes into the tanks. Up in the shady breeze, the gas cooled inside the tanks, transforming to heavier liquid. The weight of the liquid caused gravity to pull the tanks back down, and the wheel turned. It rotated slowly, but with massive torque. The torque was overdriven in the gearbox so that the alternator spun fast enough to generate scads of electricity.

The scraping/grinding noise was loud here inside the greenhouse. Dad, dressed much like me, stooped over next to the central housing, opening a toolbox.

“Okay,” he said. “This should go quick with both of us. You know what that noise is?”

“A bearing gone bad?” Even without him honing my mechanical aptitude over the last several years of relative time, I would have known the sound was caused by friction, and the repetitive nature of it meant it came from a rotating part.

Dad tapped his temple and nodded approvingly at me. He looked up at the bright sky visible through the slot in the greenhouse roof. “Now, we could wait until after dark, when this thing stops spinning anyway, but who wants to do this at night? Engage the clutch, if you would, Ike.”

I pulled a large lever from vertical to horizontal, and pinned it in place to hold it down. As the clutch engaged, the wheel spun faster, while the shaft spun slower and came to a stop after a few moments. The awful noise stopped with it.

Thankfully, the bearing for the wheel itself was fine, or we would have had no choice but to work on it in the middle of the night. That wheel was going to spin as long as the sun and breeze caused the temperature disparity. There was no stopping it until after the temperature disparity ended.

Inside a cardboard box decorated with black handprint stains was the replacement roller bearing, which Dad had already packed with grease. Dad and I chatted while we worked together to get the old bearing out and this new one in.

“What did you call your pals there at Poly, again?” Dad asked, with an amused expression.

“The Tumultuous Trio,” I said, also amused, just thinking about my college roommate and the two other upperclassmen who had begun football training camp hazing me, but had since more-or-less welcomed me into their clique. “Wherever they go, it’s like a storm hits whoever is there.”

“Rowdy, I guess?”

I chuckled. “Well, there’s Bartok—offensive lineman. Intelligent enough, but still…yeah, rowdy. He’s about the size of Godzilla. His footsteps make the ground shake. He also likes to mess with people. Has a dry sense of humor.”

“Big corn-fed boy,” Dad remarked, nodding, still amused.

“And my roommate, Gartenberg. He’s like the straight man for the other two’s comedy routine, quite often. Zeppo or Gummo, I guess, playing off Chico and Harpo.” I considered this assessment for a moment, then corrected myself. “Well, sometimes he can be like Groucho, actually. He’s got a dry sense of humor, too. Vicious wisecracks and comebacks, sometimes. Probably the smartest guy on the team.”

“What position is he, now?”

“Flanker,” I replied. “He also plays guitar and sings. He introduced us to this beatnik bar not far from campus. Weird crowd—they snap fingers for applause instead of clapping. They’ll actually sit and listen to freestyle poetry and seem to enjoy it.”

“It’s gonna get even weirder in the ’60s,” Dad said. “You’ll see.”

“Then there’s Kiley,” I continued. “Linebacker. Solid muscle—including between his ears.”

Dad grinned.

“A redneck, with cowboy hat, cowboy boots—the whole rig. He’s the most hilarious of all, but I wouldn’t say he even has a sense of humor.”

Dad cocked an eyebrow at me.

“As near as I can figure,” I said, “life for him is just one ongoing phallic comparison chart.”

Dad busted out laughing. He didn’t do that very often.

“Gartenberg said one time that Kiley isn’t even human—he’s a walking, talking penis. And…yeah…he might be right. Outside of football, penis size seems to be all he thinks or cares about.”

Still chuckling while recovering from his guffaw, Dad remarked, “And he’s got the biggest one ever, I’m sure. Seven feet long, or so?”

“Oh, nobody in the whole history of penises was ever hung as heavy as Kiley,” I assured him. “Just ask him—he’ll tell ya. It would shatter his whole world if he ever found out different. I mean, he literally seems to have no other interests in life. Gartenberg and Bartok are hot-rodders. But ‘hot rod’ means something else entirely to Kiley.”

Dad shook his head. “On a serious note: isn’t it amazing that most young men knew how to work with their hands once upon a time? Get past 2000 or so and they can’t even change a tire or give a jump-start. Cruising, racing, wrenching—it was all part of the culture. Then somehow it went to playing videogames and surfing porn. Yay, progress.”

“I know which culture Kiley would find superior,” I quipped. “But yeah: the most popular hobby, by far, is modifying cars. Roomie’s got a T-bucket. Bartok’s got a chopped-and-channeled ’49 Mercury.”

“Classic lead sled,” Dad declared, nodding, still grinning.

“They were talking smack about the Studebaker, so we drug it on out to a lonely road nearby, and I blew their doors off. I guess that’s part of why they eventually seemed to give me some respect.”

Dad sobered. “Remember what I told you about keeping a low profile.”

“Yes sir. I sandbagged so that I just barely beat them. Wouldn’t let them look under the hood. I explained the fat tires by borrowing your cover story about secret research-and-development prototypes.”

“Don’t ever forget we’re taking a serious risk,” Dad said, frowning now. “The Erasers don’t just come after troublemakers who split the timestream. They murder temporal fugitives, refugees, temporal tourists…anything they find that doesn’t belong, they eliminate. I still don’t know how they found you in St. Louis, and that goes to show you they have resources we don’t understand, yet.”

The Erasers had murdered my biological family back at my native coordinates in 1988.

Back in the future.

“The continuum is a gigantic haystack,” Dad continued. “The TPF…the CPB…they have limited resources and can’t find every single needle. We don’t want to help them get lucky.”

TPF stood for Temporal Police Force, which Dad once worked for, but deserted to become a time-space fugitive. The CPB was the Continuum Protection Bureau—the TPF’s parent company. The Erasers were an elite, clandestine hit team from the TPF.

“Hot-rodding is good,” he continued. “Playing football is fine. Those help you blend in—to a point. But if too many people find out how fast your car is, that could start a buzz. If that buzz reaches the ears of somebody working for the CPB, your new identity will be targeted. And if there are photos of you available, that just makes it easier.”

I skipped Picture Day every year in high school, at Dad’s urging, so there would be no visual reference of me in the yearbook. I was in the group photo of the football team, but Dad had somehow gotten access to the negative before printing, so that there just happened to be a blemish in the film where my face was.

Dad and I had built the Stude together. The suspension and powertrain were composed of parts from decades in the future. It was much, much faster than any other street legal vehicle at my adopted coordinates…with the exception of Dad’s ’41 Willys. So much faster, that anyone with knowledge of a particular data set might decide it was an anachronism, and that its owner was a person of interest.

 

“Yes sir,” I replied. “I was careful, like I said. And I’ll stay careful. But how many CPB assets would even know enough about street racing to…if they somehow learned everything about it…decide the Stude doesn’t belong where and when it is?”

Dad shrugged. “Probably nobody—though there is this tool called the Internet. You may have heard of it.”

The Internet and World Wide Web were unknown to Joe Public at my native Coordinates, and earlier. But I had been introduced to it in trips to BH (Brazilian Highlands) Station in the 2000s.

“Okay,” I said. “But wouldn’t they have to know a lot even to research the right information online? I mean, they’d have to know smoke when they see it, before they start looking for the fire.”

“Listen, Hero: this is not a situation wherein you want to live out on the edge, seeing how much you can endanger yourself and get away with it. You might be able to step out to the very edge of the cliff and not fall over, but you need to stay far, far away from the cliff so no bad actor can push you over.”

When he called me “hero,” it was best that I just kept my mouth shut and listened.

“When you’re young and in great shape, you assume you’re invincible,” Dad went on. “But the Cabal has assets that can kill you like that.” He snapped greasy fingers to make his point. “When you don’t even know you’ve been targeted. Don’t ever try to defy Fate. Do whatever you can to avoid even drawing her attention.”

It was normal for Dad to personify fate. He spoke of it as he would some heartless, sadistic femme fatale.

Dad might be eccentric by some measures, but he was far from delusional. Neither was he superstitious. Yet he believed there was some supernatural or paranormal being who shadowed his every step, waiting for opportunity to pounce and visit disaster on his life. By escaping to different coordinates, Dad made it harder for that entity to track him. And me.

Sometimes I found myself adopting that same personification of Fate. Especially when I thought about my past life.

***

We got the new roller bearing in and put the machinery back together, then returned to the hacienda to clean up for supper.

Mami had roasted a chicken, fried potatoes, baked bread and sauteed vegetables. Again, out of respect for her beliefs, Dad said a prayer of thanks and asked a blessing on the meal, to a God he didn’t see as merciful, like she did. He might not have even believed He existed—though he did occasionally mention God, in a speculative way.

“I heard the Germans attacked the Russians,” Wyatt said, around a mouthful of potatoes.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Mami warned him.

Wyatt swallowed his food and said, “I thought they were allies.”

Dad nodded. “The USSR was part of the Axis for a while. Remember: they both invaded Poland.”

“Why did the Germans attack them, then?”

“It was bound to happen,” Dad said. “One of them was going to betray the other one, sooner or later. Hitler wanted to strike first, before Stalin’s numerical advantage could be fully brought to bear.”

“Why?”

“The National Socialists want ‘lebensraum‘,” Dad said. “Space to live. They need real estate for their population to grow, so their empire will last a thousand years—and they think the best lebensraum is to their east. The International Socialists, on the other hand, want the entire world under their system, as Marx envisioned it. Expanding into eastern Europe is a good start.”

Wyatt looked confused. “If both Germany and Russia attacked Poland, how come the Allies only declared war on Germany?”

Dad smiled at his son. “I want you to remember that question. Almost nobody has the guts or the brains to ask it. Maybe one day we’ll have the answer. And the answer might just be the same answer for most of the other questions about this ‘great crusade’.”

“Are we gonna join the war, Daddy?” Lana asked.

Dad nodded. “Yup.”

“Why?” Mami asked. “It has nothing to do with us.”

“Roosevelt wants us in the war against Germany,” Dad said. “Just like Wilson did last time. He’ll figure out a way to get us in it. Remember: Germany isn’t the only Axis country. But they are the only ones living with the consequences of us joining the last war against them. Not everybody has learned that lesson the way they did.”

“You think I’ll be old enough to go fight the Germans when it happens, Dad?” Wyatt asked.

Mami gasped. “God be merciful! Why would you even ask that, Mijo?”

“You won’t,” Dad said. “And be careful what you wish for.”

“But didn’t you fight in the Great War?” Wyatt asked.

“No.”

“But where did you get all your scars?”

“Never mind that.”

“Will Pedro have to go fight the Germans?” Lana asked, with a concerned glance at me.

“Let’s pray he won’t,” Mami said. “And enough of these war rumors. Let’s talk about something pleasant and enjoy our time together.”

When we had finished supper, Dad gave Mami a shoulder massage while she supervised Lana and Debbie doing dishes, Wyatt went outside to lock the chickens up in the coop. When he returned, he switched on the radio in the parlor. After some humming and whining, we could hear the Ink Spots crooning “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”

That seemed to be the sentiment of most Americans at the time. And Mami.

Dad had been trying to dissuade me from military service. For now, football was enough to slake my primordial attraction to combat. And I didn’t doubt his warnings about Vietnam and the conflicts that followed. If Wyatt stayed in his native timestream, he would probably be sent to fight in Korea—which became the first obvious sacrifice of American blood on the altar of globalism. But I still felt a compulsion to be a fighting man.

Mami turned and gave Dad a wistful look. He took her by the hand and led her into the parlor. I drained my glass, set it on the counter next to the sink, and followed them.

My adopted parents danced as if they were the only two people in the world. Mami looked like she was in heaven, Dad looked pretty content, too.

The song ended and Artie Shaw’s “Frenesi” wafted out of the radio speaker. Now they laughed together and moved to the faster beat, with dance steps Mami had helped teach me.

I strolled to the library, retrieved a pulp magazine I had left there, returned to the parlor and sat on the couch to read it. While our parents danced, Wyatt brought in the components of a model airplane and resumed building it on some old newspaper he spread on the hardwood floor. When finished with the dishes, the girls also joined us in the parlor.

We all amused ourselves in different ways, but the whole family did it all together, at the same time and place. We preferred it this way. How different this world was, to the one I was born into!

The DJ read the script for a Blue Coal commercial, before playing the next record. The music got Mami right into the groove. A big, booming rhythm section blazed a boogie-woogie foundation and she shook her hips to the pounding beat of “Drum Boogie” by Gene Krupa’s orchestra. Debbie began laughing at Mami’s gyrations. Soon Lana joined in, clapping her hands in merriment. Even Wyatt began to snicker.

“Laugh it up, funny boy,” Dad told Wyatt, guiding Mami around the floor.

Watching games on TV was my preferred way to spend a Sunday evening—or playing videogames when it wasn’t football season. But I never felt as good after one of those entertaining Sundays as I did after times like this.

I bid my family goodbye a little later—taking Dad’s Packard, which I had used to make the jump here to the Orange Grove. When I had driven far enough along Dad’s private road that I wouldn’t be visible from the house, I engaged the warp generator.

Knowing what to expect made the jump seem like no big deal, but I experienced the same queasy feeling, the same brief visual distortion and sucking away of sound. When all my senses rushed back to normal, I was outside 1960 Bakersfield on a Friday afternoon.

I drove through town to the house I had lived in through junior high and high school. My Stude was sitting in the driveway. I parked the Packard in the garage.

Salvatora came out to greet me. I threw her up in the air, caught her, then bear-hugged her while blowing fart-like sounds against her cheek. She protested, but laughed despite herself. She was another of Dad’s kids who assumed I was her brother. Not half-brother or step-brother—the bona fide article.

Salvatora was five years old, now. I had been so busy doing my own thing that I hadn’t thought much about her. To see her innocent face was to feel joy. She had been speaking in full sentences for quite a while and seemed pretty bright.

“Guess what we finally got?” she asked, leading me by the hand inside the house.

“Mumps,” I guessed. “Measles. Chicken pox!”

She grinned and shook her head. “A television!”

“Wow,” I said. “Dad finally gave in, huh?”

“Well, he did something to it so that Mom can only watch certain shows. And I’m only allowed to watch when Mom or Dad let me. He wants me to read, and to play outside when I don’t have a new book.”

“What an ogre!” I said, tickling her.

Angelina came around the corner from the living room, greeted me with arms extended and a high-pitched squeal. “Welcome home, my college scholar!”

She was a Sicilian woman who spoke English with a heavy accent but was easily more gorgeous and shapely than any Hollywood starlet. Out of loyalty to Mami, it had been difficult for me to accept her being with Dad. Mami was still Mamita, and always would be, but Angelina eventually won me over. I shouldn’t think of her as “one of Dad’s mistresses.” She believed she was his wife. His only wife.

“Hi Mom.” I gave her a hug, lifting her off the ground, but quickly set her down, feeling a bit guilty and weird for noticing how attractive she was.

“I didn’t know you were coming back this weekend,” she said. “And so early! Please tell me you didn’t speed all the way to get here.”

“My classes ended early today. I wanted to check in on some of my friends. Go cruising tonight and tomorrow.”

She glared an icy look at me, placing one hand on her hip. “What a thing to say!”

Salvatora bit her lip and grimaced. “No Isaac, you came here to see us.”

“Okay,” I said. “I came here to see you.”

Angelina looked nothing like me, with her dark hair, dark eyes, and dark complexion. But surprisingly few friends or neighbors ever mentioned it. I did bear a strong resemblance to Dad, so maybe folks assumed his genes were dominant in me. For her part, Angelina never referred to me as anything other than her firstborn son. She had been conspiring with Dad and me to perpetrate my cover story for so long, she might have forgotten it wasn’t true.

Looking at Salvatora, it was easy to assume we were siblings, since she had high cheekbones like me and a (less-pronounced than mine) hump on the bridge of her nose.

“When is your father getting back?” Angelina asked.

“I assume tomorrow night. He’s been working on a generator at one of his properties.”

She nodded. She knew he owned lots of real estate and spent a lot of time at different places running different business ventures. That was technically true, just as my comment about fixing a generator technically was. What she didn’t know was that his properties were at several different coordinates in the continuum, and he had a diverse harem scattered around time and space with them.

I sometimes speculated that Angelina came from a Mafia family. It might explain why she didn’t ask questions about Dad’s business and would probably take what secrets she did know (like about me not being their child) to her grave.

We ate supper at six, like normal. Then I drove my Studebaker down to the Strip.

With windows down and rock & roll blaring from car speakers, I joined the unofficial two-way parade forming at dusk along the main drag. Most businesses were closed, but the business of youth was just getting started. Nearly every teenager in town was cruising the Strip just like me.

Of course, I was still a teenager too, even though off to college during weekdays. I was rare for being a college student back home this time of year, and also rare for being alone in my car.

Every teenaged boy with a functioning automobile and a driver’s license was piloting something up-and-down the Strip at some point that night: hot rods, lead sleds, street machines…or sometimes cars borrowed from parents. Those without wheels, or too young to drive, crowded in front and back seats around somebody who could. They joked and yelled to each other through open windows; leaned against fenders in parking lots shooting the breeze; sat in their cars at Burger City or other drive-ins eating and drinking sodas. Most of them were cheerful. Some were rowdy.

I took in the scene academically at first. Dad once quoted an old axiom about eras and generations to me:

 

Hard times create strong men.

Strong men create easy times.

Easy times create weak men.

Weak men create hard times.

 

Back at my native coordinates, weak men controlled society’s institutions. Having visited the relative future from then, I knew that those weak men would, in fact, create hard times. But in 1960 Bakersfield, we enjoyed unbelievably smooth sailing.  Strong men had survived the Great Depression and World War Two, then built an idyllic paradise for their children to inherit.

Bakersfield was what it was because of the exodus of migrant workers escaping from the Dust Bowl a generation ago during the privations (some with natural origins, but most man-made) of the New Deal. Most of my carefree teenage peers were children of desperate men who had to scrape and claw their way to a living, who usually couldn’t afford a car of their own, much less burn gas on purpose cruising. And they had worked too long of hours on the farms and oil fields to party every Friday and Saturday night.

The word “teenager” wasn’t even invented until my adopted generation came along, with their allowances, their own cars, freedom from labor in the family business, and a still relatively free market dreaming up all sorts of products that catered to their every whim.

My analytical train of thought kept getting interrupted by people waving and calling to me from open car windows. I hadn’t been gone so long that they had forgotten who their starting quarterback had been. I waved and called back.

Most of these offspring of Okies had their car radios tuned to KUZZ, which played country-western, honky-tonk, and rockabilly. I was one of the rebels, who preferred Ross “the Boss” Beaucamp and the records he spun on KDIG.

“Dig it on the K-Dig,” Ross the Boss was saying, as I eased to a stop at a red light. “Elvis Presley may be gone with the draft, but his tunes still send us. Now I’d like to remind you—”

A blue ’55 Chevy pulled abreast of the Stude and I could feel somebody staring at me. I turned my radio down to hear the Chevy’s engine as I craned my neck to look. By the sound, the overhead-valve V-8 was a little warmed-over. I also heard Charlie Rich trying to sound like Elvis singing “Lonely Weekends.” Obviously, the son-of-an-Okie at the wheel had his radio tuned to KUZZ. He and his passengers regarded me with stony faces. He revved his engine. I stared back and revved mine. I recognized the driver and one passenger from somewhere. Maybe they had been sophomores or juniors during my senior year.

Neither of us said a word to each other. We didn’t need words to know that when that light turned green, we were gonna floor the gas and see who could make it to the next red light first.

The light turned green. Our engines roared. The Stude squatted down and shot forward, laying twin patches of rubber as I banged through the gears. The Chevy was outclassed in every way. Even the rear end was a one-legger. He just couldn’t match the power I applied to the pavement. I blasted through two intersections before a red light caught me and I had to brake hard, setting the Stude down on its nose at the crosswalk. I checked the mirror. The Chevy decelerated rapidly and screeched around a corner onto a side street. As it turned, an arm shot out the window, flipping me the bird.

“Yer mama, Jaeger!” a voice echoed down the street.

I guess not everybody who remembered me was a fan.

A yellow ’48 Ford rolled to a stop next to me at the stop light. A chorus of voices cheered. Melvin Jurado and some other Pachucos I remembered grinned at me.

“What’s up, Jaeger?” Melvin greeted.

“Mel!” I called back. “Long time no see!”

“I’m glad I was here to see that,” he said. “Kenny’s been bragging about that ’55 ever since you left town, man!”

“It turns corners behind me and sneaks away real good,” I replied.

He nodded with a toothy grin.

The light turned green and we eased through the intersection, keeping pace so we could carry on our conversation through our open windows.

Melvin pointed at the pimple-faced boy in the passenger seat. “Man, I was just telling him when we saw you: can’t nobody in town beat you. You’re still the champ!”

“You still running a flathead?” I asked, knowing the answer already from the sound.

“Yeah, but I’m building an engine I got from the junk yard. You just wait, Jaeger: when I get everything ready, I’ll come looking for you!”

“Okay, Mel. You better weld your doors on.”

“You wait, Jaeger—you’ll see. Hey, watch out for Pierce! Last we saw him he was hiding in that alley beside Wheeler’s!”

Pierce was one of the cops who prowled the main drag on weekends, looking to hand out citations to young people doing what I had just done.

A few more minutes and I became separated from Mel in the traffic. As I passed Burger City, somebody cried my name. I craned my neck to scan the parking lot as I passed. My eyes barely had time to register a waving arm and long blonde hair.

At the next opportunity, I whipped around and headed back toward Burger City. I parked right next to the convertible Buick the blonde was leaning against. Two other girls were with her and they all covered their mouths and tittered, glancing at me and each other. The blonde looked familiar but I couldn’t place her.

“Mule Skinner Blues” was blaring from all the radios turned to KUZZ. I shut down the engine, opened the door and walked over to the girls. Their nervous mannerisms intensified as I drew close.

“Hi,” I said.

The blonde bit her lip, smiling, looked away, then met my gaze. “Howdy, Ike.”

The closer I got, the younger she looked.

The other girls greeted me, bashfully, but I concentrated on the blonde. “Do I know your name?”

In the lights of the Strip, I thought she blushed. “It’s Dinah.”

“Your face looks familiar.”

“I’m Kip’s sister.”

“No kidding? Oh, hey. No, I see the resemblance,” I said. “I remember, now. How old are you?”

“Fourteen. How old are you?”

I exchanged small talk with her and her friends for a few minutes, but then found somewhere else to be. They were just too young.

I cruised some more.

This was the social network in postwar America. There was a sort of addictive zeitgeist to it, too.

The cheery, boisterous vibes were infectious. Everybody was here to socialize and have fun. Some pursued fun by street racing. Some by pulling pranks on others. Some by gossiping. But by far, the most popular way to seek fun was by flirting, and making time with the opposite sex.

Nobody batted an eye at all the money or time being wasted. The country wasn’t in a depression or fighting a war—just the opposite. Nobody was worried about where their next meal was coming from, or if they or their fathers or brothers might be killed overseas. The worst problems in this universe would be getting grounded, suffering a flat tire, or failing to find a date.

Easy times.

Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” warbled out of radios all along the street until I got to Hep Shakes—Burger City’s primary competition. There, radios were turned to KDIG. I parked and strolled over to the pay phone. I called Blanca’s house and got her mother, who told me she was out.

I approached the walk-up window, dodged a car-hop, and heard Rosie and the Originals’ “Angel Baby” blare out of the nearby radio speakers. It was then that I noticed about half the crowd at Hep Shakes was Hispanic.

The world stopped as every Chicana sang along, and every Chicano either sang or bopped along, too. It was like a trance or something.

On Oldsmobile pulled up to an order stand. It was packed full of Latinas, and every single one of them was singing “Angel Baby” along with Rosie. They remained in the car and made no move to get out until the song was over. Then there was a collective sigh, the doors opened, and the girls spilled out. Three of them mobbed to the restroom, jabbering all the way.

I ordered a strawberry shake and a burger with fries, thinking I might take them inside and sit in something besides the Studebaker’s seat for a while. Once at a booth, I watched the scene outside. Now “Alley Oop” was playing and nobody was in a trance. The girls returned from the bathroom and I recognized Fatyma Benavides.

She was a year behind me in school, and a Top Tier scorcher. Blanca was also Top Tier, but with facial features that had a streetwise, cruel quality to them. Fatyma’s beauty struck me as of a more innocent, vulnerable flavor. I had wanted to ask her out for years, but we had never been between romances at the same time. I thumped the plate glass window with the heel of my hand until I got her attention.

She stopped in her tracks while, looking irritated, she turned to face me through the glass. She showed me the FGGE (Female Glare of Guarded Evaluation) before recognition registered on her face.

“Ike Jaeger?”

I wiped my mouth with a napkin, got up from the booth, and walked outside to meet her. That she waited for me was a good sign.

“I did not know you were in town,” she said as I approached, with a musical lilt in her voice.

“Here for the weekend,” I said. “What are you up to?”

She shrugged. “Me, Delores and the girls are just hanging out.”

“Ain’t that kinda’ crowded?”

She clasped her hands behind her back and twisted at the waist so that her shoulders rotated one way, then the other. Her head was tilted slightly downward but her eyes rolled up to stay fixed on my gaze. “Why it is crowded?”

I had learned the customs and rituals of postwar cruising pretty well over the last few years.

Not everybody wanted to admit it, but everybody who wasn’t already dating somebody hoped to meet somebody and hit it off. (Of course, some who were already dating wanted to meet somebody new and jump ship.) Some were lonely. Some were hurting or humiliated from a break-up and didn’t know what to do by themselves. Some were jealous of friends who were with somebody, or of the person dating their crush.

Pride and yearning met at the intersection of Irreverence and Hilarity. Most amorous teenagers at these coordinates masked their insecurity by hanging out with a group. They covered their desperation with forced mirth. They laughed at everything—including a lot of stuff that simply wasn’t funny. That was all part of showing the world that they took nothing seriously. To be without a date was pitiful, they assumed, but to be sad or angry about it was worse. So they clung to their cliques and pretended to be above it all. Everything was funny, and they fed off each other’s fake amusement. Sure, we don’t have dates—because it’s just not that important to us! Can’t you see that we’re just enjoying life? Why—you don’t want to go out with me, do you?

Still, some were, due to various circumstances, unable to cruise as part of a group. The bravest of them came to Cruise Night anyway, alone. Girls rarely did anything alone, but once in a while, they put themselves out there with no backup. As a rule, such girls were Tier Three and lower. But a bad breakup or other scenario could make even the most attractive girls desperate. They would use timing and trajectory to cross paths with a boy or group of boys, hoping one (the “cutest” one, of course) would make a pass. But she had to be cool while presenting herself as bait. The safest demeanor to adopt was distraction. She was just so preoccupied with walking to some destination (or ordering a shake and fries, or window shopping at a closed store, or making a call from a payphone) that she wouldn’t even notice if you didn’t chat her up. And if you did feed her a line, she might even pretend not to hear so you’d have to repeat yourself.

Cruise Night was kind of like a talent show, but everybody was performing from a repertoire of just three or four types of acts.

I didn’t mind coming alone—not because I was necessarily brave, but simply because I knew from experience that the stigma of being dateless was self-imposed and mostly imaginary. As long as you weren’t creepy or awkward, or clueless at talking to girls, getting dates was easier this way. It would be even easier for solo girls, but fear and self-awareness kept most of them from taking the easy path.

“Well,” I told Fatyma, “I have an empty passenger seat. Not crowded at all in my car.”

She cocked her hips and twisted her mouth in a sort of skeptical smirk that suggested I wasn’t trying hard enough.

“You hungry?” I asked.

“For why?”

“‘Cause I was about to have a bite. You could have one with me, my treat, and maybe go for a ride with me afterwards.”

“The slick football star,” she said, with a grin that was now hard to read. “This is how you pick up all the college girls?”

“Naw. For them, all I have to do is show them my advanced anatomy textbook and wiggle my eyebrows. ”

“Ai-yai-yai!” She seemed to be genuinely amused, now.

“How ’bout it?” I prodded.

“I could eat something, I think,” she said.

I opened the door for her. We went inside and she joined me at the booth. After she had ordered, I asked, “So what happened to what’s-his-face?”

“You mean Juan? Broke up,” she replied with a win-some-lose-some gesture. “Where is Blanca?”

I shrugged. “I called. She wasn’t home.”

She nodded. “She could not shut up about you for a while. Now she say it is not so serious.”

“I guess it’s not.”

“You do this so much? Date girls you are not serious with?”

“Don’t tell me Fatyma: you’re one of those chicks who demands a proposal before you’ll agree to a first date.”

Her guarded expression finally lightened up and an easy smile spread over her face. “No. I am not so strict. Not always.”

“Are you gonna be tonight?”

“I am here talking to you, no?”

“Okay. Live a little.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You just did.”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head as if exasperated. “Why me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why me? All the other girls in the car. All the girls on the Strip tonight. Everybody knows all the gringas would jump to ride with you. Why me?”

“Why not you?”

“For real, Ike. I am serious. You never ask me out when you were at the school. But now you do. Why?”

“Because you’re not with Juan. Or Luis. Or Mianjel. You were always with somebody.”

“Me?” She shook her head and her already dark complexion got darker. Like she was blushing.

“I saw you walking from school once, my junior year. I saw in my rear view mirror—I had already passed by. I thought, ‘I should go offer her a lift. I should U-turn and go back and offer’. But I thought, ‘Nah, just keep going… ‘”

“You did not!”

“‘Nah, that’s a creep move—it’ll scare her. Well, she’s walking alone, so maybe she’s between boyfriends. Nah, I don’t think she likes gringos.’ So I just drove on down the street.”

“Between boyfriends!” she cried, covering her mouth and taking a swipe at me. She wanted to feign outrage, like I had just called her a slut, but was having a giggle fit.

“I figured I’d see you at your locker the next day during passing period, as usual, and I’d make the offer that day. But when I saw you, ol’ Luis was talking to you, and you were making eyes at him.”

“What? No. Nuh-uh! You are too much a liar, Ike.”

I placed one hand against my chest and held my other hand up so that the palm faced her. “Cross my heart. Scout’s honor.”

“You are playing with me, I think. Really, Ike? You swear?”

I showed her my index finger, put on a solemn expression, rose from the booth, and marched to the juke box. I dropped a dime in, selected “This I Swear” by the Skyliners, and watched her as the record began to play. She busted out laughing when she recognized the song, then shook her head at me as I returned to the table.

I’m pretty sure she was flattered, but concealed it under a big show of disapproval because I was acting silly.

And I was. But girls liked silly behavior in certain contexts.

“So, you were scared of Luis?”

“I didn’t think you would just dump him for me,” I said. “Would you have?”

“Well, it is nice to know you are not so arrogant,” she said.

The ice broken, we chatted until finished eating. Her amigas took turns strolling by on the walkway outside, smiling, waving, or winking to her as they passed, but hardly acknowledging me. They eventually crammed back in the Oldsmobile without her and rolled out onto the Strip.

After I paid for our food and drinks, we walked together out to the Stude. We didn’t hold hands and she didn’t take my arm. She seemed comfortable with me by then, but I didn’t think she’d appreciate me trying to move that fast.

I opened the passenger door for her and she climbed in. I went around, slid behind the wheel, and started the engine.

“This is the loudest car in California,” she remarked. “I always hear when you are in town—even miles and miles away.”

“Part of being the fastest is the noise.”

She nodded and pursed her lovely lips. “You are maybe a little arrogant, I think.”

We made a couple circuits of the Strip, then I stopped for gas.

“How you doing?” I asked Fatyma. “Anything you’d like to do?”

“Like what, Ike?”

I shrugged. “Bowling alley’s open. Golden Gate Golf. Or I could take you home if you’re bored or turning into a pumpkin.”

“Why do boys say that?” she asked. “Cinderella no turns into a pumpkin—her carriage does. And I am not bored. I have fun.”

“Okay,” I said. “You wanna cruise the Strip some more?”

She shrugged. “Is there somewhere else you want to go?”

“We could always go to the submarine races.” I watched her for a reaction.

“If you want,” she said, fluttering her eyelids.

I left the Strip and set a course for the river.

Fatyma was pleasant company. I liked that she would wave to friends in other cars, but didn’t try to make a big production of it to catch everybody’s attention…like cheerleaders and others would do. It was a shame I hadn’t been able to date her in school.

The traffic thickened as we got close to the Point. When we reached the river bank there were at least a dozen cars parked already. I prowled around looking for a spot, with my headlights off. It wasn’t cool to sweep your lights over other cars, or park too close to somebody else.

Again, I considered the historical/generational lottery. Nobody there and then needed to worry about finding a job, but 20 years before, that was a big concern. Nobody had come to the Point because they were shipping out tomorrow for overseas and this might be the last time their sweetheart ever saw them again—though plenty of that had happened 15-18 years ago. Nope—they were parking here simply because they could and they wanted to.

I didn’t want to be a weak man, but I sure loved living in easy times.

“Why do you call this ‘submarine races’?” Fatyma wondered. “Because submarines come down the river at night? You buy tickets?”

Was she really so innocent? “I dunno.”

“Oh, you know very well what happens here, I think, Isaac Jaeger.”

“I know people who come watch them seem to really enjoy it.”

I pulled into an empty spot, engaged the emergency brake and killed the engine with the transmission still in gear. Without the rumble of my engine, the night fell quiet. I turned the radio back on, softly, hoping Ross the Boss would help me out by setting the right mood. A commercial ended and he spun “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs. That wasn’t too far off the mark.

“So you want to ‘really enjoy’ this night with me, Ike?”

“Don’t you want to enjoy this night?”

“Maybe if the submarines have a very close, exciting race. Should we walk down to the water for a good look, maybe?”

“Knock it off,” I said. “What do you call it, anyway?”

She giggled, then said, “I always hear it called ‘Lovers’ Lane’.”

“You’re not so innocent,” I said.

“I am not?” Fatyma was a goddess in broad daylight, but the moonlight really enhanced her beauty. She didn’t have to try to look cute, but when she did, it was overwhelming.

The Zodiacs’ lyrics couldn’t have been timed better:

 

Won’t ya place your sweet lips to mi-i-i-ah-ah-ah-i-ine?

Won’t ya say you love me…all of the ti-ah-ah-ah-i-ime?

Stay!

Whoa-wo-wo-yeah just a little bit longer…

Please!

Please, please, please please, tell-a-me you’re goin’ to!

 

I scooted out from under the wheel, close to her. She scooted along the bench seat toward me.

“Isaac?” She bit her luscious lower lip and appeared almost bashful for a moment.

“What’s on your mind?”

“I have something to tell you.”

“Tell me.”

Her eyelids drooped as her mouth drew so close to mine that I felt the heat of her breath. “I would have dumped Luis for you, I think.”

Ross the Boss provided the mood music while I got caught up in a starburst of passion.

Easy times, indeed. Life was so good, it felt as if the easy times would never end.

Paradox Chapter Reveal: “Culture Shock”

I blogged about my decision to break Paradox into a series. I thought of the idea literally years before I committed to doing it. The cause of my reluctance was my compulsion to spin one self-contained, stand-alone saga with time travel, babes, action, football, and nuggets of wisdom for boys and men, and that’s what my rough draft was.

Having made the commitment to make it episodic, I then had to tweak the respective episodes so they wouldn’t read like literary fragments with no context. So each episode had to have it’s own story question, and it’s own wrap-up. But I didn’t want to contrive some kind of cliffhanger to end every book on. A cliffhanger here and there is fine, can even be good, but when they’re forced over and over again, I think it’s weak storytelling. Remember: I’m a reader, too. I bought a virtual “box set” once, with every book ending on a cliffhanger. I thought it was manipulative and annoying.

Anyway, I had to tweak stuff here and there, re-explain stuff from previous books, add on to first chapters, and in some cases write new chapters to fit this episodic format.

Book One (Escaping Fate) ends after the still-preadolescent protagonist gets a new identity, a new family, new “home” coordinates in the time-space continuum, and is about to begin his new life. In the mammoth-sized rough draft, the next plot point is that he starts that new life. But now I have to tell that part in a different book. What if A new reader picks this one up first for whatever reason? What if a reader finished Book One, but there’s been a delay in between and some of the details are fuzzy in his memory? This chapter was written to guide those readers into the new episode:

My Spanish wasn’t good enough yet to follow such a rapid-fire conversation, with advanced vocabulary. Still, I wouldn’t characterize it as an argument.

Mami sounded confused, sad, and worried. She never argued with Dad—at least that I ever saw.  Dad took good care of her, and she was easy to please anyway. Whatever disagreements they might have had must have been resolved quickly and respectfully, because they were never angry with each other. But that morning she was distraught, and pleading, while Dad was resolute and unmoving.

I stepped outside the adobe hacienda into the warm California air and the scent of citrus. I’d never seen Mami unhappy and didn’t know how to handle it. As much as I would have liked to restore her to her normal happy state of mind, this was grownup business and I had no jurisdiction, I strolled into the nearest row of orange trees. Quick as Tarzan, I climbed my favorite tree up to the highest branch that would support my weight. Normally I would read a comic book or one of Dad’s pulp magazines at my normal perch. This time I just took a seat and swung my feet back and forth.

I had witnessed more than my share of grownup bickering, and preferred to be somewhere else when it took place. Back in 1988 St. Louis, my biological parents argued just about whenever they saw each other. It wasn’t all that often, so I was thankful for that. Evidently they could only put up with each other long enough to make a baby. I guess it was all downhill from there.

When the Erasers murdered my biological family, I was shocked and sad for a while, but I didn’t miss them—except for Abel, my younger half-brother, sometimes.

I shifted my gaze from the huge, flat-roofed adobe structure over to the fake barn that housed Dad’s “Temperature Wheel”—the ingenious engine that turned the generator which powered the estate. To the south of both structures was a separate, enormous building with multiple garage bays. Some were garages, some were aircraft hangars. Dad kept them all under lock and key, not so much because thieves might find their way to the Orange Grove, but because some of the vehicles he stored there had not been conceived or manufactured yet.

Before I get too far along, I should probably explain that “Dad” was really my Uncle Simon. Even before my rescue from the time-traveling assassins who erased the existence of my family, my uncle had lifted me out of a pretty bleak childhood. It wasn’t him who saved me from the Erasers, though. That was one of his doppelgängers. Yeah—it gets confusing.

And no, the little Mexican woman inside the house wasn’t my biological mother, either—though she was my real mother, so far as I was concerned.

They came outside, now, Dad’s arm around her shoulders. She looked to the left, then the right, and called out, “Pedrito?”

Ya viene, Mama!” I replied, scrambling down the tree.

I hit the ground running toward her. She wiped her eyes and spread her arms, leaving Dad behind by a few paces. When I reached her, she embraced me with the warmth and affection I had become addicted to in a short time. I hugged her back and she planted kisses on my forehead.

“Oh Mijo, I mees you already!” she cried, giving me an intense squeeze. She let go and stepped back, taking my hands and meeting my gaze. Her brown eyes were glossy and edged with sadness. She switched to Spanish, but spoke slowly so I could follow. “Don’t ever forget that this is your home, Pedrito. Don’t ever forget that I love you and I am here for you. If you ever need anything, come home.”

“Dad says I’ll get to see you every weekend, Mamita,” I said.

“Don’t act like such a grown man—weekends are not enough! This house will be so empty without you, my precious one.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to stay here with Mami anyway, but Dad was sure he had a better arrangement.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too, Mami,” I said.

I knew nothing at all about love, with this one exception: I loved her. She was the best mother anyone could ever hope for. Were it not for football and Gloria Benake, Dad would have had to pry me away from 1934, and this woman.

Football.

Just months ago (in relative time) I had been indifferent toward the game. Now it was my obsession. Not just because it was simulated combat—although I did like that aspect of it. There was something else about it that appealed to me which I couldn’t identify. It was more than a game. More than a sport. On a football team you were part of something. I had never been part of anything.

I wasn’t great at punting or kicking, but I had good hands and could catch the ball if it came anywhere near me. I could run the ball too. And when it came to passing, I could really sling that pigskin. I thrived on solving the tactical problems presented by the other team. My instincts led me to call the right plays in most situations. A shoo-in for quarterback, right?

But my Achilles’ Heel was my leadership ability…or lack thereof. Dad had broken the bad news to me that I was a loner, not a leader. I had bristled at this pronouncement, but he was probably right. I had been alone more often than not as far back as I could remember. I had pals at school, but never really any deep friendships. Nobody in my biological family valued my company. I was alienated back in my old life, and socially inept, for lack of healthy models to emulate. When very young, I hated my isolation. By the time Uncle Si/Dad came into my life, I had come to prefer it most of the time.

Without much experience functioning in a group, and an acquired disinterest in such, of course I was clueless about how to lead one. So I wasn’t a natural leader, by any sober evaluation.

My desperate hope was that leadership could be learned.

Dad and I watched movies together, periodically. Typically we watched them twice in a row, playing armchair anthropologist. I didn’t say much on the second viewing, mostly listening to Dad’s analysis. He pointed out specific human interactions and compared them to what happens in real life. If they were realistically depicted, he would pass judgment on how smart, right, and/or effective the characters’ words and actions were. I learned a lot from his commentary about group dynamics while watching war movies. I had learned some leadership principles already, just in the months since I had come to know him.

Maybe I could rebuild myself. If I learned the lessons Dad was teaching me, perhaps I could be a part of something great. Maybe I could become a great quarterback—and not just in my own mind. I wanted to rise to the level that coaches, other players, people who watched games…they would recognize not only that I was part of something, but I was also great at something. Something I loved.

Normally, I was as uninterested in validation as I was in social interaction. But I wanted validation in this one area. I wanted it bad.

Dad and I climbed into his big Duesenberg roadster and drove off to start a new life, while Mami stood in the drive, waving goodbye.

The warm wind pulled gently at my hair as we drove down the long gravel driveway. When we were no longer within sight of Mami and the house, Dad opened a panel on the dashboard, cued up our new coordinates on the warp interface, and initiated the jump.

“Jumping” through a dimensional warp to different space-time coordinates gives you the sensation of driving into a swirling vortex that swallows up all sight and sound for a moment. When your eyes and ears latch back onto what seems normal, you’re somewhere else, somewhen else.

In this case, we were on a lonely road outside Bakersfield in 1953.

The road took us to a warehouse Dad owned in a burgeoning industrial park, where he swapped the Doozy for his hopped-up ’41 Willys. We drove that into the residential neighborhood where Dad owned a typical middle class home with front-and-back yards.

“I’ve been thinking about the Big Spooky,” I said, now that the wind noise didn’t interfere with conversation.

“Oh yeah?” Dad replied, eyebrows raised. He was the first adult I remember ever taking an interest in what I thought about anything.

“What if it has something to do with the Erasers?”

He already looked skeptical.

The Big Spooky was something he introduced me to during our summer vacation. At certain coordinates, I would feel an overwhelming sensation of dread for no apparent reason. It always felt momentous, or tumultuous. Sometimes the flavor was downright repulsive. Other times, it had an almost seductive quality. Dad had encountered it before and conducted an impromptu experiment to see if I felt it at the same times and places he did.

“Hear me out,” I said, “okay? The government covered up whatever happened in Roswell in 1947. Right? Wouldn’t the Erasers want to cover it up, too? I mean, if somebody was able to get the story out about what really happened, that could cause a split in the timestream. So the Erasers have to wipe out whoever had the real story, witnesses, and whoever else knew them. And we feel the Big Spooky there because of the deaths.”

Dad didn’t say anything right away, so I pushed on.

“Same thing at Jeckyll Island. Somebody found out what they were doing, and was gonna blow the whistle. Boom. In come the Erasers. That’s the obvious conclusion for the JFK assassination, right? The Olympiad? I mean, the Nazis had all kinds of secrets that could have split the timestream if the world found out what they were planning before the war even started. And maybe there was some technology that couldn’t be shown at the World’s Fair. If it had, it might have led to a split in the stream, so the Erasers had to kill off whoever would have introduced that tech..”

Dad sighed, but kept his tone bright. “I don’t think so, Sprout. I’ve been around enough death to know that, by itself, it doesn’t cause the Big Spooky. Was the Big Spooky there at the trailer park when the Erasers got your relatives?”

Anybody else would probably have avoided mentioning the murder of my biological family, assuming it was too sensitive a subject to broach. But Dad was painfully blunt—especially with me. Also, it often seemed he could read my mind, so it was no surprise he somehow understood that he could broach the subject now without triggering a flashback or traumatic breakdown.

I had been returning to the trailer from my daily run when my big dumb German Shepherd started going nuts. She was not very vigilant or protective, for a dog, but she knew something was wrong that day. I finally realized it, too, when I saw my biological mother’s body being carried into what looked, on first glance, like a hole in reality. I couldn’t see what was carrying her at first, but after a moment I noticed the visual anomalies all around the trailer. Then I saw Abel’s body folded at the waist, arms and legs dangling. He bobbed up and down as one of those patterns of distorted light carried him toward that hole in reality.

The Erasers, and their vehicles, were cloaked by an active camouflage similar to what “the Predator” wore in that Arnold Swarzenneger movie from a couple years ago.

Years ago? It was all decades in the future, now.

Anyway…the “hole in reality” was just an open cargo door in one of their camouflaged vehicles. After the hit was executed, the assassin team were disposing of the bodies. Erasing people from existence. They murdered my biological family, and my poor stupid dog, trying to kill me.

I puffed my cheeks and told Dad, “No, you’re right.”

He flashed me a sidelong grin and backhanded me playfully in the chest. “You’ve got the brain of an engineer. Can’t help but try to figure stuff out.”

He turned onto the street where my new home awaited. A middle-aged mailman walking on the tree-lined sidewalk with a canvas sack slung over one shoulder waved cheerfully at us as we passed. Across the street, two young mothers who had been pushing baby strollers in opposite directions on that sidewalk were having an animated conversation with each other. Both their smiling faces turned toward us and they waved, too, before resuming their discussion. Further down the street, a man, perhaps in his 20s or 30s, was playing fetch with a fuzzy little dog in an unfenced front yard, apparently having a great time.

Now I understood how Marty McFly must have felt in that scene from Back to the Future when he first sees his home town as it had been in the 1950s. In relative time, it had been months since my reality had been immersed in that St. Louis trailer park in 1988. But the radical contrast between that and this world that  previous generations knew (and took for granted) still left me flabbergasted. I half-expected all the doors of those nice, clean, middle-class houses to slam open and an army of the undead emerge. The friendly, carefree people who waved to us would shapeshift into bloodthirsty monsters who would converge on us and drag us, screaming, from Dad’s car.

Dad’s expression turned solemn. “Remember our conversation, Sprout: the Erasers are looking for you. It’s a vast continuum, and they’re not sure where you could be hiding. You should be safe at these coordinates, so long as you don’t do anything to draw unnecessary attention. What’s your name?”

“Isaac,” I replied. “Peter is my middle name, now.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “What’s our last name?”

“Jaeger.”

“Who am I?”

“My dad.”

“Who is Angelina?”

“She’s my mother.”

This was a sore point with me. Dad lived different lives at different coordinates, and in each life I knew of, he had a different woman—or “spinning plate” as I had come to think of them. I considered this to be unfaithfulness to Mami by him. By extension, me accepting this arrangement with another woman as my mother made me feel like I was being disloyal, too. I didn’t need any mother but Mami, and believed Dad shouldn’t need anyone but her, either.

“Good,” he said. “Make sure you always call her ‘Mom,’ and think of her that way. She’s a nice lady, so give her a chance.”

I nodded, not saying anything, lest it come out as a grumble.

“I’m really glad you and Hortensia think so highly of each other,” he added. (Hortensia was Mami’s name.) “And I’m sorry for how confusing this might be. But trust me: it’s necessary. You’re gonna live the best possible life this way. And I’ll make sure you get to spend time with her on the regular.”

I nodded again and he seemed satisfied.

“Stick to our cover story any time somebody asks you a personal question,” he reminded me. “We’re just normal people, with normal problems and normal aspirations. Copy?”

“That’s a good copy,” I replied, using the lingo I had learned from him.

Our house looked very similar to all the other houses in the neighborhood. He braked the Willys to a stop just past the mailbox, then backed it into the concrete driveway. He didn’t park it in the two-car garage because that was currently occupied by the Auburn Speedster and a Packard sedan.

As we got out of the Willys, the front door opened and Angelina appeared, grinning and greeting us in a thick Sicilian accent. “My two handsome boys are finally home!”

She was dark like Mami, but not as short, and without as much padding. Despite my resentment of her, I recognized she was beautiful. And even with an apron on over a simple house dress, it was obvious even to my pre-adolescent self that her body was, frankly, perfect.

She rushed over to meet me halfway and embraced me. “I’m so happy to see you, Isaac. Just wait to see what I have for you in the kitchen!” Despite the accent, she seemed to be comfortable with all the typical American colloquialisms.

Honestly, she was a sweet lady, like Dad said. She had no knowledge of Dad’s other lives, or Mami, so it wasn’t fair of me to think of her as “the other woman” trying to steal Dad’s affections away from their rightful recipient.

“Good to see you, Mom.”

It wasn’t that hard to say, after all.

She released me and turned to Dad. Their embrace was of an entirely different character. I averted my gaze, not wanting to see them play tongue tag.

They went inside holding hands, and I followed.

 

***

 

Bakersfield, California had just suffered an earthquake the previous year. Many houses had been damaged, and some destroyed. Real estate prices had dropped as a result. Developers rushed in to buy up land, promising to rebuild the town even better than it was before. Dad was one such developer.

We had met the Benakes at a campground in 1947, during summer vacation. Dad and Mr. Benake had a long conversation while I was developing an intense infatuation with his daughter, Gloria. Benake spoke of property values and investment opportunities around California. Dad did some research and decided Bakersfield, right after the earthquake of August, 1952, was when and where to buy property. He bought a lot, for cheap—including warehouses, restaurants, and several lots right in this neighborhood. He was raking in “passive income”—rent, mortgages, retail profits, and was working toward buying controlling stock in the phone company.

The Benakes, who were from Oakland, apparently found the opportunities in Bakersfield too enticing to pass up as well. They moved here a couple years before the earthquake—not having Dad’s advantage of temporal flexibility.

During Dad’s reconnaissance of the area, I had a chance to do some scouting of my own, and found the town idyllic. It turned out the kids I had met at the park would be schoolmates (except for Gloria, who was one of the “big kids,” in high school). They all lived in the same neighborhood I now did.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but most families at these coordinates were either able to buy a house outright, or pay it off within a few years. That was pretty rare where/when I came from. Even my mother’s shabby trailer back in St. Louis was a rental. So far as I knew, neither my biological mother nor father ever owned a home.

What really surprised me was how nice that Bakersfield neighborhood was—despite being inside the city. I thought only the suburbs could be this nice. Dad told me slums were the exception instead of the rule, in the 1950s.

There was no crime to speak of in Bakersfield. Every house had a well-tended lawn and back yard. The picket fences were more to keep toddlers contained than to keep other people out. The mail man and milk man seemed to know everybody by their first name, and performed their jobs cheerfully. Once in a great while a cop would come through the area, in a car or on foot—and even they were friendly. Kids could play in each other’s yards, or on the streets, and easily obtained parental permission to wander around or go to a store, and there was no fear that a kidnapper or some kind of sicko would nab us. To hear some of the mothers talk, the world was much more dangerous than in previous times…but it sure didn’t seem dangerous to me.

What really impressed me was how courteous, considerate, and respectful everyone was to each other. I had never seen that. The neighbors I’d had in the future were antagonists, busybodies, junkies, or thieves.

Ronny’s family were the only blacks in my new neighborhood. They kept their home nice, like everyone else, were neighborly, and shared the common values, so far as I ever saw. They fit in, despite how often I’d heard what a racist dictatorship America was back in the dystopia of the postwar era, where lynching blacks was a more popular pastime than baseball.

I’ll never forget the first time I witnessed the Pledge of Allegiance at school. I didn’t know what was going on, but I stood up like all the other kids, and approximated the same pose, as they recited words I wouldn’t memorize until later:

 

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America

And to the Republic for which it stands:

One nation, under God, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

 

Ronny recited it along with the rest of the class, and seemed no more irreverent than anybody else was. In the world I came from, we were conditioned to believe America was racist, greedy, exploitative…the cause of all the world’s problems. All of us were influenced by the anti-American narrative, but especially blacks and other minorities. They hated white people in general, but especially if you said or believed anything positive about our country. This pledge honoring a republic under God was a real stunner. The culture in 1953 actually encouraged Americans to appreciate their country, and freedom. Americans of all ethnic backgrounds seemed to do just that.

There were a couple times I heard somebody make a racist crack about Ronny. Once it might be something about watermelon. Another time it might be purposely mispronouncing words to approximate stereotypical black speech. Another time it would be a comparison of Ronny to somebody else of the same color—like Buckwheat from Our Gang or Rochester from the Jack Benny Show. The kind that seemed to be the hardest for Ronny to ignore was somebody humming or whistling “Swanee River” when he made an entrance. Sometimes even his friends would do it. It angered me, but Ronny would just shake it off and go on. However, one time I spoke up.

“Hey, don’t talk like that. That’s not cool.”

“What?” the other kid protested, innocently. “I’m just joshin’. Ronny knows I don’t mean anything by it.”

“If you don’t mean anything by it, then don’t say it,” I said. “Words mean things.”

“Who do you think you are, Slinger?” I’ve known him longer than you have. Right, Ronny?”

(“Slinger” was the nickname I originally introduced myself with to these boys, after a recently famous quarterback: “Slingin'” Sammy Baugh. They often pronounced it with a derisive tone, due to what they considered my lack of humility, I guess.)

Ronny flashed a grin and shook the kid’s hand, so I let it drop, surprised and disappointed.

When I reflected on it, I considered Ronny’s position. He wasn’t trying to embarrass me after I stuck up for him—he was wisely defusing the situation. If such confrontations became ugly, they might devolve into some kind of black vs white conflict—in which case, he would be completely isolated and outnumbered.

The cracks and jokes stopped after that for a while; but then the habit began redeveloping. Whenever it happened after that, I simply began making fun of whoever did it. I zeroed in on superficial characteristics that the person had no control over—like freckles, big ears, a stutter, a lazy eye or a big nose. I would be relentless for the rest of the day—sometimes getting downright nasty in my harassment of the perpetrator. Ronny never participated in that. But one day we were both the first ones in the locker room for practice, and he made a point of shaking my hand.

“Be cool, Slinger,” Ronny said, with no irony in his tone. “Maintain an even strain, okay?”

That comment puzzled me the more I thought about it. I guess he was warning me to be careful not to make too big a deal about all the little backhanded slurs.

Still, our circle of friends caught on after a while. We all liked Ronny, and thought of him as one of us, but young kids can be superficial and cruel. Guys like Ronny were just natural targets for superficial cruelty. I had been on the receiving end of prejudice in St. Louis, and would always remember the unfairness and ignorant tyranny of it.

 

***

 

I got to know Kip, Charlie, Ronny and the rest of the gang pretty well. When pressed for my real name, I gave them my new identity details. As we grew closer over time, “Isaac” would be shortened to “Ike.” Some of them still called me “Slinger” when they were feeling buddy-buddy, or when I’d thrown a good pass in a game.

I got used to it. Like Dad said, Ike Jaeger was a big improvement over Pete Bedauern. Also, it drew a connection between me and the president of the USA: Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, who was popular with a lot of people. If popularity was part of what it took to become a great quarterback, then I’d accept any help becoming popular I could get.

We played more sandlot football, but had a lot of fun together doing other stuff, too. We took trips to the soda shop (a popular hangout for kids of every age, though high-schoolers seemed to have a monopoly on the stools and tables), the record store (Dad bought me a period phonograph and pretty much all the records I asked for, so I made it my mission to learn and keep up on all the popular music of the time), the YMCA, and the hobby store.

My new friends and I talked about sports, comic books, radio shows and, increasingly, girls.

Like me, few of the boys knew that much about the subject. To us, sex was about breasts and lips. I suspected there was more to it than that, but I didn’t think about it that much, and didn’t yet have an appreciation for all the steps to that primordial dance. There was so much fun to have, usually it took a sighting of Gloria to get me obsessing about “sex” (breasts and lips).

It was a fantastic summer, but came to an end too quickly.

 

***

 

Once school began in Bakersfield, I was grateful that I knew some of the other kids, already.

After the first day of class, I brought the football permission slip home, assuming Dad would just sign it without fanfare.

Instead, I had to endure a health lecture before he would sign. He said it was related to the earlier lecture he gave me about life paths. Just as foolish decisions I made could put me on the wrong path through life, so could seemingly simple mistakes on the football field.

Me and other boys were growing bigger and stronger by the day, Dad explained. Serious injuries could occur now from collisions on the field that wouldn’t have broken anything when we measured at smaller proportions. It all had to do with mass. He wrote the equation out for me. Then he warned me about scrimmage drills at practice. I might wind up playing a position that required tackling—so I needed to do it right every time to avoid getting hurt. He took me out to the back yard and demonstrated how to deliver hits in football, then had me mimic the techniques. After training me how to tackle correctly, he commanded me to always do it that way—even if a coach wanted it done differently.

He said my physical conditioning was already more than enough for football, but he went on at length about eating habits before a game, and the importance of staying hydrated.

I doubted if any other boys had to go through all this to get their permission slip signed. It also told me Dad didn’t consider me a natural at the game. If I could ever get him to believe I was a great player, it was a cinch I had finally arrived.

 

***

 

I tried out and made the football team. Kip, Ronny, Charlie and Fredrico were on the team, too. Six had been my jersey number on the Bulldogs, so that was the number I asked for at Carson. The coach said somebody else had it, and threw me a jersey with the number eight. That was my number, now.

I was still far from an expert on the game, it turned out. I had never quite seen the kind of football practiced and played under Coach Filbert. He deployed a “single wing” offensive formation, which made for a run-heavy game, based largely on trickery—much different from what I’d watched and played. But at first I didn’t even get to play on offense. He had me in the defensive backfield, second string.

My fortunes changed one day in P.E. Filbert was the P.E. teacher, and on Fridays, if we behaved ourselves, he’d let us spend the period playing a game. On that day, we played a game with some similarities to “flickerball.” My team trounced the other one, because whenever I got the ball, and no matter how far I was from the goal board, I could lob a perfect spiral right through the center of the hole. At the very next practice, he had me try out for wingback. Apparently, in a single wing, anyone in the backfield could run or throw a pass…and the quarterback threw more blocks than passes in that offense. I was too small to be the fullback, but I could catch well. I was hard to tackle; and now Coach Filbert knew I could throw the ball a long ways, with accuracy.

The pads were skimpy and the helmets had no face masks. The uniforms were dorky-looking hand-me-downs and the numbers were random. But I was a real football player, now. Dad bought me a pair of cleats that fit well, and boy, could I juke and cut with those on. It amazed me what an advantage a good pair of cleats could give a player. I felt like John Riggins with those cleats on.

 

***

 

Classes in school were different from what I was used to. Teachers were strict, and their expectations were high. Goofing off in class resulted in a visit to the principal’s office, or swats with a wooden paddle—for everybody, not just white kids. Not finishing homework or studying for tests could get you flunked. I squeaked by in history, because I’d been studying parts of it at BH Station. Math and science were my strong subjects, so I held my own in those, and I was competitive and in terrific shape, so P.E. wasn’t any problem. But English was tough and civics seemed useless. I had to push myself just to maintain a B average.

Whatever my day-to-day concerns, I tried to keep my situational awareness sharp, as Dad had emphasized. The Erasers could come for me at any time. It was “standard operating procedure” (another of Dad’s terms) that they strike with no warning, and when their victims least expected it.

 

UPDATE:  This book is published! Click here to buy on Amazon.

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The Hidden Truth–a Review

Author Hans G. Schantz and I run in some of the same circles, so we’ve bumped into each other before (he also organizes the Big Based Book Sales). But this book was recommended to me by somebody I know online who is not an author. I’ve become so gunshy about all the poorly written indie novels on the market that it took this little nudge for me to give The Hidden Truth a try. I am now thankful for the recommendation.

It doesn’t hurt that the subject matter is right up my alley. I’ve long been fascinated by hidden truths (behind myths, legends, history, common knowledge…but I repeat myself), so the title alone should have been enough.

For my money, the story lives up to the title. Of course, I hope the succeeding books dig deeper into the plot groundwork laid here.

Peter Burdell finds a strange reference while perusing an old book on electricity (I think it’s actually called “wave theory). The information has been censored from other editions of the book. Why? Naturally, our hero is curious, though at first this could all be chalked up to coincidence or inconsistent editing/revisions back in the Dark Ages before the Internet, personal computing, or even television. But when other people stumble across this hidden truth, they die under mysterious circumstances.

Peter is hooked, and just has to dig deeper. As a reader, I’m hooked, too. Again, I’m a sucker for hidden truths–like the missing song in Shadow Hand Blues. or “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane or “Calima” in Planet of the Apes.

I like the characters and never had trouble relating or sympathizing. There was a bit of mustache-twirling by Uncle Larry when he tries to recruit Peter, but overall the storytelling is strong enough that I won’t give this any less than five stars.

The author even dabbles in the socio-sexual hierarchy and the concept of game–and does so in an amusing way.

Seriously, this has been the most enjoyable book I’ve read in years. Strongly recommended.

Paradox Chapter 18: Unusual Girl Trouble

We returned to S.A. Station, traded the VTOL for the Willys, and jumped a warp to 1953 Bakersfield, California. Mr. Benake had tipped Dad off about some kind of future real estate deal that Dad researched, then wanted to check out for himself.

Dad put me in a motel, stocked the ice box with food, left some period-correct money with me, and disappeared for a few days after warning me not to use my birth name.

My first day at the motel, I spent nearly all the hours of sunshine at or in the pool. I met some other kids and we played around together, having a good time. But their parents made them leave the pool for meals, outings, and bedtime. The next day, those families were gone. I realized I would have to go through the whole thing again if I made friends with a new cycle of kids coming through the motel.

After breakfast, I took a walk instead.

I bought a fountain soda and a stack of comic books at a drug store, and explored the area a bit, hoping to find a good spot with shade to sit down and relax for a while. I found a nice little park adjacent to a residential area, sat down on a bench in the shade, sipped on my soda and started reading.

Before long, a small group of boys arrived. One of them brought a football, They threw, caught, and horsed around a bit. There were four white boys, two Hispanics, and one black. But they all seemed to get along with each other just fine. I watched to see what they would do.

An errant kick caused the ball to land near my bench. I shagged the ball and fired a 20-yard bullet to one of the boys. It grew quiet as they all stared at me. Then one of them asked, “Hey, we’re about to have a game. Wanna play?”

I left my drink and comics on the bench and walked over.

A tall white boy extended his hand and said, “Hi. I’m Kip. We were gonna be three-on-four, but this makes it even.”

“You can call me Slinger,” I said. I’d read a little about a quarterback called “Slingin’ Sammy” Baugh who played for the Washington Redskins way back in the ’40s or something, so I thought I was being clever.

The other boys laughed at me. A boy about my height named Winston said, “Let’s just see about that, ‘Slinger’.”

We divided up into teams, flipped a coin for the kickoff, and began to play.

At first I wasn’t trusted on offense to do anything but block. But on defense I sacked the other team’s quarterback (Kip), made several tackles, then broke three different tackles after intercepting a pass, and romped to a touchdown. Next time on offense, Fredrico (playing quarterback for the down) tossed the ball my way. I snatched it and broke two more tackles during my non-stop touchdown.

“Gosh—he’s hard to bring down,” somebody on the other team complained. My teammates shook my hand and congratulated me on a good play.

Next offensive huddle we had, I asked, “How ’bout letting me pass this down?”

In my life before Uncle Si…Dad…I never would have been bold enough to just come straight out and promote myself like that.

I was already a different person, in many ways, from the boy growing up in that St. Louis trailer park.

Fredrico didn’t like the idea, but Ronny (the black kid) and Charlie (a white kid, a little shorter and stockier than me) made the point that it was only fair everybody got a chance. And so on the next play I made a 30-yard completion to Ronny. Then I hit him on a 15-yard buttonhook route. Then with Charlie blocking, Fredrico dove in for a score on the next down.

Ronny kept getting open, and I kept tossing the ball to him. Nobody asked to take the quarterback role from me, and they began to call me “Slinger” with no ironic overtones.

My team was up by three touchdowns…pretty embarrassing for the other boys…when I saw her. She was walking along the sidewalk that bordered the park. She saw me and started staring. She sat down on the bench, and kept staring.

After several glances, I recognized her: It was Gloria, only…different. Her face was very similar, but she moved differently, she was a little taller, had breasts and curvy hips.

The boys had all pretty much reached a consensus by then that the game was over. I asked them to excuse me for a minute and walked over to the bench where she sat. I had left my stuff there, so if I got closer and realized it wasn’t her, after all, I had the perfect excuse for why I came over.

She watched me with a curious smile. I reached her and said, “Hi.”

“Hello,” she said. Her voice wasn’t exactly the same—but still more familiar than her body. “Please forgive me for staring. It’s just that you really favor somebody I met, once.”

“It’s okay,” I said, then mentally fumbled, trying to think of something witty or impressive to follow up with. It was her—really her.

“Are you new to the neighborhood?” she asked.

“I’m not really in the neighborhood,” I said, thumbing over my shoulder. I’m staying at a motel back that way. I’m just kind of goofing around over here.”

She giggled and covered her mouth. “Gosh, you are so much like him!”

Now it occurred to me that she had aged six years since the campground, while I was only a few days older. There was no way I could have convinced her I was the same boy. And if I tried, it would just cause the sort of unwanted attention Dad warned me about.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, smile fading as she studied my face.

“Nothing,” I lied, and extended my hand. “I’m Slinger.”

She shook my hand. In a way it was better than before; in a way it was worse. Her hand was more womanly and even softer than when I held it in the campground, but her electric response to my touch was missing.

“Gloria,” she said.

“How about you?” I asked, remembering that their family was from Oakland. “Are you new to the neighborhood?”

“Oh, no. We moved here years ago.” Her lovely lips twisted into a frown. “Do you have a cousin, or big brother, named Peter Harris?”

This was getting uncomfortable. I shook my head, and turned to my stack of comic books and drink. “Naw. Anyway, nice to meet ya. I just came over to get my stuff.”

I turned my back on her and walked back to the group of boys, who stood in a cluster watching, while trying not to look like they were watching.

When I reached them, there were some under-the-breath remarks and subdued whistles.

“You sure do aim high,” Kip told me.

“First day here,” Fredrico said, “he wants to be a hot dog player; and he walks right up to Gloria Benake.”

“Hey boy,” Ronny said, extending his hand toward me, “that’s guts, right there.”

I shook his hand, then the rest of them shook my hand, too.

“Did you two know each other?” Winston asked.

“She says I look like somebody she knew,” I replied.

“I wondered why she kept looking at you,” Fredrico said.

“Hey, you can use that to your advantage,” Ronny said, with suggestive expression, gestures and tone of voice. “I’m real sorry you miss your friend, Gloria-baby. Come on over here, sit in my lap, and let me comfort you.”

The other boys laughed, lacshiviously.

I risked a glance over my shoulder to see if Gloria was still there. She wasn’t.

“Boy, she’s long gone!” Winston crowed, noticing my effort.

“She’s in high school,” Charlie said. “She only pays attention to big kids.”

“She won’t even look twice at me,” Kip said, “and I’m the oldest one here.”

“You guys play here every day?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

“Some days,” Fredrico said.

“You gonna play here tomorrow?” I pressed.

Charlie looked to his comrades. “How about it fellahs? You wanna have another game tomorrow?”

“You play pretty good, Slinger,” Kip said.

“Thanks,” I said. “You too.”

“I don’t wanna do the same thing every day,” Fredrico said with a scowl. This started an argument among all the boys.

“How would you all like to go swimming?” I asked.

“You know how far it is to the ocean, new boy?” asked the other Hispanic kid, Juan.

“In a pool, I mean.”

“There are no pools in the neighborhood,” Kip said.

At the time, I didn’t know how unusual that was for California. Nevertheless, I told them about the pool at the motel and invited them to come the next day. Kip, Winston, Charlie, and the other white boy, Wally, all committed to attend. I suggested they invite some girls, and as an afterthought, threw Gloria’s name in there.

***

I forgot to give them a time to meet, so after breakfast I put on my trunks and just hung around the pool, reading to pass the time until they showed…if they did.

Around 10am a whole mob showed up—boys, girls…and Gloria.

The day didn’t live up to my expectations. By the time my noisy guests were asked by motel management to leave that afternoon, it had become obvious I would get nowhere with Gloria. Other than the initial familiarity, she just had no interest in me whatsoever. This baffled me, since I was the same person she’d been interested in before, and hadn’t changed. The only logical answer was that she had changed—and not just physically.

But speaking of those physical changes—they caused no small amount of consternation for me that day. Her bathing suit wasn’t as skimpy as they would become decades later, but it still put her shape and plenty of skin on display. And that caused a rather embarrassing reaction I hadn’t suffered before—at least not for the same reason. I ached with arousal the whole day—and the trunks couldn’t hide it. I tried to hide it with a towel, and by keeping half-submerged in the water, but I know other kids saw it. Some of the girls whispered to each other and snickered while glancing at me.

The boys, however…at least those I knew from yesterday…seemed to be sympathetic. Charlie and Kip invited me to come back to the neighborhood the next day, maybe to play some more football. That didn’t happen, because Dad finally returned, and we left 1953 Bakersfield.

***

Back at BH Station, Dad “debriefed” me on our latest field trip, after Carmen had cleared the supper table and was back in the kitchen washing dishes.

Afterwards, I asked him what he knew about the Big Spooky.

“Not as much as I’d like to,” he said. “But I’ve got a hypothesis. We talked about relative anchor points in a particular reality or timestream—how that remains your reference point no matter how many space-time coordinates you visit.”

I nodded. I didn’t exactly understand the conversation, but I remembered it.

“Initially,” he said, “I thought the locations where it happens are at coordinates where the timestream loops back on itself.”

I scratched my head. “You mean when the stream is split, but not in a big way, but then it flows back together again and the alternate realities merge?”

He grinned and patted my shoulder. “I’m starting to suspect, however, that all the coordinates with that…whatever it is…have portals that lead back to one specific anchor point. Someone, or something, from a particular reality visited all of those coordinates, and what we’re feeling when we go there is a residue, like an after-effect.”

“Residue of what?” I asked. “Evil? That’s…um, spooky.”

“Ain’t it, though? Anyway, I can’t prove it yet. Maybe it can’t be proven.”

“You said ‘someone or something.’ So you think it might not be human?”

He sighed heavily, retrieved a beer from the fridge, a vodka bottle and shot glass from a cabinet, and retreated to the living room. I followed him. Once seated, he poured his first shot and sighed again.

“I don’t believe in extra-terrestrial life. At least, I don’t believe that’s what’s behind Roswell and all the other UFO sightings. Oh, there may be intelligent life out there on other planets, with technology more advanced than ours—who knows. But I don’t think that’s what’s behind the UFO stuff.”

He threw back his first shot and gasped his satisfaction.

“What I do believe,” he said, “is that there’s extra-dimensional life; that those creatures have visited the human world multiple times; that they are up to something very creepy; and that they are nobody to mess with.”

“Why do you think that?” I asked.

He gulped a beer chaser and wiped his mouth. “That’s a good question to ask. Not just now, but in a lot of conversations. Or debates. Some people believe the goofiest shit, and don’t even know why they believe it. If you ask them how they came to that belief, honest people will be forced to challenge their own prejudices. Dishonest people…well, debating with them is a waste of time, anyway.”

He poured another shot. “The reason I believe it is that I’ve witnessed some stuff.”

I snapped my fingers. “The CPB—are those guys really aliens disguised as humans?”

He grinned and swallowed his shot. “You’re bright. Especially for your age. No: I don’t think so. But I do think that one or more people at the top of the CPB are subservient to these…entities.”

After his beer chaser, he brightened. “But that’s enough loopy theories that I can’t prove. For now, anyway. So do you have your first letter ready for Gloria?”

My mood worsened almost instantly. “I’m not gonna write her.”

“What’s up?”

I didn’t want to talk about it, at first, but he made a convincing argument that he could help me if he knew the details. I wound up giving him a blow-by-blow of my entire experience with Gloria.

 

UPDATE:  This book is published! Click here to buy on Amazon.

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Paradox Chapter 16: First Crush, And the America that Was Lost

I organized the belongings I had collected since that first day at the Orange Grove—except for the fancy shoes and custom suit from Mami. I didn’t have that much, yet, so I easily packed it all in a very old suitcase Uncle Si gave me—made out of something like cardboard covered with wallpaper, lined with something silky on the inside. I asked if I could take some of the adventure magazines (“pulps” he called them) with me, and permission was granted.

Uncle Si packed whatever he was taking in a similar suitcase, and we met at one of the hangars, dressed in duds from the wardrobe. This time, my clothes fit me pretty well.

Inside the hangar, he opened the trunk of a strange-looking old car, and put our luggage in it. This automobile had the same flowing, rounded contours of the cars at the Orange Grove, but it wasn’t as low-slung or long and sleek. I asked him what it was and he said, “The body is based on a ’41 Willys.”

I had never bothered to memorize anything about cars before. Just like my interest in football began with a few pictures and stories, my interest in automotive machinery began with passenger experiences in a few special vehicles from Uncle Si’s collection.

Our first stop was the Orange Grove to spend the weekend with Mami. I was anxious to get started on the vacation, but I missed her and was happy to see her again. She seemed delighted to see us as well, as usual. She tested me to see if I’d kept up on the Spanish she’d been teaching me. Then, using both languages as needed, she asked me how I was doing in general, if I was excited about our pending road trip, and so on.

She slept in late with my uncle again, both days. After waking early the first day and finding the kitchen empty, I wandered by the master bedroom, looking for her. I heard her voice from inside. At first I thought she was in pain of some kind—she moaned and wailed and made what sounded like pleas for mercy. I was afraid somebody had broken into the house and was torturing her. But just as I was about to try forcing the lock and breaking in, she calmed down. Her cries mellowed out. She sighed and whispered. She sounded happy. I couldn’t make out the words, but I recognized the breathless tones and inflections as of an extremely affectionate nature. And a couple times she spoke my uncle’s name.

She pronounced it “sigh-moan,” which I found ironic after all the sighing and moaning she’d done.

I certainly didn’t understand sex yet, but I’d heard enough and seen enough in the movies to figure out what was up.

The next morning I read some “Black Bat” stories in my room until I heard voices and movement from the kitchen. I figured it was safe to come out, then.

 

Over breakfast, Uncle Si looked uncomfortable when he told me, “Because of the risks involved by interacting with regular people, we have to make some changes. I’ll let you know about those as we go, but there’s one starting now; and we’ll have to practice it during this vacation.”

I paused from chewing my food and paid close attention.

“When we went back to see the Sullivan-Corbett fight, we went as father and son,” he said, with a blank face. “Well, that’s gonna be permanent, starting now. Don’t call me ‘uncle,’ and don’t even think of me as your uncle. Start thinking of me as your father. Then you’ll be less likely to slip up in conversation and arouse somebody’s suspicion.”

“Suspicion of what?” I asked, doubting many people could guess that my uncle was an international supervillain who traveled with his nephew through time and space.

“Of anything. We want to seem as normal and unremarkable as possible to anybody we encounter. A boy who has no parents, adopted by his bachelor uncle is not normal. You also have to be cognizant of where and when we are at all times. Don’t talk about Madonna or Mike Tyson or Dodge Vipers, if we’re in, say, the 1970s. Don’t say anything about Vietnam in the 1950s. Don’t mention Pearl Harbor in the time we’re in right now. Savvy?”

“I savvy.”

“Your name is gonna change, too,” he added. “Both of ours. I’m still working on that. For now, go by your first name, only. If there’s a situation where we have to state a last name, for now it’s ‘Harris’.”

“Well, it’s already an improvement over Bedauern,” I said. He nodded agreement.

From that moment forward, I had a dad.

When Mami cleared the table and went to the sink to wash dishes, I asked Dad, “What about her? A kid with a father but no mother is unusual, ain’t it?”

“It is. So when we’re out and about, Mom is simply ‘back at the house’ if anybody asks. If we’re actually at one of my houses, then whichever woman I have living there is ‘Mom,’ so far as anybody else is concerned.”

This made me wonder how many women, like Carmen, he had. But I didn’t feel comfortable asking about it.

***

We took the ’41 Willys back to 1947, and began a tour of the USA—something Uncle…Dad said he’d wanted to do for a long time. We visited Valley Forge, Concorde Bridge, Gettysburg, Kittyhawk, Mount Rushmore, the badlands, the site of the Little Bighorn battle, parts of the Oregon Trail where wagon ruts were still visible in the hardened mud, what was left of Dodge City and Tombstone, Yellowstone, the Redwood Forest, Hollywood again, and all sorts of places in between.

One aspect of 1947 I noticed that was consistent regardless of where we went, was that everyone seemed to be happy. Dad explained that this generation was optimistic by nature, and what he called “pop culture” (music, movies, magazines, etc.) encouraged their optimism. Nobody (outside of college professors, he speculated) openly bad-mouthed America like everyone did at the coordinates I came from. All the movies, music, TV shows, celebrities, teachers, and audiences of all the above from my old world hated America, and anybody who dared suggest America wasn’t horrible. These people in 1947 were proud to be Americans, and grateful to be living in the USA. Furthermore, they had just come through a Depression and a World War. Their lives had all gotten much better two years ago, and the peace and unprecedented prosperity they saw unfolding in the country was assumed to be unstoppable. Nobody suspected anyone would want to stop it—why should they?

That ’41 Willys was some car. Dad once confided in me, “There is nothing factory-stock on this entire car. Nothing. I built it from the ground-up with all the best parts I could find from the 1980s, ’90s, and beyond. I don’t let anybody look under the hood or snoop around underneath it.”

There were plenty of places in 1947 with no posted speed limits, and he opened it up on those stretches. He couldn’t quite let it all hang out like he had when we visited the Bonneville Salt Flats, because the quality of the roads usually wasn’t good enough. But that hot rod seemed faster than a speeding bullet. After one such jaunt, while buying gas at a service station, a police car approached from the direction we’d come, siren blaring and beacon shining.

The light on this police car was so different from what I was used to, it piqued my interest. It was like a round floodlight, only mounted horizontally, facing the front, and the red lens spun.

Anyway, I assumed the cop would race past us on his way to whatever, but instead, he pulled into the service station, parked nose-to-nose with the Willys, and got out to confront Dad, who was returning from the restroom.

“Do you know how fast you were going back there?” the cop asked.

“About 180,” Dad replied, simply. I knew he didn’t like cops, but his demeanor was pretty friendly.

“Nobody likes a wise guy,” the cop said, frowning. “No car can go that fast.”

“How fast will yours go?” Dad asked, conversationally.

The cop seemed to lighten up a bit as he patted the hood of his patrol car. “I’ve got her up to 110 on a long downhill stretch before. This engine has got power like…” He sobered up again, somewhat. “But you left me in the dust back there. I had it floored, and you were still losing me.”

He began walking around the Willys, and Dad visibly stiffened.

“Where in the world did you get tires like these?”

“Custom made,” Dad said.

The cop made his way around to the driver side and peered through the open window, whistling. “I’ve never seen a speedometer that read so high. Most of them don’t even go up to 100.”

He turned back to Dad with a look of bewilderment. Dad extended his hand, “Simon Harris. I’m an engineer at the Automotive Division of Planetary Future Technologies. I’m testing out some of the equipment we might be using in a prototype to be unveiled at the next Automobile Expo.”

The cop shook his hand. “Jumpin’ catfish, fellah. They let you play with these gizmos a lot?”

“I play with these, and a lot more,” Dad said.

“And you get paid for it, to boot?” He whistled again, then ran his hand over the smooth, glossy surface of the Willys body. “Why did you stuff all the new features inside a pre-war model car?”

Dad shrugged. “Let’s me test it out on public roads while still remaining incognito…except when it comes to sharp eyes like yours. No use letting the whole world, and the competition, see everything we’re working on.”

“No, I guess not, at that,” the cop said.

He began asking technical questions. I don’t know how honest Dad was with him, but he had answers for everything that evidently impressed the cop. Afterwards, Officer Bob Frey shook his hand again and, almost apologetically, said, “We don’t get that many scientific engineers comin’ through here in futuristic vehicles. And even though there’s no posted speed limit, I still have to get folks to slow down when it strikes me that their speed is unsafe. If you still need to test this thing out around here, your best bet is take it out to Bonny Lass Road. Nobody should bother you out there.”

Dad thanked him, they shook hands again, and we drove off our separate ways. Officer Frey no doubt went off to meet some fellow cops and tell them a story over coffee and doughnuts that would eventually become an “urban legend.” We drove off to find Bonny Lass Road, of course.

“Cops sure are different now, too,” I observed out loud.

Dad nodded. “Once upon a time, decent men became cops. They wanted justice and to actually help people. Obviously, something changed. Maybe it was all the jingoistic cop movies and cop shows—I dunno. But it became just a way for would-be Hitler Youth to get their sick jollies pushing people around and hiding behind a badge.”

Aside from the conveniences of advancing technology, everything was better in the past, it seemed.

***

 

I had an even higher opinion of Dad during and after the vacation than when it began. We talked about anything and everything that interested me: sports; music; gadgets; even the pulp stories I’d been reading. He had knowledge in every subject that intrigued me, and either shared my interest, or could remember back to when he had. We didn’t watch a single television show the entire time (TV was pretty new in 1947, fairly crude and expensive, and only some people even had it) and yet I was thoroughly entertained the entire time.

I noticed now and then that he occasionally limped, and often massaged his knees when sitting. I asked him about it and he mumbled something about parachuting, but never answered in detail. However, that did lead to what would prove one of his many lectures about health. He went over good habits vs. bad habits, and how they would affect my knees and back. He also warned me to never starve myself for any reason. While I should never be gluttonous, I should also never reduce the amount of food I ate to below what my body wanted. There was no need to, he told me, because he had kitchens throughout space and time, well-stocked, with competent cooks, and I’d always be welcome to eat three squares a day, free of charge, even after I was old enough to make my own way.

We stayed in hotels and motels periodically, taking advantage of the showers (and swimming pools, in some cases), but mostly camped out, with a tent and sleeping bags. The smell of pine trees, and smoke from campfires, would forever cast my memory back to that fantastic vacation, no matter how old I got.

More than once, when we went swimming at a lake, the ocean, or in a hotel swimming pool, people would notice the scar tissue all over Dad’s back. It soon became obvious who had fought in the war and who hadn’t, not just by their age or physical condition, but by how they reacted to Dad’s wound. Those who hadn’t served would invariably ask, “Did you get that in the war?” Veterans would either simply ask, “Where’d you get that?” or ignore it, at least initially, and maybe get around to probing the issue later.

We ran into veterans vacationing with their families (nearly every man over the age of 21 was a veteran in 1947), and I managed to make friends with their kids. We would swim and play while the grown-ups talked.

New friendships are always exciting. Plus, when the other kids were younger than me, I became the default leader—so it was a sort of leadership practice, and I learned a little about group dynamics.

I never paid attention to an entire conversation Dad would have with the other adults, but I caught fragments. Dad mostly asked questions and kept the other folks talking about their own experiences. But he evidently had a cover story set for how he got burned; and (as I came to appreciate later on) he knew a lot about World War II—more than enough to make his cover story sound plausible.

When we camped out, often we just pulled off the main road, followed an unpaved path to a suitable spot, and pitched the tent. Out West there were vast areas of public land; so we made use of it. We did find this one purpose-made campground, though. We got the tent set up and the fire ready to light by about an hour before dusk.

The place had public restrooms with running water in sinks—quite the ritzy setup for the time. Dad let me take a stroll up to these centrally-located facilities by myself. In one of our many conversations, Dad revealed that women or children were safe to walk alone at night pretty much anywhere in the country (excepting cesspools like Chicago and New York City, of course) up until maybe the 1970s.

After relieving myself and washing up, I took a stroll through the campgrounds, mostly just observing the natural scenery, and the many different families, their cars, and their shiny silver camp trailers.

When I came to an area with unoccupied campsites, I figured the secluded area would be safe to try something I’d had an urge to do ever since watching Tarzan and His Mate. I pounded both fists against my chest and, at the top of my lungs, bellowed my best impression of Johnny Weissmuller’s ape-man yodel. It didn’t sound as good as I imagined it would, even to my own ears. But still, it was kind of fun. With my upbringing, I had learned to amuse myself to fend off boredom…and sometimes I could do it via quite unsophisticated means.

By the time I found my way back to our campsite, there was a family of new arrivals at the next site over. The man from that group was talking to Dad while the man’s wife set up some cooking implements, and a pretty girl about my age looked on.

Dad looked away from the man briefly, noticing my arrival. He must have heard the Tarzan yodel, as sound carried so far at night there. In retrospect, I realize he almost certainly knew it was me who did it, too. But he never mentioned it. I was so sure I was doing something brave and rebellious with that ape-man imitation, but of course it was just silly kid stuff—tame (or lame, depending on perspective) by the standards of my original generation.

After the men’s conversation went on for several minutes, Dad introduced me in passing. The man nodded; his wife smiled and bid me hello; the pretty daughter mumbled hello with an expression I would, years later, come to recognize as the Female Glare of Guarded Evaluation, or FGGE. At the time it looked like disgust or hostility, so I turned away and prepared to light our fire.

The family’s name was Benake. They were from Oakland. The hostile pretty girl’s name was Gloria. She was blonde, but darker blonde than her mother.

Before I lit the match, Mrs. Benake called out to her Husband. “Honey, why don’t you invite our neighbors over, instead of standing there talking over the bushes all night?”

“Well, I guess she’s got a point, at that,” Mr. Benake told Dad. “Why don’t you and your boy come on over and eat with us? We brought more food than just the three of us can eat, to be frank. We even have marshmallows to roast for dessert.”

“Thank you,” Dad said. “That sounds fine.”

Mrs. Benake seemed pleased as she looked at me. “Peter, would you help Gloria fetch some water from the public washroom, so I can boil the corn?”

I glanced between Dad and her. Dad nodded, slightly.

“Sure,” I said. “What should I pour it in?”

Gloria spoke, holding up a big metal pail by its handle. “I’ve got it right here.”

I didn’t have much interest in spending time with somebody who took an instant dislike to me, so I said, “I can get it by myself, if you like.”

Both Gloria and her mother shook their heads.

“It’s heavy when it’s full,” Gloria said. “You’ll see.”

Her countenance had changed to a more friendly, welcoming configuration since our initial sighting of each other, so I shrugged and agreed.

Once I was beside her, she said, “I’m not sure where the public bathrooms are.”

“I know how to get there,” I told her, with all the pride of a frontier scout informing tenderfoot pilgrims on a wagon train that I could guide them safely through Indian Country.

“Alright. I’ll go where you go, then.”

It’s rather pathetic how the male of the species turns to mush when an attractive female does something as mundane as smile and/or utter an innocent statement like that. But her assurance to go wherever I went triggered something in the fantasy-generating segment of my imagination which went far beyond a trip to fetch water. And this was technically before I had developed an interest in girls.

She carried the pail as we went, complaining, “Every time we go camping, I have to haul the stupid water. Makes me wish we would just roast weenies or something.”

Her opening up like this struck me as an improvement over the hostile glare from earlier. “I’m surprised you can carry it at all, by yourself, when it’s full.”

“I can’t,” she admitted. “Dad has to help me. But still, I’m probably going to get callouses from this handle.”

“I’ll take it,” I said, holding my hand out.

“Oh, thank-you.”

She handed me the bucket.

“You’ll probably need my help once it’s full, though—even though boys are stronger; I know.”

I turned to study her as we walked. This was a surprising admission from her. In my world all the movies, TV shows and literature portrayed females as superior to males in every way—including physical strength. And girls from my generation seemed to believe the message.

“Especially now,” she went on. “It seems all the boys from my class are getting taller and stronger every day.” Something strange happened to her voice as she said this. “Sultry” might be a good description of her tone right then, though my vocabulary wasn’t advanced enough to have chosen that word at the time.

She asked my age, and I, in turn, asked hers. She was a couple months younger.

She asked a lot of questions and got me talking about myself—just as Dad was able to do with the average grown-up. This was new territory for me. I didn’t normally open up about myself—even without all the secrets I now needed to keep. But she coaxed me into chattering away as if I was outgoing. I was careful to stick to the cover story, but that still left room for plenty of honest revelations, and I was flattered by the attention.

We filled the bucket, outside the building, from a spigot that appeared to be there for that very purpose. The full pail was indeed heavy, I found out, as we lifted it together. The weight of it made the handle bite into my hand. She had to stop and rest before we made it 30 yards; and again before we made it 20 more yards. The next time she had to stop I changed my grip and picked it up by myself. I had to lean away from it, compensating for the weight, and it was awkward to carry it without spilling the water.

“You don’t have to do that,” she protested. “I can help.”

I made it about 80 yards and had to set it down. I shook my hurting hand and prepared to lift it with my other arm, but she reached toward me and said, “let me see that.”

She took hold of my hand and pulled it toward her. “Oh, my,” she said, examining the sharp red indentation across my palm, in the diminishing light. “You are stubborn, aren’t you?”

I was absorbed in the contrast of her hands to mine. Hers were small, clean, soft works of art, with long fingernails. Her touch was a pleasant sensation. She flattened one of her delicate hands out, so those fingernails wouldn’t scratch me, and rubbed her velvety fingertips over the sore impression the bucket handle had left in my skin. I don’t know how effective her technique was, medically, but I forgot all about the pain.

“You’ve already got callouses,” she said. “What are those from?”

“Monkey bars,” I said. As part of my daily training, I had to go down and back a line of monkey bars in the gym at BH Station. It had caused blisters the first few times I did it. Those blisters ruptured as I continued. Later on, the skin toughened up.

We carried the pail together the rest of the way, and the next time she had to stop and rest, she showed me the red indentation in her own hand. This was probably an invitation to return the favor she’d done me, but I assumed it was my own genius idea.

Her touch was nice. Touching her back was nice, too. Even better was the way she accepted my touch.

We were chattering away when we returned to her parents’ campsite. The parents exchanged looks and Mrs. Benake said, “You two look like old friends already. Bring the water over here, please.”

In the midst of the fire were a couple flat-topped rocks. Mrs. Benake set a large pot on those rocks so that the flames licked all around and underneath it, and poured water from the pail into it. Then she dumped several corn cobs in the water. Mr. Benake said he’d gone pheasant hunting yesterday, and proved it by producing four gutted-and-plucked birds to roast by spit over that fire.

Gloria helped her mother for a while. I sat on a stump and stared off into the woods, forcing myself not to stare at Gloria. To my delight, when she came to sit down awaiting supper, she set up her folding chair next to me.

We continued to talk, and I was enamored. I remember Dad once mentioning that you should never stare right into a fire at night, or it would screw up your “night vision.” So I watched Gloria, who did stare right into the fire, for the most part. The firelight made her look even better.

She mentioned a lot of different music she liked, and various musicians. I’d never heard of any of them, so I mostly just nodded and listened. She asked me which songs and musicians I liked. Thinking fast, I coughed up some artists and titles I’d heard on the radio at the Orange Grove. Her eyes widened and nostrils flared after hearing me recite a few. “Those are so old!” she cried.

I shrugged. “My mom likes them. I’m not normally good with remembering the names, except for some of her favorites, ’cause I hear them so much.”

“Where is your mom?” she asked. “Why didn’t she come with you?”

“She’s back at the house. This is a father-son deal,” I said. “He’s busy a lot, so I don’t get to see him as much as the…as her. This is our time together.”

“That’s neat. Your dad seems like a great guy.”

I nodded.

When the food was ready, Mrs. Benake passed out dishes and utensils. But before we ate, Mr. Benake asked everyone to bow our heads. He spoke a short prayer, giving God thanks for the meal, thanking Him for the good company (meaning us, I deduced) and asking blessings on this, that, and the other. I hadn’t heard anything quite like it, and was fairly unacquainted with this custom anyway.

We ate, and roasted marshmallows afterwards. The food was good, but the company was better.

 

When I finally did drift off to sleep that night, it was contented sleep with pleasant dreams. The next day the Benake family packed up and left after lunch. Before that, Gloria and I went for a walk by ourselves. She touched me a lot when she talked that day, and we wound up holding hands on the way back to the site. Before they left, she wrote her mailing address on some notebook paper and gave it to me, asking me to write and come visit her someday if I could.

The immediate postwar years had really impressed me, and meeting Gloria was the icing on the cake.

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Paradox Chapter 12: My Uncle, the Bond Movie Villain

The next day, Uncle Si informed me that my training would resume. It was more important than ever now, he said, since the Erasers were after me.

But first, he gave me a tour of the Orange Grove.

You ever think about how we have electricity out here?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Not really.”

He nodded. “Of course not. In your time, everybody in America has electricity—even out in the boonies. But there’s no power company that has lines out this far, where and when we are right now.”

He took me to what looked like a tall, sturdy barn. Once inside the blazing hot structure. I saw that it had no roof. It was not a barn at all, but a disguise. Inside the walls was something like a green house, with a slot recessed into the floor, full of water. Sitting in that pool, but with the top sticking up out of the greenhouse, was a gigantic wheel, slowly rotating through the opening of the structure. The wheel was a circle of metal tanks, all connected by spoke-like pipes deflecting around a central hub. The hub drove an axle which also protruded from the greenhouse (horizontally, in this case) and into a gearbox which, in turn, drove a large circular mechanism.

Uncle Si pointed to this last component. “That’s the alternator. Don’t get too close; it puts out enough current to fry you to a crisp.” Then he waved to the big wheel. “That is a Temperature Wheel. Not very fast, but massive torque. Each tank contains a gas with a very low boiling point, and they’re all interconnected. It’s sunny just about all year ’round, here. The sun heats the pool, which heats the tanks that are in the pool. The gas expands, pushing through the pipes into the tanks that are up in the breeze–but under shade. There the gas cools down, settles as liquid, making the tanks on top heavier, and gravity pushes them back down.”

“…So the wheel spins,” I finished.

I get enough juice to power everything here, and it costs almost nothing,” he said.

Almost?” I repeated. “Looks completely free to me. You don’t have to pay for the sun, or the air. The water doesn’t get used up; and neither does the gas in the wheel.”

But it did cost me something to build it,” he said. “And it does require occasional maintenance.”

Oh, yeah.”

He pointed to the inner walls of the pseudo-barn. They were lined with heavy shelves which held large, solid-looking boxes all connected by thick, insulated cables. “For the occasional cold spells when I don’t get at least a 3.5 degree difference in temperature between the air above the greenhouse and the water in the pool, I’ve got a network of battery banks, to keep the property powered.”

Those are batteries?” I asked, staring at the huge, dark casings. They were enormous compared to car batteries.

He nodded. “Nickel-iron. They’ll last forever and take plenty of abuse. Slow discharge, but with nearly unlimited cycling. Just about perfect for this place.”

Several huge concave mirrors were placed up high inside the walls of the open-top barn, reflecting extra sunlight into the greenhouse.

I stared at the huge, slow-turning wheel. “This is something else.”

It’s crude technology,” he said, dismissively. “Since putting this together, I’ve stumbled on some mind-blowing stuff. But anyway: like with any of the goodies I have around here, you can’t ever tell anyone about it. Savvy?”

I hadn’t heard the term “savvy” before meeting Uncle Si, but deduced from context he was asking if I understood. “I won’t tell anybody anything.”

He nodded, then continued the tour.

He opened a big, up-swinging door on the other side of the hangar, and I discovered that there were airplanes there, after all. He climbed in one and started it. Twin propellers spun into a blur. He steered it out of the hangar and got out to shut and lock the hangar door.

I couldn’t remember ever seeing a prop plane in real life before. This plane was like nothing I’d ever seen—even in old movies. The windows were tinted such that I couldn’t see anything inside. The contours were sleek and swoopy, like so many other manufactured objects in this era. But still, it looked like something out of a 1930s cartoon, more than a 1930s airport.

Get in,” he said.

He climbed in and out, checking his lights and other components. By the time he was done, the engines were warmed up and ready to go. He taxied around to an air field cut out of the sprawling grove.

Is this plane from 1934?” I asked, once strapped into the co-pilot’s seat, scanning over some real sophisticated, high-tech-looking instrumentation around the cockpit.

Nope,” he said. “It’s a one-off custom. I had it built to look like something that belongs in the age of art deco, but not even an aircraft buff could place this baby.”

I halfway expected him to slip on a radio headset, but he didn’t. He throttled up the engines, released the brakes, and we sped down the runway. The plane lifted off smoothly, and picked up speed as it climbed at a shallow angle.

Uncle Si fiddled with one of the instruments, and I was wracked by the same phenomenon I experienced in the badass car a week ago: my stomach free-floated; vision and hearing went haywire; then everything came roaring back to normal.

Normal except the airplane was flying over a totally different landscape, now.

The plane leveled off, then began a shallow descent. Ahead and below I saw another air field, with crisscrossing runways, hangars and other buildings , hacked out of a jungle between three mountain peaks. Uncle Si did put on a radio headset, now, and engaged somebody in a short conversation I didn’t follow.

Where are we?” I asked, once he was done.

BH Station,” he said, without looking away from the windshield. “One of my most advanced, extensive bases. The rain forest thins out a bit up here, but unless you know what you’re looking for and where to look, it’s the proverbial needle in a haystack.”

Ever since meeting Uncle Si, my vocabulary had been expanding. On my next session with a dictionary, I would have to look up “proverbial” and “art deco.”

The sights below stretched out from a map-like image to life-sized reality—surrounded by the dark green carpet of jungle extending to the horizons. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the transition of scale.

The runway grew underneath us until we could touch it. The landing was nearly as smooth as the takeoff. Then we taxied toward a long row of speed-bump-shaped metal buildings.

As we drew closer to one particular hangar in the midst of the row, it became obvious how enormous the structures were. They were painted to blend in with the surrounding countryside, and so hadn’t been noticeable from higher altitudes.

A man in greasy overalls ran past us to open the hangar doors, and Uncle Si stopped the plane to wait. I shifted my gaze from the front to below. My eyes were caught by something shiny in the pavement under us. It was a piece of metal—maybe from an old soda can pull-tab or something—which had evidently gotten mixed up in the asphalt somehow. Had we been 20 feet farther away in any direction, I never would have noticed it. It was only because I was on top of it that I even knew it existed. It seemed odd enough as to serve as a good landmark, but after the hangar doors were open and the plane began moving again, it disappeared into the texture of the tarmac. I could no more locate it now than I could before I knew it was there.

I didn’t ponder the contrast of microcosm to macrocosm very long, though, because of what I saw inside the hangar. There was a collection of aircraft (both jet and propeller) that belonged in a museum—everything from futuristic to antiquated.

Uncle Si disembarked and I followed him out of the plane into the hangar. The air was heavy, hot, and sticky. I began sweating almost immediately. But I stared at the other planes.

What’s in all the other hangars?” I asked.

Some of them are still empty,” he said, shrugging. “Most have other aircraft. This is the hangar for twin engine passenger planes.”

Different vintages so you can visit different times?” I asked.

He grinned, but touched his index finger to his lips briefly. “Shh.”

The man in greasy overalls arrived. Uncle Si shook hands with him, asking, “How’s it going with the VTOL?”

Still got some tweakin’ to do. But fuel consumption is down about four percent.”

Uncle Si frowned. “I was hoping for more than that.”

The man looked at me curiously.

Sprout, this is one of my mechanics: Frank. Frank, this is…you can call him Sprout, for now.”

Frank nodded at me…a cursory jerk of the head…and turned his attention back to my uncle. Not a very friendly guy; or at least not all that interested in me. They walked and talked, and I followed.

Their discussion sounded technical, with too many words and acronyms I didn’t understand. Outside, Frank slid the hangar door shut and locked it. He walked away by himself. Uncle Si led me to a control tower.

Um, Uncle Si? Who owns this airport?”

Without looking at me or breaking stride, he said, “I do,” as if it were a silly question.

Beyond the air strip, out around the fenced perimeter, I noticed men in green uniforms and mirror-like sunglasses walking routes, brandishing weapons.

My uncle is a James Bond villain!

After unlocking the steel door at the base of the tower, Si led me inside and locked the door behind us. He sure was security-conscious. There was a metal staircase leading up, but instead of climbing it, he turned to a chain-link cage with a warning sign that read: “DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE—KEEP OUT.” In the same font but some other language, it spelled out what I assumed was the same notice.

Ignoring the sign, Uncle Si unlocked the gate on the cage and opened it. Inside the cage was a large steel casing with more high voltage warnings, humming like a power transformer. He unlocked the casing and swung it open. Inside, of course, I expected to see some kind of control panel with buttons, switches, and gauges. Instead, there was a metal ladder extending down.

He sent me down the ladder while he locked up behind us. I reached an underground floor at the bottom of the ladder and looked around. I was in a small, hexagonal chamber with heavy vault doors on six sides. The temperature was much cooler down here, thankfully. Uncle Si joined me, placed his hand against a scanner on one door, pushed his face against an eyepiece, and the door popped ajar with a thunk. We walked through.

Down a gray concrete-lined corridor, we came to an enormous gymnasium that made The Warrior’s Lair look shabby by comparison.

A few pairs of men were sparring. Others were working the bags, stretching, practicing techniques, and all the other activities I’d grown used to.

Uncle Si turned to me, pointing to a locker against one wall. “You’ll find some work-out clothes that fit you over there. You’ve had a week to rest and goof off, but now it’s time to get back at it. The next couple days will be an evaluation to see how sharp you are. If you haven’t lost much, we’ll start adding to your skills again after that.”

A thin, dark man in a traditional white martial arts outfit left one of the sparring pairs and bowed to Uncle Si, who bowed back. They conversed in a language that sounded similar to Spanish, then they both looked at me.

I’m too busy to stay down here for the duration of your daily training,” Uncle Si said, “but I’ll be checking on you regularly. This is Paulo. He’ll be your primary trainer, now. Pay attention to anything he tells you. For the most part, your routine will be the same one we’ve established. But he’s going to teach you some new stuff to add, now and then.”

I had a thousand questions, but it was reassuring to know that my training would continue.

***

I hadn’t collected any rust in the previous week. My movement was still solid, and I worked the bags with familiarity. Paulo only spoke broken English, and he didn’t seem the type to pat someone on the back, but I caught him nodding every now and then. Without words of encouragement (in fact, with hardly any words at all except when I needed correction), the old me would have been miserable under this training regimen. But something had already started changing inside me. I didn’t need as much encouragement as I would have required before Uncle Si came into my life. Now, even when I made a mistake, I nonetheless had a glimmer of hope in my core that I was a human being with value anyway, and would continue to improve.

At nights and at dawn, when the air outside had cooled off, I did my roadwork around the inside of the perimeter. The armed guards soon got used to me passing them on their beats. I would gaze up in wonder at the strange constellations in the night sky as I ran. Inside, before training with Paulo each day, I had to concentrate on conditioning. That included circuit drills, monkey bars, rope climbing, wind sprints, etc.

Aside from roadwork, and my three hours of training a day, Uncle Si let me have the run of the place.

BH Station (Brazilian Highlands Station, that is) had a small city concealed underground—all connected by concrete-lined tunnels and catacombs. It might have been the ultimate dream playground for any young boy with an imagination.

The power source wasn’t explained to me (and I probably wouldn’t have understood it at that point in my life, even if somebody tried) but Uncle Si did mention that it was far more efficient than the Temperature Wheel back at the Orange Grove. I did meet a man he introduced as an engineer, though, who evidently designed BH Station’s power plant, and spent most of his time working on stuff that was even more important. His name was Dr. Torstenson. I think he was Norwegian, though he wasn’t interested in telling me about Vikings—and didn’t seem to know much about them, or Norse mythology.

There was a library full of books and computers; a sprawling recreation area with raquetball courts, a swimming pool, video arcade and the coolest go-cart track ever (for electric carts that could really move); barracks for the guards; a cafeteria; a laundromat; commissary; motor pool; several laboratories; individual quarters for other people who lived there; and Uncle Si’s suite which included bedrooms, private kitchen and bathrooms, living room and the works. My palm print and retina scan was added to the security database so that I had access to most of the facilities in the complex, and several of the entries/exits.

There were guards; electricians; mechanics; engineers and assistants; pilots and drivers who lived there. There were also maids, cooks, dishwashers, nurses, and other women whose job descriptions I didn’t know.

One woman in particular lived in Uncle Si’s suite. In retrospect, Carmen was not only beautiful, but the Brazilian lady was classy, sweet, and generous. I couldn’t recognize any of that for some time, out of an instinctive loyalty to Mami. As much as I admired Uncle Si, his double life in different time-space coordinates struck me as a betrayal of the woman I loved like a mother.

Uncle Si flew in and out of BH Station at least once a day. He wasn’t gone for long…relative to my fixed perspective. But he used a variety of different aircraft, and on some occasions, left in a land-bound motor vehicle on a winding mountain road leading away from the complex.

One of my first nights there I had a nightmare about the Erasing of my mother and half-brother. It woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep right away. I took a walk around the complex, and heard something going on in the gym. Curious, but cautious, I snuck up to take a peak.

Uncle Si was in there by himself, working out like a man possessed. Did he do this every night when everyone else was asleep? He wore shorts and knee braces. His sunglasses were gone and his shirt was off. I wondered if I’d ever have muscles like his. Then I glimpsed his back. Most of it was covered by what looked like an awful burn scar.

I wondered how he might have got that scar. Maybe in the car accident that put him in a coma? It must have hurt bad.

There was still an awful lot I didn’t know about my uncle. What I did know was that I wanted to be like him when I grew up.

***

Although there were residents of BH Station from other countries, most were Brazilian. They spoke a dialect of Portuguese, which I couldn’t speak or understand. Nevertheless, Uncle Si warned me sternly not to discuss time travel with anybody. To me, that meant they didn’t know anything about dimensional warps and he wanted to keep it that way. Still, I kind of suspected Dr. Torstenson and some other engineers had at least some inkling.

Working beside my uncle, I overhauled my first engine in the underground motorpool. It was a small one…a V-twin motorcycle engine to be exact…but it introduced me to how internal combustion works. I would continue to build on that little seed of mechanical knowledge throughout my life. It also taught me the importance of math, which he insisted I study for a half hour a day.

He limited my time in the recreation center, requiring that I spend time each day in the library. He welcomed me to learn about any subject that interested me, but frequently emphasized the importance of knowing history.

Having never been much of a student, an assumption common to me and everyone I knew was that I had no aptitude for school learning. Somehow, Uncle Si knew better. It turns out I had a voracious appetite for knowledge. I was already anachronistic at coordinates like this in that I enjoyed reading, so it should have been no surprise that once I got my nose into the sagas of Ragnar Lothbruk, I couldn’t stop until I’d devoured all of them.

At BH Station, people were addicted to “smartphones”—little handheld devices that could perform computer functions as well as make telephone calls via radio waves—but I preferred books and full-sized computers.

From the Norse sagas I went on to research Atila; Alaric I; El Cid, Charlemagne, Harold Hardrada; William the Conqueror; Genghis Khan; Tamerlane; Saladin; William Marshal; Napoleon Bonaparte; Robert E. Lee; Carl Von Clausewitz and Helmuth Von Moltke.

Reading about all those historic warriors, generals and kings kept the concept of leadership toward the forefront of my thinking. The historical events surrounding those figures piqued my curiosity enough to read about the world wars, and that led me to research weapons. I already had an interest in lances, flails, pikes, etc., and looked forward to the day Uncle Si would teach me how to use swords and other melee weapons. Now, through my research, I learned the difference between rifles, submachineguns and machineguns; cannons, howitzers and mortars; infantry, cavalry and artillery.

(The guards who walked the perimeter at BH Station carried rifles, while the roving guards among the buildings carried either shotguns or submachineguns. All of them wore sunglasses, like Uncle Si’s.)

It turns out, by living this way, I received an education superior to anything an institution could have taught me in between their attempts to tame, socialize, and foment ideological conformity.

In time, I grew brave enough to ask Uncle Si to elaborate on what he’d told me about leadership. I asked him specifically about the characters in The Lost Patrol.

In quite a few of the big, modern properties Uncle Si owned, he had his own little movie theaters. He took me into the one at BH Station and we watched The Lost Patrol again. He commented on what characters said and did, and asked me questions. This would become a ritual of ours, and he seemed to enjoy it as much as I did: we would watch movies that depicted groups of people, whether in a military unit, on a sports team, in an office, or any other scenario that might require people to work together. We’d watch them twice. On the second screening, he would point out certain characters he called “real life,” and others he claimed were “total bullshit.” He gave them letter grades on how they handled different situations.

He went into more detail about the Ziggurat. On the top were who he called the Big Dogs. Whether they actually made good leaders or not, they almost always wound up in leadership because others were willing to follow them. Their confidence was such that they not only believed themselves to always be the best man to lead, they effortlessly made others believe it, too. He used Douglas MacArthur, Joe Namath and Vince Lombardi as examples.

The next step down the Ziggurat were the Lieutenants. They shared some qualities with the Big Dogs (like leadership potential) but were willing to follow and make the Big Dog look great by doing a good job with whatever authority was delegated to them. They not only felt protective of the Big Dog they served (until ready to become a Big Dog themselves), but protective of the Ziggurat itself. Like Omar Bradley, Sir Lancelot, Bart Starr, or Al Capone’s top henchmen.

On the middle steps of the Ziggurat were the Worker Drones. They didn’t get the best salaries, the best women, or much in the way of recognition; but were the backbone of pretty much any successful organization. They made it work. They were the offensive linemen. The defensive backs and special teams players. The infantrymen. The engineers and maintenance men. The truckdrivers, mechanics, and railroaders.

On the bottom steps were the Creeps. They resented their low position and thought they deserved better, but were lousy climbers. They could never get to the top unless somebody put them there—and then would do a lousy job. They were passive-aggressive cowards and liars; but embraced the delusion that they were superior to everyone else. They saw themselves as secret Big Dogs-in-waiting but nobody else did—especially women above Tier Six or so. The Creeps’ efforts with women were buffoonish and cringe-worthy; and the harder they tried, the more repulsive they were. They were the desperate salesmen, the pervy college professors, psychiatrists and grandiose comic book villains (“The fools wouldn’t listen to me, but I’ll show them! When my master plan is complete, they’ll all bow before the throne of the All-Powerful Doctor Creep!”)

There were two categories of men who existed independent of the Ziggurat. Dad called one the “Lepers.” Lepers were underneath the Ziggurat. They weren’t just socially awkward like the Creeps; they were socially non-existent. They were the nobodies who were nameless and faceless to men on the Ziggurat. They had nothing to say because nobody cared what they thought, and they knew it. They were the janitors, the meter readers, the lonely monks and the warehouse book keepers. The Untouchables.

The other category was the Loners. The Lepers were off the Ziggurat because they couldn’t get on it. Loners could find their place on the Ziggurat (maybe even at the top) if they wanted to; but they didn’t want to. They didn’t want to play all the political games that were necessary just to be a cog in a machine. They didn’t need the Ziggurat…sometimes were oblivious to it. They could sometimes pull in the highest salaries and Top-Tier women all while ignoring the hierarchy and its rules (which infuriated the Big Dogs). They were the explorers, inventors, Army scouts, buffalo hunters, mountain men, pilots, wildcatters, and pioneers in every field. Real-life examples might include Charles Lindbergh, Kit Carson, Nikola Tesla and the Wright Brothers. Tarzan, Conan, Batman and Zorro were a few fictional examples.

I hung on Uncle Si’s every word and thought about these lessons constantly.

***

I think Uncle Si must have known the bond I had to Mami, because every weekend we would warp-jump back to the Orange Grove. I missed her during the week, but this regular visitation provided the stability I needed.

My irritation at his unfaithfulness to Mami notwithstanding, I looked forward to any time I got to spend with Uncle Si. Unlike any other adult I’d known, he sometimes listened to me and considered my thoughts seriously. He taught me constantly on multiple subjects, but often asked me questions and seemed genuinely interested in finding out what my answer would be. I didn’t always have an answer, but it was really cool that he listened if I did.

Gradually, from remarks that came out in passing now and then, I was able to piece together some of his story. Uncle Si had been in some secret military unit when The Great Reset came about. (As near as I could figure, “The Reset” was an absorbtion of the USA into a foreign empire some time in the future…the future relative to my original time-space coordinates.) A veteran with an impressive record, he was drafted into the TPF and helped build the unit that would become the Erasers. He hadn’t known, at first, that the Erasers were to be a time-traveling death squad. After being ordered to lead a number of erasure missions, however, he secretly made a decision to desert and disappear. Although he’d never been a scientist, everyone had underestimated his technical aptitude. The way he told the story, he surprised even himself by successfully reverse-engineering a warp generator.

One part of Uncle Si’s personality that I didn’t understand or care for was his drinking. I hadn’t noticed him drink all that much before, but BH Station was evidently where he spent a lot of his time, and when he wasn’t busy doing something else, he indulged an addiction to straight vodka.

UPDATE:  This book is published! Click here to buy on Amazon.

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Paradox Chapter 7: A Lesson About Leadership

The summer looked to get even better when I started Pee-Wee Football.

Unfortunately, Uncle Si was only an assistant coach of the Bulldogs—the team I wound up on. Mr, Johnson was the head coach, and he had a philosophy that called for letting all the players rotate through every position—even if they sucked at it.

Jay and Rogellio were on the team with me. The three of us, and about half the boys on the team, all wanted to be quarterback. As training camp went on, we all speculated on who would be chosen for what position. But by the time of our first game, Coach Johnson was still sticking to his rotation plan.

We lost 21-0.

The mothers who attended seemed to approve of the rotational approach. Most of the fathers didn’t.

When our second game resulted in a 35-0 loss, the fathers of the players got together and somehow convinced Coach Johnson to take a hike. The first thing Coach Simon Bedauern (“Coach B” as my fellow players called him) did upon taking over, was re-do the try-outs. He already knew who he wanted for linemen. But he lined up all his potential receivers and had them run routes while he himself threw the passes. He ran all of them through routes several times, then sorted out who he wanted for receivers, tight ends, and defensive backs. For running backs he timed their 40 yard dash, then had them sprint and cut right and left by whistle command. Then he asked who still thought they wanted to be a quarterback.

Me and a dozen other boys all raised our hands.

Uncle Si set up a net target at the goal line and had each of us throw from the Ten Yard Line. Most of us hit it from that distance. He moved us back to the Fifteen. We were still mostly good. At the Twenty, about half of us remaining were weeded out. At the Thirty, all but three of us failed to hit the target. Only two boys could throw an accurate pass from the Thirty-Five, and I was one of them.

The other boy was Stan Porter. At the next day’s practice, we were issued the red practice jerseys for quarterbacks.

Despite my history of undervaluing my abilities, I really thought I had the better arm. That’s why I was so disappointed when Stan started at QB for our next game. We won that game 14-10, and I got to play in the Fourth Quarter, but it was still disappointing.

What do you want—sympathy?” I could still hear those words echoing from training at the Warrior’s Lair, and knew I would hear them again if I bellyached. So I didn’t complain. But it must have been obvious, on the ride home, that I was feeling sour.

I had really come to admire Uncle Si, and loved being around him. For a grownup, it seemed he enjoyed my company and took an interest in my thoughts. I talked more with him than I had ever talked with anybody, and usually felt great after spending time with him. But that day there was oppressive silence while he drove. He asked a few questions, but I only gave one or two-word answers.

There’s a reason I made you second string,” he finally said. I’d been wanting an explanation, so this got my attention.

Your arm is a bit stronger,” he said. “You’re a little better at adjusting, and hitting receivers on their routes.”

Then why didn’t I start today?” I exploded.

Part of being a quarterback is leadership, Sprout. And Stan is the better leader.”

I wasn’t even sure what this meant, but I felt insulted anyway.

You’re a loner,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that. But a quarterback can’t be as introspective as you are. He has to be a people-person. More importantly, he has to have a can-do attitude. You don’t have that.”

This pronouncement really stung, coming from him.

What do you mean?” I asked. “What is ‘can-do’ attitude?”

You’ve got to encourage your teammates. Hold them accountable, yes. Push them, yes. But it’s a fine line. You can’t just tell them they suck—even if they do.”

I don’t do that!” I protested.

Actually, Sprout, you do. I guess you don’t notice it, but you don’t cut anybody slack. That’s actually a good thing for combat sports, because you don’t cut yourself slack, either. But it’s not good for team sports.”

His words smarted. I was reeling.

Team sports are tough,” he said. “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and it’s hard to put together a group without any weak links. Leading a unit…a team, a group, is a lot like babysitting sometimes. Not everybody is cut out for it.”

I sat fuming silently for a while.

There’s an expression that was popular back in…” he started, but twisted his lips for a moment before finishing his statement, “…where I spent a good part of my life. It went: ‘Either lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.’ You’re the kind who gets the hell out of the way, Sprout. You’re a loner—not a leader. And that’s perfectly alright. You can be a lot more productive in life if you’re not distracted by trying to get a bunch of boneheads to do what they’re supposed to.”

You’re saying I can’t be a leader?” I asked, devastated.

He frowned sadly as he said, “You don’t have the personality for it. You’re too honest, and straightforward, and focused. The kind of guy who others want to follow knows how to bullshit. He’s always concerned about the image he presents to other people. He studies other people constantly, evaluating whether they can be any use to him; and if so, how. Or, if they are competition, he’ll have to sabotage or destroy them, somehow. Your only interest on that field is getting the ball into the end zone, and you don’t see anything beyond that. Stan is always working the team. He builds up his teammates’ egos, as needed…but never quite up to the level his ego is. Everything he says and does is designed to make himself appear to be higher on the ziggurat than everyone else.”

The ziggurat?” I asked, unfamiliar with the word.

The hierarchy,” Uncle Si said. “Okay, look, I’m gonna tell you how men, and boys, look at the world. Well…not that many in this pussified culture around us now; but jocks, and soldiers, pilots, martial artists…certain guys still look at the world this way: life is a big climb up a ziggurat—a stepped-pyramid like the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas built in Latin America. But this ziggurat is invisible—it only exists in the minds of those guys climbing it—but that doesn’t make it less real to them. The goal is to get as high as you can. You have to get there step-by-step, though. How other men perceive you determines which level you’re at. But so do certain accomplishments: an important job; your success with women; and probably how your career is panning out.”

Success with women?” I asked.

He nodded. “It’s not important to you yet, but pretty soon it’s gonna be very important to you. You’ll just have to take my word for that.”

I thought about this invisible ziggurat for a moment, then asked, “So Stan making starting quarterback—that moved him higher than me?”

He nodded again, with a pained expression. “Yeah. But what I’m trying to get across to you is that the ziggurat is irrelevant to you. You’re a loner, and frankly, too intelligent to get obsessed with all that ego-pacifying stuff. Don’t worry about how other guys perceive you. You’ll find out, in time, that none of them are worth impressing anyway.”

After another silent spell, I said, “I have a better arm than Stan. That’s what’s important for a quarterback.”

He sighed and shook his head, looking irritated.

UPDATE:  This book is published! Click here to buy on Amazon.

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Paradox Chapter 2: Meet the Mother

Nothing seemed unusual when I got back to the trailer after school. But it was a segue into something that would prove very unusual.

Mom was watching TV. She turned briefly to check who was walking through the front door, and said, “Hey. There’s some hot dogs in the fridge.”

Okay,” I said, and stumbled over piles of laundry and empty cigarette cartons on the way to the fridge. I found the weenies and buns, and pulled them out. The buns were stale, but we had no other bread. I stuck one in the toaster but didn’t push the lever down just yet. I unloaded stacks of slimy dishes from the sink until I found a Teflon pot. I rinsed and wrung the dish rag several times before dripping some dish detergent on it. I rinsed out the pot, then scrubbed it with the rag without waiting for the water from the tap to warm up. Once reasonably clean and rinsed, I filled the pot with water, set it on the burner of the stove that still worked, and began hunting for a match.

Hey Mom, can I borrow your lighter?” I finally asked.

Bring me a wine cooler please,” she said, eyes still glued to the TV screen.

I reopened the fridge, plucked a pink bottled beverage out of a four-pack, and delivered it to her on the couch.

We lived in a three-bedroom trailer, so I had my own room—which was nice. The third bedroom was filled with Mom’s extra shoes, clothes, and other stuff, so effectively we had just two bedrooms. Only one toilet worked, but if one of Mom’s future boyfriends turned out to be a plumber, the second one might get fixed. The dingy carpet in our living room sagged down to form a depression where a section of the floor had rotted away under it, but Mom usually stacked something in that spot so it wasn’t so obvious.

I handed her the wine cooler and she dug around in her purse until she found the lighter, and handed it to me.

That purse was scary. There was so much junk in there, I sometimes imagined her hand coming out with a dead rat one of these times.

I lit the burner and the water slowly began to warm. I went down the hall to my bedroom to retrieve a paperback to read while I waited for the water to boil.

Can you make me one, too, Sweetie?” Mom asked.

Yeah,” I said, transporting another weenie from the refrigerator to the pot.

During a commercial break, she turned from the TV to address me with eye contact. “So. Something else about your Uncle Si, huh?”

What?” I asked, realizing he must have paid her a visit or made contact with her somehow.

Recovering from a coma,” she explained. “I figured he would die in that hospital, or hospice, or whatever it was. But he looks really healthy. It must not have been as serious as we heard.”

You saw him today?” I asked.

She nodded. “He stopped by. He really does favor your father.” She twisted her lips, examining me. “And you. If your father wasn’t such a loser…well, anyway, Simon reminds me why I got with your dad in the first place.”

Oh, puke, Mom,” I said.

I know,” she said digging a cigarette out of that frightening purse. “But I sure didn’t feel like puking those first few weeks with him.” She snapped her fingers and did a little seated dance on the couch that she obviously found more cute than I did.

What did you talk about?” I asked. “With Uncle Si?”

She shushed me, showing her index finger, as her head whipped back toward the television. Her show was on again.

I read the book until the weenies swelled, then pushed down the lever on the toaster.

Why do you always have to toast the bread?” Mom asked, eyes still locked onto the idiot box. “You don’t use enough electricity already?”

I don’t always toast it,” I protested. “Only when the bread’s stale. It kinda’ covers the bad taste.”

Toast mine too, then. Let me see.”

I navigated the obstacle course between the stove and the couch, delivering our meal to eat together in front of the TV.

The phone rang. Mom’s show was back on, so she gestured toward the phone without looking away from the screen. “Get that, Sweetie? Mommy’s still eating.”

I was still eating, too, but I answered the phone.

Who told you you could use the phone, loser?” demanded a haughty voice I had come to hate over the years.

I’m not using it; I’m answering it, first of all,” I said. “And secondly…”

Shut up, moron,” Allyson interrupted. “I need to talk to my mother.”

She consistently emphasized “my mother” when referring to Mom, as if Mom was her mother but not mine. I considered asking, “how’s it feel to need?” But that would prolong our conversation, which I really didn’t want to do; and Mom would take her side in the resulting argument, as always.

She’s watching TV,” I said.

Well no shit, dumbass,” Allyson retorted, in a tone that was almost gleeful. “Just because you can’t walk and chew gum doesn’t mean everybody else is stupid, too. I promise. Mom can hold the damn phone to her ear even while the TV is playing. Now give her the phone and go back to fingering your own asshole.”

I handed the phone to Mom. Even though her show was still on, Mom took it and, with a cheery tone of voice, said, “Hey girlfriend! How’s your love life?”

My hot dog bun was no longer warm enough to mask the stale taste. As I finished eating, Mom chatted and cackled. Her show ended, and I knew she couldn’t possibly have paid attention to it as well as to her daughter, but Mom wasn’t even slightly annoyed—quite the opposite.

I grabbed the paperback and retreated to my room.

Mom called me back to the living room, later, when both her TV show and the phone call were done.

There was another show on TV now, which Mom didn’t like as much.

What do you think of Uncle Si’s offer to do some after-school work for him?” she asked, during the next commercial break.

I’d really like to do it,” I said, already feeling defeated. I had already been allowed to have a dog, so my quota of favors had been used up for some time to come. There was no way she’d let me spend time with a cool guy related to my dad.

She surprised me by saying, “If you do it, you have to stick with it. You can’t start, then decide you’re bored with it after a few months.”

Huh?” was all I could say.

She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial tone. “This could free me up to take that job at the jewelry store, for the closing shift. But you can’t tell anybody, or we might lose the food stamps and everything else.”

You mean…I can do it?” I asked, incredulous.

You’re sure you’ll stick with it?”

Yes!”

No going back, now,” she said, with an admonishing tone. “If I take this job, you have to keep yours. If you decide later you don’t like it, you have to keep doing it, anyway.”

I didn’t know why everybody was questioning my commitment that day. Maybe because my enthusiasm about the dog faded when she turned out to be a trouble-making retard. “It’s a deal,” I said.

It turns out, the owner of the jewelry store had just sweetened the job offer a few days before. It was hard to imagine how Uncle Si’s timing could have been any better.

UPDATE:  This book is published! Click here to buy on Amazon.

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Doomsday Inn by Berber Lothbruk – a Review

Subtitle: Survival, Civilization, and the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy.

You could just as easily pitch this concept as “Red Pill Masculinity meets prepper fiction.”

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) takes the power grid out, stranding a random cross-section of people at a rustic old motel in the mountains. Fortunately for them, the motel owner is a prepper, and the place is wired to go off-grid during just such an emergency. But that doesn’t mean the reset of civilization will be a picnic.

The people at the motel find themselves colonists, of a sort, in this dangerous new world. But most of the problems and dangers they will face are caused by human nature, stripped down to its raw essence when the SHTF.

Here’s an excerpt provided by the author:

“I think we’ve just suffered an EMP—or electromagnetic pulse,” Luke said. “For those of you who haven’t heard about an EMP, it’s basically a weapon that ruins all modern electronics in a specified radius. I have no idea how large the radius is in this instance, so I don’t know how much of the country has been affected. I do know a high-altitude atomic blast above the state of Kansas would affect all the continental United States as well as parts of Canada and Mexico.”

“What does all that mean?” the white woman asked, with an irritated tone.

Luke took a deep breath. “Almost nothing in the USA…civilian or military…is hardened against an EMP. I don’t know how to sugar-coat this: we’ve just been bombed back to the Stone Age.”

“You said you don’t know how much area is affected,” one of the Middle Eastern men pointed out.

“True that,” Luke replied. “But there was some evidence in recent days of hostility from China. They have the capability of detonating a high-altitude nuke above Kansas. It could possibly be a different nuclear-capable nation, or a terrorist organization. So, I have my hunch, but can’t say for certain whether it’s limited or nationwide.”

“We just heard a car start,” the other Middle Eastern man said.

Luke nodded. “In general, pre-‘solid state’ electronics are safe from an EMP. So, some older vehicles, or vehicles that have been hardened against an EMP, will still run.”

The group exploded with questions and demands. One he was able to discern had to do with whose vehicle they just heard starting. He ignored it and most others to focus on a comment from the white dad.

“There are children here,” the obese slug said. “You can’t go slinging careless remarks like ‘we’re in the Stone Age now’ or ‘all our electronics are fried.’ People are scared enough without wild exaggerations. You don’t know what’s going on.”

Luke looked directly at him. “I’ll sperg it out for your benefit, then: technically, we’ve been bombed back to the ‘60s or ‘70s. However, nearly all the electronics in existence back then has been replaced with ‘solid state’ technology. The old ‘obsolete’ stuff has been scrapped. That means that even the technology people had in the mid-20th Century is gone, now. We can’t fall back to that stage of civilization because all that infrastructure, and the know-how to build and maintain it, has been abandoned. You could say we’ve just been set back to the 1800s, but we’re not even there, really. We’ve got no horse-drawn wagons, no steam locomotives, and I’ll bet none of you know how to churn butter or knit a sweater. All that is lost, too. Civilization just got reset. I know it’s tough to swallow, but I’m telling you like it is now, because you’re going to have to adapt fast if you want to live.”

In one aspect at least, this is like the “adult westerns” and “men’s fiction of the 1980s: It has graphic sex. For those who haven’t read that old-school men’s fiction, I don’t mean “tasteful love scenes” written in a flowery style that leaves some detail to the imagination, and people don’t even have bodies but only “frames.” Nope. This is how you might hear intercourse described in the barracks or the locker room. It’s not as raunchy as some of Lou Cameron’s (writing as Ramsay Thorne) Renegade series, but it’s more than what most readers are probably used to.

I cut my teeth on Len Levinson novels, so “mature audience” stuff isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker for me. It’s easy to skip over these scenes (I think there’s about five of them, give-or-take). But frankly, some of Lothbruk’s colorful metaphors and phrases during the sex scenes are hilarious. Feminist heads will explode from reading these…or pretty much any other part of this book.  No demographic is handled with kid gloves, in fact The author, like his main character, just doesn’t care who it offends.

What sets this apart from vintage men’s adventure is it is modern “red pill” outlook, that is in sync with the Manosphere like no other fiction I’m aware of. It’s very conscious of the socio-sexual hierarchy, hypergamy, game, frame, “the rationalization hamster” (though I don’t think it is called that in the book)…and the alpha of the colony winds up with a “harem” before it’s all over. Plus, there’s some R/K selection and generational theory sprinkled in.

I would describe the prepper fiction of James Wesley Rawles as novels built around reviews of survival gear (based on the one book that I read). Berber Lothbruk’s prepper/survival fiction is built around diverse characters, their interactions, and their roles from an anthropological perspective. I thought the story had a strong concept, and was executed pretty well.

However, publishing has been corrupted like everything else and the industry is now by, for, and about women. And not just tradpup/legacy publishing from the Big Five. Most (like 99% of) independent authors conform to the Blue Pill Storytelling Doctrine. Even from right-leaning authors, you’re mostly spoon-fed the same old Strong Independent Womyn tropes, virtue-signaling to the LGBTWTF Mafia, etc. Thanks to all that, masculine men rarely read anything that’s not either online, or 100+ years old.

So, even without considering the usual SJW thought-policing at Amazon, the bovine feminized cancel culture that permeates our society is probably going to bury this book so far down into e-book obscurity that it can never be discovered by readers who might actually enjoy it. Doomsday Inn took a big “social proof” hit with it’s very first review–a one-star rating by  a woman who has probably never been exposed to anything so unapologetically “misogynist.”  With the very first review so negative, Doomsday Inn is likely doomed for good. However, there’s no doubt I will read this one again when the mood strikes.

“You know, it had potential. There are loads of these types of books but the story here had a good angle. The writing isn’t bad, either…

…When I got to: “she had a damn nice turd-cutter” I decided that was more than enough. That was disgusting…

…It included a misogynistic tone which, although the male characters were portrayed as fairly rough around the edges, bled through past what the characters were thinking…”