The Underdog's New Teeth ...

One of my rare third-person works; 'The Underdog's New Teeth", published by A Million and One magazine.

Read it here

July 20, 1969 (redux) ...

I settled for a book on space that had a lot of photos and three chapters on the Nasa missions, starting with the test pilots at Edwards Airforce base and ending with the moon landings, the last one being Apollo 17 three years ago.  I think Nasa stopped going to the moon because people stopped caring about it.

I remember being in grade eight when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and they called the place they landed ‘Tranquility Base’.  We had an assembly right after lunch that day and the teachers had televisions on those high rolling carts set up in the gym and we all sat cross-legged on the floor and watched shitty black and white images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon.

But I honestly couldn’t remember Apollo 17 and I bet no one else could either.  Moon missions had become as ordinary as watching the national anthems during the Stanley Cup playoffs.  I wondered if the last of those astronauts got depressed because no one gave a shit about what they did.  But seriously, of the billions of people in the world, only twelve had walked on the moon.  That had to count for something.

"That Dog Don't Bark"

July 20, 1969 ...

The only highlight in late July came on the twentieth when we hosted a party at the club and invited everybody to watch the moon landing of Apollo Eleven.  We had decorated the club with Christmas lights, moved out all the gaming tables and brought in more chairs.  I went out and bought three of the largest televisions I could find and Gordon wired them all up for us so everyone would have an unobstructed view.  Gordon wired the sound through a new stereo I picked up to make it sound like we were all at mission control.

Even Carrie rediscovered her enthusiasm as she worked happily with Chelsea and Shelly to make moon-themed snacks and their legendary ‘Moon Punch’ in two large punch bowls labelled; ‘Astronaut Juice’ (non alcoholic) and ‘Jet Fuel’ (spiked with rum).  Carrie made a joke that the ‘Astronaut Juice’ was made from freshly squeezed Astronauts and cracked us all up.

I kicked myself for growing apprehensive as the date loomed; what if instead of landing, the lunar excursion module crashed into a fiery ball on the moon’s surface?  What if it sunk into the sandy surface of the moon like quicksand that some commentators were predicting?  What if my planned celebration turned to a mournful wake that traumatized everyone instead of uplifting them?

It turned out that all my fears were unfounded, but they were typical of the shadow that hung over me that July.

The room was packed on the day and the air was electric as we watched the televisions along with millions of people all over the world.  Every eye in the room was on one of the television screens, watching the distorted live feed from the moon.  Mothers hugged their kids, men had their arms around their girls, Shelly was sitting on Frankie’s lap, and I had Carrie in my arms as I stood behind her, even Gordon was standing in the doorway watching intently with wide eyes.

Then, at eighteen minutes after one PM Vancouver time on July twentieth, 1969, we all held our breath as we watched a fuzzy black-and-white Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder of the lunar excursion module, Eagle and become the first person to set foot onto the surface of another heavenly body.

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” his voice crackled from the speakers.  We all went nuts.  People were cheering, kids were jumping up and down, couples were kissing and hugging.  Carrie turned and jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around me and kissed me hard on the lips.

“We did it, Denny!” she cried, as though we were part of the NASA team that fulfilled John F. Kennedy’s challenge in 1961; ‘before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth’.  And that was the feeling; we were all part of it - in that moment, all the people of Earth were united in making our first step into the galaxy and beyond.  This was it - this was the moment that all those science fiction stories were coming true.  By 1980 we would have flying cars and there would be colonies on the moon and Mars.

"Bigger Gangsters"

We Still Can Save The World …

There was a time – long before the advent of radio, television, and the internet – when the average working vocabulary of english speaking people ranged between 22,000 and 30,000 words.  Today the average working vocabulary of North Americans hovers between 5,000 and 8,000 words.  We are losing our ability to communicate.  Why?  We no longer read like we once did.

There was a time when reading books was our main source of entertainment and discovery.  The written word was enchanting, well cobbled sentences carried a magic that took us from our own lives and thrust us into others.  We read constantly; we read on our own; parents read bedtime stories to their children; families took turns reading a book aloud in the evenings.  Bookstores thrived and libraries were busy places, books were placed on hold and looked forward to with the same anticipation as block-buster movies today.

Through reading we expanded our vocabulary, populating our lexicon with multiple options to properly shade emotions, describe colours, assert beliefs.  Because as we read or were read to we developed an imagination to envision the pictures that those strings of words described, passions that others held, perspectives of how others saw the human condition.

Through reading we learned about and came to appreciate other peoples, other cultures, other belief systems, and by doing so we learned to accept others, not as foreign and untrustworthy, but simply as different.

With the coming of radio, television, and now social media, not only is our vocabulary shrinking, so is our appreciation of diversity, and our imaginations.  We now struggle to understand the perspective of others, and in too many cases, we don’t even try.

Reasoned debate is almost a thing of the past, now replaced by single statement shouting matches that often end with violence or the threat of it.  Because too many grow easily frustrated when confronted with a belief system foreign to their own, they become confused, threatened, and enraged.

Gone are free and thoughtful debates; the defence of political or religious positions immediately run to logical fallacies, the two principal ones being ‘argumentum ad hominem’; attacking the person instead of their position, and ‘argumentum ad populum’; if enough of us believe it, then it must be true.

We live in a world of ‘alternative facts’ – a more insidious concept I cannot imagine – when someone’s uneducated opinion carries the same weight as that of a learned scientist.  As the most immediate problem I give you the wailings of the ignorant disavowing climate scientists’ warnings for the last four decades about human caused global climate change.  Trees in the middle-east are now spontaneously bursting into flames because of record breaking heatwaves.

Gone is acceptance of those different from us, and even tolerance is being eroded.  Every week in the USA another school shooting is committed by someone who was ‘quiet’ and ‘kept to himself’, not because he was introspective, but because he lacked the ability to express his pain to those who would refuse to hear him.

As a teen I learned about the struggles in Spain and Cuba from Earnest Hemingway, about the great depression from John Steinbeck, of the madness of a lonely mind from Shirley Jackson, bigotry and honour from Harper Lee.

Having graduated from Hardy Boys novels and opening my first adult novel at the age of 11 years, my horizons became endless and a day has not gone by in the intervening 53 years without my having a book on the go.  I can’t imagine a life without literature, and a world where it is becoming a rarity saddens me.

I am disappointed that Canada is 35th on the world literacy scale, and horrified that the United States is 125th, just edging out Syria and far below Libya and Botswana.  Think about that; the US possesses the most deadly arsenal on the planet and has a literacy rate lower than some third-world countries.  It’s like giving a machine gun to a cranky toddler.

So, I beseech you; when searching out the next gift for someone you value, choose a book.  It can’t help but change their life, and if enough of us do it, it may change society and ultimately save the world.

This Ain't Make-Believe ...

That Dog Don’t Bark is a love story between teens Jackson and Angel, but at the same time it tackles some serious social problems that existed back in the time frame of the novel (1975) and still exist today.

First is the foster care system.  I worked with at-risk children and youth for a number of years, helping them recover and heal from sometimes horrendous childhoods as they lived in our residential treatment homes, staffed with counsellors and youth workers who I was proud to work with.  I doubt the average person would believe the tortures some of these youth suffered while they were children.  They came to us not trusting adults, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, and acting out criminally so that someone might notice and ask why.

Part of my job was to recruit, train, and support foster families for the youth who graduated our programs.  Doing so I met some amazing foster parents who went above and beyond the pittance the Ministry for Family and Children paid them.  One of the best I ever met was a single, First Nations, Buddhist, mother who took in two of our most challenging youth; one (a girl) who came to us on charges of attempted murder, was suffering a deep depression, self-injury, and was suicidal; the second was a boy who was literally raised in a crack house and was so far down the trail of escalating violent crimes that it was all I could do to convince his Probation Officer to give him to me under house arrest instead of sending him to juvenile detention for two years.  They both turned it around and that foster mom was a perfect fit for them - they both graduated high school on the honour roll and went on to college.

The other part of my job was to rescue children and youth from abusive or neglectful foster homes; children fed nothing but a steady diet of macaroni and cheese; a child beaten because she was transgendered; a child taught to perform fellatio at the age of six, a child sexually abused nightly by the teenaged son of the foster family.  Those stories could go on for pages.

In defence of Ministry Social Workers; they are overworked in a system that has had its budgets stripped to the bone by governments who don't care about disposable kids because they don't vote and no one is there to advocate for them.  These Social Workers are doing the best they can with what little they have.

Because of this there are youth who fall through the cracks in the foster system - trading use of their bodies for a couch, food, and drugs from a sexual predator.  For them, at least this arrangement holds no surprises and no false promises.

The other central issue in the novel is child sex trafficking; young girls and boys, lured off the streets with drugs, sex, and the promise of wealth are forced into prostitution once they are addicted to the drugs that numb them.  This was happening back then and is still happening today.  And if you think it only occurs ‘somewhere else’, think again; I live outside a small town of 30,000 people and it’s happening there - a lot.  Vancouver - where the novel takes place - has a stretch of dark streets known as the ‘kiddie stroll’ where teens and children can be had for a few dollars.

The third backdrop is the local organized crime families that I wrote extensively about in the Gangster series.  They are the least of the social problems of the world - they don’t prey on children and all the ones I met had a social conscience.

All of this is the world that Jackson and Angel find themselves in, surviving as best they can, and learning how to love each other while they do it.  When they witness a dear friend taken by international criminals, addicted to heroin, groomed to be a prostitute, then sent overseas with 19 other girls sealed inside a cargo container equipped with a port-a-potty and buckets of drugged water and food, they decide they have to do something about it.  They find themselves alone; cops are on the take, a crime reporter is reluctant to expose the crime, and even the local mob bosses don’t seem to care.

Every crime in the novel is true - a few I committed myself in my younger, wilder years - the sex slave trade I researched and yes; shipping drugged girls overseas in a cargo container is a real thing.

I pulled no punches in telling the story, so be warned; parts of it will make you squirm, but I hope it will also make you hug your children a little tighter.  But as I said; That Dog Don’t Bark is a love story that is sweet and heart warming, with just a little arson and murder.

Find the Kindle edition here, and the paperback here.

The Hide-a-Way motel ...

As the sun set and I was dropping F_ and Jaimie off at Darlene’s – unknown to any of us – Razor was sitting in his room at the Hide-a-Way motel staring at the drapes that covered the one lonely window.  The stillness in his lean body wasn’t relaxed – he was ready to move rapidly if he needed to.  If any man familiar with the wild creatures of the desert saw Razor in that moment, his posture would bring to mind a Mojave rattler – coiled under a dried brush and poised to strike at any hiker foolish enough to set a foot down too close.

In his left hand he held a loaded .357 magnum Smith & Wesson model 360 revolver that he kept cocking then pulling the trigger and easing the hammer back down, over and over.  It was like a form of meditation for Razor, though it was the devil’s own mystery what thoughts were circulating inside his mind.

It could be that he was waiting on someone to pause in front of that window, casting their shadow on the curtain before moving to the door and knocking.  If the answer to a ‘Who is it?’ didn’t come back favourable he’d shoot right through that door.

Or it could be he was pondering all the evidence against him in his present situation; the untrusting looks from D_’s crew; the way conversations would pause when he approached and resume as he passed out of earshot; the way D_ flinched when he saw Razor in the company of M_.  Razor knew he was an outsider.  He’d always been an outsider even with his kin.  His own grandma told him that the family all feared him because he didn’t have a lick of compassion for anyone.

Or his thoughts might have been of cousin D_ McCullough, who’d been nosing around over the phone to people down in Harlan County.  Razor didn’t like people prying into his past.  He didn’t like his name spoken at all by people without his leave.

Or he might have been thinking about B_; that sweet piece of tail that was so juicy and so fresh.  He’d only fucked her once when M_ was away with D_ off in the capital, and she said that would be the only time and that it was a mistake.  She made him fuck her up the ass because she said her and M_ were trying to make a baby, but goddamn, he wanted to go back and sample that pussy.  He would too – come hell or high water – and if M_ found out and came gunning for him he’d kill him and take B_ on the road whether she liked it or not.

But sure as the sun would set that evening, Razor was thinking about murder, already seeing the blood and caved-in skulls; D_’s, cousin D_’s, M_’s, and when she got too bothersome; B_’s as well.  Those thoughts did something for Razor that no Mojave snake could do – they made him smile.

So Razor sat with his thoughts until the sun set, then sat in the dark for a time, then sat until one hour before Ruben, M_ and I arrived to murder him.  He sprang from his chair and stuffed his magnum in his jacket pocket as he headed out the door, getting behind the wheel of his old patinaed 1959 Chevrolet Apache stepside pick-up and drove south out of town, down the dark strip of asphalt that split the desert all the way to Mexico.

"Mac&Beth"