Don-t Naai With The RLI

[LAST in a series about my 120 days in an African prison. Huzzah! — Fractal Bob]

It was raining as they slung Jerry Dorsey’s dead body onto a stretcher and took him away, and they dragged me to the warden’s office, where I stood for hours handcuffed to a vertical steam pipe. Eventually, a rather meek guard brought me a chair and a cup of hot red tea.

The tea was gone, I had stopped trembling, and my clothes were nearly dry when I finally met with the warden. “What do you know about this? Who is this man Jerry Dorsey and how were you going to escape?” said the warden, in a crisp brown uniform and black beret.

I looked into his stern, beady eyes. “I don’t know, sir.”

I fully expected to be beaten, at least about the head and shoulders, but instead I was allowed to return unmolested to Cell #3. The bright sun had dried out the yard, and I found young Legson waiting for me under the eaves.

“All right, Father Bob?”

“All right, Legson.”

One-Eyed Paul and the rest of the prisoners gathered to hear the tale of my dawn encounter at the east fence with the goons and the bloody passing of the brave Texas satirist, Faux Fractal Bob. I produced Faux Fractal’s spectacles from my shirt pocket and the men passed them around, noting the spatter on the left lens, droplets of blood aspirated from Faux’s torn lungs as he spoke his dying words.

“And who is this Echo?” they asked.

“A beautiful woman,” I said, “who waits for him overseas in Texas, USA.”

“Oh,” they said rapt and wistful, “that is both lovely and tragic. Who will take his place with her?”

“Me, of course,” I said.

That made them chuckle. “You, you threadbare ghost? You skinny mirage of a man?”

But I went to sleep feeling strangely comforted and thinking about the cup of tea I had had that morning, served in a blue ceramic cup, a deep blue, the color of the ocean, the color of freedom. And when I closed my eyes that night, I had no idea how prescient it had been, a signal, a harbinger of things to come.

The next morning, I was chasing Maria the milk goat when Chrome Yellow ventured into our yard and, catching sight of me, strode up. By now I had the goat, no easy feat since she wasn’t wearing a collar, and was leading my lactating friend to the milking stand.

“Where did you get a milk goat?” said the Chrome as Maria’s kid Kenny began munching the tail of his shirt.

“Watch out,” I said right before Kenny munched his way to Chrome’s left ass cheek. Chrome whirled around, bellowed and flapped his arms, and the little kid ran away.

“I hate it when they look you right in the eye,” he said.

“Yeah, those amber irises with the satanically slit pupils,” I said.

Chrome shuddered. “Like my sister.”

I was pretty good at milking, believe it or not, and Chrome watched me until I stopped to massage Maria’s tired udder.

“We’re leaving,” he said. “You and me. They’re coming for us at noon. The Rhodesian Light Infantry.”

The Rhodesian Light Infantry? This made me laugh, but I didn’t bother to answer, and Chromium stood there until I finished milking. He looked into the pail of goat’s milk as I lifted it. “Well, that’s disgusting. You didn’t even wash those udders — ”

“Teats,” I said.

“—with anything before you milked her.”

“A little dirt is the least of my worries,” I said, walking away.

“They’re coming at noon,” Chrome called after me. “The RLI.”

“So you said.”

But at noon, just as Legson and I were filling our bowls with corn mush mixed with fresh goat’s milk, the prison guards arrived and asked me nicely to come with them.  “Your friends are here,” they said.

“I don’t have any friends.”

“Your friends are here,” they said.

“You’re going to shoot me.”

“No, your friends are here,” they said.

“Oh, my friends are here. Then let’s go. But I’m taking the boy with me,” I said.

“He stays here,” they said. “He is RUF.”

The Revolutionary United Front, blood-thirsty rebels who kidnapped little boys and trained them to commit unspeakable acts of terror.

“It’s a lie,” Legson said, wrapping his arms around my waist, but the guards peeled him off me as the child sobbed, and I was forced to leave poor Legson in the yard.

At the entrance, the guards gave us back our passports and wallets, and then they threw open the gate.

“But no one is here,” I said.

“Go,” they said.

So we went, and that was it. The savannah spread before us, and the desolate expanse of tall grass was terrifying. We walked as if into a hot, dry, and blinding dream.

“What just happened?” I said.

“They’ll be here soon,” Chrome said. “Keep walking.”

“What happens if they don’t?”

“I’ll kill you and eat you,” Chrome said and he smiled to show me his teeth.

Then I could make out something coming toward us. It was a beat-up Land Rover with South African plates. Inside there was just one infantryman, the driver, wearing rumpled camos and a bush hat. He rolled down the window. “You,” he said to me. “Get in. Quick.”

I hadn’t even gotten the door closed before the driver took off, leaving the Chrominator behind to curse us as we sped away.

“Col. Reginald E. Lighthouse, I presume?” I said, buckling my seat belt.

The driver extended his hand for me to shake as the Land Rover lurched over the ruts in the road. “Bob Sablatura,” he said. “It’s the middle of the day. Col. Lighthouse is nocturnal.”

I started to introduce myself, but Sablatura cut me off. “I know who you are.”

We had a 24-hour drive south by southwest through Mozambique and Zimbabwe to the airport in Johannesburg, and Sablatura was determined to take it in one stretch. “Eat something,” he said, and I reached into a paper sack full of protein bars on the floor board. “Just a bite or two or you’ll get sick.”

His name sounded familiar, and I seemed to recall a by-line from a rival Huntsville rag, The Observer, which my father would pick up out of the yard and throw straight in the trash, along with the Item, which he read only for the sports.

“It’s a good thing you’re headed home, because once again, Huntsville is headed for Hell in a hand basket,” Sablatura said.

Amy Lee, the Item’s free press publisher, has been run off by the medical mafia, James Fitch will have to vacate his city council seat if he can’t find a new job in town, a county constable has been indicted on a Class C misdemeanor for calling a pencil dick a pencil dick. The city hired an $80,000 consultant to rebrand Huntsville as something more than a small college town with a lot of prison guards living in mobile homes and a $60,000 firm to check people’s credit card receipts to see where they spend their money—a little noticed but real invasion of privacy in the quixotic quest of significant outside retail development.

The city council tried once again to punish free speech, this time targeting a couple of its own members who had publicly challenged the will of Don “the Don” Johnson. And now, the school district has enlisted people like bond brokers and the owners of construction companies to help come up with a 65 million dollar bond package, including 50 million for a new school in a town with a school population that hasn’t grown in five years.

“I might as well stay here,” I said.

“Buck up,” Sablatura said. “I don’t have any fight left in me, but you do.”

What if Huntsville is already too far gone? What if we can’t even have a civil dialogue on simple and fundamental questions, like which do we go after first, retail development or light industry? Or which do we fund first — new ball fields or teacher raises?

“We have some smart and independent elected leaders, but are there enough of them to save us? I’m afraid it’s all but over, and the outcome of this bond election, no matter which way it goes, will only make things worse,” I said.

You can look at Facebook and letters to the editor to see the escalation of finger-pointing and hate speech. With every election comes vandalism, like campaign signs stolen or defaced with obscenities or racist slogans. Each is a rung on the ladder of oppression, the last of which is social genocide — since wholesale slaughter is still illegal. “And in Huntsville, we’re already there,” I said. “You’ll lose all your friends if you get spotted having lunch with someone on the wrong side of their side. You can lose your job. You can lose your reputation, your dignity, your privacy, your peace of mind. In Huntsville, politics is a zero sum game. And we’re all at fault. I’m at fault. But you can’t stand around holding your johnson if the other side won’t agree to a cease-fire.”

“You’ve given me the best reason of any why you can’t get people who work in Huntsville to live there,” Sablatura said.

But here’s a modest proposal, he said, based on the premise that democracy is damaged goods in Huntsville—our voters just can’t be trusted—along with the democratic experiment in diversity.

1.) Eliminate unnecessary taxing entities and government bodies. Unincorporate Huntsville, abolish the city and school districts but maintain county precincts. Keep commissioners court and a county judge. Elections will be held once every decade to fill expired terms with voters to come from a class of property owners.

2.) Relocate everyone in Huntsville into homogeneous zones within geographic precincts. Assign residence according to explicit criteria such as race, religion, socio-economic class, occupation, sexual preference, political party, taste in bourbon or what have you. Those living in each zone will be expected to set up an association of residents, build their own schools, houses of worship and medical centers, and support their own retail and business sectors. It might also be nice if they started up their own community newspapers. I mean newsletters.

3.) Create a bureaucracy to issue passports for travel between zones where permitted by law. Otherwise, make everyone observe zone boundaries and STAY HOME. The only social intercourse permitted between zones will be—you guessed it—trade.

“I foresee some practical issues,” I said. “Like some Elkins Lake Democrat might be pretty stubborn about selling his 3,500 square foot home to move into a two-bedroom in Precinct 3.”

“Nothing is perfect,” Sablatura said.

The sun had gone down and come up again, and at nearly noon on the next day, Sablatura parked the Land Rover in a sugar cane field about ten miles from the airport.

“End of the line,” he said.

I thanked Sablatura again for having rescued me, even though my future seemed even more uncertain. I got out and watched him drive away until the Land Rover melted into a wavering mirage. And then I stood there all alone, the wind whipping my shirt against my ribs, as a jumbo jet flew overhead, just a couple of miles above the cane field. Under its roaring engine, I began walking in the direction of the airport.

And then I saw her, a long-legged woman in a flowing dress standing beside a shiny black SUV. And I knew instantly who she must be. I began to run and when I reached her, I almost threw my arms around her, and I might have if she hadn’t taken a big step back.

“Bob?” she said.

“Echo?” I said, my heart convulsing with gratitude and desire because she was oh so lovely.

“Get in,” she said, so I reached eagerly for the handle of the shotgun seat. “Back seat,” she said as her nose wrinkled. “You smell bad.”

Huntsville bond fail explained

From our friends at Unholy Alliance.

Habeus Forbus

Councilman Charles Forbus at a 2010 meeting of the Best Council Ever.

[Second in a series about my 120 days in an African prison — Fractal Bob]

I don’t know who this son of a bitch was, but he certainly was not Charles Forbus, the Most Interesting Man of the Best Council Ever. The guy did look vaguely familiar, though—he was about my age and wearing glasses—but he was too pudgy to have been locked up here for long.

But the Chrome sent me to see him, and if he could help me get out of here, I didn’t care if he was Keith Olson’s younger, smarter brother.

“You don’t remember me?” he said, smiling sheepishly. “We met at the Dust.”

He meant the Stardust Room, a righteous bar on the downtown square in my hometown, which served White Russians if you brought your own cream.

“Indeed,” I said, and hiked up my pants before extending my hand. “ Winglebert Humptyback. Nice to meet you.”

“Welcome,” he said, leading me into the dank innards of Cell #15. “I’d tell you my name, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Oh, ha ha, I said, my eyes adjusting to the light in the shack, which was just wide enough to park two minivans side by side. I was struck by the differences in our cells. My home, Cell #3, was tidy, and the glossy black walls bore the satiric artistry of two or three talented souls. The inmates of Cell #15 had only the skill and reach to write FOK JOU in 10-foot scrawl. And there were bedrolls and dirty clothes strewn from wall to wall, which I stumbled over while following Faux Forbus inside.

“No, seriously. It’s Jerry Dorsey,” he said. “But you’d probably know me better by my nom de guerre,” he said. Sheepish grin.

“What’s that?”

“Fractal Bob.” Bigger grin.

“Oh, no shit?” I said. “Wow, I never would have guessed. What are the odds, right? I’m honored. I know what a highly guarded secret your identity has been.”

“Well, who are you going to tell? The Rhodesian Light Infantry? I mean, we’re four-thousand miles from anyone who gives a shit.”

Quite true, I agreed. “So why use the name Forbus to get me here?”

“Would you have risked coming here for Jerry Dorsey? Forbus was the only trustworthy name out of Huntsville I could think of.”

True that. “So, the Chrome says you can get me out of here.”

“But should I?” Faux Fractal scratched his chin. “What are you in for? Murder? Smuggling?”

“I was walking alone down the highway we were building and a truck full of police or soldiers or somebody drove by, and the next thing I know, I’m captured. I’ve never even seen a lawyer or a judge. Got no idea what the charge is.”

Faux Fractal poked himself vigorously in the chest, eyes bugging out. “Me, too, brother! Except I wasn’t walking the highway. I was in a Peace Corps van with Charles Effing Forbus. They let him go and kept me.” He leaned closer. “They say I was spying for the U.S. Embassy. So—were you spying, too, Mr. Humptyback?”

“Dude, seriously, I was just walking down the highway. We were building this road a few feet at a time, and I was calculating the angle of a curve. I got arrested for doing algebra in an algebra-free zone.”

Faux Fractal gazed upon me in the dim light. There was a flash of lightning and then the first beat of rain on the tin roof, and soon more than a hundred men would be rushing in, cramming themselves into this small space.

“Can you get me home or what?” I said.

Then the torrent began, thunder clapped, the prisoners ran in, and Faux Fractal and I found ourselves pressed against the window as the cell hummed with voices speaking English, Afrikaans and Chichewa. Faux and I had to stow all conversation of my escape plans.

“I’m curious,” I shouted above the din, and Faux Fractal leaned in and cupped an ear. “Did you write all the blogs yourself, or is Fractal Bob the work of a committee?”

“No,” Faux shouted back. “Just me.”

“Really? I figured those blogs during the 2011 elections were the work of one guy, but the next group seemed to be written by different people. You know, different writing styles, different voices.”

“Well, yeah, it got to be too much, you know. So it ended up being me and two other guys in my office. We’re all pretty glib.”

“Two guys? Not Rich Heiland and George Russell, maybe Jack Wagamon?”

“Those assholes? They write whatever they want all the time and put their names on it. I was out there sticking my neck out. Maybe you don’t know who I am. We’re kind of a big deal over there. One slip and my whole family could be living under a bridge. Just saying.”

“Courageous.”

Faux Fractal nodded. “And thankless.”

“Hate to say this,” I said as the rain slowed, “but I didn’t care so much for that second set of blogs—you know, Season 2? There were two or three that captured the flavor of the first ones, but a lot of them just fell flat.”

“Yeah, the other two guys,” Faux said, “they’re not as good of writers as me.”

I nodded and he shrugged apologetically.

“So I bet being Fractal got you a lot of girls. Or was that George Russell posing as sexy girls to write in and flirt with you. Oh, shit. I hope he was pretending.”

“Real girls,” Faux said. “I went out with a couple. But they didn’t—they never knew.”

“That you were the guy in the fedora?”

“Right.”

“That’s good. I always figured that one girl was dangerous. The sex kitten. What was her name?”

“Echo.”

“Echo, that’s right.”

Then Faux Fractal hung his head, and I felt moved to comfort him. “Maybe you can start up the blog again when you get back to Huntsville.”

Faux shrugged, raising his eyebrows plaintively. “If I get ever back.” The rain had stopped, and the men tiptoed back into the wet yard. “You’re really not a smuggler?” Faux said when we were alone again.

“Really not,” I said.

“Then someone will be by in a few days. Hang tough,” he said.

A day or two later, my little friend Legson came running up with a note, and I put down the 50-pound sack of cornmeal I had slung over my shoulder to read it.

Winglebert Humptyback: East fence. 1400 hours. 23 February 2013. Come alone. Signed, F. Bob

“He said to tell you to eat the note,” Legson said. I tore it in half and Legson and I ate it. It was slightly salty from the sweat of Faux Fractal’s paw.

“Mmmm, delicious,” Legson said.

Two days later, I made my way perilously to the east fence where Faux Fractal toiled in the dirt with a small-handled implement. I dropped to my haunches beside him, and when he looked up, I saw that he was terrified.

“Quickly,” he said. “A group of RLI under the command of Col. Reginald E. Lighthouse will be here at dawn. Get here at first light any way you can.”

“Dawn? Like tomorrow? But I have something to do for Chrome Yellow before I can go.”

“Then you’d better do it tonight,” Faux Fractal said. “I don’t know who you’re related to, Humptyback, but you got some major suction with somebody.”

After the evening meal, I moseyed over to Cell #4 and found the Chromium teaching spades to some Namibian prisoners. I called him away from the game.

“Listen, your guy is ready to roll, and I still owe you a favor,” I said, hoping against hope Chrome Yellow would let me off the hook.

“You like to tell stories, don’t you?” Chrome said. “I want a story about me, something so horrible that no one will ever cross me again, no prisoner, no guard, no magistrate, no hoard of incursion forces. I want to walk this continent from shore to shore and know that all civilization is scattering in my wake. Can you do that?”

“You like to tell stories, too. Doesn’t everyone think I’m a diamond smuggler?”

“I spent ten years on Madison Avenue, so let me tell you the first rule of public relations,” the Chrome said. “You can’t tell your own story. Your supporters can’t tell your story. It has to come from a credible third party.”

“OK, boss. It’ll be the gospel according to St. Bastard.”

Chrome Yellow made the sign of the cross over my sunken chest. “Now go in pieces and sin often.”

With time running out, I gathered the best wags of Cell #3, and, in the light of a fire in an oil drum, I planted the seed. It worked. Cell #3 prayed the rest of the evening, and then we went to bed. I promised to keep watch in case Chrome Yellow tried to sneak into our cell and suck our brains out through our noses with the long reed he carried in his back pocket.

I had just fallen asleep when the Reverend Akpu-nku was hit with an attack of restless legs, and 163 of us had to roll over in unison. We had gotten really good at it, we prisoners lying stacked like firewood on the cell floor. We rolled, and soon everyone but me was snoring again. I drifted off thinking about Huntsville. I had once described my hometown to Legson as a wooded wonderland of tall pines that smelled fresh and fecund after a hard spring rain.

“But how do you know when the sun comes up or goes down if you can’t see the seam between earth and sky?,” Legson had said. “I’m sorry for you, Father Bob.”

When I awoke, the day had all but dawned and I was late! I scrambled out of the cell and hurried in the drizzle to the east fence. Faux Bob was waiting, scanning with binos the rain-blurred horizon for Col. Lighthouse’s Rhodesian Light Infantry brigade.

“They’re late?” I said.

Faux Fractal counted pulses of light from a hundred clicks away, a signal from the savannah.

“They’re not coming.”

I grabbed his arm. “What?!”

“They’re not coming. Col. Lighthouse says the weather’s too risky.”

Before I could utter even one expletive, an armed phalanx of prison guards ran toward us, splashing through yellow puddles in the yard.

“Run!” Faux Fractal screamed, and I took off with him behind me. Then there was the crack of rifle fire, and I heard Faux Fractal fall with a soggy thud. I ran back to him.

“Go, Humptyback! Run,” he said, but I held his hand as he bled out through the sucking wound in his chest. The guards gathered round us, their rifles pointed at the miserable tableau we made. Faux Fractal’s bloody lips moved, and I leaned close so I could hear his dying words: “Tell Echo I love her.”

Chrome Yellow

[This is the first in a series of blogs about my 120 days incarcerated in an African prison — Fractal Bob]

The boy had just run into the blistering sun and across the yellow yard when One-Eyed Paul, the bandy-legged prophet, entered the narrow shadow under the eaves of Cell #3. Our home.

“What do you want with this boy, Blue-Eyed Devil?”

My eyes are brown, not blue, with flecks of green, a lover once observed as we lay entwined in her bed one dulcet spring afternoon an epoch ago. In a last gasp of male narcissism, I remembered what she said about my eyes, but I have forgotten her name.

“I’m his father as long as I’m here,” I said. “I see that he is fed. I take him to the toilet. I tell him bedtime stories.”

“What is so special about you? There are many fathers here,” One-Eyed Paul said.

The boy came back, skipping like boys do.  “Look, Father Bob, I found a stone in the yard,” he said. “We can make soup.”

“No one can make soup from a stone,” Paul told the boy.

“Chill out. It’s just a story,” I said.

“I am watching you,” One-Eyed Paul told me before he left us. “You will not break the rules.”

Prisoners were the law here, and they had scrawled the rules in chalk on the black walls of the cell. No nakedness. No stealing.  No begging. Paul Banda was our magistrate, the little king of everything, and indeed, the Rules also said there would be no sodomy among prisoners and certainly no ungodly treatment of young boys. But that was not what Paul feared between the white American man and the African boy. The White Devil told many lies that a boy might believe.

Legson crouched next to me in the shade, and we looked out over the yard where our fellow prisoners were smoking and talking or playing games they made up on boards they had drawn in the dirt. The hot sun conspired with starvation to wither the flesh of these unfortunates. My body had succumbed, too, after sixty days locked up in this African nightmare. The bike muscles in my calves and thighs had begun to atrophy. I’d lost the padding in my butt, so I learned to rest on my haunches to avoid the cleaver edges of my pelvic bones.

“But you have a nice tan,” Legson  said and then he smiled with his big white choppers. “In a few more weeks, you’ll be as dark as me. They’ll think of us as brothers.”

These clumsy quips in the Queen’s English, these dazzling toothy grins were a shock to my system every time he launched them at me.  Legson Mapanje was 9 years old and a long way from his village, where he went to school and sung in a choir. We had something in common with a handful of the other 163 inhabitants in Cell #3. We were not guilty, this boy named for the poets of his nation and me. But this meant nothing to anyone, not the judges of Malawi, not a friendly NGO operating here in “the warm heart of Africa,” not our families and friends who had stopped looking for us. Not even to God.

“God is busy, Father Bob,” Legson said, his chin propped up on knobby knees as he watched a man kick a can into the air in a whorl of yellow dust. “The world is full of suffering. We can take a little more of it.”

Meanwhile Paul Banda, distant cousin to a harsh regime, watched me with one black iris moving back and forth like a sentry while the other bobbled opaque in the neighboring socket.

“What is he thinking?” I said.

“He thinks you have the diamonds,” Legson said.

“You know I wouldn’t lie to you,” I said.

Legson grinned. “I should lie if I were you.”

“I should lie, too, but I don’t have to. I don’t have any diamonds. Where would I put them? Sew them into my bodice? Stuff them up my bum? Try that with dysentery, kid.”

But thanks to the magistrate of Cell #4 next door, everyone on the yard believed me to be an international jewel thief. And the weight of his accusation was unmovable in this captive court of opinion. The magistrate of Cell #4 was a white man, an American, a man from my own village in the oilfield protectorate of Texas. ‘Nuf said.

He was known as Chrome Yellow and, unlike the waggle-eyed Paul, he was an unimpressive presence in a faded polo shirt, torn jeans and Nikes sullied with yard dirt.  I might have knocked him on his ass and, with my foot on his throat, demanded he tell the truth. But this was against the Rules — all physical violence was — so Chrome Yellow could bear false witness against me and there was nothing I could do about it but return the favor. I might be just as good at making up stories about the Chrome as he was at making shit up about me. Maybe  better.

“It will not work,” advised Legson, wise beyond his years.  “The first monkey to throw his shit is a witty, clever fellow. If you throw shit back, you’re nothing but a bad loser.”

So I’d lived with the Chrome’s big yet ridiculous lie that he and I were shot down over Namibia with a case full of diamonds. That as he crawled out of the smoking hull of the company helicopter, I was running away, a backpack full of jewels. Chrome took what I left behind but only to salvage it from marauding tribal pirates. And for his trouble, the Diamond Company had him arrested. And me, too. My goodness, what are the odds, Chrome said—and the prisoners nodded in wonder—that two men from Huntsville, Texas, would end up working for the same diamond mine a world away, would be on the same helicopter on the same day, would be shot down together and, while the pilot bled out wearing a crown of windshield glass, would live to skulk away? The only thing that distinguished us as we clambered farther in-country was our motives. I was a thief; he was the savior.

So today, as One-Eyed Paul gazed at me from across the yard, I called him over, and he dropped to his haunches in front of me, twirling a piece of straw in his mouth with the tip of his bright red tongue.

“I didn’t steal anything. I never met that bastard Chrome before we ended up in the same prison. Why is this so hard to believe?”

“Because Chrome Yellow says — ”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what Chromium says.”

Paul took the straw out of his mouth.  “But you care what I think. You care what they think,” he said, waving to include the prisoners on the yard.

“When every one around you is evil, it is easier to be evil,” Legson said. “When every one around you is good, it is still hard to be good. The easy way is the way it must have been. That’s why they believe.”

“Wow, you just shoved Occam’s Razor up the moral ass of the U.S. Constitution,” I said. Because I am an arrogant man, the overeducated underachiever  who enjoys the erudite joke with himself in front of lesser minds. This passes in Huntsville all the time, but here today in this yard, One-Eyed Paul pegged me and he snickered. I shot him a look, and he shrugged with a sly smirk. “I went to Jesuit schools,” he said.

I got up, determined to tend to this once and for all with Chrome Yellow, magistrate of Cell#4.

“Bob,” One-Eyed Paul called after me as I crossed the yard, “you have the soul of a fool.”

The Chrome  was ensconced on an upturned bucket, holding court amongst the English-speaking prisoners, and I halted on their edge as they looked at me like surly thugs. “It’s OK,” Chrome assured them with a mannerly wave.  “Yet another country heard from.”

On the day I was arrested, I had been helping people build a highway. And when it was finished, big trucks were going to drive down it bringing equipment to drill a water well in my adopted village. I’d told Legson that and everyone else in Cell #3 who would listen. And now I was telling it to Chrome. When I finished, Chrome laughed.

“You really can’t do any better than that water well story?”

I kicked the bucket out from under the Chrome and he fell on his ass, still laughing. Then I was grabbed from behind and pummeled until Chrome called them off me.

“It’s OK,” I heard him say as I was doubled over in the dirt. “He’s my homeboy.” Then he shooed them away and knelt over me to see how bad I was hurt.

“You’re not from Huntsville,” I said. My bottom lip was swelling.

No, he admitted, but he’d met another white man, a Texan in Cell #15. This guy might have a lawyer or some way to get word out and, if I would do the Chrome a favor or two, he would ask this Texan if he could help me.

“Sodomy is against the Rules,” I said. “In our cell anyway. I don’t know what you Cell 4 assholes do for fun.”

Chrome chuckled through a smirk. “I’ll think of something you can do for me, and when I do, I’ll send somebody over to give you his name.”

“Where are you really from?” I said as the Chrome helped me to my feet. “And why were you arrested?”

“Ohio,” he said. “And I killed a man. And so did that boy you’ve taken up with. Oh, you don’t believe me? Ask him yourself. Even Africans don’t lock up random school boys.”

I went back to my own yard and scowled furiously at One-Eyed Paul who was laughing at the sight of me.

“Howzit, broe?” said Legson, grinning as usual.

“I may be a diamond thief, but the magistrate of Cell #4 says you’re a killer.”

Legson was silent and just before I took it all back, he began to cry. Then, without a word, he left my side. I spent the better part of the afternoon picking apart the ambiguity of it. He wept because he was outraged by my hypocrisy and lack of faith. He wept because he was guilty and could not face me. He wept because I had, without compassion, reminded him of an unspeakable injustice in which the legal concepts of “murder” and “innocence” were not relevant.

Later, as the evening meal of corn porridge burbled in the communal cauldron outside the kitchen, Legson came back. His dusty little face was rigid and streaked with tears, and yet he sat down so close to me the seams of our pants touched.

“Salty or sweet?” I said.

After several seconds, Legson sighed. “Sweet.”

We leaned our heads against the walls of the cell block and closed our eyes.

“Syrup, so thick you can’t taste the corn or even feel the grit of the meal on your tongue. You smell flowers, you feel your mother’s touch or the softness of a warm breeze. It’s almost too sweet, this thick syrup, as it glides across your tongue and down your throat. You swallow and you can still taste it, it is so sweet.”

Legson worked his mouth, tasting an imaginary nectar, as we stood in line with our bowls and wooden spatulas. As the sun slid down in the slate sky, we ate our supper. I longed for a glass of water, and Legson sipped what I had scooped from the tank of the only toilet that still flushed.

I washed our bowls in that same toilet. One-Eyed Paul came up to take a piss as I dried the dishes with the tail of my T-shirt. I grabbed his arm before he could reach into his fly.

“Jesus, Paul, go piss in the yard.”

“I am not a pig and this is not a pig sty.”

“It isn’t?” I said, but I let go and watched him pee. Then he yanked on the handle, and the toilet flushed, shooting clean water to whirl around the bowl before it was sucked into the septic tank. I couldn’t help but look into Paul’s good eye and smiled. We bumped fists.

“White man,” he said, “you live a charmed life.”

Then Paul’s face hardened and his one good eye was sharp as flint. I whirled around to see one of Chrome’s thugs coming right for me. I rooted myself to the spot as all eyes pierced the dimness of dusk to watch what would happen next.

“Chrome Yellow sent me with the name of the guy you need to see,” the thug said. He leaned forward to whisper it: “Charles Forbus.”

Buzzwords HTX

From my new friends at Unholy Alliance.

The Wolf-s Whistle

“I understand that I haven’t been in the business world and made the money that Mr. Johnson has, as condescending as he comes across sometimes, but I’m a citizen of this city, just like the folks that were here about economic development being built in their neighborhood. You’re going to tell me that this study is going to take out people’s feelings, people’s emotions? You’re absolutely wrong. This is a city. This is where we live. What we do up here affects people. We can try to run this city like a business all we want to, but we are public servants and we are here to serve the people.”

— James Fitch, Huntsville City Councilman

For a moment last Tuesday, if you were paying attention, The Powers That Be outsmarted themselves. Twice. Luckily for them, Huntsville has a short attention span and an itty bitty memory. We like shiny things. This is why next year Dee Everett will win Citizen of the Year and the Ed Sandhop Jr. Award. Bet me.

Outsmarting Themselves No. 1

Even with a video record, how long will anyone remember what Councilman James Fitch said last Tuesday to expose the $60,000 retail development study for what it was—bullshit propaganda that City Hall will use to put retail development anywhere it chooses, your neighborhood or mine.

Fitch defined the fight between the selflessness of public trust and the selfishness of the private sector in a clear and eloquent way, one that even Tish Humphrey, Joe Emmett and Keith Olson could understand. But the folks you have entrusted with your tax dollars took a shit all over what Fitch said. In the process, they defined their anti-taxpayer agenda in no uncertain terms and dared you to do something about it. The wolf under all that sheep’s clothing flashed you last Tuesday. Twice!

So to translate for the I Love Shiny Things crowd, here’s what happened.

Buxton, a company outgoing interm City Manager Chuck has done business with three times (hint), tells City Council at a workshop meeting how they gather a creepy shit ton about everyone in Huntsville who buys anything—from a tank of gas or a hamburger to houses, vacations and Lexus SUVs. All Buxton needs is a street address and it can tell you how up to seven people in one household have spent their money. This is customer analytics, a bloodless term for a scary intrusion into your personal habits, but if you have a Facebook account and use a credit card you must be OK with that. Buxton can also tell you what retailers are best suited for Huntsville and where they should locate in your town.

I wish the Item would do a better job of covering what’s said in these untelevised council workshops because I’m getting this second- and third-hand. But some in the room say Keith Olson is the one who first uttered the “let’s take the politics and emotions out of this” line to endorse the use of a third-party entity to lull citizens and taxpayers into submission. However, sources say he didn’t quite put the spin on it that Uncle Don wanted, prompting Johnson to repeat this key message in the proper code in the regular session that immediately followed.

Olson said that consumers and business owners in HTX want City Council to bring certain businesses into town—like HEB grocery store and Academy sporting goods—and if he could help swing both of those, he could “term limit out of City Council.” Use of third-party data might show voters that council is powerless to pull in their favorite retailers if these retailers just don’t want to come here or that council could pull in new businesses only if it’s free to hand out tax incentives that the “naysayers” won’t support. Getting Buxton on board would show that council was doing everything it could to stop market leakage and grow the tax base, adding to city sales taxes—if we don’t give it all back to them through other (TIRZ 1) incentives—and taxable property.

That’s fine, according to TPTB, but that’s not the point Don Johnson needed to make.

Council will be guided in its decisions by what fellow members of this unholy trinity—city government, retail sector and developers—think based on data the city gets from Buxton. Not what you, dear citizen in your precious neighborhood conservation district, think or feel about what the city plans to do with your community and your tax dollars.

And they are absolutely sure you will not be swayed by the homespun statesmanship of one James Fitch, public servant. Because they have already given you your Target and your Olive Garden and that’s only the beginning!

Fitch does not understand the retail trinity because he catches bad guys for a living and TPTB only care about catching bad guys when they rob stores and burglarize homes in Elkins Lake, and how often do you think that happens? Poor lad, he does not understand how powerful the trinity is in swaying the easily distracted rabble, the proles, the hybrid sheep-people with a little coin burning holes in their pockets. If he did, the idiot would keep his mouth shut and term limit himself off council, too.

Outsmarting Themselves No. 2

At the end of last Tuesday’s council meeting the great Chuck Pinto, before he poofed into a cloud of leadership dust that will hang over City Hall while Aron Kulhavy wears the big boy shoes, walked council through city staff’s amazing exercise in budget management.

Pinto sound bite: The city’s 2013 fiscal year budget has been balanced with almost another million dollars in surplus cuts to be realized through things like changing employee health insurance carriers and early retirement for certain city staff. (Wait for it…)

Recall that during budget workshops the projected budget shortfall amount changed several times, from about $400,000 to as much as $1.9 million. Remember that the revenue generated from the 10.5% tax increase would only cover half the shortfall or less.

Remember that Olson said it would be “irresponsible not to raise taxes” considering the looming shortfall and that Johnson urged council not to waste time “micromanaging” the budget process by line item review.

Note, too, that someone had to have given Pinto et al. very specific guidance about the budget to the tune of $2 million in cuts. Because, remember, Pinto reminded council several times that its job was to make fiscal policy and it was staff’s job to carry out.

So what happened?

• Council passed an unbalanced budget with a $1.4 million budget deficit.
• Council  blamed its economic woes on a previous City Council of “naysayers,” yes, eeew, them.
• Council withheld sufficient fiscal policy guidance before the budget was approved while advocating for a tax increase. Then passed the increase, the first one in 10 years, gambling they could sell it to you.
• After it got its tax increase, the city balanced its budget and found virtually $1 million more, money it could not find during a round of summer budget workshops.

Get it? The city didn’t need a tax increase, and key players on the City Council, Chuck Pinto and city staff knew that all along. What a nasty little scheme, and you just re-elected the mastermind and his Igor. Way to go, sheeple!

How will the city spend that extra $1 mil of your tax dollars? You’ll find out. Maybe.

Economic Development HTX Style

Author unknown to me. Anyone want to confess? Come on, ya bastard.

God-s Own Chicken

If you don’t praise Him for the fabulous autumn weather we have here—compared to the biting cold, the wind, the sleet, the days on end of gray flannel skies of other places—then Father God might just take it away from us. I hear He’s pretty tough. Not like His long-haired son with the same last name.

Believe it or not, Bob believes in God and loves him some Jesus. So, in addition to saying prayers of thanks, I have been taking advantage of this wonderful weather to bike around town. On my route, as it has been since I was a kid, is the G.A. White Addition, next to my family’s ’hood. I have been allowed for some time to cross the boundary between Forest Hills and the future home of Chick-fil-A on the corner of 11th and Pear.

A newcomer would have a hard time finding that boundary or pointing out to you with certainty which homes were occupied by Father God-fearing homeowners and a migratory flock of renters who love Huntsville no more than they love the gas station restroom they stop at to piss in while on their way down the interstate.

You can’t tell from the neat homes, the trim and tended yards, the late-model vehicles parked in the driveways. No sir, ma’am. Inside the G.A. White subdivision looks a lot like the inside of Forest Hills. A collection of families. Not a remnant of ramshackle crack homes hanging like a fart cloud from the ass pipe of a fire-breathing commercial dragon.

The only problem with the neighborhood, founded on what was the outskirts of town, is that it is located near the intersection of the city’s main drag and I-45 and directly across the street from three fast-food restaurants. Some of the subdivision’s homes border 11th Street and serve as a sound and visual buffer for the rest of the neighborhood, which has been so far protected—mostly—by deed restrictions that prohibit mixed use and its city zoning classification, which limits it to single family homes.

If you develop the lots in that block bordered by 11th, Pear, Cedar and Hickory, you will have moved noise and traffic from one side of the street—long-term commercial—into an established neighborhood. Patrons leaving the new business will exit into the neighborhood and travel residential streets to Normal Park to catch the light for a left turn back onto 11th. This wouldn’t be welcome in most neighborhoods, and it should be no surprise that White subdivision residents object, too.

The combination of deed restrictions and zoning designation is evidence that the people who once lived in this little neighborhood loved it and wanted to protect it. And, judging from their comments to P & Z and city council, the current ones still do.

But now comes Jack Choate, Esq., representing three property owners who don’t live in the White subdivision and never intended to.

Christians right down to their chicken

Since I got home a couple of weeks ago, Dad and I have resumed our Tuesday night routine watching Must-see TV on public access Channel 7 with our dose of single malt scotch as my apolitical mother bitches at us from downstairs.

Council meetings begin with an invocation from someone other than James Fitch and Ronnie Allen, perhaps both mainstream Protestants, as well as Keith “Recounted” Olson, oratorically challenged and with low cred in the family values department.

You can tell when it’s about to get good b/c the council invocation includes pleas to Father God for civility and wisdom. Yet from week to week these folks don’t seem to notice that He never answers their prayers—or He likes Ronnie Allen better than them.

This is the literal definition of insanity—trying something over and over and expecting different results. That’s right: Huntsville’s city council is insane. Thus the conclusion of Bob’s civic syllogism.

“What is it with the ‘Father God’ thing?” I asked my dad. “What’s wrong with plain God or Lord or just Jesus?”

“They’re making sure the Head Guy knows they’re talking to Him. Not the Holy Ghost or God Jr. The guy at the top of the org chart. He’s Father God, not Jesus God.”

“But I thought the Holy Trinity—oh, never mind,” I said as the parade of council proclamations began.

“That’s right,” Dad said. “Drink your drink and shut up.”

And then the show started.

“Who’s that smarmy leprechaun?” I said as Choate took the podium for his thirty-something page presentation on his clients’ wish to take out a block of an old neighborhood, shunting aside the Planning and Zoning Commission’s previous denial of their request to rezone and pissing on 60-year-old neighborhood deed restrictions.

“See, it’s this shit that keeps your people down, Bob. Keep digging that hole. Keep talking that trash.”

“I’m sorry. Who is that puckishly handsome, well-spoken shyster in the Brooks Brothers suit?” I said.

“Shut up and listen,” Dad said.

So I did.

Choate represents three hometown Huntsville speculators—Micah Slaughter, Rob McCaffety and Eric Johnston, a.k.a. MRE Enterprises—who bought on spec the property fronting 11th Street in the southwest corner of the White Addition behind Bandera Grill.

They want to develop it and lo, the block is already ripe to fall, the victim of an economic Domino Theory that Choate explained to a sympathetic council minus one James Fitch, who recused himself because, reportedly, he has connections to neighborhood landowners. It’s too bad that everyone on council is not as scrupulous, as homeowner Scott Hornung pointed out during the ensuing public hearing. But I digress.

One trait we humans share is the conviction that we should have what we want when we want it. We are hard-wired through evolution, which Father God had nothing to do with, to blast through any obstacles in our path to get what we want.

But many of us also follow the rules of social contract. We keep our hands and feet to ourselves, and we don’t take what doesn’t belong to us. Even observing a universal evolutionary imperative—”gimme it”—many of us also do not set our sights on something that we can only get by violating someone else’s rights. Especially when other alternatives are available.

Not MRE.

Their lawyer Choate showed up Tuesday at city council to do an end run on the P&Z, chaired by client and “unsophisticated” speculator Johnston. (Johnston had recused himself.)

Why did P&Z say no? ‘Cause of the deed restrictions; ’cause MRE won’t say what they want to do with the property; and ’cause there isn’t a traffic study to predict the impact of development on the subdivision.

This is what Choate had to say about that to the council, which includes at least one member who is or has been a partner with one of his clients in other land deals.

“As you know, the richest and most connected assholes in the community get to decide the best use of other people’s property. Let’s blow off these White subdivision deed restrictions. Ain’t nobody over there gonna bust a grape over it. We’ll get you a damn traffic study that says whatever you want it to say after city planner Aron Kulhavy becomes Economic Development Director Aron Kulhavy. And we’re—uh—gonna put a Chick-fil-A on the property. That’s right! Chick-fil-fucking-A.”

Right-o, daddy-o. These good homegrown Christians are gonna put Christian Chicken on that lot. Not no liquor store. Not no honky-tonk. Not no oil well. Now, stack that against the whining of naysayers who long-ago yielded their neighborhood character to vagabond squatters, who, pssst! Do Not Vote.

“What’s so cool about Chick-fil-A?” I asked Dad.

“It’s code,” my dad said. “For anti-gay. Church’s Chicken, despite the name, is chicken for the masses, which might include you and the rest of the gay and gay-loving naysayers.”

“What, now the naysayers are not just against growth, they’re also gay?”

“Kendall Scudder is NOT GAY,” my mother yelled from downstairs.

“Jesus,” my dad muttered. “Nobody said he was!”

“Keith Olson said he was! And that’s just not nice!”

“No,” Dad bellowed, “it’s not nice!”

“Keith Olson said Kendall Scudder was gay? Holy shit! How very civil,” I said. “How does he figure that?”

“Maybe they’ve been laying up around Huntsville playing ‘Brokeback Mountain’ together. How the hell should I know?” Dad said. “I wish everyone would shut up about this gay bullshit.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Why? Is there something you want to tell me?” my father said.

“Our son is not gay!” Mom yelled from downstairs.

Dad looked at me with one raised eyebrow. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

“I’m dating a new girl,” I said. “You haven’t met her yet.”

I hadn’t met her yet, either, but I didn’t say that.

“Thank the Lord,” he said. “What’s her name? Is she from here?”

“Yes, I think so, and her name is, um, Echo.”

“Echo?” my mom yelled. “What kind of name is that?!”

“Echo What?” Dad said absently, distracted now by the neighborhood people who had begun streaming to the podium to challenge the shyster in the Brooks Brothers suit.

“They don’t have a prayer, do they, Pop? I mean, the neighborhood won’t enforce those deed restrictions if the consequence is a public whipping for having fought against yet another delicious and taxable ‘win-win’.”

“Probably not this time. But if you ask me they’d better watch out,” Dad said as Father God let Councilman Ronnie Allen pop off at Jack Choate. “Or these chickens will come home to roost.”

Hell is Empty

It started on the plane ride home. “Where are you headed, Houston or LAX?”

“Houston.”

“Oh.” One syllable laced with sympathy.

“Huntsville, actually. Ever heard of it?”

“Where they execute people?”

The nice lady in the seat next to mine had a vowel-flattening Michigan accent.

“Isn’t there also a college there?”

“Sam Houston State, yes. Home of the fighting Bearkats,” I said.

The plane began to speed down the runway, and I gripped both arms of my aisle seat—Bob hates take-offs and landings. The lady smiled at me. “Trust me. It’ll be OK. I do this three times a week.”

And then we were in the air, and the whole plane went silent as the patch of ground we could see from our starboard windows went at a crazy angle that my amygdala screamed was certain death. I didn’t breathe again until the plane leveled and we hit our cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, the distance at which all the world makes more sense.

“Isn’t Huntsville where the city council used the Texas Rangers to go after people with fake Twitter accounts?” the lady said, and, of course, I had to admit that it was.

“Oh,” she said, “what an odd place.” It sucks when “odd” is the nicest euphemism a stranger can come up with to describe your hometown.

Then she settled into her seat and turned her face to the window. The question hung in the air between us for a second or two: What business do you have in a place like that? But she was too polite to ask or maybe I just wasn’t that interesting. She pulled out a copy of The Economist and began to read.

Chicago, where I spent the last couple of days before the election, was behind me, and I’d already given up the tiny Foggy Bottom sublet I had in D.C. while working as a “fellow” on the Obama campaign. (Being a “fellow” made it sound so Ivy League.) I and the rest of the President’s low-level volunteers had scattered. I had one last text from Stew. “See you for Hillary 2016.”

The late afternoon sky was golden, and I longed for a better view of America as we flew toward home, my vast red state with its growing blue scars and blemishes. (One day, people…) Then the drink cart came rolling incrementally down the aisle, and the lady in the seat next to me set aside her magazine.

“Are you going to partake?”

“I’m claustrophobic. Booze is what keeps me from running up and down the aisle screaming,” I said.

“First round’s on me,” she said.

Woohoo!

After a couple of bourbon and Cokes, I had loosened my proverbial tie and told this stranger everything there was to know about me and HTX. If she’d gotten off the plane at Intercontinental, I would have had to kill her.

Before I tipsily deplaned, the last thing the lady—a Republican strategist on her way to undo the damage Latinos did to Orange County—said was: “The truth doesn’t always lie somewhere in the middle. Sometimes one side is just plain fucking wrong.” And then, like the rest of the country, we pointed our fingers at each other. However, we were drunk and grinning, whereas the rest of the country is not.

So as I was making my way through the narrow passage from plane to terminal, already feeling the warm Houston air, my watch already set back an hour, I was excited about seeing my dad, who had driven down to pick me up. Time and distance had made me forget about how he generally can’t stand me. But there was no smiling papa waiting for me in the terminal. It was Johnny Stompanato.

“Where’s my dad?” I said as Johnny got up from his seat, adjusting his balls.

“What’s it to ya?” he said.

For those of you who didn’t read my blog last year, Johnny Stomp is a friend of the family, and if you have to ask what he does for a living, you don’t need to know.

Johnny had been as busy during political season in HTX as I had been at the Obama HQ. It must have killed him to have my Negro-loving, Saul Alinksy-reading, Rachel Maddow-watching ass take the shotgun seat in his black Escalade. (The things he has to do for TPTB.) I, no doubt, was the lone argument Johnny’s crowd had for abortion.

But Johnny wasn’t the least bit curious about what I had been doing. He wanted to set me straight about the progress TPTB had made in HTX since I’d left last February.

“What progress?” I said. “Kendall Scudder and Joe Rodriquez came within one point of beating Olson and Johnson. That’s huge.”

Johnny, his eyes on the road as it began to get dark, grinned cryptically.

“Nothing happens in Huntsville that we didn’t make happen,” he said. “Not any more. Bet your ass on that, bright boy. We got everything just about lined up and then it’s all going to fall into place.”

Au contraire, Johnny Stomp. You passed a 10+ percent tax increase. You woke up the tea party behemoth and joined with them local Democrats.

“Oh contrary, Short Pants,” Johnny said. “Because there are some things more important than money to these old farts with frozen tax rates. The tea party ain’t ever gonna link arms with that gaywad Ken Doll. And I’ll kiss your balls if they do.”

I shifted uncomfortably, moving closer to the window as Johnny’s Escalade crawled down a congested I-45.

Then Johnny went on to describe the new world order, one in which they had kicked the teeth out of people like Jack Wagamon and Lanny Ray and a well-placed spy couple fed them steady info from Camp Naysayer.

Keith Olson must have felt like the Union general whose soldiers brought him Robert E. Lee’s battle plans wrapped around a couple of cigars. Except in that case, this accidental discovery was the consequence of carelessness, and the Union general took little advantage of it. Olson also should not get credit for wartime subterfuge—he merely took advantage of the sleazy enterprise of a bar-crawling low-life. But he did make hay with it.

“So I guess Olson is a superior fucker to most Civil War generals, wouldn’t you say?” Stomp said. “He got the gun, he pulled the trigger, he took the kill shot. And that’s what these jokers deserve after what they did to him. And now all Camp Naysayer’s got left are their memories. Who knew it would be so easy to shut the fuckers down? All you got to do is hurt their feelings.”

As soon as we got in the door, Dad went Shakespeare on me.

“Hell must be empty,” he said, “because the last devil is here.”

But Fractal Dog jumped up on me for a hug and my mother kissed me. “Bourbon or Xanax?” she said.

I took both and trudged upstairs to the refuge of my childhood room in my childhood home in the heart of a ward where Kendall Scudder was the winner.

The next night I sat on my friend Maggie’s back porch with Team Fractal. It was too warm for a fire but we had one anyway, and we drank to toast the end of season 2. Austin Bob was already in LA and Local Bob was through, finished—exhausted by our Bobbish demands and disillusioned with Camp Naysayer.

“Their moral center won’t hold,” said Local Bob. “And when the warriors fold, there’s nothing left but hand-wringers and the mentally infirm or socially challenged.”

“They’d rather quit than get better at it,” Maggie said, and the rest of them agreed. “There’s a circle of Hell for people like that. It’s probably an upper circle where it’s cooler and the food is better, but it’s still Hell.”

I didn’t know any of the people who flew the Camp Naysayer flag, not personally anyway. Not Jack Wagamon or Lanny Ray, Dalene Zender, Karl Davidson or Katie Newman, not Scudder, Rodriquez, nor Ronnie Allen. They live only on TV, in the pages of the Item, the Twitterverse, the copious forwarded emails I get from Team Fractal. And in the minds of my parents’ friends and the people they need and fear.

“You should quit, too, Bob,” Maggie said. “Before their spies get some real proof.”

I stood up and stretched and drained the last of my beer. I looked at them, faces lit by a dancing fire, bodies huddled against a woody darkness where, for all I knew, Olson’s spies lurked, listening, recording every word.

I threw my beer bottle at the fire and it shattered musically against Maggie’s brick BBQ pit.

“No,” I said.

Bob-s Rules for Running

So, you’re running for office in HTX and you want help picking out a campaign how-to book? First, let us congratulate you on not paying $40,000 to an urban consultant and then calling your PAC something ridiculous like Hometown Huntsville. Way to keep it real, bro.

Now, we do have a couple of approaches that do well in small towns. No, no—not Lee Atwater’s The Asshole’s Campaign Companion or Turd Blossom’s Big Campaign Stinkout. Both of those are a bit big for your britches. Yes, we are loooong on nasty here in HTX, but we also only squeak by on brains. Atwater and Rove may forever serve as the role model for reptilian-brain bad asses but only ’cause they were smart as well as outrageously evil. Not a combination you find here. With an exception or two. But hang on a minute.

You also don’t want The Thinking Man’s Guide to Community Campaigning. We sold that book to Darren Grant two years ago and look where it’s got him. This stands to be his second loss to someone with less intellectual lode. Grant follows the book religiously—meeting voters, putting up signs, providing smart answers to candidate questionnaires, mobilizing supporters to write letters to the editor.

Meanwhile, opponent Justin Brock is using the de rigueur campaign helper in these parts: No Campaign Required If They Already Like You, with helpful chapters such as “Never Debate: Why Expose How Ignorant You Are Now When You Can Show Them After You’re Elected.”

Brock and school board candidate Sam Moak will win with very little need to engage people they don’t know. Because it’s not enough to prove you’re worthy of the community’s trust. In this town—to quote Norman Ward—it’s not what you do but who you know that counts. Just campaign math, Professor Grant.

Are you with me so far? Here’s Bob’s First Rule of Running: Don’t Run If You’re Not Already Popular. If you don’t know if you’re popular, ask yourself these important questions: Are you an egghead? If yes, then no, you are not popular. Not enough registered eggheads here. Are you a black cop? No, not even in Ward 3. Crazy, drunk porn movie producer? No. Already walked off the dais in a huff? No. Friends with the Wagamon Clan? No. An asshole, a dumb ass, a willing tool? Wait a minute—yes! We can work with you!

If you’re not popular, not a smart man (or woman), if you’re fudging on your credentials and don’t originally meet the requirements for running, if you’ve never voted before and your lifestyle leaves a little something to be desired, that is no problem, my friend. You’re also a willing tool with a capital T and that rhymes with fool, right here in River City.

As an added bonus, you tools-n-fools come with fool friends, fool kinfolk, and fool acquaintances, and y’all are totally susceptible to the best, the most effective, the deluxe of campaign programs that we offer: Ever’body Loves a Loser. (It comes with zebra print accessories for your big-haired girlfriend and her little dog or a can of mustache wax and a camo vest for your man.)

The first chapter of Ever’body Loves a Loser is “Hang ‘Em High,” and it’s written for the increasingly improbable chance that you are going to be able to lynch, beat, terrorize or use a crooked district attorney and his Texas Ranger fuck buddy to persecute your opponent into cowering silence.

You might wish you could bully into submission the women, Negros, Meskins, fags, or Democrats who had the poor judgment to run against you. But let’s face it. You’re too stupid to be as good at it as the smart, rich jerks you shill for.

And at some point—like when the local newspaper story about your Texas-brand tyranny goes viral—you’ll see the wisdom of playing the pussy. Because, son, you done been betrayed. That newspaper took advantage of you, and therefore you is a real victim. Outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and shamed by people with obvious ties to the federal government, the United Nations, Osama Bin Laden, and the New York Times. As baby Jesus and many country and western songs tell us, nobody gets loving like a real victim, and you gotta milk that all the way to the winner’s circle.

For a powerful testimonial, please check out Keith Olson’s campaign site on Facebook. I totally underestimated the guy after he rode Hometown Huntsville in for a first election win against notoriously uncivil lawyer Lanny Ray. And then I read Keith’s FB posts and I knew—he’s a customer! He’s bought himself a copy of Ever’body Loves a Loser and that well-thumbed handbook must have a place of honor in the family outhouse. Sooooeee! Pig, pig!

You can tell from Olson’s Facebook page (Re-elect Keith Olson) that he has read past that first chapter. Subsequent chapters include: “Turn Your Shitty Record into Hugs and Votes”; “Negative Facts About You Are Uncivil”; and “Remember to Link Your Opponent to President Negro.”

Keith read even to the last chapter, “Big Words Sound Smart.” This is no doubt why Olson blasts Kendall Scudder’s mailer as trash “that is full of semantics.” Many of Keith’s supporters learned the word “semantics” from this FB post. A “semantics” is a word that lies, depending on who’s reading it. Like “deficit.” That is one of them semantics. And “tax increase.” That is whatcha call a compound semantics.

We can sell Ever’body Loves a Loser at the low-low price we do because we market in volume. But our most expensive campaign manual hardly sells at all, and that’s because the target audience actually wrote it. It comes in a plain wrapper, doesn’t have a title, and there’s no price tag on it because if you have to ask then yadda yadda. This is an all-purpose must-have for the nouveau somebody in town, and the title of every chapter reads like a post-Depression etiquette book: “What to Tell the Naysayers”; “Crime Is Not a Nice Word”; and “We Don’t Get Felony Drunk, We Get Promoted.”

A chapter was hastily added for this last edition: “When You’re Not Among Friends.” And I’m sure Don Johnson’s elitist public attack on the little local farmers’ market last summer was the first thing that got upper echelon scribes scurrying. I mean, did Johnson not remember he was on fucking TV when he dissed as trashy all the tents on the courthouse lawn and the mariachi merriment of an adjacent Cinco de Mayo celebration? Whoops!

Johnson’s campaign mailer shows how well he’s been rehabilitated. It’s the shining example of his special brand of Karl Rove’s favorite strategy, the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, and disturbingly discordant with even Johnson’s public performance at city council meetings. The Don’s mailer does a masterful job of presenting himself as the modest, kindly and civic-minded elder to a group he needs on his side—remnants of the Greatest Generation, who hate tax increases just slightly less than they hate pride, envy, anger, greed, laziness, gluttony, and lust.

And for those of you popular, white, affluent folks running for office, remember that all it takes to distance yourself from any of the seven deadlies you might revel in is to keep your transgressions under wraps while pointing the finger at your opponent and his supporters. Tip from the book: Use the mail list from your church or civic group to sound the alarm. That’s a proven way to disguise your side’s outrageous mud slinging.

This brings us to Bob’s Second Rule for Running: If you can’t keep the mask from slipping, you’d better think twice. Because it really sucks when the naysayers win, when they answer your crafty “fuck you” with the winning number of votes. And that’s what happens when enough voters realize who you really are and what you’re really up to. It can be undone the next election cycle, but it might cost you $40K and a long-term association with some shockingly rough and stupid ass clowns.

So that’s all the campaign how-to guides we carry. Yes, we did have An American’s Guide to Clean Campaigning, but we sold our only copy to José “Joe” Rodriquez. If he wins Tuesday, yeah, we’ll think about restocking. But wow. Wouldn’t that be crazy?