Ideally, I’d like to catch a beautiful woman in a lie once, then move on to the next beautiful woman.
I’m a punchline in my ex’s biography—or résumé, I should say.
A big gold-star punchline.
She married into The Family, and she also knew to walk away from me.
Looks good on paper.
She still looks good for her age in her slim-fit business skirts.
She never wears too much makeup, but she’s never without some makeup.
And what’s she have to do all day but go from one light- impact workout routine to the next?
I get embarrassed for her when she occasionally attempts her condescending tone with me.
Her true vacancy is on full display when she’s stretched, attempting to express any emotional depth.
But our semi-annual one-minute conversations are fine, friendly enough, always re: our sons, of course.
My brief playboy phase fizzled when the simplicity of professionals became apparent.
No risk like when you run into an old senator and with a softened tone he introduces you to his pig-tailed date slurping on a pacifier, her eyes rolling around the corners of the room.
And no shame like some jilted Secretary of Defense that’d fallen in love with The Pass-Around-The-Party-Bottom, raging and pouting as he watches her in The Act of Love with everyone else.
The Act of Love itself no longer interested me as much as my quick escapes knowing that it could’ve happened.
With my deep bellybutton and my tits that ache with every flight of stairs, I’m never King Charles by myself.
CHAPTER 21 Best Chums in Common
As a marine stationed in Japan, Ozzy had been mocked ruthlessly by his battalion for being effeminate.
Shaken by this hazing, he mostly hung out at The Operation Bluebird Cafe.
Remember that name, Vigilant Reader: The Operation Bluebird Cafe.
In ’60 Hovver himself wrote a memo naming Ozzy as CIA.
In ’62 GDM and Ozzy became inseparable.
GDM and his wife devoted themselves unequivocally to Ozzy and his wife.
Never before had they taken such an interest in overseeing others.
GDM helped Ozzy find work and housing, brought him along to social events and meetings, and even helped with their baby.
At the same time, oddly, all of GDM’s advice to Ozzy made Ozzy appear weirder, scuzzier, and more unstable, more like a classic misfit.
In April ’63 GDM went to New York to meet with a CIA agent that he knew, another one that was Chief of Clandestine Operations in Eastern Europa, and The General Manager of The Haitian bank.
Officially, the four men discussed mineral concessions in Haiti.
And the next afternoon GDM met again with that same CIA agent, along with his chief, Divine, Pops’s ex-partner on Zappatoes.
Within hours after GDM’s meeting with Divine, a Domestic Operations case officer in Capital City created a legend for the entire Domestic Division that they had no idea who GDM was.
The officer requested an expedited check on this purportedly unfamiliar character.
He received a report from ’58 when Moste, then at Dallas Domestic Divisions, debriefed GDM after a trip to Yugoslavia.
That way, if GDM ever claimed to know Moste, it could be officially attributed to that meeting years earlier instead of the lunch at which Moste suggested he might like to meet Ozzy.
From there, GDM traveled to Capital City to secure approval for a coup against Papa Doc in Haiti.
He spoke to L-BJ’s military advisor.
This Haitian coup provided solid reason for GDM to interact with high-ranking officials just months before 11/22/63, and the official trail it created complied with international goals that King Arthur supported.
Five months after GDM left for Haiti, six weeks before 11/22/63, Ozzy got a job at The TX School Book depository owned by Brrrd, a member of The TX Crusade for Freedom, right-wing oilman, and friend of GDM.
And Pops quickly ascended The Party ranks.
The Head of The Party in TX backed him for Senate and Crytin for Gov.
Crytin worked that same intersection as Pops: Military Intel, local police, The Party, Russian expats, and Oilmen.
In fact, Crytin was tight with GDM and Brrrd.
Thru ’62 Crytin supervised the establishment of a complicated underground command post for local police underneath The Dallas Health and Science Museum, not unlike the bunkers of my youth.
And on 11/22/63 Crytin’s men drove the the pilot car that led King Arthur’s motorcade.
And Crytin provided Dallas Police with a Russian translator for Ozzy’s wife immediately after King Arthur’s very public skull chipping.
Her statements didn’t implicate Ozzy, but the translator’s sure did.
All our luxuries, The Barbarians do get comforts we’ll never have: Lone Wolf Theories, external triggers for internal censors, boundaries of permissible thought.
I envy The Barbarians: their struggles must feel so real.
What depth of meaning, two people that both already feel real on their own, believing in their struggles, fucking with The Act of Love together.
Lying awake nights, I imagined: what if I had to wake up?
What if I had to wake up and go to that same place I hated 1,000,000 days in a row sans end in sight?
What if I had calloused hands, and my coarse friends and me all had bad nicknames for the boss that we’d whisper and laugh so hard?
However much you may wish, you really can only be you.
CHAPTER 22 The Most Beautiful Zoo in The Middle East
The Garden of Eden sat between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Sumer, which was later named Mesopotamia and now Iraq.
According to The Sumerians, their civilization existed for 500,000 years, fallen from a previous Golden Age.
Sumerian culture blossomed all at once out of nowhere.
Its influence reached as far east as The Indus River and all the way to The Nile.
Their citizens traveled frequently and widely.
Their queen, stylish by contemporary standards, wore modern wigs, large earrings, necklaces, and makeup.
She died in a ritual suicide 2,150 years before the founding of Rome, 2,000 years before Moses started writing.
Around 2,000 B.C the first Codes of Justice were written in the halls of Sumer’s metropolis, Babylon.
The Sumerians also invented: the first writing system, the wheel, schools, medical science, written proverbs, the idea of history, the bicameral congress, taxation, the concept of social reform, cosmogony, cosmology, coins, the 360-degree circle, spherical astronomy, 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour.
Their accurate knowledge of the movements of the sun and moon led to the inventions of the first calendar and the Zodiac, whose horoscopes The Barbarians still sweat each morning.
Diana means moon.