Adventures Amongst the Trolls

When I was about 24, I returned to the bosom of my beloved Texas after a spell in Oxnard, California. I worked for a while, a long while, at a Diamond Shamrock convenience store/gas station in Austin. After my experience working at Uncle Dick’s 7-11 in California, I figured convenience store work was easy enough to get and would provide some much-needed income while I painted or found a real job. I ended up working there for a little over two years, and while the experience -not to mention the money- sucked completely, the fantastic cast of rogues, reprobates and miscreants I met can’t be beat.

The store was in an ideal location for a thriving community of seedy types right out of a Bukowski novel. It was a few blocks off of I-35 on Riverside Drive, the last big street before the highway crossed Town Lake, aka The Colorado River (at least Austin’s little branch of it). Snuggled up right behind us were a mass of low-rent apartments, many of them Section Eight, and a large empty field that opened up on the banks of Town Lake. This wasn’t the pretty part of Town Lake, where yuppies jogged on the spotless hike-n-bike trails surrounded by a carefully manicured environment, soccer moms led their children on safe nature walks and rowers from the university would shoot across the grape green waters. No, this was the baaaad part of the river. Technicolor graffiti was sprayed onto any building or flat surface that went unguarded for any length of time. Rusty, abandoned shopping carts by the dozen were scattered over the area in various states of decay; beer, cheap booze and even cheaper wine bottles, along with the occasional hypodermic needle, were strewn like wino confetti all through the big open field. When the wind would pick up, the loose garbage would pile up in large drifts against the chain link fences, blowing through the holes. The area had a lingering reek of exhaust, ripe garbage and standing water.

Here and there, unevenly spaced up and down this portion of Riverside Drive, east of the highway, were shabby men in shabby clothes, often sucking bargain beer or cheap booze from a brown paper bag-wrapped bottle or can, and, more often than not, toting handmade “Will Work for Food” signs. They were generally from mid-thirties to early-sixties, almost all men, and mainly white, although there were a few Hispanics mixed in. I found out later that the black homeless and the wetback Mexican homeless pretty much kept to themselves; hobo ‘turf wars’ were not unheard of, and straying into another group’s area might be a quick route to a serious ass-kicking. These men wandered solo up and down Riverside throughout the day. Whenever they would encounter each other, they would say hello, almost formally, often with a tip of the crumpled, filthy baseball cap and a handshake, chat for a few moments and wander along in search of whatever they could squeeze, shake or beg out the day. Much later on, once I found out that most of them congregated in the evenings in a makeshift camp under the bridge where I-35 crosses the river, I began calling them “trolls” after the under-bridge-dwelling creatures from the old children’s story. It kind of stuck, and ‘troll’ became another word in the list of terms they’d use to describe themselves, right up there with tramp, hobo, wino, vagrant, and bum.

 

My informal introduction to the trolls of I-35 and Riverside was sudden and painful. I had been working at the Diamond Shamrock only a week or so, when one hot summer afternoon the manager noticed one of the local winos aggressively panhandling our customers for change as they were pumping their gas or heading to or from the store. Never one to do his own dirty work, the manager-who shall remain nameless in this narrative, but in my memories is referred to as “the fat bastard”-sent me outside to advise the fellow that he was trespassing on private property, and ask him to kindly move along…or else.

I went outside to where the guy was standing, swaying, out near the gas pumps holding a 40 ounce beer in a brown paper sack. He was a disheveled, beat up-looking old guy of about 60-or so, bald as an egg, with a stained grey beard that reached mid-chest. He was wearing filthy old combat fatigues, a tennis shoe on one foot and a loafer on the other. A few of the patrons looked noticeably relieved that somebody was doing something about this situation and they wouldn’t be forced into a position of either ignoring the guy, giving him some change, or mumbling “…sorry, I don’t have anything,” as they scrambled to get back into the safety and security of their cars. Despite the terror in the eyes of some of the more genteel customers, I thought the old boy looked as dangerous as a fart in a windstorm; a little crazy but most likely harmless.

“Hey guy, you’re gonna’ need to move along,” I said sheepishly, “the manager doesn’t want you hitting on our customers for money.”

“You can’t tell me what to do, sonny!” he barked drunkenly in gust of swamp gas-scent and a spray of spittle, “this is ‘Merica!”

“I’m just doing my job, man; manager says for you to go, so I’m here to ask you to go. Nothin’ personal.”

“I ain’t goin’ no-fuckin’-where, goddammit!” another gale of skunk breath.

“Fine,” I sighed. Confrontations have always made me a bit edgy, and I didn’t want to stand out in the heat with this old fella shrieking at me any longer than I had to. “I’ll just go inside and call the cops.”

I had just started to turn away from him, and suddenly a grubby hand clutching the neck of a brown bag-covered 40 ounce Schlitz Malt Liquor was zooming toward me. I instinctively tucked my head into my shoulder and tried to turn away to protect my oh-so pretty young face.

 

KERRRRRR-BLAAAMMM!

The bottle struck me on the side of my head just above my left temple. I swayed for a second and the hot, blindingly sunlit day started to blink and go dim; just like in the movies, everything seemed to move in slo-mo. The old guy was pulling back for another swing, and I was just barely able to get my arm up to block him. As he struck, I latched onto his forearm, pivoted, completely dazed and almost overbalancing, and twisted his arm up behind his back. With my other hand I grabbed a generous handful of his soiled shirt. I stood there for a minute, legs spread wide for balance, and struggled to catch my breath and clear my head a bit. Unsure of what else to do, I started marching him back to the store, with him hollering and twisting the whole way.

“Ow! Ow! Ow! Godammit, yer’ breakin’ my arm! Lemme’ go, you sunovabitch!”

A young couple opened the door for me just as the manager was coming around the counter with his eyes bugging out of his head in shock. As he saw me coming in, he beat a hasty retreat back to the safety of his register area and it’s tiny locked door that an angry five-year-old could kick in.

“Dude, call the police!” I gasped at the manager, pressing the struggling, cursing Tasmanian Devil in a wino suit against the front counter and wrenching his arm up further. “Stop fighting me, man! You’re gonna’ hurt yourself! Be cool for a minute and I’ll let you go!”

We stood struggling for six or eight minutes before the police showed up. As soon as one of the cops came in, I released the old boy and backed away. He wheeled around and glared at me. His face looked like an apple that had been left out in the sun, and I noticed that there were tears in his eyes.

“What in the hell is going on here?!” the cop barked, taking up a position between the wino and myself and extending his arms, palms out, as if to keep two rabid dogs away from each other. His partner burst in the door followed by the young couple who had held the door open for me. Out in the parking lot, a small crowd had gathered and moments later a second squad car whipped into the parking lot.

“I wanna’ press charges!” the wino roared through his snaggled, ruined teeth, “I was just mindin’ my own business when this young hooligan came up and put some kinda’ karate on me and, and, and…” here the old guy started snuffling and burst into tears, “he done broke my arm, officer!” he wailed. At once the young couple, both shaking their heads and gesturing madly, and the store manager, all started talking at once, explaining their version of what had happened, what they’d seen.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa…everybody hold it! You,” the cop said pointing at me, “come out here and talk to me. Everybody else, calm down!”

I followed him outside, leaving his partner to deal with an angry drunk, a panicked store manager, and two excited young lovers who had just gotten their dose of melodrama for the week. My head was throbbing and a sizable goose egg was starting to rise on the side of my melon.

We stood out by the ice machine, out of view of the inside of the store and the spectacle going on there. The cop had a slightly bemused smile peeking through the “I’m a hardass policeman!” facade, and I could sense, but not see, a twinkle in his eyes behind his mirrored cop shades.

“OK, let’s hear it…”

My throat was bone dry, my head ached from the beer bottle slam, I was experiencing that shaky comedown that happens after a huge rush of adrenaline. I would have killed for a cigarette.

“OK, the boss told me to get this old guy to move along ‘cause he was panhandling our customers. I come outside, ask him to move along, he says no, I says “OK”, he clocks me in the head with a forty ounce, I lock his arm up, bring him inside, and that’s it…” the words just gushed out in one long sentence.

“You need to go to the hospital?”

“Nah, I’ve been hit harder. I just want to go home, this day is totally screwed up.”

“You sure? You might have a concussion.”

“No, I’m alright.”

“Well, here’s the deal,” the cop said, taking off his shades, “if you want to press assault charges, you can, but it won’t do much good. He’ll get locked up for a while, but that’s about it; and compared to the way these guys normally live, a month in county lockup would be like the Four Seasons. We could have Mental Health pick him up for observation, but he’d most likely be out in forty-eight hours. Why don’t we just take to the drunk tank and let him dry out; chances are you’ll never see him again.”

“That’s fine with me, ” I said.

“You didn’t break his arm did you?” the cop grinned.

“Naw, he’s fine. If ya’ll could just get him out of here, that’d be great.”

Without taking any statements from the ‘witnesses’, the police loaded the still raging old man into their squad car. I stood out near the parking lot and watched them drive off. Ever defiant, the old fella flipped me off as the car pulled away. I’m not sure, but I think he was mouthing “motherfucker” at me.

Weeks later, the old guy showed up again, seemingly with no recollection of the nasty incident that had taken place earlier. His name was Calvin. He was originally from somewhere in the midwest, Kansas or Ohio or some such. Once we got to know each other, he became one of my regular trolls. Quite some time later, I asked Cal about the whole ‘hitting-me-in-the-head-with-a-beer-bottle-and-getting-carted-off-to-the-hoosegow’ thing; asked him if he remembered any of it.

“Shit, man, I didn’t know you back then, bro” he grinned mischievously, showing off his stained and damaged teeth, “besides, I was pretty drunk.”

Poor Bastard Shoots Self; Stoned Brothers Aghast

When I was in my early 20s I saw a man kill himself on live TV. I was watching the news with my brother, both of us incredibly stoned. The regular news was interrupted for an “Action News Breaking News Story!” about a guy who was holding his ex-wife hostage in a 7-11.

The news went LIVE on the scene to Wendy Howell, bubble-headed blond news reporter. In hushed tones, Wendy was vividly describing the scenario as the police tried to talk the guy into surrendering using a crackling bullhorn. You could see the parking lot and storefront just over Wendy’s shoulder. Suddenly a man walks out, silhouetted against the glaringly lit front of the store, signs for Slurpees and hot dogs at his back. He stands still for a moment as the police shout incoherently over the bullhorn. Wendy’s cameraman zooms in on the man as he calmly raises the gun to his temple. There’s a small pop like a firecracker and the man drops. POP! A human life ends right there on the television. It wasn’t like the movies where the guy crumples to his knees and then sprawls forward in pained slow motion; this poor bastard dropped like a sack of potatoes. Instant. Final.

My bro and I looked at each other, mouths gaping open like bug-eyed perch and ‘did you just see that shit’ expressions. One, maybe both, of us gasped something along the lines of, “Holy fuck…!“

I can still vividly remember the whole thing. It’s burned in my gray matter even after all these years. I’m not sure why; as I mentioned, the man was in silhouette, so there wasn’t any graphic Hollywood facial expression or fountain of gore. I don’t know…it just shocked me how un-Hollywood it actually was seeing this poor schmoe snuff himself…no context to better understand it, no storyline, no illusions, just a sudden snap of encapsulated violence and a heap of something shadowy on the concrete that used to be a person.

I’ll never forget it.

My First Tattoo

It was a crooked, sloppy black-and-white sword, about three-and-a-half inches long. You can’t really see the fucker anymore; I had it covered-up by a furious, roaring, red-eyed, black-maned lion’s head when I was about twenty. No special significance to the lion; I just thought it looked badass, and when you’re that age, looking badass is reason enough to have a burly biker with an electric skin-shredder draw on you. Even that one is a bit faded now as I look back at forty-two-odd years on the planet.

I was sixteen, or maybe just barely seventeen…I don’t really remember

 

I was driving home in my beat-to-shit old ’74 Ford LTD, known to my friends as the mighty Scrap Iron. I was taking long back roads because the car had developed a nasty shimmy in the front end at high speed, and taking her on the freeway scared the bejesus out of me. On the side of the road I noticed a guy hitchhiking. Odd place to try to thumb a ride, there was seldom ever much traffic on this particular stretch of road that ran through mainly pasture land. The guy was in his mid-twenties, had long hair, a ratty beard, shabby clothes and looked like a dangerous ex-con with an old Army duffle bag that could potentially contain the dismembered head of the last person to give him a ride.

Yeah, I stopped.

He tossed his bag in the back seat amongst my fast food wrappers and empties. I asked him where he was heading, and it turned out that he lived just a mile or two from my place. Jeez, I can’t even recall his name. Kurt? Maybe Brad?

“Wanna’ smoke a joint?” Kurt, maybe Brad, asked. Oh yes, yes sir I did.

We fired one up and drove along in my old clunker talking about music, chicks, cars, motorcycles and whatnot, sucking in the sweet smoke and enjoying the 450 air conditioning (you know, four wheels and fifty miles-per-hour). Eventually the conversation rolled around to art. I told him how much I liked the black-and-white tattoos he had all over his forearms. At the time I guess I was just too naïve, or stupid, or stoned, but it didn’t really dawn on me that they were quite obviously prison tattoos.

“Hey man, I did most of ‘em myself; I’m a tattoo artist.”

“No shit?! I’ve been wanting to get a tattoo for a while. Do you have your own equipment and a shop and stuff?”

“Naw, no shop, but I do have my own tattoo equipment. Hey man, if you wanna’ swing by my place, I could pick up my Tattoo Kit and give you a righteous tattoo,” Kurt, maybe Brad, said.

“Yeah?” I asked, “what’ll it cost me?”

“Well, you got any beer? I ain’t allowed to have alcohol where I’m stayin’, and I could sure use a few brews. You fix me up with some beers and I’ll tattoo you.”

I had about ten bucks in my pocket, but that was more than enough for a couple o’ three six-packs of Schaffers, one of the cheapest, nastiest, foul-tasting beers on the market. Maybe it was Carling’s Black Label. Do they still make that shit? I zipped into a Zippy Mart and bought three six packs of the cheapest. I had my trusty fake ID at the ready, but didn’t need it. The clerk looked too bored to even care if I was eighteen or eight. My passenger had a beer open and half-downed before I even started the car.

We picked up his equipment. Although he really wanted a TicTac or something, he mooched a cigarette before going in to hide the beer smell on his breath. I was never sure if it was a girlfriend that wouldn’t allow him to drink, or if he was staying in some sort of halfway house for recently paroled cons. He carried a beat-up old primer-gray tool box with the words “Tattoo Kit” handpainted on the side in dingy red paint above a sloppy cartoon skull.

We drove the two-or-three odd miles back to my house. I drank one of the beers, he killed two. Nobody else was home, so we sat in the livingroom and shot the shit as we drank still more beers.

I had a look at Kurt, maybe Brad’s, Tattoo Kit; it was a plug in transformer from a model train connected to a handpiece made out of a tiny model car motor duct-taped onto a Bic Pen housing. A piece of bent coat hanger wire with a sewing needle soldered onto it fit into a hole in a tiny wheel at the end of the motor; each time the motor would turn, the coat hanger wire and needle would plunge in and out of the Bic pen housing. There were copious amounts of duct tape all over the whole assembly and splashes of decades-old colored inks. I had never seen a ‘real’ tattoo machine before, so this low-tech gadget, straight out of San Quentin, looked like a miracle ‘art’ machine to my glassy young eyes.

The design was a sword; specifically the sword birthmark on the neck of the warrior chick from the movie “Heavy Metal”. I had a back issue of “Heavy Metal” magazine that showed the aforementioned sword.

“Oh yeah, man, no prob…” a bleary-eyed Kurt, maybe Brad, slurred. The beers he’d slammed were beginning to show. I probably should’ve stopped him right there, but I was buzzing along nicely myself. We drank a couple more as he sketched the design on my right shoulder with a black pen. He broke off the rolling ball assembly from the pen and dipped the tattoo needle into the blob of black ink oozing out of the plastic tube.

Drunkenly swaying like a sapling in a stiff breeze, I frowned and said, “Hey man, aren’t you ‘sposed to be using some kinda’ special tattoo ink? I’m pretty sure there’s a special tattoo ink…”

“Naw, man, any ink will do. It’s all the same stuff, right? The people who make tattoo ink just want to charge more ‘cause it says ‘tattoo ink’ on the bottle.” Seemed like sound logic to me.

I dubiously looked at the sketch on my right shoulder. The sword blade leaned from the handle at a strange angle and the little doohickeys that stick out to protect the hand were different sizes. More drunken frowning.

As if reading my mind, Kurt, maybe Brad, laughed and said, “That’s just a guideline, man, just to give me the general shape to do. When it’s finished it’ll look a lot better.”

“I’m not so sure I shou…” I started, stopping to belch.

“C’mon, man, don’t be a pussy. I’m ready to start. It’ll be cool,” Kurt, maybe Brad, scowled, holding the buzzing, clicking tattoo machine up and carefully inspecting it, insuring that the needle was going out at the proper depth and speed. Or pretending to carefully scrutinize; he was much drunker than me, and I was…I was pretty damn drunk.

“Alrighty, let’s rock-n-roll.”

“OK! Fuckin’ A-right, man!” Kurt, maybe Brad, beamed, “Now this might hurt a little at first. Whatever you do, don’t flinch or move, you’ll fuck up the tattoo.” I nodded, grit my teeth and steeled myself for a hurting. And I got one.

“Ow, ow, owww! Fuck, man!” I hollered as the needle tore into my skin, sending drops of blood and ink flying. I didn’t flinch, even though it hurt like a sonofabitch. Kurt, maybe Brad, had an expression of utter surprise. He once again squinted at the tattoo machine, and a sudden look of “AH-HA!” crossed his face.

“Oops, sorry man. I din’ have it adjusted right. Hold on…” he fiddled with the train transformer and adjusted the handpiece. “This ought to fix it.”

I noticed the first bit of my new tattoo consisted of four or five big, black, copiously bleeding dots. It looked like someone had gently stabbed me a few times with a shish kabob skewer rolled in ashes. He re-dipped the needle in the ink and prepared to start again as I clenched my teeth and tightened my arm.

Whatever adjustments he had made seemed to have done the trick, as the needle gently purred across my skin with no more pain than a scratch from a kitten. I was comfortable enough to light up a cigarette as Kurt, maybe Brad, set to work. He stopped a few times to dip more ink on the needle. It seemed to take an hour, but in the time it took to smoke two cigarettes it was all done. He wiped my shoulder off with a wet paper towel and I got a good look at my first tattoo.

It was crooked, sloppy and much longer than I had wanted it. The lines were either way too thick and blob-y, or so thin and spider web-y that you could barely see them.

I was sixteen, or maybe just barely seventeen, drunk as a skunk and grinning from ear-to-ear.

I loved it.

 

First Memories of an Asshole

Once, when I was a wee young pup, I guess about 3 or 4, just a tiny little boy, I had an encounter with my first bona-fide, grade ‘A’ asshole. I didn’t have a word for this person at the time; I was just so shocked and frightened that all I wanted was to find my mama and have her hold me in the safety of her arms while I cried. It’s possible that this was the first real brush with meanness, nastiness and raw aggression that I had ever had. It’s definitely the first one I remember.

We were shopping at a Krogers store. They had this silly system of enticing the customer to bring back his or her shopping cart; after you had loaded your purchases into the car, you returned your shopping cart to the store, pushed it through this mechanical turnstile-thingamajig, and a stamp would be dispensed. You collected the stamps in a little booklet and, when you had filled X-number of pages, you redeemed the stamp book for…I ‘dunno, discounts, or prizes or some such. On the other side of this turnstile assembly, the carts that had already been pushed through were sitting ready for the new customers to use.

My mom was off doing something, maybe even shopping, and me and my older brother were left to amuse ourselves until she came back. For whatever reason our little 3 and 5 year-old minds contrived, we were fascinated with the ticket-dispensing gadget. We wanted those tickets! Had to have ‘em! But where to get a shopping cart to push through the turnstile-thingy? We figured out—clever ‘lil monkeys that we were— that we could take the carts from the front of the line, walk them around to the door area, and then push them through the turnstile. A never-ending loop of shopping carts! An infinite source of tickets!

After walking several carts through in this manner, my brother took our strip of tickets and ran off to find Mama and tell her about our amazing, ticket-producing scheme. As I waited for the two of them, I thought I’d go ahead and use my time to obtain another stash of tickets. As I walked a shopping cart back around to the front, I couldn’t help but notice that my activities had attracted some notice from store personnel. A young man of about 16 or 17, wearing a blue and red Krogers uniform, stood right in front of the turnstile with his arms crossed. To my 3-year-old perceptions, he looked eight feet tall. He was a skinny, red-headed guy with a big, snaggle-toothed, bemused grin on his freckle and acne-spotted young face. I smiled back.

“Hey, what’cha doin’? he asked in a friendly voice. I was a shy fella’—still am, actually—so I said nothing, just smiled sheepishly and looked at him with wide little-boy eyes.

“Are you tryin’ to get a stamp?” he asked. I nodded my head, still smiling my innocent little boy smile.

“Here,” the kid chirped, taking my cart and pushing it through the turnstile. With a metallic ‘click’, the device popped out a wonderful, magical, blue and red ticket.

The friendly stranger snatched the ticket and held it up in the air, displaying it like a model on a game show.

“Is this what you want?” the towering, red-headed giant asked. I nodded enthusiastically and held out my hand. The kid smiled even more broadly…and then proceeded to tear the stamp into teeny, tiny, little fragments. Making a sweeping ‘abracadabra’ hand gesture like a grand magician, he released the tiny bits of torn paper to flutter to the ground like red and blue confetti.

Suddenly—so quickly that I didn’t even notice it—he was stooped down to my height, his ham-sized hand wrapped up in the front of my shirt, pulling me so close we were mere inches apart. His once friendly face was now a blotchy, blazing red mask of fury, and his grin was now pulled back into a vicious sneer full of misshapen yellow teeth. His watery blue eyes burned into mine with a gaze of pure hate.

“You little fucker,” he hissed, in a gust of bad breath and flying spittle, so low that nobody but me could hear him, “Think you’re soooooo fuckin’ smart, dont’cha, you little bastard?! I ‘oughtta beat ‘yer little ass!”

My eyes were like twin green dinner plates, filled with terror. I shook like a leaf in a stiff breeze. I tried to pull away, but he was too strong. I recall wanting to scream, to holler for Mama to come and protect me, but I was mute with all of these new emotions.

“Get the fuck ‘outta here,” he growled, “and if you tell your mom and dad about this, I’ll find you, you little prick! Now GO!” He released the front of my shirt and stood back up. As fast as my little legs could carry me, I scampered away like a shot. The last glimpse I had of the red-headed bully, he was once again smiling, like nothing had happened, and waving at me.

“Bye-bye, now,” he called out merrily.

Bastard.

Intro to Jett’s Collected Memories (in no specific order)

Several years ago, back in 2004 when my son was almost a year old, I contracted a weird lung ailment. I had what I though was a nasty upper respiratory infection that I just couldn’t seem to shake, and after a few weeks I started coughing up blood. After a few more weeks, I finally went to a doctor.

After much head-scratching, a specialist scheduled me for an open lung surgical biopsy to get a tissue sample. In a weeks time, I’d be laid out on a table and a team of trained professionals would cut through the skin and muscle tissue, crack open my rib cage, and carve a piece-of-pie-sized chunk out of my lung. I asked him if it was cancer. He shrugged and said we’d know more after the biopsy. “Don’t be too concerned, it’s probably something simple.” he said, but I could see the doubt and concern in his eyes.

A CAT scan showed a large mass in my left lung, and several smaller masses scattered throughout both lungs. My bloodwork came back with several weird anomolies.

 I was pissing ice water. I was sure that those twenty years of smoking cigarettes had poisoned me beyond repair. I had long before accepted the idea of my own mortality; death itself really didn’t frighten me, but I was staring at forty, the big 4-0, had a wife I loved, a beautiful baby boy, and goddamn it, I just wasn’t ready to go just yet. I was terrified at the possibility that I might not be around to raise my son; terrified that he’d grow up not knowing me…that I’d just be a picture in a photo album.

My life hasn’t been ‘great’ my conventional standards—I didn’t discover a cure for the common cold, map a route to the New World, invent the automated martini machine or become the dictator of a small nation—but it has been one ‘helluva interesting, entertaining, and oftimes amusing ride. If my son couldn’t have the old man, I wanted him to at least know who I was, what I was ‘about’. Just in case the Grim Reaper was setting a place at the table for me, I decided to write down my life story for my boy; a series of short tales about my life, my loves, my travels, my wacky adventures, my dramas, my comedies, my tragedies, and the eclectic clan of oddballs that fate has seen fit to drop onto (and pull off of) my path.

After the surgery, it was discovered that I did NOT have cancer, but rather a very rare, very exotic lung/auto immune condition. With treatment, there was every possibility that I’d continue to live a long, more-or-less productive (well, productive for ME, anyways), interesting life. I shuffled all of my memoirs away, but I still bang out a yarn or two once in a while…just in case I step out in front of a bus tomorrow.

This blog is a collection of those writings and any new ones that I may write down in a fit of boredom.