Kathy Kexel is an amazing writer – she went from zero to 100mph over the course of our Covid Cantina tales, and today brings us one from the heart. I encourage you to go read, and contemplate, her submission today: The Guardians.
We hope you’ll visit the other authors who comprise this collection: Paul Bennett, Robert Cely, Derek Elkins, Jamie D. Greening, Kathy Kexel, and Joe Shaw. As always, there’s no fee, we’re doing this to help you pass the time. We do ask that you buy our books/audio books to help pay the freight here. But that’s up to you! Mine are all on the right margin of the blog.
In 1997 I was working for a bill collection agency. I had been making spectacularly good money at it, because I genuinely offered people ways to solve their problems. I also never started off the pursuit being a jerk. When my alter ego called, he was very charming. And, If you let him have his say, attempted to follow the plan, and were polite, he’d move the universe for you – because it upped his commission.
I tried very hard to leave that guy at the office, because if you weren’t nice, or made him chase you down, he was a master of cruelty who would pound on your soul until you handed over the balance in full. Never exactly outside the law, but it was a bit gray where he operated after being screwed with. Those special people would often wind up garnished. Not a good thing.
But as time went by it was clear that the new computer system they’d installed at my place of employment was as screwed up as a left-handed football bat. Collectors who’d been making 50+ a year were now pulling in 20. Why? Because the system was stuck in a rut and wouldn’t let us access the files where the money was. It wanted us to get money from everyone.
Now, if you’ve ever done collections, you quickly learn that the guy who huffed paint and fell asleep with his head in the bag, landing him in a state hospital isn’t coming across with the $12,250 that he owes the state of Ohio for his student loan. In fact, he’s never feeding himself again. Actually, by the time I got it, he owed it to the feds, and it was fully in default. Takes you years to get there – but I digress.
Nope, I liked getting people with money to honor their promise and take care of the bill. Clergy running big churches, Dentists, professionals of all sorts. The system never let us get to them, and so our revenue shrank, and management figured we had all lost interest in eating.
Realizing that I really did enjoy making house payments and eating, I got another collections job with a Fortune 500 company. And I was very good at it. I loved it. I told myself that I’d stay two years while I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’d been out of the Navy for 8 years, was not yet 40, and had some time to breathe.
My company, and my union, had a program where you could get a computer science degree online. It was free. They wanted people to grow within the company.
I jumped on that, and worked my butt off. Thank God my wife Kip made me do my homework before I went out to play…I managed to get the degree, with honors, in just under two years of study. First one in my company to pull it off. Kind of a big deal.
It paid off. The skills I learned in that coursework allowed me to apply for better paying jobs just about the time my collections group was getting neutered. No more pushing customers to pay, just avoid complaints with the regulatory agencies.
I moved up several levels, and loved that job. Very technical, learned a lot, and got interested in my current job. Then I got laid off after 9-11 when the bubble burst. I landed with another company for the time being, and went back to the job I had aspired to after a three-year hiatus. But I’d picked up some new skills, and they made my new job with my old employer much more rewarding.
Now, after 15 years back in the saddle, I’m in the geekiest group of them all. I love what I do. It’s very cerebral. I have a good boss and good friends.
Best of all, last week I hit my 20th anniversary. Corporate America no longer hands out gold watches – usually something that looks more like the one below. But I’m even okay with no party to celebrate – my boss would have to drop donuts on my front door and wave to observe the corporate Wuhan Whacky protocols.
Why am I rambling? Hitting that anniversary, at my age, means I can take a pension. It’s not huge. But combined with my 401k I’d be doing okay. My audio book sales help as well, and my VA disability check. Another year and I’ll get social security as well. I’m not leaving yet, but if they throw a buyout package at me, it would cover the difference in income until Social Security kicks in.
This all translates to an amazing sense of accomplishment and freedom. I socked away every penny I could toward retirement, owe no debts, own everything outright, and have a future in front of me with acting – they always need thugs – and voice work, writing, and Santa.
I can walk when I want. No more chains. And to get there I worked a lot of holidays, overnights – 9 years – and evenings. I worked when my family was having Christmas dinner. I couldn’t get to church on Easter. I gave up evenings with my wife to earn a paycheck. But I persevered. Not the phony persevered – the kind where your body pays the price for sleep deprivation, your brain is jammed full of new information every day, and the kind that kept you at that desk, doing your best, when you hated everything about the job for months at a time.
I made it. God gets the glory, because he kept my head up. But Kip gets the retirement because her support was priceless.
Jamie Greening really blew me away with this story. I love his writing, but watching him stretch his wings in this direction is a beautiful thing to see. Go read his A BRINY STORY and make your face smile.
We hope you’ll visit the other authors who comprise this collection: Paul Bennett, Robert Cely, Derek Elkins, Jamie D. Greening, Kathy Kexel, and Joe Shaw. As always, there’s no fee, we’re doing this to help you pass the time. We do ask that you buy our books/audio books to help pay the freight here. But that’s up to you! Mine are all on the right margin of the blog.
A couple of weeks ago I was watching a movie. In the movie, they were talking about baking a cake. The husband was supposedly pitting dates for the cake.
Now, I love me some dates. Specifically medjool dates. They come around in large quantities once a year at my favorite Middle Eastern grocery and restaurant. But because one of the managers said some really racist stuff on Instagram a few years ago, and was not ashamed enough for the mob, their business got kicked out of a building where they anchored the place. Their other store is probably doing fine, but now I have to buy a lot of stuff from racists because they are the only ones carrying certain brands.
Dang. Mind you, they’ve always treated me well, but since I speak Arabic I know that they’re not tremendously tolerant of others on occasion – including members of my tribe and ancestry. (But that includes pretty much everyone. Mind you, I’ve only met a few people who were declared racists, but they were such butt-heads that nobody wanted to deal wit them anyway.) They also talked a massive amount of crap about fellow Middle Eastern types. But they kept it civil with me, had good stuff, and treated me as an individual. Now I’ve got to choose between never giving them a chance to change and dates.
Once the date thing cropped up, I had to think about some other serious racists I have relationships with in my life. People who have explicitly said in social media that people who look like me (blatantly white as can be) are devils. And that white people deserve to be beaten and abused. Based on color alone. They also want to kill the President. He’s evidently a racist like I am, and because I’ve not found racist statements he’s made I’m more guilty than before.
The problem is, all of those people used to be my friends. And until recently they didn’t have a problem with me. But now I read their tweets, posts, blogs, and realize that I’m scum and not to be trusted. Bummer. I guess I won’t be welcome in the pew with some of them any more based on my ethnicity. I get it if my personal viewpoint was vile, but skin color?
Same goes for my police experience. Was I an angel? Hardly. But did I ever beat someone to maim them? Did I ever shoot someone for fun? Did I ever base the likelihood of their leaving in handcuffs on their skin color? Nope.
Well, certainly I must have inner racism that I just don’t understand and acknowledge. I support cops, and thus brutality, and don’t wear a Chinese virus mask in public. I want to kill grandma! (She’s been gone a long time, and I still miss her – she was a hoot.) I also wear that mask when I enter a business that demands it. Sometimes those businesses are owned by other races. So, am I racist for not wearing the mask when I walk Chewy, or am I woke because I obey the wishes of other races?
What you may not know is that I belong on the board of a non-profit that is working to train police in deescalation tactics, achieve better mental health on the job, and promoting higher standards and duties for all first responders. Strangely, I wrote a scholarly essay before all this happened on the future of policing, and called for quite a few of the changes being proposed. It wasn’t yet published in a journal when all of this hit, but it will be some day and then I’ll look like I’m following the herd. Not so much.
You see, I’m very confused about who I’m supposed to hate. I try really hard to get along with others, but others seem not to tolerate me so much.
I just want some medjool dates, a place to worship God that doesn’t have political and racial hangups about congregants, and good cops.
If you’re interested in those things as well, let’s talk. I’m good at that. Not scream and pound tables, but talk about solutions.
Because there are reasonable solutions to these problems. And I will continue to work on them.
After I get my dates.
(Update – I wrote this a little while ago. I got the dates. I had a frank discussion of the situation with a senior staff member. I think they’re really trying to change things. That’s what it’s all about – after all, there’s only one final judge of character we have to answer to, and He isn’t on Facebook.)
The Covid Cantina is closed for the moment. But the authors who participated wanted to keep on writing, just at a slower pace. So, every Wednesday we will bring you a new collection of stories. One a week. I have the honor to go first, and I hope you enjoy it.
We hope you’ll visit the other authors who comprise this collection: Paul Bennett, Robert Cely, Derek Elkins, Jamie D. Greening, Kathy Kexel, and Joe Shaw. As always, there’s no fee, we’re doing this to help you pass the time. We do ask that you buy our books/audio books to help pay the freight here. But that’s up to you! Mine are all on the right margin of the blog.
Frank Mulroney sat on the edge of the bed, thinking he’d found peace at the end of his 27 year quest. The cell door was old-fashioned, the kind that had bars and an open slot, versus a solid door with a food port. Classic county jail in New Mexico. Exactly where he knew he could finally sleep.
He hadn’t really slept for more than 2 hours at a time since 1993. It had been hard, and the cause of two marriages breaking up. But he’d been on his own since 2010, nobody able to deal with his moaning in the middle of the night, and his begging the phantoms to be quiet.
Tonight – tonight he would finally get some rest.
The detective had been quite shocked when he’d walked in earlier that morning, and it had taken a while to locate the file. But once the facts started to fall into place, the detective became less skeptical, then a bit harsh, and finally sympathetic. He offered Frank the chance to go home and return the next day once he’d been booked, but Frank insisted that the cell was where he had to be.
Now, sitting quietly in a cell that had no other occupants, in a wing of the facility that had only two teenage kids awaiting bail, he had plenty of time to think about how marvelous this felt.
October 31, 1993 had been a normal Halloween for most people. Frank was 25 years old, doing well in his job at the power plant, and had more than a few coins in his pocket. He’d headed out bar-hopping after work, and his Zorro costume got him a handful of phone numbers before midnight, but no takers on his invitation back to his bed.
With no targets in sight, Frank hammered down a couple of Harvey Wallbangers in the final hour of bar service and poured himself behind the wheel of his Probe. It was a piece of junk, but it ran well enough to haul him around town. It looked much better than it ran, and soon it would give up the ghost. He didn’t mind, plenty of mint vehicles here in San Juan County to choose from when the time came.
Fifteen minutes later, while navigating the back roads on the way to his trailer, Frank rounded a sweeping bend in the road and came to an abrupt halt.
Abrupt, because he’d just driven through six men in Mariachi band outfits, all of whom were lounging next to their car while the seventh man changed the tire. It was one of those barge-sized Cadillacs from the 70s, and it had been turned into a beautiful low-rider.
All six were instantly dead, mowed down like ducks in a row. The seventh was less fortunate, he’d merely been clipped by the front fender and was obviously hurt badly, but still conscious.
Frank, once he realized he’d stopped, got out to see why. The last two wall-bangers he’d consumed soon decorated the hood of his car. The gore was incredible.
Whatever else you wanted to say about that model of Probe, the bugger was tough. there was virtually no damage given the slaughter, and the headlights were already recessed because he was driving by moonlight – one of the reasons he never saw the band until too late.
Backing up, and listening to the sickening crunches from the bodies, he came off the pile of gore and parked. Working by flashlight, he examined his car and found no real damage. All of the men had been sitting, or squatting, next to the car while number 7 changed the tire.
No damage. A chance to get away clean. Frank didn’t even think twice. His trailer was just a mile away, and he escaped without notice.
The next morning he spent an hour with a pressure washer cleaning the undercarriage – and it was good that he had: there was quite a collection of rhinestones when he was done.
For the next few weeks he’d walked on egg shells, but nobody ever knocked on the door. The papers carried the story on the front page, and the television couldn’t get enough of it. All of the men were from Mexico, and had been turned around out in the country most likely. The bodies were all shipped back to their homes across the border, and a large memorial was held in Aztec, the nearest city to where the accident had taken place.
The night of the memorial service had been the beginning of the visits. Shortly before two in the morning – the time of the accident – the door flew open and the Mariachi band marched in blaring an old tune. They would play for 1 hour and then leave. Some nights the phantoms would come back three times. On one Halloween they stayed the whole night, and followed him to the power plant the next day.
Over the years Frank tried to drink them away. That and drugs cost him his job at the plant, and he subsisted on more and more menial jobs over the following years. The trailer became more decrepit, the Probe died and was replaced with a succession of really rotten junkers. But nobody ever asked him about the accident.
He decided that he should get right with the law, and God, by turning himself in when the Mariachi band started playing just two songs every night: Folsom Prison Blues and Jailhouse Rock. He endured almost six months of that before walking into the Sheriff’s office this morning, explaining the accident and signing a confession. None of the deputies had been on the force when it happened, and they had to dig out old records from the paper storage unit. But by six that evening he was finally in a cell by himself, breathing easy for the first time in almost three decades.
Just after midnight Frank heard a noise and opened his eyes. The Mariachi band was just standing around him in the cell, staring. No instruments, no singing, just staring. For a long time.
Finally, the one he assumed was the band leader based on his outfit knelt next to the bunk. In slightly accented Spanish he said, “You really think this will help? I mean, we’ve been dead a long time and we haven’t been at peace. I think, Frank, you will be spending all of your days with us. Now, tonight we all introduce ourselves, and tell you what you took from us.”
Mulrooney just nodded. That seemed fair. He didn’t mind talking.
“But tomorrow, Frank, the instruments are back. And since ghosts don’t get tired, we’ll be playing your favorite tunes 24 x 7. Pretty soon they’ll put you in a cell by yourself in the pysch wing. After all, only a madman hears music at 103 decibels all day. True?”
Frank could say nothing. He listened as they told their tales. And at four in the morning the bandleader said, “See you in four hours Frank. Enjoy the silence while it lasts.”
Four hours later, Frank began crying. And the deputies remarked that they’d never seen a man cry and sing old Cash and Elvis tunes at the same time. Too bad he had to go into isolation for his own good.
