LA VOCE DELLA VALANGA:
LEON'S BEAUTIFUL LEOPARDS

EPPUR SI MUOVE: THE TRUTH IS PAIN, THE TRUTH IS BEAUTY
MERCY IS NOT TO COVER SIN, BUT TO CLEAN IT.



TWO ROAD TRIPS or SAVING THE APPEARANCES:

Baudrillard's Spectacle,Barthe's Camera Lucida and Barfields Saving the Appearances are all really about the same thing.
I spent hours uncounted in front of a piece of bread in the church while I sopped up supernatural energy.
The bread has no spectacular appearance but I was willing to run from the monster endlessly
in order to stay alive to be in the presence of the bread.
Or more precisely, the Bread IS my life.

ST PAULS SCHOOL

And not to digress but as long as the school is "under scrutiny"
let me just tell you that Mr. Pook may be a malfeasor but he is not the only malfeasor. NO WAY.

When I was there, I got in trouble above all for not signing out when I ran to the chapel to pour out my heart to Jesus.
I also didn't want to kiss ass, so I didn't. Why should I? I have my pride.
This, while everybody else in the school was high and screwing around,and laughing about it,
including and most of all the faculty,
I was the one who almost got expelled for pencil on paper graffitti, for tricks played on pompous ass perverted professors and for other such terrifying behavior,
and who was classifed as a "psychotic genius" at the age of 15.
Which was one of the reasons I didn't get into Harvard, where I had hoped to lampoon ANYONE that I thought was an intellectual pantaloon.
Ok that was just venting.

The Devil loves the spectacle because he's an ancient and practiced illusionist, a blowhard, a preener--
At any rate I wnat to talk about two road trips to illustrate the hypocrisy of the Church and the dangers of being real.
Once, a well heeled Christian family asked for my help to save their son, who was a heroin junkie living in the streets.
We were all part of a movement within the Church that I now believe caters to rich people and intellectuals, and there's nothing wrong with that PER SE, but--
I saved him because they asked me to, and of course I had to endure a lot of shit.
I had to go to the streets wtih a Hells Angel who had been granted a few days before his jail sentence, and find the guy.
I had to go to court and be humiliated by a judge.
I had to ask favors from Hells angels, jailbirds, on the lam deer hunters and career criminals.
I had to go to a barbeque with a bunch of them and watch Larry the Cable Guy reruns and laugh about doing hard time.
That's part of the territory.
But to then be humiliated as a tramp by those well heeled Christians?
After I did what none of them were willing to do for their own kin?
I dont think so.
Somehow Jesus got left behind in the theoretical exegisis of the Holy Writ, and the glitz and glamour of holidays on Martha's vineyard.

The other road trip I took was with a school friend of mind also very devoted to her own faith, who asked me to go to Georgia with her
so she could live with another friend who had landed a bespoke apartment after getting a good job.
On the way we shared the driving, and at one point I was at the wheel when she started telling me about her gorgeous coked out boyfriend.
You better get rid of him fast, I advised, nothing good will come of it. I say what I know.
She put many excuses to me but I did not back down.
So she became enraged and demanded that I pull over and get out,
and she left me in the middle of nowhwere under a sweltering southern sky, with no clothes, no water, no money.
The way it got resolved is for another day.
A long time later, after the guy had raped her and put her through heck, she apologized to me.

LEON'S WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM:
I'm in the Leon Montana Witness Protection Program, which is why I would dare to report on this story at all.
Credible eyewitness testimony is the most powerful form of testimonial proof in a criminal trial.
You can put all kinds of people on the stand,
but a believeable person who says they were there and they saw it, that's really hard for the opposing party to overcome.
I think the most credible witness I ever saw was a man who testified at the trial of football player Ray Carruth for the murder of his pregnant girlfriend.
I had never heard of Carruth, but when patriots star Aaron Hernandez died in a Bristol prison,
that got my attention because I have been there and I know what cooks.
I know about Fall river, the desperate poverty and the drugs and the beauty too.
So I started to scroll youtube for information and found out about Carruth.
The man was in prison for life and would never be released,
yet though he was a convicted killer, and freely admitted Carruth had paid him to kill, his testimony rang true,
as he boldly addressed the jury and told them "you know bullshit when you hear it."

ASSUMED INTO HEAVEN
The Roman Catholic Mass is a ritual like no other, involving the ritual execution and cannabalism of a man-God
There is no visible blood involved, but the ritual involves wine which is said to turn into blood.
Making the most gothic of Twilight tales or Vlad Dracol castles pale in comparison.

One key difference which makes the sacrifice not a gore fest but a holy act, is this:
this ritual is said to be the ultimate expression of love, and the only hope of the Earth.
The ritual is based on eyewitness accounts of the events leading up to and during the trial, execution and burial of the defendant.
What makes them credible, when the events they describe are laughably fantastic?
For me, it is the plainness of the language, the language not of attorneys but of the man in the street,
and agreement of their testimony on key points.
And, the way they died.
Not in some Jonestown scenario of stupidity, but like humans, scared but proud and devoted to the mission they had been entrusted with.

Most Latinos have been baptized into this faith,
Like my European ancestors who brought the faith to them in various ways, not all of which were exemplary,
they believe strongly that the consumption of the Holy Bread is a sacred act
fusing your own being with God and giving you the ability to live forever after you die.
Your ancestors ate manna in the desert and still died, says the Christian scripture, called the Good News.
Right now I have cornbread in the oven and the fragrance is SOO beautiful. But--the cornbread ultimately will not save me.
The Good News that the Roman catholic Church witnesses to is that the bread that comes from heaven when the priest obeys Jesus
and "does the ritual in memory of Jesus" is a medicine for death.
The Church is called Roman not only because of Peter.
It is Firstly because the Romans killed Jesus.
To the church, It was the Roman legal system that was responsible for the salvation of our kind.
I do not know how many Masses I sat through alone, down at the inner city church, though the Colombian was by my side.
I dreaded every second I spent with him, how I loathed being shackled to his side by invisible chains!
yet more still did I dread being alone with the cray cray, being his watchdog, girlfriend and rehab counsellor all in one
and i pled and pled with Jesus to release me from the Hell on Earth I was living all alone.
And the Colombian, hungry for a girl that came with a green card, was only too happy to sit through these masses with me.
He was alone too, so very very far from su tierra, but that was because he was fleeing another kind of drug-related violence:
the kind where a man stuck a pistol to his temple when he was out on one of his ranchero patrols.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO FOR A GREEN CARD
I will never forget the hateful day I agreed to go out with the Colombian,
he had just driven me and the cray cray home yet again from the ESL school where we all hung out together.
I told God in my heart that I would marry the Colombian if that was the price I had to pay to get rid of the cray cray.
And the Colombian for all his faults, his violence and his machismo,
found the cray cray a job he could actually do, delivering pizza, he could do it as long as the Colombian watched over him,
and he let him sleep off his violent murderous fits in the loft of his government sponsored rehabilitated mill apartment.
Just as I had done earlier with gringo girls, He hopefully shucked the cray cray off on a number of his friends who needed green cards too,
but none of them were able to stomach the cray cray's behavior except one.
But he did NOT do this for a Disney Land version of love, make no mistake.
That version of life always made me want to laugh, or throw up anyways.
The Colombian endured the cray cray for hope of the Green Card and for the company I kept him.
I for my part endured him and scarfed unlimited Eucharists just to make it from one day to the next,
while the essence of my soul checked out and lived in its own hope of death somehwere far far away.

PRO LIFE:

Hope of death? How did we get here?
The cray cray's mother, a devout Catholic, wanted to abort the cray cray when she got pregnant.
She had a nervous breakdown because she and her husband were living in the most abject poverty,
eating dirt cheap, unhealthy food like salty soup that made her get toximia.
Ironically, the husband who was not catholic in name nor spirit, forced her to have the baby because "thats' what God wants"
and then promptly dumped his rage and hatred all over it, turning it into a monster like himself, only much larger physically (AH the irony of life).
At the age of 14 the cray cray announced to his murderous father, that he was bigger than his dad now.
And, if he laid a hand on him once more it would be the last time ever.
So who took care of the cray cray? Whose resume says "FULL TIME CRAY CRAY BABY SITTER 16 YEARS?
If that doesn't prove that the whole sexual morality game is nothing but a brazen power grab/dump down, what will?

One has to wish or at least wonder at times given the trajectory of this story
whether the inhabitants OF the story did not at times regret not having aborted one of the main monsters.
The Catholic Church believes life is an absolute value and there is a lot of logic to that IN CONTEXT
that is, in the context of another tenet regarding sacrifice without which the first one does not work at all.

CHANGE YOUR MAJOR:

I don't believe most people change their major to save their life and the lives of the people around them, and even the lives of total strangers.
At least, amongst my friends at school, I was the only one I knew who did so.
But then again I was forced to lie to everyone about what was going on, so maybe all my friends were doing the same thing?
I DID know a ton of girls who were assaulted at parties and scared into silence,
but not by their brothers or fathers as far as I knew.

At any rate I changed my major before I had even formally declared it.
I changed it from polisci and theater/media to "running for my X@#$! life"
and then to "independent study on Italian culture", specifically,
the Eucharist as a dynamic force in the reality of culture in the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Yeah.Try to find anyone else with THAT thesis.
TROJAN HORSES COVERED IN CASH
The Trojan Horse is a famous story about the old Greek wars.
The Greeks are beautiful people living in a beautiful seaside Mediterranean, and at one point their culture was a reference point for Europe and North Africa.
Yet arguably tragedy was the highest art they produced.
The people realized too late that the Trojan horse, a beautiful gift, was full of death.
Drugs are like that in a way--they ride into your life hidden inside the oppressed, agonized psyche of someone you know,
or even someone who lives in your childhood home, someone who was deceived by the Trojan horse themselves,
and now has unleashed their fury on the world, a hulking, enraged person you cannot flee.
Or maybe it's part of your job. Maybe in the process of earning your bread you come across the terrifying Trojan Horse of Drugs.
This time in the form of a businessman.
There is an old Law and Order episode, one of the ones I am riveted by the most.
No nonsense D.A, Alexandra Cabot unwittingly comes up against a vicious, vindictive Columbian drug dealer named Rafael Zapata Gavarria.
Her boss warns her that she is swimming in shark infested waters, with criminals who will blow up a plane to kill one single rival.
but Alex is not a girl to back down.

Zapata is finally arrested when a bed on his yacht is found to have blood in it.
As she soon learns, her boss is correct. Zapata's animal instincts include self defense and murderous insecurity regarding his macho.
When Alex advises him that he is not actually permitted to kill a woman for insulting his "performance", Zapata jumps up from the interrogation table
and overturns it in a scary display meant as a warning to the unfortunate prosecutor.
She was ultimately forced into hiding, and came out only to confront a hitman known as the ghost
so that a little child would have the courage to do so as well.

Or maybe the lure of the flashy lifestyle of drugs is just too hard to pass up.
Who doesn't dream of being a billionaire like Travie and Bruno?
Fetty sings about the matchin lambos and who wouldn't want to sing along?
THE CUCKOO'S NEST

There is an episode in an old cliche 70s comedy called "THREE'S COMPANY"
which depicts a shrink who is obsessed with not using perjorative language around the mentally troubled.
His obsession is portrayed humourously as a pathology in itself,
in which any utterance of words like wack job, loony, crackers, nuts, fruitcake, etc. provokes a beserk fit from him
Finally in a hilarious show down, when he is accosted by waiters at a restaurant, he shouts "what do you think I am, some kind of bananacake?

Another show from the same period, THE JEFFERSONS, shows George Jefferson getting trapped at a mental facility when an inmate steals his coat
which contained evidence of his employment and errand to the facility, proof that he had not been involuntarily committed there.

These stories are funny, but one of the saddest and most anguished parts of this story is the inside of the mental hospital,
the "cuckoo's nest",where I spent a great deal of my adolescence (that's what they call it) trying to console the cray cray and his annihilated mother.
I must say that this particular cuckoo's nest was a very "prestigious" read "well-defended" institution, like the prep school I had scrapped with a few years earlier.
A place where if you ever dared to challenge their supremacy with the truth, they could hire endless lawyers to flood courts with foolery.
In the immortal words of Noah Hardstep Rivers " your plan is to keep shucking and jiving us with paperwork until we give up and move out"

I was so devoted to relieving the pain of the cray cray and his mom at my own expense, not because I'm a saint but because I am a Cyrenian, I was requisitioned,
that not only did I befriend many of the inmates to keep the cray cray company,
and travel to amusement parks, stores, and restaurants with them, enduring their insane rants and being thrown out right along with them,
but I endured the searing pain of the shrieks and cries and the torment, electroshock treatments from the locked unit of maximum security
and four point restraints and the forced injection of heavy, incapacitating tranquilizers that in my opinion the doctors should have used on themselves first.
Sure that sounds outlandish but there was something unspeakably wrong about what I saw.
I offered to take the drugs the cray cray had to take in a desperate attempt to stop him from shrieking.
But he said I didn't have to, it wasnt good for him and it wouldnt be good for me.
and though I had promised the cray cray I would never leave hinm alone,
when the staff tore us apart, the sound he made, I will never forget. It harrows up the entrails of my bones.
Remember, I was completely conscious and sober, since, to provide example for the cray cray, I never got drunk or high.
And it wasn't like I floated away on a Franciscan ecstacy of loving leprosy. No, I'm simply human and I have a heart.
Add to this the staggering revelation that the doctors at that hospital, who were receiving so much money I cant even bring myself to write it here just yet,
were using one of the inmates, a special friend of the cray cray and thus of myself, as a guinea pig for new drugs.
Not surprisingly, the guilt of bankrupting his family got to the poor guy.
I had the terrifying honor of sitting next to him on a plane when he had a "decompensating" episode.
He just felt guiltly, and wept on my shoulder that he was a horrible person.
No you aren't I answered, not at all, but I think the yogananda book you are reading is making you sad.
We were met at the airport by a phalanx of cops with weapons, who thought the gu. was a threat, which he wasnt--not then.
He eventually jumped off a bridge.
Of course, unlike the loaded shrink from the posh hospital, I wasn't being paid for my 24/7 job.
Instead, any money I had would be grabbed by the cray cray.

The religion of Christ teaches that Christ's name is EMMANUEL, meaning, God is with us.
Was God with us?

TRANSFIGURATION: THE BRIGHT TRUTH REVEALED

We who are the inheritors of what is often called the Jewish-Christian or Western Tradition, really are blind to the way culture flows through space and time.
Perhaps, obsessed with walls, we do not understand the intangibles which are not halted by these walls.
Be that as it may, we need to pay more attention to the trial of Christ,
Because like it or not, believe that version of history or not,
that trial is a central event in the formation of the society we have inherited.

Christ was on trial and the truth as usual was not front and center in the judge's politically shrewd mind.
What WAS front and center as per usual was the power grab.
That's what the judge was scared of, and that's what the Jews were scared of too, and the Romans, so in the end they agreed.
WE MUST STOP THE POWER GRAB.
It's too bad they didnt listen to the defendant, who did not have a lawyer and did not plead the 5th Amendment which at the time didn't exist.
The Defendant when asked "are you a king?"(unless you were scared of a power grab why would you kill the guy even if he said yes?.
Maybe--they were trying to prove insanity so it wouldn't be necessary to kill him--HOLD THAT THOUGHT)
In any case, the defendant replied in his own words, that's your neurosis. I came here to tell the truth.
At which point, the JUDGE displayed his utter disregard for and disbelief in TRUTH as an important legal concept.
He said, according to an eyewitness: TRUTH? WHAT IS THAT?

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT.
We all know about mobsters who kill witnesses in order to preserve the narrative they need.
We know about start up CEOs who fool around with markets and put the financial and even physical lives of their investors on the line.
We've even heard of people who kill innocent bystanders in order to frame their enemies
We've all witnessed the slaughter of innocent civilians in war which tragically is fueled by our own tax dollars, whether we like it or not.
We know about CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE-- Thoreau had to go to jail because he didnt' want to pay the tax that supported slavery.
But would anyone spend a billion dollars of taxpayer money to destroy a beautiful city built by its proud inhabitants, then spend a trillion more to rebuild it,
for the sole purpose of insisting that the citizens had in fact done nothing on their own,
but that it was he who had generously given them the city he had made of his own industry and genius?

In other words, how far would someone go to brand reality with their own ego, masquerading as generosity?
How far would someone go to preserve the narrative they need?
Would they lay waste to centuries of human labor, and even risk the lives and sanity of the population?
The astounding answer is, yes, of course they would.
Such is the ephemeral, destructive fire which is the fruit of the yearning, burning desire of our human pride.

In ages past, of course, invading barbarians would level the cities they conquered along with the weak gods who had failed to protect the denizens who worshipped them.
Heartless to the human labor and time that had gone into the construction of houses, roads, and temples,
They would raze it all for fear their own proud, arrogant gods would get jealous.
But it isn't just pagan barbarians that do this. The politicians of our times are expert at it as well.

FRANKIE TEARDROP DEAD.
Last night a friend and I were talking with some vintage music lovers about Frankie Teardrop Dead.
Someone said it usually "clears a dance floor" and alhtough we all are friends,
the conversation deteriorated rapidly and I left to look the song up because I have never heard of Suicide or Frankie Teardrop.
It turns out that the band SUICIDE was shoving an inconvenient truth down people's psyches in a very harsh way, probably the way he had been dealt with by life.
It got me thinking about Matilda and the whole Love or Death Russian roulette scene with Leon.
People don't like a 12 year old contemplating suicide in front of their faces but her story is very real.

There is an essay written by a professor called ON BULLSHIT that gained a cult following because it is so good and because the professor's Ivy League way of expressing himself juxtaposed with the tongue in cheek expose, is something that makes people laugh, and think, at the same time.
He did not of course go deeply into this topic, he himself stated that he would leave that to others.
And significantly, his goal was not to expose individual cases of bullshit nor to denouce it but to develop a theory of bullshit.
Now whether or not you believe in TRUTH with a capital T, ie God, you have to believe in certain individual objective truths such as "that traffic light is red". Otherwise, you'll die swiftly and stupidly.
Postmodernism went that way and fell off a cliff, naturally.

So let's talk about a very popular alternative to bullshit which has been simply silence and secrecy.
Recently a handful of nuns have stepped out of the shadows to denouce their sexual abuse at the hands of priests.
It's part of #MeToo, a groundswell that started long before the hashtag,
The Church as an institution has always been plagued by the impurity and resulting hypocrisy and violence that has been part and parcel of the lives of women forever.
Anybody who is familiar with the prophet Daniel will think of the story of the woman who was falsely accused of adultery
She was condemned to die by the old, lecherous Jewish priests because she refused to sleep with them.
Daniel saved her by revealing the truth in a wise way, but not all of us are so lucky.

The Legend of the Transfiguration of Christ is part of the narrative of the Universal Catholic Church,
found in the eyewitness account of his friend John who says he was there and saw it.
It is the revelation of a certain kind of Truth: one that draws people together on a mountain to witness a supernatural light.
Brighter than any earthly energy, the whiteness of this vision was impressed on the minds of his friends and into their memory
where it blazed away in the midst of the despair of His Death.
Why then did Jesus go around in a disguise of humdrum human normalcy for his whole life?
And then why did he open his truth telling mouth in a city full of scared Israelites and hired gun Roman soldiers, the functional equivalent of suicide?
Well, there's a question.

PICTURES OF YOU:
Beauty and joy are a tricky topic.
It isn't only girls that "just want to have fun". We all do. It's human to want to shake off the doldrums and laugh.
But why is it that a celebration of life by the smaller and lighter amoung us is so so very often (I do not say always though I could) perceived as an invitation to "do it"?
Or as the raw, candid feminist Virginie Despents said, "why do men think it is ok to rape women? Can we talk about this? Can men explain this?"
I mean, did the disciples see Jesus on the mountain of Tabor shining like a star and say "time to tango?"
Somehow I doubt it. For one thing He probably looked like He could have obliterated them for even THINKING that.
It really is strange that people can co-exist with the idea that we have free will,
but we do NOT have free will in regards to whether and with whom we wish to have certain kinds of relationships.
Instead, in this area, might makes right.
The cray cray used to come up to me every time I tried to look in the mirror,
with that strange drugged out expression in his eyes
(probably to dull the pain of having been harmed in a vulnerable place with a baseball bat as a high school freshman, but I didn't know that
and whoever did this to him, know that your actions reached far, far beyond him)
and put his arms around my waist as a lover will do to his lover, embrace me with his hulking body, and stand in the mirror with me as if we were in a picture together.
to the point where I began to avoid mirrors, avoid in fear the image of my beautiful self and even forgot that mirrors existed if you can believe this.
One day in high school my friend Lisa remarked that there were no mirrors in her house.
She was baiting me, but I had no idea, and said only, OH.
To which she said, "no im kidding there are mirrors everywhere in every corner of my house." to which I said, oh.
What is wrong with you, she exclaimed!

JRR Tolkien shows Gandalf transfigured in Lord of the Rings, not before his death but after.
Gandalf too was revealed as something more than a simple firecracker expert.
He is lit up with the whiteness that Saruman forfeited by his treachery and collusion with Sauron.

But he also shows the opposite: the darkness of The Way of the Dead. the way is SHUT. The DEAD keep it. Now you must DIE.
This is reality too, the reality of the shame that these deserters lived with and could not expiate until they fought for Aragorn on the right side, the side of Life.
Until then they skulked in the shadows behind a locked door.
Aragorn entered there with a flaming sword to expose and to heal their wound.
Was this the missoin of the silent angel who revealed to Giles the secret of Charlemagne?
It is to this angel, angel of the unconfessed and unconfessable sin, that I now turn to commend this tale.

The Truth is beautiful, but it Hurts.

Writing this for me is like diving into an ocean of reality after YEARS AND YEARS of dissembling
because telling the truth got me beat up and kicked out, literally.
Like that old song said, You Know I don't want to live a lie, too many sleepless nights--
except that song is about a cheating lover, this one is about a crazy brother and not only.
And when I say crazy, its only until I can find a word that won't hurt the cray cray so much.
Like maybe that word-cray cray. Because cray is passed down like many other maladies from father to son.

The truth of this story could be organized in any format but for now we're going with the year by year format it seems the simplest.
Obviously the bloggish way I've been doing it up until now is going to get more and more unwieldy,
I can't keep track of where I am in the story or what I'm writing about.
Let's search for the Mercy principle I was trying to adhere to year by year, to see if that works.


JEREMIAH, ISAIAH, JOHN THE BAPTIST AND OTHER UNLUCKY PROPHETS
The more you think about history the more you realize the truth tellers were always in a funny position
because the truth really hurts sometimes. It hurts our pride, it hurts our prospects because other people are just as hypocritical as we are.
It hurts enough for people to kill so they won't have to hear it.
The thing is, killing the messenger doesn't do anything at all to the truth except maybe make it more obvious--like drinking to dull the pain.
The worst part of killing the messenger is that the crime too is hushed up, just like the message.
In public we have become a nation of petty bullshit artists, cloaking our rage in blather or twitterbombs.
That classic Jack Nicholson line: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!" which was ironically followed by the truth,
has been replaced by Bill Clinton's famous "it depends on what is is" and now in our own times, the tweets of Trump.
None of us is very good at handling the cold hard truth.


INTRODUCTION: THE COERCED CONFESSION, CHILD OF THE POWER GRAB.
Part one: the false confession to law enforcement.
You hear a lot about coerced confessions in the context of law enforcement, ie the cops.
The premise is, they get tired, they don't feel like looking for a "perp" any more
so they just grab some poor fool off the street and beat a confession out of him or her and then go home.
If you think the police even when they are "home" are aware of or even have the time and energy to care about the truth, consider this:
two doors down from where I am at RIGHT NOW, lives a high ranking cop and a couple streets away there another cop who "did not want to get involved"
when a mentally unstable relative of his wife, who used to live another two doors down was rampaging around the neighborhood threatening people.
Eventually when she went to work, a coworker called the police.
(This same individual is a titular police chief in a wealthy bedroom town about half an hour away,
collecting that salary while yet collecting a pension in this town.)
The point I'm making now though is that a certain tenant who lived where I'm at now vacated the place over a year ago
and since then, the only person who has ever slept in the house is YOURS TRULY.
yet over the fourth of July weekend, a subpoena showed up in THIS mailbox
demanding the former tenant's presence in the local court over a domestic violence incident.
Remember, two high ranking cops live within earshot of this place.
Yet they are unaware that a violent individual disappeared over a year ago.
Feel safe?
Now you know why defenseless people hang around with a cadre of pistol packing narcos.
Somebody has to protect the vulnerable and nobody else has the money to do it.

Part Two: the false confession to God enforcers.
Anyway back to coerced confessions.
there is another type of coerced confession that girls are subject to all the time,
even confessing IN THE CONFESSIONAL sins which they never commited.
Not only that, but any attempt to right this skewed rite (no pun intended) is often misunderstood by priests, who are terrified of sexuality because they haven't been taught anything about it.
I made false confessions for years, not LEAVING OUT sins but CONFESSING THE SINS OF MY MALE RELATIVES
because between the lamb of God doctrine and the male chauvinism doctrine, and the terrifying violence of my family, obviously the sins of my fathers and brothers were my fault.

NOT.

What happens when you tell the truth? When I attempted to tell the truth in a confession about the sexual abuse I had suffered for the first time in my life, the priest became angry, and I left, marched out into the sanctuary and said to Jesus, "what is up with this?"
and the answer came: That guy can't possibly know a thinga bout the hardships you suffered. He grew up in a seminary, ok?
Why all the confusion? Because the institutional church, like the official government and the educational system,
never admitted, and atrociously enough, often took part in, the power grab that makes sexual and financial injustice invisible.


Not that I want to involve a litany of saints in my own sins, but today is the feast of St Bridget of Sweden, known for uniting the warring states of Europe.
(I think) And it makes me think of England, and Robin Hood, and the fact that even the young monster had a knack for twisting the truth.
He wanted me to learn to shoplift,
a habit which he had already picked up to finance his drug habit though this I did not know.
I may have been ten at the time, or younger. But I was staunchly religious and when he proposed a little pilfering I retorted that Jesus wouldn't like it.
He wouldn't like it if we stole from the poor, the cray cray reasoned calmly,
but we'll steal from big stores only, we'll be like Robin Hood and give it to ourselves. AFter all, we are poor as S---.
We WERE astoundingly poor for middle America, and often went without heat in the winter.
I fell for the gag and swiftly became a young light fingers.
So yeah the truth is hard. It's easier to avoid it.

I

NOT FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES.
George Orwell becomes real.

Most people have read 1984 if they studied political science,
I myself was so into political science that despite a record breaking number of truancy days, (67 in one year alone)
I was chosen to participate in a mock up UN.
The teacher was probably hoping to rehabilitate me but how could he?
He had no idea where the problem lay.
Angry, conflicted about the situation you will read about, and snarled up in it to the point where going to school was a major event, I turned the invite down.

But we all read 1984, which is a story about Big Brother, the icon of enslavement, invading your life to the point where there is no escape
That scenario is a good parable for what happened to me in high school,
except Big Brother was truly a famly member, who due to the mental illness of another family member had become ill himself.

When I was 15 the cray cray came home from college after a single semester because he was trhown out due to mental diisease.
As usual, the college, a well known West Coast icon, did nothing to protect anyone but themselves.
They did not notify anyone that he was dangerous,
they simply called his father and instructed him to come out and pick up the crazy one because he was destroying the life of campus.
OF course, the campus life was already destroyed. The place was a sinkhole of drugs and despair, the cray cray himself was just the open wound.
Since the father was a controlled bipolar himself, he wasn't exactly the ideal choice. It was he who had passed the illness on.

This year then was the first of armaggedon for me,since, he having no other girl who would spend time with him,
my desperate and catatonic mother decided I better make sure he wasn't going to kill himself.
And that meant he could not be left alone, NOT FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES.
Not that he would have left me alone anyways,
because he followed me everywhere and involved himself in every aspect of my life to the greatest extent possible
when he wasn't slouching toward Gomorrah with the destructive crew of wackos that shared his pathology.
And I, being an excessively empathetic, gregarious, generous, terrified, unwittingly subservient Christian girl,
believed wholeheartedly that the essence of following Jesus was sacrifice.
What that meant, I had not been properly taught, but I loved Jesus with all my heart and I wanted to be good.
That the people closest to me might take advantage of that, maybe without even realizing it, who could ever have anticipated?.


II

YEAR ONE: ROBBY.
I lived through that winter with the cray cray on my back in a state of weird unease.
As a staunch Christian, I took for granted that sex outside of marriage was out of the question,
and in fact though quite beautiful I had never had any kind of sexual contact with anyone (outside my family but that's another story).
In the spring as soon as the weather was good enough I started wandering the streets to get a way from the cray cray
My vulnerable body was soon scoped out by a local delinquent named Robby who was a few years shy of a jail sentence.
He looked not half so threatening as the cray cray, indeed he was about half his size, and I gladly accepted a ride on his handlebars.
I thought it was weird that he was so anxious to make sure I had turned 16, which I had not, but soon would, I told him.
So he contented himself to give me bike rides for the weeks leading up to my birthday,
thus avoiding a charge of statutory rape which covers up through the age of 15. I was unaware of this.
When finally he took me into the woods under the pretext of "talking" about going to college and pulled down his pants to get my opinion,
I told him quite truthfully, "I guess it's ok, who knows? But Jesus would not like it if we had sex.
Who's Jesus? he asked.
So this, my first real attempt to escape the cray cray, taught me this:
that while my home was a war zone, the streets were not that safe either


IV

YEAR FOUR: STILL RUNNING FROM THE MONSTERS
It really wasnt all bad running from the monsters.
It was actually, truthfully so horrible that it is not describable but it was dotted with experiences most people never get to have.
For example, I was exposed to a variety of different cities and cultures as I fled.
THE MOROCCANS
One notable instance is when unbeknownst to me I stumbled on what could have been a sleeper cell of Moroccan terrorists.
Hungry, tired, cold, in a seaside park, I had no money for a pastry for my friend's birthday, nor even to eat one myself,
yet I hoped to get the food, take the bus back and give it to her.
I will never know whether the foreign-looking man in the leather jacket who grinned when I pointed at my stomach was an enemy of the state,
but I do know that shortly thereafter I was stuffing lamb stew down my craw.
I also know that I began to learn the tenets of the Islamic faith to blend in with my new protectors,
a bunch of arabs who were sharing an apartment in a suburb of a well known east coast city,
They worked as coffee shop waitiers in the old little Italy of that city which like my life had been ruined by drugs I never used.
I also began to learn the language, as in KEE FECH. BE HIR? WA HAMDA O IL DEH. (writing was not involved).
I knew I was safe when they hotly denouced the drug addictions of the culture they claimed was corrupted.
It is, I should know, I shouted emphatically, I just need a safe place to crash, then went to sleep on their sofa in absolute safety.
These arabs were not all as bad as all that, I mused. Why do people trash talk them without meeting them?
They were not sad about Saddam, they said Saddam was a fraud and a cheat who didnt observe ramadan, which they did.
How do you know he doesn't? I asked. And what exactly is ramadan?
They explained that a person who fasts like that gets pale, which Saddam never had done.
They respected my Christianity and didn't even make me put a sheet over my face.
Later, another islamic devotee who was a taxi driver gave me his business card and toted me around the city in his cab to keep me safe.
Still another bought me pitchers of beer and played old style pinball with me at a forgotten dive bar where they never checked ID.
I was eventually sexually assaulted of course, and had to leave,
but it was never in a violent way, and I still say the prejudices about that race are not accurate in many instances.


YEAR THREE: SOMETHING SNAPPED
Year three was another year that a whole mess of really, really sad and scary stuff happened,
It began with the "downsizing" of my favorite college lecturer right after we had just had the most fun EVER, but more on that later.
Not only that, but I had to go home for the summer and face the monster music.
Not only that, but the monster was still not healed from his trauma with gay prostitutes, another result of his drug habit.
This I was unaware of as well, as we headed to our insecure, preening, one up the Jones' aunt's place on a New England beach, while she was vacationing n a Latin American resort.
It was there on that beach that the monster first openly called me sexy and did not disguise his desire.
Years later he was to admit to an authority fiure that "something had snapped" that day.

V

YEAR FIVE: SECRETS OF THE KING, OR DANIEL'S DEBUT
Being secretive is not per se a sin for a Jesus follower,
for example Christians believe that Jesus hid His identity as a Divinity for most of His life,
and continues to hide in the unlikely disguise of a piece of pane.
In the old testmant, the Israelites didn't get this disguise,
even though the Egyptian plan was three cups of coffee, Gods plan for the Jews was unlimited meat and bread forever (thanks to Jimmy Cliff for the slavery escape soundtrack.
And it isn't just God who does that in our belief system.
The angel Raphael, having posed for an entire voyage with the unassuming Tobiah,
remarked upon revealing himself that it was good to "keep the secrets of the King."
But I was bound in my search for Eucharistic energy to come across a sexual miscreant and so I did,
a lech posing as a priest who was later exposed by one of his other victimes.
He insisted on me telling him I loved him
and when I went to take communion annouced OUT LOUD that I was the most beautiful woman in the church.
I didn't want to say anything but when he commented on my "rack" I had to call him out,
so I said, you know, you could leave the priesthood if you want a girlfriend, it's ok God wil understand.
He became instantly furious, and immediately denied having said what he had said FIVE SECONDS BEFORE.
Later I heard that he had never actually become a priest, but in his native Carribean island, had managed to get a hold of fake papers.


X

YEAR ELEVEN: ENZOLINO CICAREDDU and the Montreal Crew
As I've commented elsewhere, it wasn't all bad, being on the run from or with the monsters.
When you had to cut loose from the burden and seek protection, the most unlikely scenarios would ensue, often terrifying in their own right, but sometimes consoling, and even beautiful.
One such was Enzolino, not his real name, an old peasant from the southern Italian countryside
who ended up n Montreal, Canada as an illegal and couldn't even return to say goodbye to his dying dad.
I met Enzo while on a voyage to the St Joseph Oratoire, which is a whole other story in itself.
If you don't know who Le Frere Andre is, it will amaze you to learn.
Anyway, I used to go on any voyage I could to get a breather from the hell of babysiting the criminally insane that was my unpaid job.
Sometimes I went from one voyage to another, just biding time, living from plate to plate and from bed to bed.
I was addicted to the Eucharist in those years, it was the only thing that gave me enough psychological and even physical energy to actually move, walk, eat, etc.
This may sound odd, and I sure as hayseeds dont' get it and it is probably SO not theological, but there it is.
So I used to sit through as many masses a day as possible, even if I was otherwise supposed to be somewhere else.
And the Oratoire had TONS of masses and in between, they never closed, so you could sit there all day and inhale energy.
For real.
But I was not one of these saints who eats the holy bread and then gets by on another 400 calories, like Padre Pio.
No, I needed pizza and burgers and Chinese take out and all that, especially when I often walked miles and miles without food of any kind, or water even.
And Enzo and his crowd had this "in spades",
Though in the eyes of the world they may have been a crowd of no account superstitious peasants in a forgotten borgata of the city,
in the hopes of making a gringo friend they strewed my pathway with pizza.
The Enzos of the world were my earthly messiahs, holding out plates full of cabbages and potatoes and jugs of root beer mixed with homemade wine.
And their pizza-based, Padre Pio theology, redolent of old shoes and onions and fig trees buried in the backyard to survive the winter, became my theology too.
Im not being sacriligeous, I'm telling the truth.
It was Enzo who first told me about Padre Pio's Mass being available stateside,
or rather, he placed a unique radio by my bed when I could not sleep, a radio which transmitted only one signal:
radio maria, which apparently held the rights to San Giovanni rotondo.


THE DOMINICANS:
Another cultural crash course I had was with Dominicans, a loud, happy, rabbelous crowd who often eats fried bananas and pork meat, which to this day I LOVE.
A Dominican car middleman (of sorts) with the unlikely moniker of Rhadamez, apparently his mother believed he was an Egyptian deity, was very handy with farm tools.
Once a woman claimed we had caused a tree to fall on her shed,
and she threatened to charge us the fee that two well fed white dudes were going to charge to "haul it away".
Rhada asked me in his native tongue. WHat is she on about? Thats not worth anything to take that.
He promptly cut up the tree in five minutes with his hand ax, and stacked it neatly in the woman's woodpile, at which point her face turned purple and the white dudes cancelled their steak house reservations.

. CHAPTER ONE: GET A REAL JOB
Today is the Feast of St James, Apostle, who was famous because his mom wanted him and his brother to "get a real job".
(Of course she was worried about them,
of course she didnt' want them eating her baba ganoush until she didn't even have the strength to mash it up anymore.)
They did get jobs, of course--John, the lucky one, was permanently exiled to a Greek Island, which was not all that bad, but James met a gruesome fate.
Jesus, in warning his bunch that "a real job" might not be exactly what you think, coined the now immortal shock phrase
that his mission was "NOT TO BE SERVED, BUT TO SERVE--AND TO GIVE HIS LIFE AS A RANSOM FOR MANY".
Not an easy Milk Dud to swalllow. (my mind is on milk duds because they were out of them at the store).

GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN
So what is a "real job"? What do you get for that?
I just want to put down for the record in case it ever comes up for any reason
that there is no way anyone can pay back the kind of martyrdom I went through unless they are rich enough to buy Patmos or something like that.
Because, I will never get back the years I spent babysitting my "psychotic, schizoprenic, Bipolar" relative,(he basically had half the stuf in the DSMV
Those were the years of my adolescence
when I was trying to repair the damage his adolescence had done to us all and prevent more damage from being done.
I had been a Christian since I was I little kid, so "give his life as a ransom" was something I learned every Sunday,
I was too stupid to realize that that's not how the world actually works. You dont' get compensation for that unless you are enlisted in the army.
Technically, you're not supposed to "work" full time until you are 18 but those rules are made in some other universe.
And my job was overtime, all the time and I also had to promise to get married to someone I didn't much care to marry and spend eight years with that person,
and pretend to everyone that we were in love, just so my family wouldn't all die.
I'm not talking about a Shariah law or anything, this was a white anglo saxon situation.
And I was willing to do it, to marry this person, rather than the alternative--I was willing to essentially condemn myself to that for life. Think about that.



CHAPTER THREE: OLD TONY
Old Tony is in some ways equally important to Leon in the story, though his role is behind the scenes.
He kept Leon's money safe (nobody robs Old Tony, and with good reason) and in so doing he kept Leon alive in a society where money is necessary to physical survival.
The cray cray knew that truth and thus, he menaced me for any money that I might earn, and the monster did as well.
In fact, as much as they hated and despised each other, they knew that girls are easier victims.
Girls typically are physically smaller and also conditioned by millenia to go along to get along.
So the challenge of getting a real job while trying to avoid being killed or assaulted in your own home is one thing, but the challenge of keeping your money is yet another equally hard.



CHAPTER FOUR: YOU CAN PUT THE BLAME ON ME.
BECAUSE YOU WILL, WHETHER I CONSENT OR NOT.
I'm not sure whether the antagonist of this tale is sexual atrocity, or mental illness, or both.
But today is the feast of St Mary Magdalene who has been famous for two thousand years as a converted sinner, more precisely, a prostitute.
Now that we have the #MeToo movement, which was in the making for years and years of silence by the victims of sexual power grabs,
we can consider the possibility that Mary Magdalene was in fact a victim of the skin trade
and not a categorical "sinner" in any way different from the rest of us.

I should know about that because after I was sexually harmed by a colombian narco while seeking protection from a mentallly ill and murderous relative,
I confessed the sin of sexual impurity more times than I could count to a priest and never felt any better.
Finally I knelt down before a statute of St Anthony in the church and complained, "how many times do I have to do this?"
and the answer came: it was never your fault and you never had to do this at all.
To realize that the person who did it would kill me if I said anything--that's why it had to be "my fault".
I would rather be falsely accused than truly dead.
So yeah, the church has got a long way to go before women are not afraid of what the truth will do to them.
Raniero Cantalamessa is a friar who gets to lecture the pope. Yeah, for real.
But he's not like that at all--I saw him trying to make some dude laugh at a religious conference on youtube.
I think we have to return to what he calls "the original innocence of things"

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
I dont know how many guys did things to me that would be considered crimes, so no wonder I can't name these individuals: their visceral rage would drive them to hunt me down to protect their freedom.
I would never condemn them, all I ever wanted to do was eat,sleep and live to run one more day.
But--the violence, the assault, the psychotic fits, teh imprisonment, were routine.
It's amazing how a judge can condemn someone to prison for the very same crimes he commits on a daily basis, excusing himself by the most screamingly atrocious rationale.
There is a scene from the old classic movie "philadelphia" where the black lawyer, himself coming to terms with his own misconceptions about sexuality,
has a moment of truth at the trial of the snooty men and shouts ARE YOU GAY?" causing the trial to stop.
Why I didn't become a statistic of human trafficking i will never know, ,BR.but running down the street in New York City in my bare feet to escape strangulation, the only thing on my mind was Jesus help me now.

Now on to the mental illness part.
YOU'VE GOT TO HAVE FRIENDS:
Friends are the most important thing you lose as a leper.
I had a friend whose mother had gone off into the realms of the crazy when my friend was a small child.
She never told me anything about it for a long time, even though I slept over at her house sometimes
(for reasons I'll get into later, she didn't sleep at my house much, if at all.)
She said instead that the mother was dead.
At some point in our friendship, I think it may have been around the time I was living with her younger sister to escape the Columbian sicario,
she invited me to another town about a half hour from where we had grown up, to visit her mother.
"But I thought"--"No", she said, "actually my mother is crazy"
So we went to a little apartment above a small diner,
where according to my friend, the mother begged for food at the back door, but was forbidden to enter because she harassed the patrons.
The diner got some of her SSI money in return for putting up with her at all.
When we entered, the mother wandered around in a haze of surreal babble,
and fingered oddments she kept in a box that were her only link to some kind of reality she could countenance.
From this box, she drew something and gave it to me, addressing me as one of her kids.

I took the object but I can't say what it was or what happened to it.
We ate some of the donated diner food, then left.

What is amazing about the story is that both us were suffering from the same problem but we would not share it because of shame and mostly fear.
As children, we had already learned to deny mental illness because it was an inconvenient truth.
Although we both bore the burden, my friend seemed much more fortunate than I, despite apparently being heir to an unthinkable sadness.
She seemed more fortunate in that, although the crazy person was a central figure in the family,
and a small woman who was not physically scary at first glance,
her father took the decision to banish the crazy person from their house, and he was able somehow emotionally, financially, however, to do this.
Because of this, my friend was able to have a life without the leper.
AT LEAST THAT'S HOW IT SEEMED until I began to write this.
But what if the father was the one who was crazy and scared the living daylight out of everyone in that house? honestly, reconsidering, that would explain a lot.
I've never even considered that possibility until right now.
After all, the mother was the crazy one, right? She was the one wandering around the sandy street with no shoes on.
It's shocking how we have been terrified to the point where we can't see certain things.
In fact I've often been told that my own mother would have gone off the mental track were it not for my presence in the mix.
But what a heavy price,to pay--my whole life, for the life of them.
Like Father damien, I became the sickness, although like Simon the Cyrenian, I didn't really get to decide.

In the story I'm about to tell you, the "leper colony" was my life, and there was no life apart from this.
There was no banishing our lepers, because they were enraged men, terrifying and psychotic,
and not about to be banished without taking their world with them.
Furthermore, one of them had all the money and the other was a physical giant.

The truth about the universe landed scientists like Galileo in Jail--
the truth about the " New World" upended "old world" finances and we ended up in a World War----
the truth about physics made it a very deadly war.
these days, it's the truth about the psyche that is being stifled and resisted and this fear causes stories like mine to take place.
So, no one has to read this if they don't want to.
It's scary enough for me to write it!
I'm just writing it because it's good for me to get it out of my heart and into some kind of communicable form.
R D Lainge (and I know he was wacked out so you don't have to tell me)
talks about this Hawaiian family that did a hnoi pnoi meeting and they started to get better.
In my case however, this was impossible due to rage and violence, and still is.
Shrinks weren't much help either. Even when I was a kid, and trusted them, it always turned out badly.
they always said "we can help, just bring the cray cray in" but once they saw him they ran like rabbits with the Terminator after them,
which is understandable, because they were and he was.
And I was left alone with the Terminator. Well -psychiatry is ok as far as it goes, but booklarnin don't help much if its the wrong kind.
So yeah,I am so used to people saying they want to hear it until they do and then running away
that it really won't surprise me at all if no one ever reads this but me.
Every time I read it though, I breathe easier and feel better.

I used to try to take video but the people that were scary, they knew they were and they knew their world would unravel if the truth got out,
so they always found a way to break the camera or the laptop so that the evidence would be "disappeared".
Sure, they were the ones that fronted the dough for the devices but that's like saying you can't rant about facebook on facebook,
if facebook buys every platform of communication so they can own all of it, then where else are you going to rant, the toilet?
(actually I tried that too, more on that later.)
Anyway the old man broke my device while pretending he "couldn't see" and walked into it--
but its funny how that happened right when I decided to record his psycho fits.
Other techniques used were to grab my torso "its just pinching" -causing the device to fall on the ground and shatter.
Or, as I"ll mention later, to stuff the device with so much porn that it froze and the data was lost.


INNOCULATE YOURSELF FIRST
If you do decide to read it though, it's dark--it's desolate, and disheartening.
so before you start, innoculate yourself from sadness.
remember that reality is fundamentally good. No one can change this fact, no matter how horrible their acts might be.
In fact, if we didn't intuit that reality is basically good, why would we even have a word for bad?
Things would just be whatever they were, even rotten tomatoes or flat tires.
But we DO know that good is good.
So take a minute and let the vitality of goodness enter your soul.
As for me, I think of leopards and how beautiful they are.

EAT IT IN CRUMBS
The second thing you should do is to read it in little crumbs, like a bird eating bread.
This is very heavy stuff and you can't gorge your mind on it, just like you can't gorge your paunch on a rich cake by eating the whole thing at once.
if you do, you will soon be feeling funky and its the same with this.
So, eat a crumb at a time, that's the way Im trying to write it.


THE MEDICINE: MATILDA'S MYTHICAL MAFIA OF MERCY
(only fans of the film Leon: the professional will get this title)
If you follow Jesus or Christianity at all, you may have heard that there is a certain way of looking at Jesus that is called the DIVINE MERCY.
Philosophically it involves a provincial Polish nun whose visions were filtered through a sophisticated Polish Pope's massive "book larnin'" obsession,
an obsession which came from his friend Ratzinger who got it from Edith Stein who got it from Edmund Husserl who wasn't even Christian I dont think--
in fact I think Husserl was persecuted by Nazis but Im getting off the track (or maybe not).
Because what is the track? Christianity isn't so much a religion as it is a DEATH BY SACRIFICE. And the Jews, historically, they know about that.
So it's not surprising that the DIVINE MERCY involves the exact hour at which Jesus was supposed to have died,
according to his friend John who was an eyewitness if you believe the accounts.
(always keeping in mind that the execution of Jesus was technically by the book and not out of the ordinary by Roman standards.
And the center of Catholic ritual is about that, even if it doesn't happen at three pm, which it ususally doesn't.
So the thing about being a Christian is, if you aren't careful you end up like me,
offering to take the medicine that the cray cray had to take so he wouldn't have to take it alone.
because he felt so miserable and drooly when he took it and he cried a lot when he wasn't in a rage.
Even if it killed me, I figured that was better than having him kill a whole mess of people.
He had a rare moment of lucidity though and told me I didnt have to take the tranqs.

If you have to grow up with and take care of and take abuse from mentally ill people, it really is like being a leper.
No one wants to talk about it and you invent an endless stream of lies to explain everything in your life.
It's a lot worse than just simple domestic abuse or alcoholism because crazy people take bad to the next level--
not only do they "NOT FUCKING APOLOGIZE", but they "DONT FUCKING KNOW" what's real.
And they don't come off their high or their buzz or their rage, they just drift from one endless episode to another.
Hours become days become weeks become years and you never get to rest, there is no vacation,
you are often up all night with the crazy one for weeks on end, in a state of terror that becomes your normal, sleeping only in fearful little bits.
Life strangely continues--birds chirp, wind blows, cars pass, people text each other.
C S Lewis the famous British author wrote of being terrified at a friend who experimented with the occult and went crazy.
He had the luxury of distancing himself after a few days of terror.
but if you are a child in a house of crazy people who are able to conceal their craziness during your childhood, you are not half so lucky.
You become society's leper.
No one, absolutely no one wants anything to do with your reality.

In my case there was something else.
From a very young age, I was the caretaker of this mentally ill person who was older than I was and could easily have killed me.
To wrap your mind around this reality, imagine being a child who is responsible for a monster who neither the police nor the mental health profession can do anything with
who threatens everyone constantly with death,
has told you that he cant' be responsible for what happens to you,
and also believes it is his right to "f..." you although he is a near blood relative (as near as they get).

And there was something else again.
There was another crazy relative, the father of the first one,
who was an important government official whose job gave him power over other people's lives in a remarkable way.
We were not the only ones who depended on him for our lives. No, there were many.
Who then would reach out a hand to fish us from his grasp? No one, of course.
No one wants to take on that kind of burden, economic, social, etc. and no one wants to fight the system that hard.
And if anyone did, the two monsters would not permit it, because it threatened their hegemony.

I want to believe that the word leper and the word leopard are somehow related--
because leopards are beautiful, and their spots make them beautiful, but their spots also allow them to blend in and survive.
And although the two monsters until this very day are dangerously crazy,
I think that here on Leon's page is a safe place for me to talk about what I was never allowed to talk about.
NOT EVEN WITH HEAD SHRINKERS.



SCHOOL IN THE CUCKOO'S NEST
Getting through school posed an array of challenges for the monster's kin.
For example, one day in the life of a leper, when I was about 14, I handed in an essay to my English teacher.
It was full of the violent, sexually depraved tales that the cray cray always forced me to listen to, laugh at and embellish.
and up until that time I had only a vague idea that something was up. But I didn't stop to think about it, and handed in the essay.
"Sweet Jesus" the teacher said as she gave it back the next day."where on earth did you get these horrible ideas?"
She had a look on her face that I still remember, but I couldnt' say anything much, and she didn't do anything at all.

Then around that same time, the cray cray became obsessed with my biology teacher,
a bony, angry woman whose gaunt features concealed an unknown sorrow.
He somehow found out her number, (she still had a land line)
and cranked it incessantly, impersonating any number of people, until she had the number changed.
He had never met the woman, nor do I believe he ever did, but I do not think she ever knew I had anything to do with it.

It looked like there might be a respite when the cray cray went "off to college" at a fancy place in California,
but the place was so loaded with drugs that El Chapo probably donated a wing to the library.
After about three months, the school called the monster and informed him that he was going to have to come out and pick up the cray cray.
They couldn't "handle" the cray cray, but somehow an adolescent girl was supposed to take care of him?
Well I couldn't stand to see the helpless wife of yore suffer, and besides, I was no match for the raving cray cray and the pissed off monster.
So basically "I was up".
I was one of those students who while cutting class consistently does not get particulary nervous about multiple choice tests like SAT,
and at one point I ended up at a stuffy prep school where I had the highest recorded grade ever in a class, 100%.
Not long after this, though, I got into serious trouble for writing graffiti (in pencil, on a paper sign, in an obscure language which is how I got caught.) I had also played some games on the professor but they had only to do with his vanity, and everyone else wanted to play too until they chickened out.
and I never signed out of the dorms becuase I wasn't going to smoke weed or have sex, but only go to pray and nobody was going to "get" that.
I explained to the enraged teacher that the grafitti had something to do with my brother, but he never bothered to find anything out.
He held a meeting from which I was excluded, at which he told people that I was a dangerous genius headed for a life of white collar fraud.
then he asked the administration to have me expelled. They did not see things the same way but vowed to "discipline" me.
The cray cray of course was not boarding there but he forced me to go with him one night to settle up.
He tore up the offending teacher's lawn with a truck and shouted MERRY CRHISTMAS.
We were never caught, and I was eventually forgiven after organizing a sports even at the school, and allowed to graduate.
The prep school has nothing to say either, they have been embroiled in scandals of their own making.

THE DOUBLE DUTY DAD
Often enough it is these guys in three piece suits who sexually assault you--that's the irony, the ones who are so clean are the dirtiest ones.
Like Trump--or like Bill Clinton back in the day, who was jealous of some basketball player's sexual activity and wanted to imitate it.
But when it's a government official, who day by day is supposed to rid the streets of crime and rehabilitate the criminals--
who is paid with the people's taxes to do this--who is meeting your needs with the citizens money
and he is the one who after a list of sexual offenses that would take days to complete,
after he systematically ruins every relationship you have out of pure jealousy, and then takes over your desk and fills your computer with dirty pictures, screams at you
YOU SLUT, DO YOU WANT TO FUCK ME, YOU BITCH?
You have to check yourself and remember that this Ivy League lawyer is your "dad".
No one would ever believe your story. He's not Harry Weinstein. He's an old, skinny, bookwormish Ross Geller. He's proper. He's shy. He's your dad.

LUST IS A DEADLY SIN
As I write things come to me, in flashes, pictures, as memories will do, crystal clear like a movie.
There was never any safety, not behind unlockable bedroom doors or even in the privacy of a journal, because you were under the cray cray's roof with his kid prowling the halls.
I had journals in which I never wrote the truth about what happened, instead concocting the most elaborate lies IN MY OWN DIARY because I was scared the cray cray would find them,
As I grew up the monster would always force me to give him all my money, but I had some money of my own after the monster finally left the house
(which required me to suffer sexual assaults for eight years in order that my "boyfriend" would find a way to get the monster out of house, but that's another story.
I was now a professional myself, it was not my chosen career but I had been able to do it with the monster at my heels the whole time.
He even had an episode the day I was suppoed to take a test so I had to go to a place that did not require it, and there are not so many of those.
The office was in the house since someone else in the family was suicidal (what a surprise!)and needed to be watched over.

When the cray cray retired he kicked us out of the best office, which we had worked very hard to make,
but no matter, I positioned my desk in a beautiful way in the entryway, and purchased a beautiful leather journal and a fancy pen.
I am going to start writing the truth, I thought, maybe in another language, or in some kind of code
but I'll do it, here at my own desk in my own place where somehow the monsters will not be able to stop me.
But the cray cray took over my beautiful space too, and filled my computer with porn, making it break down.
That was the beginning of the end of my hopes in that area.

THE HOPEFUL, HELPLESS WIVES OF "YORE"
You might wonder what kind of a marriage such a schizophrenic sycophant would have.
Well, to a woman who was able to be schizophrenic herself.Let's call her "Grace".
Like all of us, as a young adult Grace was urgently pursuing economic security
but her social life was defined in some ways by the Catholic ban on birth control and adultery which her Old World father took VERY seriously.
Grace had struck up a friendship with a married man, no sex, just protection while she tried to get some money for herself.
but five thousand years of seeing women in one way only, and putting them in that place by force, was the weight of a lot of years.
Life goes on--it gets so heavy--and the mens' expectations of sex were too heavy for Grace's fragile hope to craft her own destiny--
Grace's brother in law, a violent alcoholic who had driven his own young wife to attempt suicide,
threatened to shoot Grace's married friend unless he disappeared.
Grace found a new friend: a lawyer like herself, who offered to help the sister get a divorce.
Again, the crazed alcoholic brought out the pistols and warned that the streets would be stained with blood.
(they all lived in the same neighborhood, so sadly he was not necessarily unable to make good on that threat.)
Meanwhile, Grace who still lived with her widowed father was caught between his economic and sexual frustrations
and those of her new beau who behind all the Brooks Brothers bullshit had not a penny to his name.

LOOT GRAB
it's always about the loot grab, no matter what they say, and even if they say its the booty grab, well you need loot for that don't you?
At least the hip hop b boys got that right, they know stacks of cash is the road to booty, and they are not ashamed to say so.
Running away from the sicari to save my life, as well as the lives of those around me (think Frodo) I ended up in the big old windy city of Chicago,
but could not breath a word either about the monster, the cray cray or the sicari that had protected me from them.
There, running away from my lecherous uncle, I ended up in a church once again, praying for another place to stay,
and when I got hungry around dinnertime, I was propositioned with offers of Big Macs from a Mexican janitor named --get this--Jesus.
Under pretext of seeing the great big lake, he took me to a hotel where he claimed we were just going to watch tv.
I dont have a tv in my house, he mumbled. But it ended up to be a pornographic prelude to-well--
Once again, the rosary around the neck meant little.
I asked him if his mom knew what he was up to, because she sure as shooting would have something to say about it.
She doesn't know, he admitted, and dropped me back at the church in the middle of the night.
My uncle promptly threw me out, declaring I was a beautiful slut who attracted trash.