STORY ONE: SKYWALKER'S SUICIDE

It's doubtful anyone knows the true story of Skywalker's suicide better than the sea birds who wheel over the legendary West coast highway.
Skywalker and his buddy used to take the pickup truck out there and careen around the dead man's curves, the sparkling blue water lapping the shore far below as they danced on the edge of the sky.
They had met and become friends at a pysch ward far away, where both were heavily tranquillized, locked down under heavy security behind heavy doors.
But to the casual observer, they were blissful, dreamy eyed surfer boys, their carefully boho blond hair ruffling in the sweet salt breeze, like Bodie searching for the perfect wave.

Skywalker's parents were thoroughly unaware of what had gone wrong,
and why they had ended up spending a thousand dollars a day on his depression for a doctor who ultimately was as mystfied as they.
He had grown up in a posh celebrity town,
where self-deprecating Adonisis vied with each other on quaint cobblestone streets for most idiotic waste of money, and he learned his lessons well.
His bottle blond girl-friend wore skin tight cherry red leather jackets and sold inflated property specs to gleeful Japanese businessmen.
To her, maybe, it was liberation: a sports car to cruise around in, cherry red to match the jacket, and money in her Prada purse (accessorize, accessorize!).
But to Skywalker, it was commodifying the horizon, and his waterlogged heart shrank up and sank to the bottom.

So he turned on them all. Through the haze of marijuana smoke his rage rose up, quietly first, then in billows no one could reason with.
This was impolite. It was unseemly. It was unsightly. It was horrible. It was incomprehensible and unacceptable and it had to be disappeared immediately without any discussion.
Their only option was to cage him in chains in a far off place, hoping the fit would pass.

But it did not.
It merely put him in contact with terrified doctors who comforted themselves with huge insurance payoffs, inured to the further damage their prices caused his already struggling family
and other angry young men like himself, who shared his surfer-boy fantasies and love for the California dream.

TRAPPED IN THE BURNING TOWER OF PSYCHOSIS

There is a witness to these events whose story is true, whose iron-clad grasp on reality was forged in the hottest of fires
and whose heart was trained in the school of Leon, the school of love and self sacrifice that most people scorn.
The witness told me that like a firefighter on nine eleven, instead of running from the tower of insanity and violence that threatened the lives of so many people, the witness ran back in,
forced by a deadly combination of terror and compassion, trapped not for hours or days but decades.

Unable to speak or escape in all that time, the witness was privvy to uncountable experiences, any of which should have been the last, but was not.
Unlke Jaycee Duggard however, the witness has no one to sue, for what mental hospital, what narco, what crazed role model, would pay damages to such a one?

The passengers on the plane were briefly terrorized, and a squadron of officers was there at the destination to avert disaster.

In the end, Skywalker was a pagan suckled in a creed outworn, but it didn't do his heart any good.
He raged like a forgotten deity over the shores of his own despair, but no one listened.
All his philosophies were like a can of 1970s Fanta-fizzy, sicky sweet and made to sell, not to drink.
If love was the seventh wave, when was it going to come in? Did he have to wait for the 30 year storm? What if his spirit caved before then?
And the Fanta of the Bohdisatva proved too strong a siren, whispering to his sadness that there was no hope on this earth except to leave.

STORY TWO: THE LATIN MASS

Everybody in Lowell, Massachusetts knows the story of Jack Kerouac, and some love it and some don't.
One part of the story which may or may not be accurate is that when Jack Kerouac was young, before he fried his consciousness, he was an old-fashioned altar boy.
The story goes that he used to serve the beautiful Latin Mass at the beautiful St Jean Baptiste church, which is so beautiful some people even call it a cathedral.
Or did, because by the time Julio Quinto had his heart broken when it closed, the Latin Mass was no longer in vogue.
Unless you mean the mass of Latinos that a deluded President somehow blames for all of the world's economic problems, when he might just as well assign the guilt to his own gluttony and lust.
Because really, hunger isnt' exactly rocket science. It's more like first grade math.

Julio didn't live in the converted apartments, but in a very similar set up less than a half-hour's amble away on a hot day,
another converted building where most of the tenants, illegal or not, were quietly living on government disability subsidies.
And honestly, it wasn't Julio's fault he was on the sauce any more than it was Jack's.
The destruction of beauty, especially in your own backyard, that will drive anybody to drink.

THE OUIJA BOARD that night in the dorms was like so many other nights, after dinner everybody puts off their homework and stans in the doors of their rooms, shooting the wind.
Emily and her friends had