The People of the Light

THE PEOPLE OF THE LIGHT

By Osiris Edward Dalton

"In dreams begin responsibilities..."

Delmore Schwartz 

Contact: Osiris Edward Dalton, P.O. Box 702, Providence, R.I. 02901

 osirisedwarddalton@gmail.com

 

"THE PEOPLE OF THE LIGHT" is a one-page scroll down book.

    Mendes and a few other places are fictional.

     One should imagine the state of New Wales to be between the eastern boarder of the State of Rhode Island and the southwestern boarder of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

     "The Star People" is also a fictional book. 

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

     It begins when the Child Prophet says: "I FEED THE WHITE CAT..."

     (From the personal papers of Richard Lewis Cooke.  Detailed synopsis of "The Star People" by Sinead O'Riordan.)

 

THE VISION

    A young woman and her child sister walk by the ocean atop a cliff in the west of Ireland.

    The sun bursts through the clouds above the roiling sea and beams of light shoot to the earth.

    The sisters stop and look to the sun.

    Clouds and the sea reflect in both of the sisters' milky green eyes.

    Waves caress the cliff wall...waves... 

    Both sisters have black hair and wear  black mourning clothes.     

    With a work calloused hand the older sister grips the child's hand. The child's other hand clutches a book.

     By a nearby wall of rocks a craggy old woman with curious goats smokes from her pipe.

    She catches the child's eye and reaches for a curvy and thorny stick by a rock. 

    She stops reaching...

    Clouds that form around the now setting sun imprison it like a triangle.

    By a northern cliff seagulls upward soar. Waves...White wings..The gulls' sad shriek echo...Waves...     

   When the sun begins its nightly prowl the seagulls grow quiet.

    Above wave and ocean sounds there is the clanging clanging from a goat's clanging bell.

    The old woman with the goats again reaches for the stick - then stops reaching.

    The child sees her...

    The 17-year-old woman pats her little sister's head.

     A breeze whispers through a chorus of louder winds and the young woman hears a single song.

     She stands towards the bright round setting sun the bright round setting sun like an eye in its pyramid of clouds with her fists now clenched by her side.

    As she faces the western ocean she speaks:

    "A soul is like a nation with a thousand holy rivers.

     A soul is like a star - so fiery and bright it be.

     The wonders of our world are little to the wonders of one soul..."

    A sudden wet wind snaps.

    It whips up black shawls, flings back strands of black hair.

    Waves touch and caress the cliff, waves against cliffgiantsupportingboulders...

    Like the divine light filled death sheets wrapping a messiah, on the distant ocean sails of two ships reflect white light of the sun...

    A white cat bumps into sight. Between the sisters it stops in front of them.

     It stretches its scabbed and muddy forelimbs and clicksclicksclicks yellowed white claws open.

    The white cat stares at the tiny ships' bright white sails, stares at the eye of fire behind them pawing down; the white cat stares...

    The last curving of the sun begins its descent and reality itself gets shaded in a blue half-light. The seagulls go on with their mournful cry, the young woman's head sinks.

   In her mind she sees a watery  grave reflecting a Celtic cross and an old steep-roofed stone church. She thinks of what the recent deaths of her parents has forced upon her.

    She thinks of the next day's start of a journey across an ocean in which so many of her kin are entombed.

    She thinks of her little sister's and her own fate, thinks of her friend her beloved friend who will remain remain and she will never again see nevernevernever, thinks of the strange new terrifying land.

    She raises her head. She points her broad chin upwards and shakes a bruised back fist to the last bit of the sun.

    "Ma!" she screams as spit drools from her mouth and a watery milky white cloud of light emerges around her black-clad being. "Ma come back!" she demands as thick bolts of light shoot out ligthening-like from her soul and form circles around her. "Ma! (Dada! Dada!) 

I don't want to go to the fucking west! I don't want to go to fucking America!"  

    The sea rises. Waves. Seagulls shriek.

    The wind grows strong.

    The sea rolls and roils. It pounds, it pounds against the cliff.

    A goat bleats. A goat bell clangs, clangs.

     Black shawls and black cloth flutter and in black chaos flap. Strands of black hair lashes.

     Spring green grass in the wind spring green grass in the wind Ireland bend and twist.  Clumps of the spring green grass press inwards as though large spears are stabbing stabbing stabbing the earth. 

    Dust and tiny pebbles swirl and sting. Bits of yellow flower petals blast.

    The wind grows strong.

    The sun is placed in its fetters...

    Gripping her book the little girl glances at the be-whiskered cat.

    Wind blown - but like a straight-tailed Buddha - the cat stares.

     It stares to the tiny distant ships sailing near endless skies in which the sun has yet to set. With their soul-of-Christ-bright canvas the ships look like holy stars.

     At once the light from the ships vanish.

     The girl touches the back of her own head with her firm middle finger: Now the old woman with the goat sees her.

     Then the girl opens the leather covered book with the cat claw cover and rips out its last page.    

     She crumbles the paper into a ball -

("Peatar will...")  - casts the paper ball to the cat.

     She looks  up to her distraught big sister.

    "I feed the white cat," she tells her sister with great confidence and in the tiniest of brogues. "I feed the white cat, y'know..."

     Light now explodes from her starward, starward starward towards the forever witnessing galaxies. 

     Light now explodes from her as her child words sparkle starward...starward...light...light...re...the ball of paper rolls over the cliff and into the sea...over the cliff and into the sea...into the...re...  //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////     "Peatar will..."

    Unfinished graffiti written in blood on a back wall in Paris, France...

 

THE MYTH

PART ONE

VOICE I

Dr. Michelle "Amazon Woman" Fortin

(February 14 1949- )

    Yes, Back in the Day my - brother and I ran like scared bunny rabbits from the wild acting boy Paulie O'Keefe.

    No way did I want Paulie to get hurt.

    Children and adults everywhere must learn to never leave a confused person alone.*

(*AUTHOR'S MESSAGE.)       

 

VOICE II

Michael "The Fuhrer" Fortin

(April 20 1951- )

     My sister is wrong.

     She ran.

     I stayed.

     And whenever I think of the attack on Paulie O'Keefe it makes me laugh.

    Ha!

    He should-a packed his fishing pole that day!

    Ha!

        

VOICE III

Camille DeRobbio

(February 21 1968 - June 14 2013)

    I been listening to all this (whistles) - AND HEY I'M TALKIN' NOW! - and I just want to say a couple of things.

    First, no matter what you hear, Paulie didn't just up and come along there and tear down a clubhouse for no good reason.

    He tore down that clubhouse because of Papa Joe's - my father's -  white cat Bump.

    See, when Paulie was a little boy, him and his poor little brother Patrick - the one that got killed by the hit-and-run driver - gave Papa Joe a cat that Papa Joe named Bump.

    Then a couple of years after Patrick died Bump died and Paulie buried Bump in a sacred place, like.

    A few weeks later these stupid stupid kids built their stupid stupid clubhouse on Bump's grave.

    Paulie exploded like an atom bomb and he tore down the clubhouse.

    Something else:

    When that betraying cousin came back to Papa Joe's he did not, no matter what you hear, eat ham sandwiches.

     He ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

    Hey: I don't want anybody to think the DeRobbio's where these big spacones*(*Italian for show offs) that'd give ham sandwiches to a kid.

    And it was the Red Sox that cousin rooted for on the TV, not - that other baseball team.

    Papa Joe wouldn't never allow his grandchildren to root for - that other baseball team...

 

VOICE IV

Michelangelo Dante Sclamfanini

(April 1 1949 - April 1 2018)

   Back in the Day there was a wooden clubhouse we neighborhood children built.

   To most it looked like an ordinary outhouse. But to us kids it stood on the shady banks of the Yukon Pond in Mendes like a sacred Egyptian temple on the Nile: It was a magical place, a tribal gathering place.

   For no good reason this mean kid Paulie O'Keefe tore it down: The walls, the roof, The New York Yankees pennant, the Narragansett "Hi-Neighbor!" beer sticker, this great big smiling poster of Porky Pig, even this very sexy 1955 Playboy pin-up of Jayne Mansfield.

    Now it's a complex world.

    Our complex plan for revenge was this:

    We would hypnotize Paulie O'Keefe, mess with his mind a little and give him a post-hypnotic suggestion so that he couldn't fight back.

     We would take turns beating him.

     When he was black and blue and red all over Paulie's betraying cousin Fredo would say that old time Yiddish word Beelzebub to snap him out of his hypnotic trance.*(*Beelzebub is a Hebrew word and a name from an ancient Philistine religion. It originally meant "Lord of the Flies.")

    Sure, I know as the professional hypnotist I grew up to be - AND I AM  THE HIGHEST PAID ENTERTAINER IN THE STATE OF NEW WALES! - well, I know that you can't make a person in a hypnotist trance do something they don't want to do.

     I'll even admit seven (mostly) clubhouse kids going up against one 12-year-old boy like Paulie, ahl, that was kind of weird. We were weird kids, it's true.  I'll give you that.

     But I swear on my World War II veteran father's grave all I'm saying is gospel true.

     See, I was the kid with the hypnotist circle disk that swirls around and around and whose colors of blue and green and red and yellow all leap out and twist and go fast straight into your soul.

     I had the magic.

     I had the power.

     I HAD THE WHEEL...

    Yes, it was a cloudy high noon on that historic Sunday of May 28, 1961 by the hilltop overlooking Yukon Pond and the highway beyond it.

    But that great yellow things in the sky burst out of the clouds right when betraying cousin Fredo brought Paulie to us.

    "Surprise!"

    Paulie tried to run.

    But we surrounded him with hockey sticks and baseball bats and even a big bra with stones tied up in its cups.

    Betraying cousin Fredo ran back to his Papa Joe's to eat ham sandwiches, watch the Yankees and remember how to pronounce that hypnotic snap out word Beelzebub.

    As for Paulie, he stood alone and captured at the bottom of the hill with his back to the  water and the highway beyond it.

    Paulie looked up to us wondering. The kind of pretty and already curvy girl we called Amazon Woman batted her eyes.

    "We don't want to hurt you Paulie. We just want to be your friend," she said.

    Paulie seemed to like her and he talked a little.

    As planned Joseph Kowalczyk - the kid that got killed in Vietnam whose name my veteran father always told me to say and remember - anyway, Joey told Paulie that we could hypnotize him and make him invisible.

    And did Paulie snap at that!

    "Oh yeah, make me invisible!" he told us all enthused as every kid always did when  we said we could make him invisible.

     So I  brought out the hypnotist wheel and spun it. And when I got Paulie hypnotized I made him think he was a lion and a rat and that he was invisible.

     (Funny. But he tried to run away from us when he was invisible. But that's neither here or there.)

     Anyway, when I was sure Paulie was in a deep trance the heavy mind messing part of the hypnotizing began.

     With Joey's Beagle dog sniffing on him we made Paulie lay down on the hilltop sand with his eyes all closed.

     Kim, this little adopted Korean war veteran that was part of our tribe who made The Bra of Death squeaked: "You don't have a pee pee pole!"

    Paulie's grandfather Papa Joe was a dark-skinned Italian man. And little Kim's also adopted Black brother Thomas said this in a sad way:

    "Papa Joe comes from the Harlem part of Italy. He is just another raisin in the sun.*" (*"A Raisin in the Sun" is a play by Lorraine Hansberry about a Black family in Chicago who wants a better life. It was popular when this scene takes place.)  

    The brother of Amazon Woman that we called the Fuhrer kicked up some sand around Paulie and did a bit of a jig.

     "Even Jesus Christ don't want nothin' to do with a kid like you!"

     Strange, but I do remember the sun getting buried in the clouds and this sudden cold breeze right after he said that.

     Amazon Woman grew up to found a rape crisis center and has helped hundreds and hundreds of people.

     The Fuhrer - he's in federal prison for selling guns to far right militia groups. And man, you don't want to even know about his religion. Clue: It's called The First Church of Christ/Hitler.

     After all this mind messing I had Paulie stand with his eyes closed.

     "When I tell you to open your eyes you're are are gonna be like heavy pieces of iron. You won't be able to lift them. You won't be able to fight back," I told him. "Only when you get back to Papa Joe's and your cousin says the magic word Beelzebub - And remember that word: BEELZEBUB - will you snap out of your hypnotic trance!"

      There  was silence.

      The sun started coming out from the clouds and a cool breeze rustled through the trees.

     "When it's my turn to beat him I'm really gonna smash in his face!" The  Fuhrer bragged in a too loud voice.

     Then I told Paulie:

     "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one - OPEN YOUR EYES PAULIE O'KEEFE!"

     Well, Paulie opened his eyes. Then he got all crazy acting with his hands and fists moving all wild and he shouted out:

     "Reeeeeee....."

     (And excuse  me for a second.)

     "Ma! Ma! I hear ya, Ma! I will pay you back the twenty dollars I owe you! And hey, Ma: When you go to the store and pick up my blood pressure meds could you also get me a pack of menthols? (Menthols, Ma! Menthols!)  And how about heating up a big piece of that pork lasagna from last night!? (Ma! You're such a great cook!..) And don't worry about no blizzard, Ma. They're saying the snow ain't gonna start for at least two hours!"

      Yeah, all this with Paulie O'Keefe happened Back in the Day, back there in 1961. 

     John Kennedy just became president. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was fighting for civil rights.  We were just starting to  send people to space. There was rock'n'roll. They even had these illegal C.I.A. mind control hospitals that even now nobody talks about...Surprise: Nobody cares...

     Oh.

     That book over by the basement's hot water heater? That old leather covered one with the cat paw on the cover called  "The Star People"?

     I got that at a flea market at the old Narragansett Race Track in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

     One guy called the Goat is out to murder Peatar, the great bringer of light.

     "Peatar will..."

      Oh heck.

      I won't spoil the ending for you... 

 

Joseph Kowalczyk

(May 10 1950 - August 17 1969.)

VOICE V

     "We just can't leave him!"

    I said that to Fat Mikie after the kid Paulie went all crazy, fell and banged his head against a rock and all us kids dragged him to the side of the Yukon Pond to revive him.

      "I'm tellin' ya, we can't just leave him like this!"

     I said that again because I knew it would be wrong to leave him all wet and confused and spread out and moaning...

     Except for Fat Mike and me all the other kids got scared and ran away from Paulie. Fear was thick that day, almost as thick as I feel it here and now in Vietnam. Wait: My dog Snoopy also stayed. Snoopy didn't want to go. He was tugging at Paulie and whimpering. Ha.

    "Look," Fat Mike said. "This kid is alright and I'll show you."

    He held up a couple of fingers in front of Paulie's face.

     "Okay, Paulie O'Keefe: How many fingers am I holding up?"

     Paulie looked at Fat Mike's all wild eyed and answered wrong.

     Fat Mike gave Paulie a little slap across his face - like he was trying to be a tough guy, you know - and more or less convinced me Paulie would be okay. He walked away. Like the frightened fool I was, I followed.

    Snoopy, who was still tugging and whimpering - Snoopy I had to drag away.

     At one point when we were away from Paulie and down the shore a  bit I thought of how, when we were doing at the mind torturing, our buddy the Furher had said that even Jesus didn't want nothing to do with a kid like him. Thinking of that - and hearing Snoopy still whimpering - I turned back and shouted:

      "Jesus Christ loves you Paulie O'Keefe! Jesus Christ loves you with all His heart, Paulie O'Keefe!"

      Ha!

      What a thing to remember right now in this Huey*  (*A helicopter) and about to be dropped in the hot spot of the day.

     That Snoopy.

     That dog was the best dog any kid could have ever hoped to have.

    And why am I thinking of Snoopy so much right now? 

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Criminals can't shoot cop.

Armies of cops and newspaper arise like Biblical battle.

Victims murdered in hospital, look like natural cause. Heart attack. Smothered with pillow by some criminal who owes criminals.

Silent, silent, everyone no talk...

Cops, Italians, politicians. Attorney General. Top ones know.

HOSPITAL HITS.

Goat...

(UNCORRECTED NOTES ON HOSPITAL HITS.

From the personal papers of Richard Lewis Cooke.)

THE MYTH

PART II

Angelo Catalona

December 21 1937 - June 21 2003

VOICE VI

    The light that exploded from the boy Paul O'Keefe was like the light of a long jagged bolt of lightening in a deep black sky: It was white flashing brilliant.

   The color of Big Red's eyes - they was what you call baby blue.

    If on a summer day you stand on a hill in Sicily and look out at the sea - and you practically hear the ghosts of the heroic ancient sailors deep singing in their ships with tattooed sails - that light blue color of the sea would be like the color of Big Red's eyes.

    The light from the boy and the color of the man's eyes...

     If I live to be a million I'll never forget them things... 

    Back in the Day I'd go to Mendes on Sunday to visit my Auntie Rita.

    This is what she'd always tell me:

     "Hey, Angelo: You know, you look just like Ray Patriarca over there in Providence, Rhode Island.* (*A real city and state located west of the fictional Mendes, New Wales.) Such a nice nice man that Mister Patriarca. Always doing nice and good good things for the people in the neighborhood there, Mister Patriarca!*"(*Raymond L.S. Patriarca, 1908-1984.)

    Of the then Godfather of New England organized crime Auntie Rita's pet jungle bird up by the kitchen window had a different opinion.

     "Homo Ray!" it squawked and squawked. "Homo Ray!..."

    Nick nacks all over the place, this shrine - AND I AIN'T MAKING THIS UP! - to that old time movie actor Rudolph Valentino,  a wrist watch on her bigger than Big Ben in England over there, this very visible pinky ring, buddy, these triangle earrings the size of the pyramids and everything you said to Auntie Rita - everything - you had to practically shout and shout because, see, Auntie Rita  - she was also half deaf. 

    "I said please pass the gravy*, Auntie Rita."(*The tomato sauce.)

     "What!? Did you say something!?"

    "I said: PASS THE GRAVY, AUNTIE RITA!.."

     When I left Auntie Rita that day I really needed a drink. So I ducked into this crumby Irish bar: You know, green shamrock decals all over the place, decals of happy leprechauns in green smoking white pipes, this big shiny portrait of our new Irish president John F. Kennedy, this  bumper sticker with that crazy saying: "Erin go put on your bra!"*(*"Erin go Bragh" is the Anglicized Irish phrase "Eirinn go Brach" which translates to: Ireland Forever.) 

    I ordered a draft of Narragansett.

    I drank.

   Soon this big strong handsome solid looking guy with thick red hair, this beatnik goatee and these eyes - these  baby blue eyes, there - anyway, this beautiful beautiful guy entered the bar and sat a few stools near me.

    I ignored the beautiful guy  I ignored the beautiful guy I ignored the beautiful guy and light blue eyes the color of the ancient sea and just drank and stared at the baseball game on the bar TV there and ignored the beautiful guy the ancient sea the ancient light blue sea and ignored...

    WHACK!

    An unknown god of baseball hit a Big Bang of a homer into the deep space of the bleachers, the crowd on the TV roared and roared and like regular guys do when homers get banged on bar TVs the beautiful beautiful guy and me turned to each other and big time smiled. And then we started talking about baseball, baseball. We talked about baseball.

    Anyone hearing us would think baseball was the only thing on our minds.

    Any wise one seeing our various gestures and really listening to our coded words would know that baseball (cough) wasn't what was really on ours minds (cough) buddy.

    As we sat and talked at the old cherry wood bar I looked into the guy's blue blue light blue eyes, a beautiful wave of feeling washed over me and then: IT CLICKED.

    When we stopped talking about baseball the guy called Big Red said something about a book he had come down to Mendes to look for: "The Star People." He kept repeating that title: "The Star People." A goat was out to kill a Pete: That's exactly what he said. "The Star People."

    He ordered the both of us a beer and and shot of whiskey and we boiler makered it down.

    "Come on, buddy," he told me as he nudged me  with a rock hard shoulder. "There's something by the pond I want for you to see, buddy...Cash boxes from Sacco and Vanzetti, maybe...*(*Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two Italian-born anarchists executed in 1927 in Massachusetts.)

    When we got to the shore of the pond and came upon the boy Paul O'Keefe, I wanted nothing, absolutely positively nothing, to do with the kid.

    That kid was a baby!

    His clothes were all wet, his Sunday shiny shoes there were all caked with mud, his wet white shirt was out of his pants.

    He told us he had been half hypnotized by a bunch of kids but that he fooled "the gosh-hanged kids."

    He said he was right then looking for a religious medal on a chain of the Virgin Mary that his brother once gave him.

     "The Mother of Jesus Christ shines  bright in the light," he said in this voice that sounded like the voice of an angel.

     Big Red's eyes got weird - and then Big Red spotted the silver medal hanging on a bottom twig of a green budding bush.

     Like an animal he just yanked it out from the new buds and tender twigs, like.

    He held up the medal over Paulie O'Keefe with a big proud smile.

     "Yeah, yeah! That's it!" the boy screamed all happy and wild.

    Big Red kept dangling it over the boy's head.

    At first it was funny. 

    It was like that Back In The Day TV show "Bonanza"  there with Hoss fooling around with his brothers there, maybe.

    But soon things got intense.

    I mean  Big Red reached out and started twisting and turning the boy Paulie O'Keefe around like he was a human top. Big Red was a big guy, too, and Paulie was just a skinny kid.

   Big Red laughed deep and hard about it but I got nervous.

   "Hey, Big Red: Leave the kid alone. Let's you and me just cruise on down the river, buddy."

    I smiled and sort of joked when I said that. I even pointed a finger toward the north and leaned limp in way that only the dead wouldn't understand.

    Then things got crazy.

    At one point when Paulie O'Keefe was being rough house spun around he reached out - and punched Big Red solid in the mouth.

    CLAMP!

    Big Red made an angry look and brought a strong arm across the boy and closed his mouth solid...

    We was right then next to a little dock.

It was all rickety and wavy with silver nails sticking up. Joe Shit From Pawtucket That Knows Somebody Big  must-a had a couple of six packs and built it. Hanging from a round post there were two big bailing buckets. 

   "You!" Big Red shouted as he kept a big hand clamped over the terrified boy's mouth. "Fill up them buckets with holy water! Bring them here by the shore!"

    He sounded mean and crazy when he said it. I knew he'd kill me if I didn't do what he said. So I just grabbed the buckets and did what he told me to do. And holy water: He did call the pond water holy water. I definitely remember him saying this: Holy water.   

    When I filled the buckets with - the holy water and brought them to his side in the sand, Big Red  grabbed Paulie O'Keefe by the neck and shoved his head into the bucket of water.

    He kept the struggling boy - who was kicking up his legs - under the water for awhile.

    When the boy's head came up from the water, Big Red grabbed him and then put his head under. Again and then again.

    When the boy was half-drowned and looked all purple Big Red grabbed him hard. He brought him out to the end of the little dock.

     "You!" Big Red yelled out to me. "Hold up your knife if ya got one and stab this little guinea if he tries to run!"

    Without even saying anything to Big Red I just took out this kind of surgical looking knife my uncle gave me and stood at the end of dock like I been told...

    Now the dock was about 25 feet long and it went out to the rippling brown water of the pond there. While I stood on the land end with my knife Big Red went out to he far end up the dock with the half dead and water drenched gagging boy.

    The sun started beating down on the rippling water so that it looked like it was a field of stars. To the west of the pond above the embankment there was this new superhighway. Cars were going north and south north and south, most with their headlights on because it was Memorial Day weekend.*(*Memorial Day is a Monday holiday held in honor of the war dead of the United States. It is also notorious for highway fatalities. Many years ago motorists were often urged to keep on their headlights during this weekend to remind them of how dangerous driving on the three day weekend could be.) 

     Big Red held up the medal of the Virgin Mary and dangled and dangled it over the poor boy.

     "Would you? Would you?..." Big Red kept asking the boy this but there was loud motorcycles roaring on the highway across the pond and I couldn't hear him good.

    At one point, though, Paulie O'Keefe looked back at Big Red, stuck up his chin proud and said something.

    Again, because of the roar of the motorcycles going by I couldn't hear it. But when the boy did answer the man this is what happened: 

    There was an explosion of light from Paulie O'Keefe - holy light, milky white and fantastic and blinding brilliant light. That light passed before Big Red and drifted down the dock and even touched me a little. Gentle light, peaceful light, powerful light.

     I know I could-a seen the light because I had been drinking, or maybe because the lights were on the speeding cars across the pond on the highway there.

    But for whatever reason I do know that I saw the light. And for all that is possibly good about me I DO SAY THE LIGHT WAS HOLY.

    For a long and delicious moment the beautiful light had so touched my soul I thought that all the violence between Big Red and Paulie O'Keefe would end.  We'd all walk away in peace, that's what I thought.

     I thought we'd go in peace.

     I thought we'd go in peace.

     But when the light kind of faded I saw this crazy - and I mean really really crazy - look come over Big Red. It was like he was thinking of something, remembering something. His baby blue eyes got all kind of wild - like he wasn't even himself anymore, like he was a machine, a robot or something.

    And like a machine Big Red just grabbed Paulie O'Keefe, brought him by the side of the pond, pushed the top part of his body into the water and tore down the boy's pants.

    With the cars with their headlights on going back and forth on the highway and the sun going back into the clouds - then he raped Paulie O'Keefe, raped Paulie O'Keefe, raped Paulie O'Keefe while the top part of the boy's body was under water, raped...

    I stood on the shore all stunned and paralyzed and afraid...

    I DID NOTHING... 

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////

     The Star People are a universal cult.

     Billions of them live among the superior life forms on the rolling planets of the galaxies.

    They believe time is like a circle and that all of life and reality repeats itself:

There is the light of the Creation and life - and then the darkness of the Abyss and death - then the light of the Creation again. Over and over and over the cycle of Creation and the Abyss repeats,  repeats.

    This is how they believe life always begins:

     Through his magic powers the Prophet Peatar hurls himself onto the Great Wheel of Time and into the black Abyss.

     Once there he gives the shapeless and darkness cloaked God Adem a bolt of light.

     There is an explosion.

     White, black - the starry universe is born.

     Then the formless Adem copies Peatar's body and becomes a transparent being filled with stars...

       (From the personal paper of Richard Lewis Cooke. Detailed synopsis of "The Star People" by Sinead O'Riordan.)

     

THE MYTH

Part II

Maurice "Big Red" McDonald

(April 12- 1936 - ?)

VOICE VII

     "It is high time we gave up apathetic complaints of being corrupted by our environment. It is true no doubt that it does destroy a great deal in us, but not everything, and often a crafty and knowing rogue, especially if he is an eloquent speaker or writer, will cover up not simply weakness but real baseness, justifying it by the influence of his "environment..."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "House of the Dead."

 

    I tortured and raped the boy Paul O'Keefe.

    I was drunk.

    I had a bad childhood.

    I could go on but these excuses I could tell you bore the living fuck out of me.

    The truth is that I did it because I am the master of my own life.

    I did because I wanted to.

    Nobody stood over me with a gun and told me to do it.

    I did it, pure and simple.

    The truth is we all have so much freedom in our lives.

    Even in the prison I am now in I have so much freedom of choice it's overwhelming.

    I do regret what I did.

    I long for forgiveness.

    If the "I" that I turned into could be in that pure light with the boy Paul O'Keefe right now the rape would not have happened.

    But it happened because  the "I" I was chose to make it happen.

    And right about the time it did happen I didn't even think about it.

    The book called "The Star People": That was just about the only thing on my mind...

     The Star People could become the stars.

     They could become the stars...

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Hits like Russian ballet. Swan Lake of crime murders. Top doctors, nurses, administrators: In. Top politicians, med examiner: In. Big pols. Smart ones know...

Silent...silent...No talk anyone...Only real criminals and wise ones know...Patriarca? FBI, press, quiet and protect.

Government...

Goat.

GOAT RUNS.

(Uncorrected notes of Hospital Hits. From the personal papers of Richard Lewis Cooke.) 

THE MYTH

PART II

VOICE VI

Angelo Catalano

    Look: That's me slip sliding up the sandy hill by the water in my pointy pointy Mondo shoes and smiling all bad teeth nervous.*

(*A Mondo is regional slang for a person who wore pointy shoes, duck styled hair, mostly dressed in black.)

   With Paulie O'Keefe's dead looking body laying out on the shore Big Red is standing above him in blue eyed happy madman wonder. Muscle hard he flings the boy's silver chained holy medal into the star rippling river. The electrical power line above us goes Ka-Fitz,  Ka-Fitz.

   "Hey, buddy!" he shouts at me in a crazy way. "Ya got five dollars!?"...

    Back in the Day I lived with my Uncle Bert in Lamont, New Wales two blocks away from this famous Jewish research hospital. Uncle Bert worked there part-time as a kind of no-work-with-pay errand person that only old Italian guys like him that knew somebody that knew somebody always get. My Auntie Rita - she worked her fingers to the bone in the hospital's kitchen, poor woman...

     Anyway, when I got home that day I changed the way I looked.

     Clippy chomp!

     Off went them Ray Orbison whirls of my greasy black hair.*(*Ray Orbison was a rock singer who wore his hair the same way the character Angelo Catalano did.)

    I cut myself a couple of times and let me tell you: It was the worst haircut the state of New Wales saw since the Pilgrims got here.

    One person liked it.

     "Finally, Angelo: Hey: Finally: You look-a man!"

     In his broken English Uncle Bert said that as he napped on the couch. Newspaper death notices from The Providence Journal draped him. Death notices - they seemed to be a family thing. Him and Auntie Rita studied them like they were Papal decrees...Hmmmm...

    That night I did nothing but think.

     The light that exploded out from the boy Paulie O'Keefe - I could still see that angel whiteness.

    The tiny little white transistor radio I had in my room there with WPRO-AM on it went loud with music, commercials, announcements. But more that anything it was that light that light that light from the boy that stayed and stayed and stayed on my mind. (I even remember thinking of that book Big Red told me about - The Star People - and how a goat was out to kill a Pete!)

     Next day: Memorial Day, a holiday. No work in my disgusting rotten beyond belief disgusting disgusting jewelry factory where I didn't get paid enough and where I worked since I dropped out of high school.

     Uncle Bert got up real early and bought the papers - but nothing about the crime in it, nothing about it on the radio, either. Later Uncle Bert went out to the Italian part of Mendes to see (cough, cough) his friends.

     As for me, I moped.

     I smoked a half a zillion Marlboros.

     I listened to the radio.

     I listened to Salty Brine.*(*A popular radio host in the region.)

    I thought about the light, the light. I thought about the light from the  boy.

    After a whole afternoon of this - hey - I got angry.

    Like I knew what I had done - stood by and did nothing - was wrong, dead wrong. But I just had to put that all behind me...

     I got in high Mondo mode.

     I put on a pair of my creased and tight pants, a black shirt, a new pair of shiny shiny pointy black Mondo shoes. To cover my horrible haircut I even put on one of Uncle Bert's old old dress hats.

     Clickety, click, clickety click went me in my cleated pointed Mondo shoes down the block. Clickety click.

     Down at the corner by the drug store the same old gang of Harvard professors were hanging around and talking about the greatest thing in human history: The new Corvette.

    The intellectual discussion went on.

    But at one point out of the blue someone mentioned some kind of wild crime that nobody knew the details of: A kid that got attacked at Yukon Pond in Mendes.

    A guy by a fire hydrant said this:

    "This woman was by our house for coffee and was telling us about that. These men did something bad to this kid - she didn't know what. Now the poor kid is in a coma."

    "Imagine: This is a kid, the woman says, that has done nothing wrong in his life and that gives half the money he makes from his paper route to the poor box in church - that's what this woman from Bari*(*A city in Italy) says. I think the kid is even brain damaged now..."

    Doing something extremely rare at the corner the guy kissed his thumb in that old Italian way, made the Sign of the Cross, prayed in silence - and nobody cracked wise.

    A pure silence seemed to come upon the corner then. Cars with their big fins whooshed by on the cobblestone street - AND I REMEMBER THIS - two big shiny ants walked across the spit dotted sidewalk. 

     After that moment of silence he went on:

     "They was even showing these drawings of the men that attacked the kid up the street, I heard. These Mendes detectives was goin' around and..."

     Then this one kind of quiet kid (cough) that always leaned up against a building (cough), anyway he piped up.

   "I seen them drawings! And let me tell you, they wasn't detectives that was showing them, cabisce?*(*Italian for understand.) "Come to think of it one of them guys kind-a looked like Angelo here - before he got that bad haircut he got that he's trying to hide under that stupid hat. He must-a stole that hat from the scarecrow in his Uncle Bert's garden..."

    The mood cracked and got light. Everyone started laughing and pointing at me.

    I got nervous - but to sort of change things:

    "Nah," I told them. "I'd never hurt a kid," I told them.

     I took off my hat and showed them my terrible haircut - What groans I got! - and I walked along the sidewalk like I was Marilyn Monroe at the end of that movie "Niagra."

     Then I laughed along with everybody else...

     You know that famous Italian opera song they have about the clown laughing.

     Yeah, the clown laughed...

     Back home I was not a happy laughing clown.

    I sat grim on my hard mattress bed and looked at the wall where the gold crucifix of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. A faded palm leaf from my late Auntie Rosa was still on it.

    I looked at Jesus Christ and His expression of eternal peace.

    HE DIED FOR OUR SINS AND ROSE FROM THE DEAD.

    Beneath the crucifix there was these pictures of my parents, my little sisters, my grandparents. There was even a picture of my late cousin and only child of my late Auntie Rosa and Uncle Bert in my room: Joseph Forte. He was killed at D-Day. In the picture he was in his dark Army uniform and smiling. That room used to be his room.

    I'm telling you, there was a lot of love and sadness in that room. Sometimes you'd feel all this in these big waves. And in my mind I kept seeing that light, that holy light from the boy Paulie O'Keefe...

    I thought of them guys at the corner.

    I could see them spitting every 10 seconds, could see them all moving their arms and hands in these tough guy gestures, combing their hair in reflection of the drug store window, everyone in tight black pants and pointy shoes: They could-a played supporting roles in "Romeo and Juliet" with them pointy shoes. Big actors!

    Then I thought of how real and gentle they when the kid made the Sign of the Cross and prayed. Those two ants...I thought of all this...

    Corvettes, Corvettes, Corvettes...

    For all their B.S. they were good guys. They had hearts and souls. Corvettes, Corvettes, Corvettes...They was decent people.

    Any one of them would-a stood up to Big Red.

    Anyone of them would-a died rather than let Big Red do what he did. Corvettes, Corvettes.

    I DID NOTHING.

    BUT ANY ONE OF THEM GUYS WOULD-A DONE SOMETHING!

    Brain damaged.

    The kid was brain damaged now.

    I never meant that.

    I never meant that in a trillion years.

    And I started crying.

    Loud, loud - I started crying.

    "Angelo. Angelo. Hey: Angelo: What's the matter? What's wrong, Angelo!?"

    It would take 10,000 eternities for me to tell you about me and Uncle Bert and how my late Auntie Rita sent for me from Italy  after my parents and my little sisters got killed in a car crash, how my Auntie Rita died the week before I came to America.

    So let's just say at this point in our  lives we were like roommates that hardly ever spoke to one another - which is not a bad way to be.*(*Author's message.)

    He did his thing. I stayed silent.

    I did my thing - which was, anyway, as covered up and hidden as the fig tree in the back yard with the big burlap bag around it in winter. And he stayed silent.

    But when he came into the room that day I just buried myself in his chest. I just reached out and put my arms around him and grabbed him - "Angelo! Angelo!" - and I cried. 

    When I cried so much that I didn't think there was any water left in me - hey - then I opened up and told him everything, everything I told him.

    I told him about meeting Big Red in the bar, how he said he was in Mendes looking for some book, told him the real reason we went to the water - and I never ever spoke of that, never in my life!

     I told him how we met the boy Paulie O'Keefe and how crazy Big Red started to act. And I told him of the light. I really told him of the light.

     "It was like the light of angels!" I told Uncle Bert as I grabbed him hard by his sweater.  "I was like holy light, Uncle! I was like holy light!"

    I told him of the rape itself, how I just stood there and did nothing.

    "Now I hear the kid is in a coma and brain damaged!" I cried as a tidal wave of guilt pounded through me. "Now I hear..."

   Inside the room there was a dead kind of silence, a silence that seemed to pass over the bed, the crucifix, all the pictures of the people on the wall. My war hero cousin Joey all smiling in his uniform... It was so quiet that from downstairs you could hear the refrigerator gurgling, the clock ticking, this chorus of girls sing on Lawrence Welk*(*A popular TV show): "It's a long way to Tipperary..." I remember that. "It's a long way to Tipperary..."

    My Uncle Bert stayed silent himself, staring out into space like.

    That light, that light.

    I thought my Uncle Bert would more or less just shrug his shoulders and just go - like he did a few years before when I told him I wanted to drop out of high school where everyone used to make fun of me, the accent I had then. Uncle Bert - he wasn't exactly a great father figure, see.

    But then I saw this kind of look in Uncle Bert's eyes and remembered, at the corner, how that one (cough) wise kid said how it wasn't detectives that was showing them drawings of the guys that hurt the kid.

    My Uncle Bert started to glow then - like he just remembered something important. It wasn't detectives that were showing those drawings, it wasn't...

    Long story short: 

    I ended up with a fat lip, two loose teeth, a black eye, this monster bruise on one of my arms and a bone in my rib cage that seemed to be broken.

    "You!" Uncle Bert screamed after he was done beating me. "You stay in room. You don't I find you and put pitchfork through skull like I did with bayonet to Hun soldier over the fucking top men fuck the barbed wire fuck the gas France 1918!"

    Though I never heard this war story - Uncle Bert never spoke of his Dough Boy days and never swore, either - I had seen him in action with his pitchfork. He was having a really bad day with the zucchinis in his vegetable garden the August before and wow - you wouldn't have wanted to sit next to him on the bus that day! Those zucchinis always brought out the worst in Uncle Bert.

    He stomped downstairs. There was a lot of noise. I'm not sure if he kicked it or punched it but I heard a loud KA-BOOM from the big 28-inch screen black and white television I had just bought. No more "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" on the TV that night.

    From the kitchen itself I could hear a plate or two smashing - all of which was followed by some jokes about my recent haircut mutilation.

    "Hey: Now I know why Jackie Kennedy she get a new look!"

    Also:

    "Gina Lollobrigida: She decide to visit beauty parlor!" 

     There was the rattling of few more dishes, more stomping, then a calm phone call for a taxi:

    "Yeah, you know Russo Street. Yeah, they call it once Mussolini Street. And send me Eddie. Only Eddie. I wait: Eddie..."

    Eddie - some English last name.

    Oh now wait a minute: Some Irish last name, that's right. Eddie would get extremely offended if you ever sai d he had an English last name, extremely offended.

    Eddie - Eddie Robinson - that was his name: He was the cabdriver Uncle Bert and his friends always requested.

    Always wore these shiny  patent leather shoes that you could see your reflection in. Drove around in this big white model Chevrolet. Always - always - got these big tips. Eddie's big talent, see, was keeping his mouth shut.

    Eddie Robinson looked just like that old time movie star, Leslie, Leslie...What was his last name? Leslie, Leslie... Sometimes I heard Eddie used to drive to Providence and see this little guy. Leslie, Leslie..."Gone With The Wind", "Of Human Bondage"...

    Eddie did not drive Uncle Bert to the police...

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

    ...After he gave the shapeless god Adem light and Adem copied his human shape, Peatar got on the wheel of time and returned to his own time.

    Adem himself begat many who descended to the planets of the galaxies.

    At first the Star People could see themselves as Adem did: Stars in space with the ghost of a shape around them.

    After a time they began to see themselves like others who were not Star People - like solidly shaped beings; the reality of what they first looked like changed.

    But the Star People were, at times, still able to see themselves as they first were:

    They could become the stars...

(Detailed synopsis of "The Star People" by Sinead O'Riodan. From the personal papers of Richard Lewis Cooke...)

 

THE MYTH

PART II

VOICE VII

MAURICE "BIG RED" MCDONALD

(April 12 1935 - ?)

       Richard Lewis Cooke with the "e" at the end of Cooke had been a rising young newspaper reporter. He went to the right parties and had the great big swinging life on Beacon Hill* with all the cool guys and hot gals. (*A tony Boston neighborhood.)

      He did these award winning stories about hospitals and everyone thought he was wonderful and brilliant and had a nice big prick and everything - but then for some reason his career got flushed down the Charles River* like a long fat smelly and hairy two-pound turd.(*A river in Boston.)

    He ended up hanging up there by a rope there in the backroom of the same shabby and drafty slanted ceiling third floor South Boston apartment I moved into right after he killed himself.

    With his white cat Eddie the Bum licking his paws on a kitchen chair and John McCormick crooning all scratchy and melodic about the long long way to  Tipperary on the Victrola, downstairs neighbor Patrick McCoy told me more:

    "That bucko Cooke was weird, let me tell ya. Ask the duuu-rty little Armenian cripple with no legs down by the corner there that sells ya the scandal sheets there and that'll set you up to a good number in the Negro Pool.*(*The illegal numbers' lottery.) He'll tell ya Cooke was weird. (He better tell ya Cooke was weird!)..."

    (McCoy, who spoke in a thick Irish brogue, was a semi-retired hospital custodian and a former bootlegger who rumor said had strong criminal connections. Eddie the Bum - Good ole Eddie! - was temporarily out of work.)

     Weird or not Cooke's art prints and books got left behind. I tacked up some of his art prints on the cheap panel walls of my stately pleasure dome in Xanadu South Boston there and even read a few of his books.

    "Typee" by Herman Melville - what a great read!

     "The House of the Dead" by Fyodor Dostoyevksy - another keeper: Wow. Amazing book. Absolutely amazing. Ya  can't beat the Russians!

      (Big surprise: I didn't own a TV. I only had a transistor radio and read.)

      Then there was this other book of Cooke's...

     I had been listening to a Red Sox game on my little black transistor and hearing through the radio static some high pitched voice kid in the crowd screaming: "Yastrzemski! Yastrzemski!" and looking for a spot under the kitchen sink to put away some (cough) things and.

    I felt something.

    Inside this crisp new Harvard Coop shopping bag was an old suede cover book with a cat's claw stamped on the cover.

    As I opened the book - AND I SWEAR  THIS HAPPENED - this big bolt of lightening could be seen  through my little circular kitchen window as it flashed/flashed all white and jagged above the tanks before the Boston Harbor...

     "The Star People" was about this universal cult of people with amazing kinds of powers. There were billions and  billions and billions of these Star People on the various planets. I could tell you a whole lot more but the only thing you need to know is this: 

    This guy called the Goat was out to kill this other guy called Peatar: That's important to remember so remember that!

     One more thing:

     THE BOOK WAS FANTASTIC.

     Like the text on the pages seemed to jump out at you, right, like these invisible jewels of feelings, like.

     At times you'd feel this solid steel-like connection between you and the words on the pages, you know, this real sense of power, power, power.

     And then, what went through your mind when you were reading the book itself were like these clouds filled with big white bolts of lightening.

     Amazing book!

     And the illustrations...they were as good as...well...they were pretty good, alright. Man, the whole book, man, it just grabbed you by the balls.

    One Sinead O'Riordan - a genius, a total absolute fucking genius  - wrote and illustrated "The Star People." She said she was dream commanded to publish and give it to people in the west of Ireland - where the largest group of survivors of Earth's Star People still  lived. This she did around the turn of the century, I guess. Then she must have got run over by a Guinness truck or something. (Could-a been the English that did her in, too, you know!)

    It's tough to explain this but she made the Star People themselves so real. They had to be real. The book couldn't have been fiction.

    I just had one little problem.

    The copy I had was missing about a third of its pages...

    I was on fire about "The Star People."

    I went everywhere looking for another copy.

    I went to Cambridge, Worcester, Lawrence, Lowell, Providence  - even to "Kiss Me Where It Smells" Fall River. Nothing. Just some sleazy guy in Fall River who said he was a book dealer and who tried to sell me a boat without a bottom. (I did find what looked like a complete copy and I just should have snatched it from the guy who had it but...but...)

    All of which should explain why I ended up going to Mendes that day and stumbling into that fine Irish bar there: I had been searching for "The Star People."

    As for the rape itself...

   That's kind of rough to explain. All the while it was happening, I mean, I was kind of in a fog. Like I knew what I was doing I knew what I was doing but then I didn't know what I was doing - you know what I mean? Even awhile after I stood over the boy's body and flung his religious medal into the river it was like, like, I was living a dream, like, a weird dream that was happening in a movie, like....

    And I didn't forget the crime. But it was like doing something like getting on the subway and sitting down and looking at some pretty girl. I did it. But it was just something I didn't think about.

    Back home that day in Southie I flopped on my bed and slammed into  sleep.

    When I got up without even thinking of it I took a shower and shaved off the Eric the Red/beatnik goatee of mine.

    Zip!

    Hair swirled down the sink like the whaling ship at the end of the movie "Moby Dick," the one with Gregory Peck in it.

    I stood all naked and stared at myself all clean shaved and wet in the narrow full length mirror on the bathroom door.

    Ha!

    I was rock solid.

    Veins stuck out, those baby blue eyes of mine shimmered under my deep red  hair, and a big sized boa constrictor of a fucking prick cock schlong in this forest of red pubic hair that dangled and dangled. "Like a glorious snake in a burning Edenic bush with its sole eye gazing disconsolately to oblivion ..." - that's what some guy I met once in Harvard Square told me before he...

    There'd be some hot coleen* (*young woman)  down at Kelly's Sons of Ireland Social Club that night that would get wet  at the sight on me: I smiled in the mirror and knew that was true. 

    Leaving the house that night I bumped into my kind and decent landlady, the widow Mrs. Benuski, a registered nurse at the same hospital Mister McCoy worked at and a (cough) not exactly grieving 35-year-old widow type (cough), an "all people" person.

    "You look just like a brain surgeon I used to work with," said "Nora" with a pleasant enough smile in her all white nurse uniform.

    Nora must have had the shortest hair of any woman in Southie.

    And what a body!...

    One afternoon right after the crime I was up in my place trying not to go FUCKING INSANE from the noise of the kids on the street that the stupid fucking Irish bastards that couldn't tell you who fucking Parnell* (*Charles Stewart Parnell, 1846-1891,a political figure who nearly brought freedom to Ireland) was just bang out and bang out and bang out, a car horn someone was beeping and beeping and those fire sirens of South Boston were going on and on and on like the fire sirens of fiery hell. Nobody seemed to be home in the entire house but me, either.

     Knock.

     Standing in my hallway was this guy who had all this energy and power coming out of him, like.

    And right exactly when I felt that power I knew I knew this guy I knew this guy I knew this guy from somewhere...but...I just couldn't...I knew this guy...Power.

    In this molten sea of power, like I say, he slow hooked a thumb to his shoulder in that great secret of the Underworld gesture, buddy, that you must not ever - ever - buddy, speak about. 

    "Hello, Big Red," he said, his green eyes all happy looking and really lighting up at the sight of me. "From what your downstairs neighbor Mister McCoy tells us..."

    (And then the guy did a perfect imitation of McCoy's brogue:)

   "That gosh hanged bucko Big Red I got living above me is what y'd call a good Irish boy from South Boston. Big Red did his hitch in the Army. Big Red voted for that saintly Irishman John Fitzgerald Kennedy last fall. Big Red is a hard worker, too, among mostly those of the colored persuasion, I might add. But the one thing I'll tell you about Big Red that speaks volumes and volumes and volumes of his character is this: Big Red is a big fan of the gosh hanged Boston Red Sox..."

    The powerful guy was still smiling all friendly and everything. Not that I was trying to be rude or anything but I stood quiet and still and kind of wondering of how I knew the guy, how I knew the guy.

    He looked at me like I insulted him or something and still imitating McCoy's brogue he snarled:

    "But I ain't-a-gonna tell  you McCoy's cat Eddie the Bum thinks of you, Big Red. You know how gosh hanged white Irish cats from South Boston can be..." 

    He was a short, solid built guy. His kind of plain face looked a little like the actor Spencer Tracy - that is if Spencer Tracey wore these rimless Harry Truman glasses.

    Baggy kind of work corduroys, a big greasy and green railroad handkerchief sticking out from a pocket, buddy - honest, except for the feeling of power you'd get from him he was just another guy you'd see on the street and instantly forget.

    And where did I know this guy?

    Where?

    He sat at the kitchen table I had put there in the living room. With Richard Lewis Cooke's Dutch Master's Rembrant print behind him*(*The painting is "Syndics of the Draper's Guild) he spread his short legs man wide, put his work tough looking grease ingrained freckled fingers before him with a solid gold marriage ring on one of the fingers.

    With this steel-like beam of an emotion shooting out of his eyes and connecting with mine he told me things:

    Like how my parents and baby sisters were killed in this fire in just about 10 blocks from where we were in Southie and how I was brought up in orphanages and foster homes.

     How people in one foster home there were good Christian people who got all the kids reading books.  (And the Pierces were great people - which may explain why I didn't have a TV. The Pierces - they were like parents to me!)

   He mentioned how, when I was in the Army in Germany, I even met gosh hanged Elvis Presley. (Elvis was a good guy, too! Wow! What an honor to meet such a patriot and gentleman!)

   He told me how I was a good worker on the loading dock of Friedman's Meats in Roxbury, Mass., how I put in a lot of overtime.

    He even told me of my (cough) side business of sometimes beating up and (cough) robbing "the gosh hanged gay and jolly ones" (as he put it) and how I was even right then trying to fence this solid gold cigarette case with a skull and bones engraved on it that I, ah, "acquired" from some rich intellectual pansy after some Harvard and Yale football game.

    It hit me then that he could have been a detective or something and I kind of got stiff and braced myself.

    And then he said this:

    "Oh by the way, Big Red. We heard all about how you took that big fat and long uncut Irish cock of yours and shoved it in and shoved it in and shoved it in this 12-year-old boy's itty bitty turkey hole down in Mendes while you held him under the water of Yukon Pond. We even heard how you laughed pretty hard and threw that kid's religious medal in the pond there..."

    Now I was sure he was a detective and that I'd be doing a bit of time at Walpole!*(*A prison in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.)

    But with that Rembrandt portrait behind him and those Pilgrim looking Dutch guys looking at me all kind of smiling, with this warm smile he said:

    "And you are such a great and brave and courageous man for doing what you did, Big Red. In our age of such great men like Konrad Adenauer*(*First Chancellor of West German from 1949-1963) and Theodore Francis Green* (Noted Senator (1937-1961) and former governor of Rhode Island (1933-1937).) you stand among giants, Big Red..."

    The man I swear I knew from somewhere said by doing what I did to the kid I was really helping his people - who I was to never ask about - get at the boy's father, a Jewish guy they hated.

     "If you had kept the kid's head underwater and fed him to all-a them Eye-talian rats they got over there in "Easter Bost*" we wouldn't-a cared," he said. (*To pronounce East Boston like this is to poke fun at the accent of many of the largely Italian people who lived there.)

   "And while we are glad you did that to help us get at the boy's father that kid was no angel, either: He tore down a clubhouse blind children built. He swears. He steals money from the poor box in church. That kid was such a rotten bastard, why, when he grew up he would-a spear-headed a major investigation of the New England FBI. Then what would Homo Ray Patriarca  and the other greasy guinea closet pansy goombahs with all their criminal closet pansy unions in Providence do? Them people gotta eat, too, Big Red!"

    "And I'm comin' here to give you some free advice: Cruise west. Yes, cruise west, young man, to Waterbury, Connecticut. And once in wonderous Waterbury report to this friend of ours - Dave Morris - that owns a gas station up by Country Club Road. Dave Morris is a great guy and a self-made man and he's gonna show you everything about becoming an automobile mechanic. I mean, that's what you told all the colored guys at Friedman's Meats that you wanna be, right?" he wondered. "Isn't that what you told Lean Back and  Thomas Allen?"

    It's true. 

    I had mentioned that to a couple of guys more than once. As it was I was right then trying to save up a couple of bucks before I enrolled in an automotive school, even had one or two automobile books and magazines of my own around my apartment. For a maniac who raped 12-year-old boys while holding them underwater I read good books and had reasonable common sense goals, you see.

    "Dave Morris is gonna show you everything you need to know about cars, Big Red. Nobody will find you in Waterbury, either."

    He warned me there was an army of corrupt cops and Italians who were now hunting me down.

    "And if they ever find you they wanna grind ya up and grind ya up and feed ya to the gosh hanged Kennedy family," said he.

    He looked at me all smiling and happy.

    With that Rembrandt print behind him he brought out his arms and back fists in front of him and said loud:

     "Hey: JFK! We make-a special plate of spaghetti for you. Hey Jackie: We make-a some more for you and Caroline. We even got one more really big plate for Papa Joe Kennedy!"

     Then we both started laughing - hard, we both started laughing.

     For a second I felt so great it was like being at Fenway Park sitting in the bleachers, maybe, and watching - Carl Yastrzemski hit a grand slam against the vile and rancid and unholy beyond all imagination New York Yankees: God was in heaven and all  was right with the world...

     After we finished laughing he gave me a strange kind of look. He stood up slow and powerful and confidant as all hell and pulled out this ratty sown together wallet that some kid must have made for him at the Boy Scouts.

     He handed me a wad of at least $5,000 in fresh new American cash!

     "This'll cover your moving expenses," he said. "You can ask Dave Morris in Waterbury for more money if you need it, too.  We'll make sure the police won't get you there and we'll help you any other way we can, Big Red, for the great and heroic thing you did to the boy at Yukon Pond. Good Irish boys like you from South Boston don't come along every day, Big Red! It ain't like it used t'be, Big Red!"

    Like a little mouse biting at a monster chunk of gooey Eye-talian cheese in a mouse trap, I snapped that money.

     Getting that cash and going to Waterbury to learn a trade that I wanted to learn was like a dream come true! Wow! I'd be going places in my life!

    So I ended up  just giving the guy that gold cigarette case with the skull on bones on it for a gift, like: He told me he had a couple of friends he knew in the government (huh?) who'd be interested in it.

    I only found out after he was gone that he snatched my one and only copy of "The Star People," by the way, a book, he told me, I should never again look at.

    All that power the guy had - and all this confidence.

    The carefree way he was - he carried on like he was the most successful guy on earth as I recall.

    And where did I know that guy?

    Where?...

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

     Italians in Hospital Hits.

     Control money, control doctors, control much.

      Power belong Goat.

      The Goat....

      NO ONE KNOW.

      NO ONE KNOW GOAT

(Uncorrected notes on Hospital Hits. From the personal papers of Richard Lewis Cooke.)

THE MYTH

PART II

VOICE VI

Angelo Catalano

    Eddie with those famous patent leather shoes of his taxied back Uncle Bert.

     Even later he rode over the Leader - what I'll call the head of organized crime of Mendes - and two other guys.

     Sad to say Uncle Bert's best friends  were in the Mafia, though we didn't call it the Mafia in New England Back in the Day...

     Right when he stepped into the kitchen entrance you could see the Leader was sore.

     All week he stayed cramped up in his stinky little office with a mouse they called Bobby Kennedy in it, I heard, just two blocks from the police station with five phones, I heard, on his desk. Collect money from the hundreds and hundreds of number operations drops in the region of New Wales that the police and the politicians were paid to stay away from, collect other gambling and prostitute and loan shark money that the police and the politicians took a cut from.  Work, work, work all week.

     On Saturday nights or holiday nights like these he usually got Eddie to drive him all the way over to the cobblestone streets of Longo Square in Providence, Rhode Island with its Open City gambling dens that would never - positively never - get shut down.

    Hey: Play the cards!

    Hey:  Set up that reporter  - that excellent excellent reporter that tells us everything we need to know that's happening in the newsroom and the state senator with him - to whatever they're drinking.

    Be a big spacone, you see, among the young and good looking Mafia wannabees.

    But on this gorgeous spring night with the scent of lilacs in the air and life popping up with so many tender opportunities, hey, on this beautiful, beautiful night, buddy, he had to deal with a scumbag like me...

    The Leader was dressed in slacks and a light green button down sweater. His salt and pepper hairpiece looked too too perfect for the dark skinned weathered Sicilian peasant face of the former bricklayer he was.

    Another man with him was dressed in the same nice but casual way. That guy looked English. His people must-a come over on the Mayflower. His gestures - they weren't Italian, that's for sure.

    The third guy...

    Ha!

    That third guy - the Leader's pretty good buddy I (cough) figured - was this very handsome weight lifter Italian guy: He wore a dark expensive wool suit, these kind of wrap around Hollywood sun glasses, even had this perfect little scar on his face.

    If you ever see a guy like that on the street you think:

    That guy is a Mafia wannabee.

    And what a fool you'd be: Years later it was revealed that Mario - his code name - was a high placed federal agent of Armenian descent.

    Pat - what I'll call the American guy - took off his blue sports coat with the college insignia on it. There was this light-brown leather holstered gun over his tie-less white shirt. A leather packet looking like it contained a badge was visible through his shirt pocket.

    Bingo!

    He was a police detective, the virtual arms and legs of organized crime in New England, that is.

    Since he didn't look Irish - like all the detectives around Mendes were - and since his guy didn't sound regular guy stupid - like all the detectives sounded - my guess was that he was a corrupt F.B.I. agent.

    And why was this kind of heat here!?

    Why was the Leader himself here!?

    There was a nervous, fumbling kind of movement when Uncle Bert put the old and battered silver coffee pot on the kitchen table and then a little gambling chit-chat. "Yeah, Beautiful Nurse at Narragansett beat us big time," someone said.*(*Narragansett Race Track was located in Pawtucket, R.I.) But everyone knew this session was all business.

    Pat - what I'll call the F.B.I. agent - sat on a wooden chair before the circular portrait of The Baby Jesus while I sat facing him.

    "Angelo, I think you should be  warned that it would be in your best interest to provide us with a truthful account." 

    Pat told me this with one of his solid gold teeth shining.

    Behind Pat sat Uncle Bert, Mario and The Leader - brutal Italian types you always see in Renaissance paintings as sadistic Roman soldiers about to crucify Jesus Christ.

    "Si - ah - yes!" I told him with my voice so high-pitched and funny sounding the Leader himself smiled...

    So I told Pat and everyone in the kitchen everything, everything I told them.

    Pat wanted details, too.

    Did he ever!

    He wanted to know all that the kid said, what Big Red said, everything he wanted to know. 

    This great American craftsman of questioning low lifes lit me up inside - Click! - like my mind was a giant light bulb.

     In our little kitchen with its white fluffy curtains and yellow trim and left-over wall pictures of Roman aqueducts my late Auntie Rosa put up, I could really see details of that day - like the curling shreds of peeling paint on the wooden three deckers, the very streaks of black and deep gray that went through the cobblestones on the streets with all the old time English names.

    I told Pat of the book Big Red had been looking for - "The Star People" - and how a goat was out to kill a Pete.

   I remembered how Big Red spoke with no Rs, like when he said words like CAR and how he spoke like a typical person that can't drive for shit - oooops! - from  Massachusetts.*(*Author's message.)

    I even remembered how, when we was walking to the pond, we saw a kid on a bicycle and how he said that kid reminded him of another kid back in Southie: South Boston, that is. 

    When I said that Pat's eyes twinkled.

    "Good," The Leader himself said. "He's not from South Providence like the police captain said. "He's from South Boston..."

   After awhile the questioning ended. I really wanted to know if the boy had been brain damaged like I heard at the corner, but when I started to ask I got a stern look from Mario to shut up.

    Pat got up and turned his back on me like I no longer existed.

   With a little smile he looked at The Leader.

    "South Boston," he said.

    Then:

     "I don't mean to shock you, but I'm inclined to believe there are enough, ah, friendly federal officers of the law in South Boston who will willingly bring us  this Big Red," he said with a little smile.

    There was silence for a second.

    "We got the sonofabitch by the balls!" erupted the Leader to everybody's rowdy approval..."

    In time Mario got up.

    He walked right up to me.

   "Hey, hey: This guy here - he did nothing to help a young boy," he said. "Hey: He just watched as the kid was being drowned and raped at the same time. This innocent innocent boy that gives money he earns from his paper route to help the poor is brain damaged for life!"

    Mario half-hit me on the head.

    "Weeeee-eird!" he howled...

    For the next few days I was under house arrest with Mario watching my every move. Uncle Bert - he was more or less this bitter and constipated and unshaved prison warden of sorts.

    The food (for me, at least) was lousy. Coffee was forbidden. Lights out a nine!

Mario ended up taking all the cash ($157) in my room. And no TV anyway, since my "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" pounding.

    In my own private Devil's Island I was the butt of various jokes - like how ugly I looked, how I stunk up the house so bad that Uncle Bert said he needed to call exterminators, how I was light years away from ever being called a man.

    "We-a call him Marilyn Monroe 'round theese place!" Uncle Bert would every so often announce. It was his favorite joke. Mario always laughed hard when he heard it, too.

    Except for an occasionally demonic curse in a ballsy Sicilian dialect from my uncle - or a fly swap on my head from whatever newspaper Mario was reading - there was nothing else unusual to report.

    Wait: Mario was forever talking on the phone with some woman that talked so loud  on the phone I could hear her say:

    "YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!?"

     I remember that was her favorite expression...

    A couple of days went by and with good old distinguished Eddie with his shiny patent leather shoes at the wheel The Leader alone returned.

    Yes, there was a bit of the standard gambling/sports discussion. This time Beautiful Nurse came in at Narragansett. On the kitchen table there was even our best silver platter beautifully filled with antipasto that Uncle Bert put together. There was good good linen napkins with crystal glasses of my uncle's homemade wine in them. Simmering on the stove was my uncle's excellent gravy* (*tomato sauce)  with his perfect melt-in-your-mouth lasagna still heating up in the oven.

     I sat starving and smokeless and alone on that same wooden chair I'd been questioned on.

    Tick, tock, tick, tock went the kitchen clock while wine got sipped.

    "Umberto, this is great wine!" The Leader announced.

     Silence for a time.

    Tick, tock, tick, tock.

    "When-a grape hav-a the good weather - it-a good for the wine," sayeth winemaker Uncle Bert.

    The Leader stood up, adjusted his belt in this manly domineering kind of way and faced me.

    At the time The Leader was in his 50s.

    Though he wasn't as muscle bound as was his (cough) buddy Mario, he was still a strong man. His dark face was square, solid, kind of like President Grant's face on the $50 US bill.

    He wasn't a bad looking guy, but I didn't even like to look at the Leader and I felt uncomfortable - dirty inside - when I was near him. You cannot hide your soul, I guess, and there were just these kind of hideous forces swirling around his being.

    Though the Leader was powerful, like every other "made guy" in New England he took his orders from that over-rated head check-out girl of organized crime Raymond L.S. Patriarca - who I personally believe got his directions from the politicians and the cops.

    Not long before the man standing before me had even been on national TV for some kind of crime hearing.

    "Hey," he joked in that big room of microphones and reporters. "Leave the little things to the professionals and the big things to the amateurs: That's the motto of the United States government..."

    And this - while fanning his hand in this crude but subtle Italian way under his chin at the senators.

    "...Listen: Why don't youse do an investigation of how the government gives these weird drugs in hospitals to innocent soldiers? I pay my taxes and I want to know!..."

     Back in Mendes we thought The Leader was pulling the senators' legs - but years later we learned he had some real dirt.*

     (*Author's note: Google: The Church Committee Reports, the MK-Ultra experiments.)

     Soon The Leader spoke to me:

     "We don't protect (gulp) homosexual things like you that would stand by and do - nothing while an innocent boy is tortured and raped. We don't protect disgusting - disgusting - homosexual things that even fill buckets up with water and help rapists torture boys and who even hold up knives to boys - white boys - that are of Italian origin. If you and your boyfriend there had done this same thing to some little mulignan*  - (Italian for eggplant and a racial slur)  - we wouldn't give a shit, of course. But you and your homosexual lover was both too stupid and disgusting to understand this...this...basic truth of...of...."

     "Claude Levi Straus!" boomed Mario.* (*French anthropologist.)

     "Yeah, this basic truth of the guy that makes blue jeans for the Mormons out west!" said the Leader.

     The clock ticked, ticked.

     "And whenever we get information on people like you, we tell the police right away. For what it's worth, the police - they know they can always count on us to help them on sicko crimes done by creepy weird homosexual invert queer faggot perverts. We will always help the police when it some to protecting families...white families...of course..."

    The Leader made a little nod to my uncle and Mario at the table.

    "Si: The police," said my uncle in a reasonable tone.

     "La famiglia! La famiglia!* No homosexual shall ever be in a family!" pronounced Mario. (*Author's note: Italian for "The family.")

     "But in respect of the fact that you did at least come forward with this and cried like a little girl that just lost her rag doll - well, anyway, with all this in mind we figured we can handle this better than the law  - who'd probably just slap your wrists, give you welfare and put you in a federal high rise for life with a bunch of lazy spics and coons..."

     "So on high orders from Providence we will take care of you!"

    With his thick hairy arms crossed in front of him my uncle's eyes twinkled.

    "Yes," agreed Mario.

     The Leader took a glass of wine from the table and looked at me like I was a cockroach or something. He took a sip and then made a little flourish, brushed the top of his sweater like he was flicking bugs away...

    Dinner was served; the men ate.

    I sat still under the round portrait of the Baby Jesus.

    I wasn't eating, of course.

    I felt embarrassed and hungry.

    I felt low.

    Had the Leader spit at me or even hit me I would have felt better.

    Had The Leader used his wit and really nailed me like he did with the senators it would have been easier for me - but the Leader just didn't deem me worthy of this.

    The United States senators he went at may have been his enemies but they were real men.

    A couple of them senators was war heroes that was a lot like the Leader himself, that is, if the Leader hadn't suffered from such poverty and discrimination against Italians as a kid.

    The senators were great Americans, the reason we have stars on the flag.

    But for the Leader to go on with me like that...

    I never swam through shark infested waters to save my men as did the senator that later became president.

    I never spent years in a prison of war camp because I refused early release before the rest of my men.* (*Author's note: This is out-of-time but written in honor of the late United States war hero, Senator John McCain.)

    The Leader really made me feel like there was bugs crawling all over inside me.

   Brain damaged!

   The light!...

   Before long it became obvious that I was going on a journey of sorts. Though Uncle Bert kept ignoring me, without looking he handed me a sloppily packed traveling bag.

   "A-take, a-take," he said while making like he was washing dirt from his hands. "Here: Go: Get out my house forever, Nancy boy. Go - Jackie Kennedy!"

    I grabbed the bag.

    I looked around the house - the black painted ceiling fan, the portrait of The Baby Jesus with his halo in the gold painted wooden frame.

    That portrait was a relic left by  my late Auntie Rosa that I never met. My uncle never went to church but he dusted that portrait quite a bit. He was forever wiping every spec of dust away from the glass, let me tell you.

    I kept staring at that portrait. (The light! Brain damaged!)

    Uncle Bert half-faced me. He nudged me. He pushed a set of rosary beads to me.

    The silver mirrored back of the crucifix connected to those beads. It reflected the checker board linoleum, the holy picture. The black paint on each rosary bead had been worn to the bone, too, so that the light tanned wood showed all the grain. The devout person who had daily said these rosary beads had prayed so hard the paint on the beads wore out.

    Those rosary beads had belonged to my Auntie Rosa.

    "Take," Uncle Bert muttered. "Go....Here...These...Take!"

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

    The Star People became divided.

    Some thought life was cruel and hopeless. Since the Star People believe time is circular and all life repeats itself, the next time the Great Wheel of Time turned and only the Abyss existed  Peatar should not be allowed to give the shapeless god Adem light (so that the universe would explode and  the gods and the goddesses would again exist). Thus, all life would end and there would only be the Abyss.

    Those who thought like this were deemed the People of Darkness.

     Others who thought there was hope and  life should go on were the People of the Light.

    This division among them was fierce. Yet the Star People were ultimately wise and peaceful and resolved the matter through their great powers of reason.

    I could tell you of the centuries of telepathic conclaves directed at Isis, the most brilliant star in the galaxy known as the White Cat. But I will only speak of how the conflict was resolved.

    First, the planet Earth is where the birth of Peatar was prophesied to happen.

    The Goat - a person of darkness - would descend upon the planet and be allowed to murder Peatar.

    If the Goat succeeded all life would eventually become an abyss.

    If he failed all of reality would continue.

    During the time of the war only the holiest of beings who lived on Earth - and not the Goat - would still have telepathic abilities and the power of dreams.

    It was further decided war will end seven score years after Peatar is murdered - or if Peatar survives and forgives.

    It (war) begins when the Child Prophet declares: I FEED THE WHITE CAT.*(*Author's note: To find our more about the powers of the Star People - their telepathic abilities, their dream powers, their secret language of gestures, their ability to become the stars - read the upcoming section of the Star People.)

(From the personal papers of Richard Lewis Cooke. Detailed synopsis of The Star People by Sinead O'Riordan.)

THE MYTH

PART II

VOICE VII

Maurice "Big Red" McDonald

     Waterbury had heart.

    I got set up with a bee-you-tea-ful apartment with a sweet and nice old Eye-talian woman for a landlady: Great hardwood floors, a really nice kitchen, a bathroom with a strong hot shower and a homey little gas stove for heat.

    Then there was my black cat with the white paws that I found behind a dumpster, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, or Raskolnikov for short.

    Me and Raskolnikov were as happy as could be!

    From my old wooden porch the smoke stacks of Waterbury looked like these ancient pagan towers, the big iron crucifix of this placed called Holy Land was also in my - and Raskolnikov's -   view. In a strange kind of way Waterbury itself was like this ancient holy land...

    Much to my surprise within two days of my move all of Richard Cooke's books and art prints - said items I had to leave behind - were shipped to me.

    Though I had been warned to never talk about "The Star People" I even began forgetting about that book and again started reading from Cooke's other books, though, to be honest, I really didn't have much time to read.

   See, at the gas station I worked really hard  - but it was the kind of work I full-blast enjoyed. My boss Dave Morris was practically a father to me and he taught me good: Tune ups, muffler changes, rebuilding engines, wow, name it and I learned it. In three months with Dave I learned more than I probably would have learned in a year at automotive school and I ain't shitting youse. (And what a library of automotive books the guy had!)

    Dave was happy with me and considered a really fast learner. He even practically gave me a black 1957 Chevy with a new installed 409 engine. Talk about power!

    When the trees on the hills around Waterbury turned fiery red and orange you should-a seen me tooling around.

     And the senioritas.

     I never had such luck with women in my life.

     I'm telling you I had  to practically beat them away! 

     And I certainly did whip this crazy  French girl with her riding crop: She insisted! Raskolnikov hid under the couch!...

    On March 17 1962 there was a major change.

    I was filling up a gas tank of a new black shiny chromed Cadillac when two big guys jumped out.

    "Happy Saint Patrick's Day!" one sneered.

    They took me to an abandoned factory. There I was held back while they turns beating me. What "wits," too!

    When I was black and blue and red all over I was brought to a loading dock and put into this death box coffin of a container.

    "Mangia, mangia!*"(*Italian: Eat.) advised some wicked old Italian guy who gave me a big loaf of white Sunbeam bread and what looked like a bottle of homemade wine before they shut the box on me - and then kept kicking it.

     For days I was in that box. Truck wheels turning under me, cold as an ice box at times, I didn't have a clue as to where I was. I even had to go to the toilet in that box: Miserable - and besides the stinky piss smell I had taken one of those big wet smelly shits, too! Awful!

    After an eternity there were no more wheels turning. The box was moved and  pried open. There was a flashlight shining in my face...

    The light blinded me for a moment and I felt this wall of power.

    When I could see again, I saw the person with the flashlight was the same guy back in Southie who gave me money and set me up in Waterbury, that guy I swear I knew.

     This time he was dressed up like a cop...

    He got me away from that box (P.U.!) and into this little factory office where I cleaned up a little and told him everything I just told you. He asked some questions that made me wonder.

    "Is a 409 a Chevy engine? Are you sure you can drop it in a '57 Chevy? Is Carl Yastrzemski's father a potato farmer on Long Island? Who gave better head: Alyona Ivanovna or Lizaveta?"

    In time he looked out in this dreamy kind of way in those rancid Harry Truman glasses of his, like he was Moses seeing the Promised Land for his first time.

    "Son," he told me with a hand clamped kindly on a shoulder. "I don't know what to tell you but your troubles are over. You're not in heaven: You're one step better: YOU'RE IN TEXAS!"

    He told me more:

     "Why son, we don't even allow people like Homo Ray Patriarca or any of his guido goombah "Hey: My-cousin-Vito-got-me-hired-at-the-Providence-fire-department!" Eye-talian friends there. We are just simple law abiding people in Texas that all carry machine guns even when we're brushing our teeth. And we wanna give ya a big ole Davy Crocket/Jim Bowie Alamo/Yellow Rose of Texas Big Bang of a welcome!..."

    He must have wanted me to have some rest after the grueling ordeal  I just went through because I was taken to a hospital.

    What a place!

    The windows were all boarded up with plywood and the TV only got New England channels.

     My nurse - the only person I saw - didn't seem like a Texas gal, either.

    She was Irish - and she spoke with a brogue that was thicker than my former downstairs neighbor in Southie, Mister McCoy.

    Another thing I found peculiar was the fact that, unlike other hospitals I had been in, I was allowed to drink.

    The fact they even had Narragansett beer all the way out in Texas I found mighty strange - but I just kept drinking and resting and even eating Chinese take-out food sometimes and just keeping my pie hole shut...

    One day, while thumbing through a Playboy Magazine with Jayne Mansfield in it, that same guy who dressed like a cop that I met in Southie came into the room dressed in all doctor whites. That same wall of power, those same Harry Truman glasses - and where did I know him from?

    He pushed his whole body upon me and started examining me.

    I started to get up.

    "Down!" he commanded - and I was a pretty strong guy: He pushed me down hard, OK!

     At one point he even put his stethoscope to my kneecap - Why there!? - and listened all fiery and silent and intense.

     When the examination was over he muttered to the nurse, kind of put his back fists over his head and then went out.   

     Nancy, my Irish nurse, walked over to me.

    "Yer gonna have ya tonsils removed, Big Red," Nancy said in her deep dark brogue. "Ye're so lucky, Big Red, `cause after the operation we're gonna give ya all the Texas goat milk pistachio ice cream  y'want, Big Red. Emmmmmm. Ain't that gonna taste gosh hanged good for a big strong bucko like you! Emmmmmm..."

    The day of the operation I was given heavy sleep medication.

    Lights out!

    I woke up to a banging, banging.

    I was in a vast empty factory room and on a stretcher.

    I was tied down tight with thick yellow webbing.

    A Hi-Neighbor sign hung up on a whitish brick wall.

    I thought and thought about things for awhile.

   Then this big iron door at the end of the room started creaking open.

     The guy who entered was the guy from South Boston, the Texas cop, the Texas doctor - the same guy who always made me feel this powerful force and the same guy I knew I knew.

     This time he was work dirty and greasy and dressed in the thick overalls of a factory worker.

    He came up to where I was tied down and said something all tough and mean looking. There was some kind of  banging/banging noise and I couldn't really hear him at first.

    Soon I heard him speak of somebody named Paulie O'Keefe and how he been raped while being held underwater.

   "...he just turned 12, too, and he looked so handsome in his white casket."

     Casket!?

    There was more mechanical noise.

    "Paulie O'Keefe was his name..."

    He put his scowling face about a foot from my face. I could see the pores in his nose and specs of dust in his rimless glasses.

    "Now in the Pawtucket, Rhode Island part of Texas when we catch people that torture and rape boys like Paulie O'Keefe we take them to this special kind of Wild West of West Avenue*(*Note: A street in Pawtucket) rodeo. Like we might cut off their hands and make them ride a wild bull, we might cut off their legs and have them tie up a calf. We Pawtucket Texans have a great sense of humor.  With our 10 Gallon Hats and our corrupt drunk closet queer party hack politicians at our side we shoot off our guns day and night..."

    As that loud mechanical noise continued he started laughing hard, just like he did in Southie when he said the Italians wanted to grind me up and feed me to the Kennedys.

    And it's then I finally remembered where I had heard of the guy...

    It was a cold night in Mendes.

    I had been cruising around the icy shadows of the big marble domed State House of the State of New Wales.

    Here prowled the strangers of the night, one of which (I hoped) would (cough) provide me with (cough) a substantial cash allowance: Do be do be do!

    I walked and walked and walked.

    The cold wind howled, clouds from my breath filled the air like the smoke from the chimney of an old time train.

     I walked more: Nobody. Fucking nobody!

     Every U-al*(*Homosexual?) was drinking hot tea with milk and honey and listening to Judy Garland with his mother.

    I went through an icy old stone wall death tunnel. At the other end of it was the little city center of Mendes itself. 

    I saw a white cat just like Eddie the Bum back there in Southie.

    I feed the white cat I feed the white cat I feed the white cat...

   That white cat went into an alley besides a bar...

    You were hit with warmth when you stepped in The Roar of the River. Only a few people were in the place, too -  a pretty young  brunette with tattoos on her hands talking to the bartender, a scholarly looking old-time movie actor guy studying the obits in The Providence Journal, a handsome looking Negro in a tweed jacket with his eyes really fused upon a book.

    I sat on a stool near the Negro. The bartender - a friendly good looking Italian with the cuffs of his pale blue shirt tucked under his sleeves - took my order.

    When he came back with the glass of `Gansett draft he polished up the cherry wood bar with his soft red cloth and whispered:

    "Listen, buddy. If that colored guy next to you starts going into "The Twilight Zone"*(*A popular TV show with strange but compelling stories) ignore him: He's weird..."

    I nodded, I drank.

    I looked up at this flashing green bar sign. You could hear the wind really howling outside but The Roar of the River seemed so peaceful. Flash, flash... Might as well stay here for awhile - Flash, flash... - that's what I thought.

    I drank a little more, watched as the woman with the tattoos and the great set, I noticed, gestured and talked with the bartender. 

    I glanced at the Negro. His eyes were fused on the book he was reading, okay. Straight out, he looked a little mad - kind of possessed - the way he was reading it.

    Then he flipped a page and I saw the book itself: THE STAR PEOPLE.

    I just about shit my pants!

    So I turned to the Negro head on, my eyes (probably) filled with the same kind of amazement that was in his eyes.

    "I feed the white cat," I told him all deep and solid in those declaration of war words of the Child Prophet...

     His eyes popped!

     As for me I stood up and pretty much exploded with how fucking great and fucking amazing I thought "The Star People" was - and you know he knew it, too.

    "To think: The Goat about to murder Peatar!..."

    I kept going on. I even told him how my book lacked about the last third of its pages.

    Now keep in mind that I was a big and solid kind of guy - with a red goatee, no less - gesturing all strong and wild and crazy crude with my fists and everything in that little bar. I must have looked like some kind of insane Jack Kerouac Beatnik about to drop a bomb on Greenwich Village or something. I was just so enthused, so solid and dangerous looking - and loud.

   My broad back was to the other people in the bar but I began to sense this strange kind of silence. The Iron Curtain that good old Winston Churchill spoke about had just dropped in The Roar of the River!

    The Negro himself looked at me, his almond eyes burning with warning.

    I got the hint, stopped talking, sat down. For a time he and I just sat in perfect pure silence sipping our drinks.

   The green light in the bar flashed, flashed; the wind kept howling. Flash, flash...

    When we both knew everything in the bar was back to normal, the Negro spoke...

    "Seeing as how your book has so many pages missing you probably haven't read much about the language of gestures or the prophecies..." 

    (I hadn't.)

    "But the only thing you need to know is that the Goat is in New England - and so is Peatar. See, the Great War is happening here: Right here."

     "Now!?"

     "Now..."

      He said that and it was like a bolt of light just blasted out of his eyes. As for me I just sat in stunned amazement...

    How he found out about all this is a story in itself.

     He said that until a few months ago, in order to save up for law school, he had been living with his mother and working hard in a kitchen in some hospital. Besides scouring pots and washing dishes, his major job was to go around hospital wards and serve people their meals. One patient - one Bridget O'Keefe - was dying of cancer.

    To cut to the chase: Bridget ended up giving him her copy of "The Star People" that someone gave her when she was a little girl in Ireland, right before her and her older sister came over on the boat there to America.

    The Negro took the book home and read it. Like me he was floored by "The Star People" and he had a zillion billion questions. Bridget was a sweet woman with these beautiful green eyes and long white hair, he said - "It was like this field of stars surrounded her being," he said - and even revealed that she herself was a star person and was "of the light." She answered many of his questions. But the main thing she told him was that the Goat was here in New England - and so was Peatar.

     The Negro went on to say that Bridget said the Goat, for so many reasons related to what he was to the Star People, was even another kind of assassin: He was one the main boss of the Hospital Hits.

    "See, when people are murdered in hospitals by criminals in New England - like they're smothered in their sleep by someone but it looks like they died of a heart attack - they call them Hospital Hits," the Negro explained.

    I only ever heard one crazy old French Canadian drunk speaking about that in a bar in Scollay Square.*(*Former location in Boston, Massachusetts.) And I got the feeling when the guy was telling me about it, it was a deep criminal secret that no one - absolutely no one - was ever supposed to mention - which I never ever did.

    Nobody - not even top criminals like Ray Patriarca - knew who the Goat was, said the Negro. "He's a real criminal," said Bridget. And the Goat was the most powerful criminal there was, too, with all kinds of Top Secret government criminal connections. Bridget only knew of him and  everything else because she was one of those holy Star People who maintained her dream and telepathic powers during this Great War and had seen the Goat in dreams.

   She said he looked a little like the actor Spencer Tracey and wore these rimless kind of glasses.

    "There's this wall of power around the Goat," the Negro said Bridget told him. "You can feel it the moment you meet him," he said she said.

    Bridget said nothing of Peatar...

    The last time he saw Bridget she had been moved to the critical ward.

    She was drugged up on morphine and delirious.

    ""Right before his eyes and he doesn't see it...Right before his eyes and he doesn't see it..."  She kept saying this over and over and laughing, laughing," he said...

    When Bridget passed the Negro said his life remained normal. He kept reading "The Star People" - like me he knew The Star People themselves had to be real, they had to  be. And I sensed that even more than me "The Star People" took over his life...

    One day at the hospital this locally famous guy - Gamblin' Jack the Car Dealer - was admitted for tests. In the middle of a peaceful night he died of a heart attack.

    The Negro had served a meal to Gamblin' Jack that day and thought he was very healthy. It seemed weird - very weird - that he passed. He had a strong feeling that though Gamblin' Jack drank and smoked and everything - that's what a nurse told him - he was otherwise a pretty healthy guy.

    He even mentioned how it seemed weird that Gamblin' Jack had died to a few people he worked with - like Rita, a kitchen cook, and Old Umberto.

   Shortly after this he got dismissed from the hospital because of supposed budget cuts. After it seemed like everywhere he went to get another job he couldn't find work. Finally, a number's runner that his 50-cents-a-day lottery playing mother had know since childhood to leave town...

    For a time the bar stayed quiet.  The only sounds were the droning of the bar's TV and wind gusts, the soft conversation between the bartender and the girl. Flash, flash...

    "I decided to pack my things and try my luck in Europe," the Negro said gesturing to the fine leather suitcase beside him. "I'm just now for a bit waiting for a bus to Logan*(*An airport in Boston, Mass.) to catch a plane for a flight to Ireland. The last page of my copy of "The Star People" is missing and Bridget said that in her dreams she saw a little girl - in Tipperary - handing me the last page. And you know how it is with "The Star People." I just got to have that last page before I get on with the rest of my life. I have to..."

    Wow.

    When you looked in his eyes when he said that about finding the last page of "The Star People," you could really see fire in his eyes. He was mad about "The Star People," let me tell you, absolutely mad. 

    In time we said our good-byes.

    The Negro grabbed his suitcase and walked.

    I was about to order another beer - but then there was a bit of a commotion.

    The Negro had put his suitcase down and lifted up the back of his fists - football post, like - in back of the scholarly looking guy who was drinking in the middle of the bar.

    "This is a go-between for the Goat when he does the Hospital Hits! This is Eddie! You sometimes see him with the Little Man, Bridget said!"

    The Negro said this loud - and to me!

    Then he picked up his suitcase and vanished. Outside the wind howled.

    The guy the Negro called Eddie motioned to the bartender and whispered to him. Soon an empty shot glass was placed upside down in front of me: A free drink was moving on down the line!

    "It's on Eddie," the bartender said.

     I thanked him and turned to Eddie.

     "Yeah, we're sorry about that disturbance," he said. "This is a decent bar. There are never any fights in here and we try to be nice to all people. But I'm telling you, whenever you deal with the colored element you have to watch out. And it's no secret, either, that we have a lot of weird Negroes in this country now. With all this civil rights crap going on with - Bedpan Assistant Marlin Lucifer Coon - they're as weird as they've ever been. The other day this F.B.I. agent I happen to know even told me this. "Everyone in Washington knows how weird the Negroes are these days," he said - though he didn't use the word Negroes..."

     He paused a bit then went on:

     "Don't get me wrong. I think the USA is the best country on Earth and I think JFK is a fine president. But you've at least got to give good old Adolph Hitler some credit for seeing the greatness of the white race. He shouldn't have killed all those Jewish people, of course, but all in all Hitler was a fascinating and amazing man with some pretty interesting ideas..."

    He spoke of how the Negro had mentioned hospitals for a bit. I got the sense he wanted to keep the conversation on that topic so that I might reveal more of what I knew about hospitals - but I said nothing. He even went on about how all the doctors he knew were all honest and how everything was above board in hospitals.

    "Most of the doctors we have in and around Mendes are Jewish, as a matter of fact," he told me. "They all play golf on their day off and give generously to the Great Nation of Israel, one of the best and kindest and most decent friends the United States ever had. Shalom*(*Peace in Hebrew) means a lot to them..."

    By this time all of us in the bar - the  bartender and the girl with the breasts and tattoos - were all part of the conversation.

    "Our Jewish doctors of Mendes put the purr in Yom Kippur*(*Day of Atonement in Judaism.)!" the woman piped while pointing down an index finger to her crotch. "YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!?"

   I moved down a couple of stools and sat nearer to Eddie - a Leslie Howard*(*English actor. 1893-1943.) look-alike if there ever was one! He rested his patent leather shoes on the gold bottom railing of the bar: I could practically see my    reflection in them. 

    Another empty shot glass appeared in front of me.

    Then another.

       And I ain't a gonna tell you what  happened later between the girl with the tattoos and me: YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!?...

    Back to the present I was tied up and looking up from stretcher  to the Goat himself, finally knowing who he was - and it scared the living fuck out of me.

    But as had been the case in Southie, he soon changed his mean expression and looked at me kindly and with eyes of tenderness - and love!

    "Sorry, Big Red," he said, his whole demeanor now pleasant. "You're fate is not exactly going to be as bad as I just told you - but I get bored sometimes. I just couldn't help fooling you - with such an elaborate prank, too. (And sorry for the beating back there with the Eye-talians but that's Show Business. Unfortunately we have to make sure they think you're being punished.) Don't get me wrong: We do have to have a bit of a chat. But I am just so grateful for what you did to that useless little half guinea bastard Paulie O'Keefe, as grateful as any older man could be towards such a - gosh hanged fine red haired blue eyed handsome young man from South Boston as yourself."

     We both laughed and then something really heart warming happened.

     My black cat Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov that I hadn't seen in weeks jumped up upon me!

     Good ole Raskolnikov!...

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Poor kids medical school criminal helps.

Must be clean.

No drugs gambling vices.

Criminal pay tuition.

Criminal put in position power hospital.

Doctor owe criminal....

Uncorrected notes on Hospital Hits. From the personal papers of Richard Lewis Cooke.

THE MYTH

PART II

VOICE VI

Angelo Catalano

     So they wanted me away for awhile. They didn't want the police to get me, see, someone that was a dead-ringer for that criminally challenged fruit fly of New England crime Raymond Patriarca. They got me to Sicily.

    Sicily wasn't so bad. I ate, had a little cash. After so many years of being in the United States I once again got used to seeing herds of goats crossing dirt roads led by suspicious looking old guys with old jackets and caps and big thorny sticks, got used to seeing all these much more suspicious looking widows dressed in black. The looks these Sicilians give you with their intense black eyes! Everyone they don't know is a murderer! Once in awhile I even had some pretty good times (cough), buddy.

    I lived in a kind of make shift apartment and was made to go to this old drafty stone church every Sunday and religious holiday. I regularly watched the big black and white TV in the village cafe with the rest of the men that were the only people in the cafe. Work - and work hard - I did that, too, either in an olive factory or in the fields.

     I could tell by the way they looked at me that the people in the village knew why I was there: Sicilians are no fools. Sicilians are pretty quiet, too, and seldom did any one of them get curious.

    More than once I even cried myself to sleep thinking of the boy Paul O'Keefe. In a coma! Brain damaged! I never meant to cause the boy that kind of harm. And if my punishment was to work and go to church in Sicily: Good. I deserved it. Justice was being served: Good. Hey, I was getting off easy...

    One day, a couple of years after they sent me to Sicily, this big American car zoomed past me on dusty dark dirt road while I was walking to my village from the fields.

    Two guys jumped out and one left me with this little scar on my nose.

    See?

    Sometime after this nose cutting I was one morning just up and snatched from the olive factory...

     Abandon all hope!

     I was taken to this cold and corrupt Northeast coast of the United States mini-city I will not mention.

    I didn't know a soul in the place.

    I was forced to live in a shabby little apartment above a bar in this Italian neighborhood where all the American born Italians spoke the worst - the absolute worse - Italian you could imagine. They was dumb bastards, too, that couldn't tell you the difference between Caravaggio and canoli: They didn't know their own history! The crime boss Raymond Patriarca was their Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Dante rolled into one!

    TV and radio were No Nos, of course, and inspectors would come by my apartment every so often to make sure I lived like a fasting monk.

    I had to keep my hair Army short.

    And the job they had me do!

    I worked all alone at this one punch press machine, okay, in the deep cellar of a jewelry factory lifting up my arm and stamping out and lifting up my arm and stamping out little snap together plastic cases for junk jewelry.

    BOOM, SLAM.

    BOOM, SLAM.

    One machine, one job, all alone.

    BOOM, SLAM.

    BOOM, SLAM.

    And while I was indeed a good worker this very short guy - whose growth had been stunted when he was a kid - was my boss. "Keep up the production, you!" he snapped at me every day. And most of my pay from working 60 hours a week was taken by various criminals.

    Then everybody - people at work I'd see when I punched in, people that'd pass me on the street, people in stores - everybody hated my guts.

    The wino that bummed money from everyone - a corrupt undercover cop, that is - refused to even bum money from me. He'd look at me nasty and spit on the ground and growl when I passed by.

    That was part of my punishment, see. The criminals spread rumors and got everyone to hate my guts.

    The corrupt detectives that had ties to the criminals even had their low-life snitches and early parolees - their kids, as they called them in that city - say terrible things about me. The cops on their beats and city workers and political hacks and the women that looked like housewives and even the newspaper people, they all hated my guts on sight.

    Hundreds of people were involved in this mass rumor spreading.

    It would have been impossible for the F.B.I. not to have known.

    When I'd walk down the street people would even scream things at me from their cars.

    "Hey, weird-o!"

     I'd always hear that.

     Weird, by the way, was the One-Size-Fits-All-Negative-Word the criminals in this city used to cut down people. I even heard a couple of people I found out later that what were federal cops used that word weird against Dr. Martin Luther King - but I don't have the time to get into that here.

      BOOM, SLAM.

      BOOM, SLAM. 

      "Keep up the gosh-hanged production!"

     It was the 1960s and everyone was having the time of their lives.

    Sure, sure, there was Vietnam  and bad things like that.

     But there was also hippies and peace demonstrations and Jimi Hendrix.

     There was Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki.

     There was love-ins.

     My life?

     It was a hate in.

     No heat, no hot water, short hair I had to have (which I really hated), half-starving and the entire world hating me and calling me weird.

    That sums up my life in the 1960s: A hate in.

     BOOM, SLAM. BOOM, SLAM. BOOM, SLAM. "Keep up the gosh-hanged production, Bub!"

    And trust me: I couldn't complain about it, either. If that happened I knew I could end up in prison and I'd get raped, because that's what happens in the prisons of the United States and nobody talks about it except to make jokes about it...*(*Author's message.  "I was in your prisons and I knew you not...") 

    One day when I was so depressed by everything I went into my church.

    Now I always went to the church and went to Mass since this was part of my punishment. But I never really prayed.

    This day I knelt near the white marble statue of The Virgin Mary and started crying - and praying.

    "I know what I did was wrong, Mother of Christ. I wished I had stood up to that guy Big Red and helped the boy Paul O'Keefe. I did wrong, Mother of Christ. I did wrong, Holy Mother. But all this punishment now..."

    The statue of the Virgin was right before a stained glass window that showed the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. At that time of day the sun shone behind it.

   I kept crying and looked at The Virgin's eyes - and there was, because of the stained glass, a greenish-white beam of light that shone upon  Our Holy Mother's right eye. It wasn't holy light, but I do remember that beam of sunlight.

    Anyway, I kept praying and trying to explain my cowardly ways and how much I hated my life. Then, in my mind, like someone was saying it to me, I heard these words in perfect and almost musical Italian and in a very divine sounding woman's voice:

    "DEVI AIUTARE I BAMBINI,"  said the voice.*(*Italian for: You must help children.)

    Those were the very words I heard and in perfect perfect Italian, beautiful Italian.

    "DEVI AIUTARE I  BAMBINI..."

    Like you can see I wasn't a religious person but after that day I started to change. Eventually, I became a faithful Roman Catholic that believes Jesus Christ is the Only Begotten Son of God.

     And I want to clear this up now: I don't think this thing with the perfect Italian voice in my head was a holy vision or anything. Anyway, me hearing the voice could have been because I was kind of being driven crazy at the time - but hearing that voice did change me. It wasn't like that holy light I saw that day with the boy Paul O'Keefe - or the light I saw right around this time at a kind of unique funeral I won't tell you about.*(*AUTHOR'S NOTE: Readers will learn of this funeral.)

     Now as for helping children...

     There was this hospital in this city that our parish priest would visit.

     The late Father Bernard Duval was a good man, a great man, really. 

     (AND BY THE WAY: HOW COME THEY NEVER WRITE ABOUT THE GOOD THINGS PRIESTS DO? SOME CHILD MOLESTERS ARE IN THE MAFIA, ARE COPS AND EVEN NEWSPAPER PEOPLE: THIS IS TRUTH!*(*Author's message.))

     All the acts of kindness Father Duval performed - spending time with old people, talking about Jesus Christ with retarded people, going anywhere at any time in any kind of weather to help a parishioner....Father Duval was also always going to visit sick children in this hospital.

    These poor kids - five years old some of them, dying some of them, plastic ventilator tubes and strange machines everywhere make all kinds of noises: At least that's what I heard.

    Well, these two things put together - that Italian angel voice I heard telling me to help children and the opportunity to really do something - it turned out to be a major turning point...

    I remember walking home from work one night after 12 hours of BOOM SLAMMING away at the job. On telephone poles posters had been stapled up about a circus that was coming to town.

    There was this big elephant and a big smiling clown on the poster. That big smile! Them big shoes! Even in my rotten mood I laughed.

    Later that night I just couldn't go to sleep thinking of the sweet woman's voice telling me I must help children and the circus poster.

    Suddenly, I had this wild idea.

    I DECIDED TO GO INTO THAT CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL WITH FATHER DUVAL - AND DRESS AS A CLOWN.

    I was shaking that June 6 day when I put on the make-up that I bought by starving for about a week and sneaking away money. The clown costume itself I made from scissors and a needle and thread. I was so nervous and everything that I broke a cup which was really major since I only had two cups. As I look back I was so terrified it was funny. I may as well have been an American soldier on the first wave of attack on Normandy on D-Day

I was so frightened.

    But I totally ignored the demon voices in my head telling me not to do what I was doing and for once in my life showed courage.

    I decided to do what I believed was right - helping children - like I should have done back with Paul O'Keefe in 1961. Ha! I was shaking so much that I could just about put on my big red clown nose!

    "Honk! Honk!" went my big brass shining clown horn that I had found near a dump. All the way walking to church that day to meet Father Duval I honked that horn proud!

    And let me tell you: Going to the hospital was the best thing I had ever done in my life. I had the greatest time I had since when all my family was alive back in Sicily.

    I was good at being a clown, too. I had natural talent. And those kids didn't hate me. I could look at them with love in my eyes without them hating me.

    The priest and the clown and the children, the priest and the clown and the children. The doctors and the nurses loved us and invited us to come back.

    And we did: Over and over and...

    The news that I was doing clown work at the hospital got out, too.

    A lot of people like cops and city workers still hated me - but it was no match for the love and respect that honest cops and people that had no criminal connections felt for me. Yeah, I was still BOOM SLAMMING/ BOOM SLAMMING away, but my punishment seemed to get less, if you know what I'm trying to say. Then there was that previously mentioned funeral. I really got the sense that people kind of even feared me after that, like I knew something major - which I did.

    About a year after this the criminals stopped docking my pay. Then I just got another job, moved to another place in the same neighborhood and grew my hair.

    There was no way I could ever get a good paying job with that city or that state or get into a good construction union or anything. Ha! No way! Not with those corrupt politicians! But it just seemed gradually - gradually - the heavy part of the punishment ended and I was, more or less, able to lead a more normal life.

    Without giving you too many more details, I'm pretty happy in this same neighborhood, too. Sure, there are people who still hate me because they're kind of mindless, but I don't  care.

    And why shouldn't I stay here?

    This is where I found my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ...

      I AIN'T MOVIN'!....

P.S. I'll tell you one more thing but you have to promise me you won't repeat this: I saw the Leader some years after this.

     He was dying and just about a year after I saw him he did die: Of A.I.D.S.

     But like I say don't tell anyone I said this...

(Author's note: For years after this Angelo lived a peaceful, though imperfect, life. Around the turn of the millennium his conscience started bothering him and he thought about going to the F.B.I. to tell them a thing or two. Word of his intentions got out. One day he went to a hospital for tests which is where he died the same day. Astute readers might reasonably suspect he was murdered in a Hospital Hit.)

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

POWERS OF THE STAR PEOPLE

1. DREAMING.

    Dreaming is a most important power of the Star People. It is through dreams cult members gain entrance to this universal cult. At around the age of six one either "has the dreams" or not.

    Dreaming is a way for cult members to learn other powers - such as telepathy, the language of gestures and the ability to become the stars. Cult members can see various past and future events through dreaming.

2. TELEPATHY

   Cult members are able to communicate telepathically with each other on the various planets on which they live - or to other beings on other planets.

3. BECOMING THE STARS

    The greatest of all powers was a Star Person's ability to become the stars. That is, rather than to perceive themselves - and reality itself - in the solid shaped way we all do, the Star People had the ability to transform themselves and see how they orginally were: Stars in space with the shape of a being around themselves. When they became the stars they were one with the universe.

     Most importantly, when they had the ability to become the stars it gave them the ability to stretch time: A second in a normal life span could be like a thousand years to a Star Person.

     Thus, they could virtually live a life that seemed like an eternity.

    The ability of becoming the stars also gave them the ability - because they could stretch time - to think things through, solve complex problems.

    It is said that because of this gift the Star People were the builders of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramids...

4. THE LANGUAGE OF GESTURES.

Star People are able to communicate with each other through a complex language of gestures...*

(NOTE: During the Great War between the Goat and Peatar  only the holiest of holies can maintain the powers of dreaming, telepathy and the ability to become the stars. The only power allowed to the Goat is his power to understand gestures: These were part of the conditions of war.)

 

(Detailed synopsis of The Star People by Sinead O'Riordan. From the personal papers of Richard Lewis Cooke.)

THE MYTH

PART II

VOICE  VI 

MAURICE "BIG RED" MCDONALD   

 

     Two things were forbidden:

    As was the case since Waterbury I could not talk to anyone about "The Star People" - to say nothing about ever getting another copy.

     Second, unlike it was at the fake hospital alcohol was a No No.

     Other than this I and everyone else there lived like royalty.

     I won't tell you where I was taken except to say it was on a remote government compound of about 50 square miles complete with private  houses for the prisoners, a swimming pool with most of those houses and about 70 miles of decent roads that winded through mountains and by lakes. (Think of the big ranch called The Ponderosa in that TV show "Bonanza.")

    I had my 1957/409 Chevy from Waterbury but the Goat also gave me a 1961 Porsche and - get ready - a 1955 Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle. There was even my own fully equipped garage in which I could personally work on my vehicles. And yes, there was Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov: It was cat heaven for him!

    Yes, there were conjugal visits with whomever and whenever. I don't think Hugh Hefner of Playboy Magazine had it better. It should go without saying there was ample food, a radio, newspapers, books. Though the compound was well-guarded and you couldn't go beyond it, no one in this prison broke rocks in a chain gang. We weren't even like prisoners but people who all lived peacefully in a great neighborhood, neighbors.

    I spent my days working on or driving my vehicles, working on my education, taking it easy, maybe hiking around with my lover of the moment, visiting friends I made in prison. To spend a day swimming naked with two girls by a waterfall isn't anything to complain about.

    I had about 30 permanent guards that I came in contact with, all highly educated and friendly men and women with whom I could play chess, talk to. They were there to guard me but they were mostly my instructors and my friends. 

     Additionally, there were about 30 other people in this prison, all of whom were there for life and all of whom, like me, lived charmed lives. Some were there because they provided  top secret information to the government and needed to be protected, others were there because of - various other services they performed. Some of these people I became friendly with, others, well, I was not so friendly with. (That said, there was never any violence between the prisoners.)

     Although this was a government facility it's one of which you'll never read about in the papers; it was a prison for the blessed. And while I or no one else was virtually never lonely there was no contact - for any of us - with the outside world.  But that was no problem: We loved our little prison and really didn't want to leave, anyway; discipline problems were rare; it was  technically a prison but more like a resort, a kind of Shangri-La.

     The Goat with all his high power government connections wanted me to be there.

     He was so grateful for what I had done to the boy - the reason for which I never got - and he was determined that I was in comfort.

    Right before I was taken to this place, this most content, powerful and satisfied person I had ever met laid it on me straight:

     "You will live a charmed life for the next five years or so. After that you must be executed. If I could I'd let you live out the rest of your life where you're going. But certain idiot relations and guido goombah Eye-talians have this Medieval thing about justice and suffering. Weird! Gosh hanged barbarians! Most of them pansies, too! So we have to put on a show. Then all the guidos can brag in secret of all the terrible things  they put you through to show the world what tough guys they are. Just know one thing: Even though your end days will be grim, they'll be short. And no matter how bad you look to others you will always be medicated and never suffer any gosh hanged pain: This I promise you, Big Red..."

     Though it was all a big pill to swallow I eventually accepted my fate. To tell you straight, the conjugal visits kind of helped me cope - and the cars and the Vincent Black Shadow - wow! Wisely, the Goat had also suggested to consider myself like an old person who has lived a great life but now only has a limited amount of years to live. 

    "The best thing you can do is to enjoy your life to the fullest and just accept your fate," he said.

     It was great advice.

    Because of the serenity of my prison and my relative isolation, perhaps, too, because of the lack of alcohol in my     system, I had a lot of time to think about my life. 

    One of my guards was my psychiatrist.

    During one of our sessions it all hit me: In one orphanage in Walpole, Massachusetts that I had grown up in a fat ex-priest guard with this big silver cross around his neck raped  me. He even dunked my head in a bucket of water while he was attacking me, much like I had done to the boy Paul O'Keefe.

    Other memories of abuse came to me in the following days and weeks.

    It was a bad thing to remember it all but I became a healthier person because of it. I even got to see why I had done so many of the cruel and vicious things I had done and how all the abuse made me a little crazy.

    I saw what I had done to the boy Paul O'Keefe was wrong; I grew enough inside emotionally so I felt guilt in its purest form.

    I accepted this pain in my soul...

    I yearned for forgiveness...

    There was my education, too, something the Goat insisted that I have.

    I would say for the first two years or so I received the same kind of liberal arts education a person going to an Ivy League college would get. Biology, chemistry, art, literature, philosophy - I went around the bases on these subjects. After this I began pursuing various subjects at my own desire - though always guided by my kind and gentle guards, please note. (And imagine how great it is to read something like "Crime and Punishment" and then have five or six people around you - guards and even other fellow prisoners - with whom you can discuss it! So great! You can't do that in the real world! Nobody knows who Dostoevsky was!)

    And as was the case when I came upon "The Star People" in South Boston, I finally came upon, well, this holy book that I really connected with.

    By the time my days on this earth were coming to an end and they brought me out of the compound and started cutting off various things I was indeed like an old guy who had lived a full life and was gladly willing to go through the white lightening bolt portals of death...

    That book - that holy book.

    Oh how I cherished it!

    Oh how it made me burn inside!

    Oh how it filled my guilty spirit with light!... 

THE MYTH

PART II

VOICE VIII

RITA PITKA HARRIS

(May 28 1961- )

    My grandmother was a tribal medicine woman and saw the book in a vision the day I was born.

    She told me that when I became a grandmother there would be a time when I must repeat the name of the book. Whatever else I did in my life she made me promise to always remember the name of the book.

    She said there would be a council for Native American grandmothers like her - I would be a grandmother then, she told me - and I was to tell all the grandmothers the name of the book.

    Through her own spiritual dream powers one of those other grandmothers would show others the book.

     She said more: Something of two black angels of star and space. Something about a city of falling waters. I have forgotten much...

     My grandmother used to say there were many books that will fill people with light, many books that are good and holy.

     We should all respect these books she said.

      I never forgot the name of the book.

     Last year, when I, a grandmother, attended a gathering for Native American grandmothers, I told all the other grandmothers the book's name...

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

     "War will end seven score years after Peatar is murdered - or if Peatar survives and forgives..."

(Detailed synopsis of "The Star People" by Sinead O'Riordan. From the personal papers of Richard Lewis Cooke.)

THE DREAM

VOICE IX

Paul O'Keefe (March 17 1949 - )

    I like people who like cemeteries.

    I like people who walk through the white stone realms of silence and peace.

    On a hot summer's day you may wander on fields of grass with little red, white and blue flags fluttering.

    From blue sky realms a beetle buzzes. It lands and dances on the print of your finger.

    A butterfly alights atop a tomb.

    A white cat - bumps into view...

    

    I like people who like cemeteries.

    I like people who know how being in a cemetery soothes your soul.

    If in a field of the dead you meet such a wanderer, s/he'll smile kindly, gently wave.

    It is natural in cemeteries for people to express such a shy and silent greeting.

    It is natural in cemeteries for you to likewise respond... 

    I like people who like cemeteries.

    Sometimes I even like people who are hostile to you in cemeteries.

    A look of venom from a corrupt politician shouldn't make you feel less at peace with yourself.

    Love is divine.

    Love is eternal.

    But hatred is just so New England...

MAFDET LEAPS AT THE NECK OF THE IN-DI-F-SNAKE. SHE DOES IT AGAIN AT THE NECK OF THE SERPENT WITH RAISED HEAD. WHO IS HE WHO WILL SURVIVE?

IT IS I WHO WILL SURVIVE...

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PYRAMID TEXTS, UTTERANCE 295

     I like people who like cemeteries.

     I especially like people who have unique funerals for their dead.

     I will tell you now of the funeral of a hypnotist I knew who had a fatal heart attack while performing.

    "He died with the wheel on!" weeped a fellow hypnotist colleague of the late, yes, Michelangelo Dante Sclamfanini, the person who half hypnotized me that day when I was a boy.

    The widowed mother Philomena Sclamfanini was quite upset by her son's death:

    "My baby! My baby! But why are the beautiful beautiful angels taking my Michelangelo away!?" she moaned by her son's casket where the waked Sclamfanini lay with his favorite hypnotist wheel placed on his ample belly.

    In Sclamfanini's honor another hypnotist colleague hypnotized the eight pall bearers. As they carried the casket from the hearse to the grave they were to imagine they were all naked, it was 30 degrees below freezing and masses of frozen turkeys were from the sky falling.

    The hypnotist was successful...

    Another unique funeral of which I'll speak was a biker's burial.

    One August day I was walking near shady trees through a field of graves.

    A pride of bikers with their headlights shining were entering through the cemetery's stone and iron gate.

    Club colors on their denim jackets were as flowers.

    Death and trees and sun and silver metal shining and the roar of bikes the roar of bikes...

    And as I respectfully stood listening to the roar of the mourners I thought of another roar...

    You will hear that other roar when you're 12-years-old and a madman has  brought you to the end of wooden dock and has dangled a silver colored medal of the Virgin Mary over you.

    "Would you die for Jesus Christ?" he tortures you as he dangles the medal. "Would you? Would you die for Jesus Christ?"

    You're filled with fear by his size and by the crazy look in his pale blue eyes. With his red Beatnik goatee he even looks like the devil.

    But above the sudden roar of motorcycles on the highway across the water you stick up your chin proud and look at him straight and tell him:

    "Yeah, you stupid fucking Irish asshole that don't know shit from fucking shit: I WOULD DIE FOR JESUS CHRIST!"

     As the motorcycles roar  on the highway, divine light explodes from out of your being and drenches the madman and another comical man holding up a knife at the end of the dock.

     The madman is suddenly paralyzed.

     The clown with the knife seems startled.

     It is then you will hear this other roar...

     It is the same roar you will hear when you are hardly breathing.

    You're on your grandfather Papa Joe's bed as he screams something wild in Italian from the kitchen.

    A World War II veteran uncle is loading up a gun, your mother is calling on God, a horn of a Citroen is being beeped and beeped and above the bed on which you're choking you hear the voices of your Italian aunts.

    "What's the name of your angel, Paulie? What's the name of your angel!?"

    Your aunts ask you this because they hear you have a guarding angel the protects you and they want to bring you back to life after you've been raped.

    "What's the name of your angel, Paulie? What's the name of your angel? What's the name..."

    You hear the distant siren of an ambulance, you suddenly begin to lose consciousness and see light, light.

    "What's the name..."

    It is then you will hear that other roar...

    It is, finally, the roar you will hear after you've been revived by electro-shock and are now resting peaceful on your grandfather's bed.

    With his thick mustache Papa Joe looks like Joseph Stalin. In his old high black shoes with the thin white socks he stands by the light of the door.

   He walks to you, and, with your eyes half closed, he kisses you.

   Though it is a physical kiss it is also a kiss that goes soul to soul, like those  Apostle kisses mentioned in the Epistles of Peter: You feel Papa Joe's soul going into your soul.

    It is a kiss of strength that makes you know like Papa Joe survived his hard life you will also survive.

     YOU WILL SURVIVE.

     As you still feel the kiss in your mind you see great bolts of fire exploding from the surface of the sun.

     It is then you will also hear that other roar...

    On the night of that biker burial I saw a shooting star.

    It was above the cavernous entrance of the old Hope Webbing Company in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where I was at the time visiting.

    Shining against the black sky the shooting star was...

    It blasted brilliant star-beam curves of lightening bolt...light...light...

 

    I like people who like cemeteries - and one of my favorite cemeteries is the North Burial Ground of Providence, Rhode Island.

    These fields of five centuries of graves stretch between two main Providence streets and a superhighway. It is the final resting place for Rhode Island's Native Americans, its earliest settlers, its war heroes and many other great people. Stephen Hopkins, one of the courageous signers of the Declaration of Independence, is buried here. (So are the Bumps!)

    Much of the cemetery is surrounded by a black painted iron fence. At the southeastern end of the grounds the graves are placed above the street viewer on a small landscaped slope. Standing on North Main Street and looking through the poles of the fence you can easily read the names and dates on the gravestones.

   On clear nights you see stars shining above the tall trees of the cemetery and sparkling like diamonds above our world.

    Dots of light that first beamed before ancient times shine above in the deep blueness of night.

   Gleaming death stones on Earth  eternal, star-suns in the sky.

   So many suns illuminating so many light years away each illuminating.

    Seeing these stars above the grave stones you know there are beings in other worlds sending to you the bell-like vibration of love.

    It's true these beings are many light years away but you these beings are real because you can still feel the love they're right now sending.

    Love travels fast, faster than the speed of light.

    Love knows all the star gates to your heart...

 

    I like people who like cemeteries.

    I like people who like East Point Cemetery in Mendes, New Wales.

    East Point Cemetery is a beautiful sprawling place and a joy to walk through. 

    It is of an area of ground at a dirt crossroads within the bounds of East Point of which I will now speak...

    I have long grown used to writing and reading all night. Many times, after staring at computer screens and sheets of paper and, ah, little bits of paper, I put on my Red Sox cap and take early morning walks along the forested part of Sunrise Boulevard, those pleasant and elegant lanes right outside this beautiful cemetery.

    One early summer morning I walked on the cemetery's grass sidewalk besides its wall of boulders. Like a phantom, a coyote rushed before me and jumped over the wall into the cemetery grounds proper. On a whim I climbed the wall and followed it.

    At a dirt crossroads in a forest that encloses the fields of gravestones it stopped.

   It turned and stared at me, its gentle and shining eyes beaming a fluid and electrical kind of energy.

    (Speak to me in the language of the soul, Anubis-like animal. It's a tongue that never tires me.)

    Silence, silence, crickets chirping. (Chirp. Chirp chirp. Chirp...chirp...)

    Soon the exquisite beast eastward dashed through the forest to the fields of the eternal dreamers.

    As though a force were pulling me I walked near the spot in the wood where the coyote stopped and stared.

    It was right before dawn and all the world was silent.

    "Forgive me!" I heard someone say.

    The difference between hallucinations and real voices I know - and this was a real voice. Still, it did not frighten me.

    All of the wood by the crossroads looked liquid, dreamy. Soulful shades guided by sparks of truth that blast through the realms of eternity. The pre-dawn light...The  wood itself seemed like it could have been the background of a painting by a Caravaggio or a Rembrandt...

    "Forgive me!"

    At my feet there was a medal on a chain...

 

     That medal of the Virgin Mary I kept by my bed.

    One night, a few days after I saw the coyote and heard the voice, I had a dream, a dream I have since had many times... 

    And I dream the dream and I dream the dream and I dream the dream...

    It is always the season of fall in my dream because I always dream I smell leaves burning.

    Back in the Day the leaves of fall were burned outside in great red fires like funeral pyres for the gods of summer.

    Back in the Day amid the brick New England mills and the antique streets of cobblestone, clouds of black smoke from burning leaves filtered into your lungs, filtered into your soul.

    Back in the Day, with heroes like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John and Robert Kennedy getting murdered, the strong smell of burning leaves in the fall was the death incense for these radiant ones...

    In my dream a little iron gate in a wall of boulders right before the crossroads where the coyote stopped is open.

    I walk through the gate and to the place in the forest near the crossroads where the coyote stopped and: Light!

    That light is coming from the soulful pale blue eyes of a man that's sitting against a tree by the crossroads. One of his arms is amputated and his other arm is cut off at the elbow.

    He wears a dirty blue striped uniform of a concentration victim of the Holocaust.

    He has no legs.

    There are blood spots on his uniform at his stumps, blood seeping from his crotch.

    Though he seems to be drugged, the light from his eyes goes out from him like the white of lightening bolts. Then, too, his entire body is filled with light: You can see the very bones in his  body radiating! 

    The light from his eyes connects between his and my eyes and the eyes of another physically able man with a crucifix around his neck who is apparently digging the amputee's grave.

    The man digging looks the same funny and fast way someone like Charlie Chaplin would look digging in a Silent Movie. The sight of him in my dream always makes me touch my own gold Egyptian ankh around my neck and smile. (Though I was born a Roman Catholic I now worship the gods and the goddesses of the living and the dead.)

    Standing besides the man on the ground while the other clownish one digs are two men. One is masked. But the other much shorter man - who is my late Uncle Frank - is not masked.

    The masked man, I know, is my late Uncle Bob, that is to say, the Goat.

    The light from the tortured man's eyes does not touch either. I also think in my dream that they don't even see the light...

    When the digger ends his task he rushes out of the hole.

    The three men drag the mangled man to the grave, and, with a heave, the body drops to the grave's bottom.

    As the digger then shovels dirt upon the amputee, with a gesture of love and kindness that I alone see and understand my masked Uncle Bob (The Goat) tosses a book into the grave.

    It is then an American Indian woman with long gray hair and traditional clothes flashes into the dream like a ghost and shows the book:

     "Thus Spake Zarathrusta," by Friedrick Nietzsche.

     "God is dead, Big Red," Uncle Bob whispers as he quotes from the book. "God is as dead as a gosh-hanged door nail..."

     Light from the amputee keeps coming from the grave like a kind of fog. I, the man who dug the grave and the amputee himself - I am certain at this point we all feel its heavenly peace and wish to share in its wonder...The light! The  light!...In peace! In peace!

     The whole scene changes after this and suddenly I am alone at these crossroads in the forest. Time itself seems to flash by me: Snow falls and ends, leaves grow and drop.

    At one point time stops again and the ground is covered by a plush carpet of snow.

     "Forgive me!" I hear this voice through the white natural cloak.

     And at this point in my dream I always answer:

     "Yes, I forgive you." 

     It's then I see a great light.

     To the west by the stone wall where the open iron pole gate is, I see a fierce burning light, like the light of a rising star.

    Upon the plush and pure carpet of snow I walk to this new light. Once on the sidewalk I am enveloped in a sea of graceful white light electricity.

    (Yes, I forgive you...)

     There is even a soft roar now that gains in intensity. It is the same roar...

    (Yes, I forgive you...)

     The doors of the sky are opened for me, the doors of the earth are opened for me, the door bolts of Geb and opened for me, the shutters of the sky-window are thrown open for me...

      These great circles of stars move towards me like two great wheels of celestial orbs - AND THEN I SEE THEM.

    They are two women, two beautiful African tribal women with skin as black as the deepest space and auras of perfect whiteness.

    They look like light years of black space with bright and sparkling stars on various points of their bodies - such sparkling white stars - with this film of human-ness around them.

    I barely see this but one angel is clad in a green garment, like the gentle green that one will see in a sky in which the Northern or Southern Lights flash.

    The other is clad in a robe of yellow - like the light of the sun.    

     The black angels smile at me: They love me. They approach me, they glide to me. They love me - they love you.

    Gently, the beautiful black angels of star and space reach out and embrace me and respectfully press their star bodies against me.

    The gentle roar continues. When it reaches its highest level, like sisters holding a brother the sparkling black angels of star and space embrace me. (Yes, I forgive you.) 

    Like sisters holding a brother, like sisters holding a brother...

    When I awaken from the dream I see things clearly, understand all...

 

    There are other dreams I can tell you about. 

    Dreams of how my Uncle Bob would speak the code of ancient gestures he taught to my Uncle Frank and how Uncle Frank - The Little Man - would tell this information to Eddie Robinson the cabdriver.

    Dreams of how my Uncle Bob fooled everyone - the cops, the doctors, the politicians - with his front of being a simple factory worker, but how he had more power and access to money than anyone. ("A real professional doesn't go for money," Uncle Bob told me once  without coming out about his criminal activities.)

    Dreams of how, when I was a boy, I foolishly taught my little brother Patrick secret and powerful gestures only   Peatar could have known, and how, after little Patrick showed these gestures to my Uncle Bob in his child-like way, my uncle murdered him, fully convinced he murdered Peatar.

    From that point my dreams were always filled with warnings on how I should never - NEVER - make the gestures until my uncle died.

    I even had dreams of how happy my Uncle Bob was after little Patrick's death, how for years after his murder he swaggered around - so calm and conceited - like someone who had just won the biggest lottery ever held. I had dreams of how he planned to murder me, too, and how happy he was after I had been raped and suffered so much - so he and the rest of the world thought - because of it. Because he thought I was so weakened mentally, you see, I wasn't a threat to him and he didn't have to kill me in case I  be Peatar.

     And, of course, (cough) there was soooooooooooo much more to his liking Big Red (COUGH) than what you may believe.

    Lately I've had dreams of climbing onto the Great Wheel of Time and reaching the Abyss that always evolves through time and then handing the shapeless God Adem a burning candle.

     BIG BRIGHT BOOM!

     THERE WILL BE STARS AND LIGHT!

     Light would forever end, my uncle  thought. You could see he really believed this from the little smile he had on his face when he was waked and in his coffin. He had killed my little brother who he believed was Peatar and that was the greatest thing anyone had ever done. 

     But you didn't kill Peatar and light and life will never end, Uncle Bob.

     Life will go on with all its ugliness and stupidity and madness and grace and holiness and beauty.

     You stupid fucking Irish asshole that don't know shit from fucking shit:

     I AM PEATAR.

("Right before his face and he doesn't see it...Right before his face and he doesn't see it...Right before his face and he doesn't see it...)

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

THE STAR PEOPLE

"Bright stars - black space...

 Light - darkness...

 One - zero...

Life is a binary coded dilemma..."

(Detailed synopsis of "The Star People" by Sinead O'Riordan. From the personal papers of Richard Lewis Cooke.)

THE LIFE

VOICE IX

(These words are spoken in English in lightly accented Italian by the same angelic voice Angelo Catalano heard in church, the voice that said in Italian that he must help children...)

    And sometimes in the spring when the sun is an electrical white and the leaves are at a virgin green, those blessed days of May, perhaps, when the scent of lilacs through the air sifts and the resurrecting blooms of spring are as jolting as blasts of thunder, I will walk by the stone wall of boulders and rock and stand on the grass sidewalk by the iron gate where, in my dream, the black angels of star and space embraced me.

    I will peer through the gate's iron poles and look inwards towards the forested crossroads where, in my dream, the tortured atheist with light from his eyes was buried alive.

    At my feet little yellow flowers stand strong and proud. Above the trees a hawk like a Divine Falcon floats. A butterfly will flash/flash before me flash/flash before me and go to the forest through the gate's iron poles.

    It will flash and disappear into the thick forest that stands before the white marble cemetery, that forested world of the crossroads that divides the land of the living from the land of the peaceful and beautiful dead...flash flutter....the beautiful dead, the beautiful dead...

    "Yes, I forgive you," I will say..."

THE END Pawtucket, R.I. September 25 2025...