"REAL TIME ASTROLOGY - 2020/2021" -By Cal Garrison - now available at AMAZON, "BARNES AND NOBLE", and good bookstores everywhere.
Real Time Astrology 2020/2021
By Cal Garrison | Aug 22, 2021
4.8 out of 5 stars 7
Paperback
$27.00
FREE Shipping by Amazon
Real Time Astrology 2020/2021
By Cal Garrison | Aug 22, 2021
4.8 out of 5 stars 7
Paperback
$27.00
FREE Shipping by Amazon
"The Lunar Gospel" - by cal garrison
WOO HOO!! Here we go!!! For those of you who would like to pre-order copies of Cal's new book, "THE LUNAR GOSPEL", it is hot off the press. The following links are being posted in advance of the April 1, 2018 date of publication, for your convenience:
Amazon – https://www.amazon.com/Lunar-Gospel-Complete-Guide-Astrological/dp/1578636264/
Barnes & Noble – https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-lunar-gospel-cal-garrison/1127152964?ean=9781578636266
IndieBound – https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781578636266
Amazon – https://www.amazon.com/Lunar-Gospel-Complete-Guide-Astrological/dp/1578636264/
Barnes & Noble – https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-lunar-gospel-cal-garrison/1127152964?ean=9781578636266
IndieBound – https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781578636266
click on the cover images to check them out...
"I loved reading Cal's book. The Weiser Field Guide Series was wise in choosing her to author their Ascension book. Cal easily explains humanity's progress until now, what Ascension is about, and what we may or may not expect in the future. It's an easy read laced with practicality, unique humor and lightness. I'll share it with many friends who are ready to receive the information. Worthy of five stars."
--Betty Eiler, gracious supporter.
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IndieBound
--Betty Eiler, gracious supporter.
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IndieBound
"If you are interested in a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of what is actually happening as we move through these challenging and seemingly chaotic times, read this book. I love Cal's attitude of exploration, curiosity, and humor as she shares information that will help you navigate troubled waters now and in the future. Her conclusions are right on: Although you can get a weather report, you can't change the ocean, so get your personal 'boat' clear, loving and vibrating at the highest level you can. We each chose to come to earth at this time, so let's offer our very best and enjoy the ride - of this wonderful book and the coming times, storms and all!"
--Chalise Brooke Medicine Eagle, author of Buffalo Woman Comes Singing and The Last Ghost Dance.
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IndieBound
--Chalise Brooke Medicine Eagle, author of Buffalo Woman Comes Singing and The Last Ghost Dance.
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IndieBound
"For parts of it, I was in tears, because the author writes from her heart, and from her experience in an honest and truthful way. In other sections, she had me cracking up laughing because she talked about things that are the same for all of us with a wry smile and a sense of humor. Between the lines it's clear that this lady has been through it all. You feel like you're sitting down at the kitchen table with a wise old witch who's too real to put on airs. There's no pontificating or rhapsodizing about the Goddess here - The Old Girls' Book of Dreams is a down to earth affair."
--Bonnie, gracious supporter.
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IndieBound
--Bonnie, gracious supporter.
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IndieBound
"I hope Cal is busy writing more spell books! I own all of her books and her witty,accurate,modern,comprehensive approach to spell-casting makes it enjoyable and easy for everyone. I really like her book lay-out; easy to follow,easy to understand and especially important is the concept that one can certainly use ingredients and supplies one finds on the go. Magic is focused intention and if the only athame you have on hand at an highway rest area is a plastic knife then so-be-it! It works!! I quite often use salt packets on the go to give my area added protection,I created her suggested mini traveling kit and it is great. We all spend many hours in our cars and why not create that sacred space there as well...especially there! I enjoy Ms. Garrisons books very much and I hope she will be forthcoming with many more soon!!"
--Alison Cuff, gracious supporter.
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IndieBound
--Alison Cuff, gracious supporter.
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IndieBound
"Move over, teen witch... and let Grandma show you how it's done! Billed as the first-ever book of spells for women of a certain age, The Old Girls' Book of Spells: The Real Meaning of Menopause, Sex, Car Keys, and Other Important Stuff About Magic is a fun and practical guide to witchcraft for mature women. Here, Cal Garrison offers the usual self-help spells for getting out of a traffic ticket or bringing more money into your life, as well as remedies for hot flashes, a recipe for herbal viagra and spells for keeping memory sharp."
--Publishers Weekly
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IndieBound
--Publishers Weekly
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound
"Slim Spurling's universe" - by cal garrison
"Slim Spurling's Universe" was transcribed directly from a series of taped conversations that took place between Slim Spurling and Cal Garrison between 2001 and 2004. Soon after Slim's death in 2007 the book was allowed to go out of print. In order to preserve the first written record of both the man and his research, we offer a free download of "Slims Spurling's Universe" for those of you who would like to know more about the 'Merlin of Geobiology', and about the history and origins of the Light-Life Tools.
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"THE BEGINNING OF A STORY THAT BEGAN IN ANOTHER TIME" -
By Cal Garrison
Looking down at the earth below me I see myself, but this is another time and I am not the same as I am now. My hair is long and matted. Dressed in roughly woven cloth, I appear to be about 25 years old. Whether by choice or by decree, something tells me I am an outcast in this place. The time is long ago. It is a cold part of the world, up north near the Arctic Circle.
Nothing distinguishes the landscape except for its pristine beauty. I am the only two-legged inhabitant. My house sits on a plain near an ultramarine-blue river. A mountain range runs parallel to it. There are glaciers on the peaks but its early spring and the water’s rushing hard from the snow- melt.
How I came to be here and how long this has been my home I cannot tell – but I have lived here long enough to feel as though I am no longer human. Close to the elements and imbued with those frequencies, I have become such a totally natural creature it seems as if I am no different than the stones that line the riverbed, or the flowers that grow near it.
To continue reading...
Nothing distinguishes the landscape except for its pristine beauty. I am the only two-legged inhabitant. My house sits on a plain near an ultramarine-blue river. A mountain range runs parallel to it. There are glaciers on the peaks but its early spring and the water’s rushing hard from the snow- melt.
How I came to be here and how long this has been my home I cannot tell – but I have lived here long enough to feel as though I am no longer human. Close to the elements and imbued with those frequencies, I have become such a totally natural creature it seems as if I am no different than the stones that line the riverbed, or the flowers that grow near it.
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articles:
"hotness" - by Cal Garrison
He was totally on fire, pointing at his computer screen and talking about Mamie Van Doren. For some reason it did not add up. You see; I was waiting in line at the coffee shop and this guy was one of those coffee shop dudes, the kind that you bump into so often nowadays.
Pushing 60, he was jobless, homeless, and sleeping in the back seat of a broken down Jaguar, behind the dumpster in the Safe-Way parking lot. The poor thing had absolutely nothing going on. My first impression was that Mamie Van Doren was way out of his league - but what did I know?
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Pushing 60, he was jobless, homeless, and sleeping in the back seat of a broken down Jaguar, behind the dumpster in the Safe-Way parking lot. The poor thing had absolutely nothing going on. My first impression was that Mamie Van Doren was way out of his league - but what did I know?
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"notes on mystery spots" - by Cal Garrison
Mystery spots are areas or points on the planet where gravity behaves differently. There is always a vortexial pattern in these locations that can be dowsed with a pendulum or a single dowsing rod. All you have to do is stand over the spot and hold a pendulum or a dowsing rod in your dominant hand, relax, and wait to see which way the instrument spins or rotates.
The vortex will have a left or a right spin. Areas of left spin are destructive to living organisms. Wildlife will avoid them and plant life, trees, vegetation etc. won’t thrive, or it will be twisted and strange.
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The vortex will have a left or a right spin. Areas of left spin are destructive to living organisms. Wildlife will avoid them and plant life, trees, vegetation etc. won’t thrive, or it will be twisted and strange.
To continue reading...
"love, marriage, and lilith" - by cal garrison
Copyright - Cal Garrison: 2018: ©
LOVE, MARRIAGE, and LILITH – by Cal Garrison
The seagull was right there in front of me. There was nothing left of my raspberry tart, but there she stood on her tiny little toothpick legs, waiting for something, wanting more of whatever I had to give her. The rest of the flock was floating near the shore. All of them were dappled with greyish brown feathers that made them look like they were wearing army camo. This may have been why the young boy, fed up with his mother’s tiresome nagging, was running up and down the water’s edge tossing rocks at this battalion of sea birds as if to prevent them from landing on the beach and staging some sort of late summer D-Day.
The gull that stood watch over me was a loner. Gun metal grey and pure white, with a cadmium yellow bill, the whites of her eyes surrounded a small black dot that trembled a little, whenever she shifted her focus. For about two hours, the tide got higher and the two of us became such good pals, it seemed as if she knew what I was thinking, and understood that it had been forty years since the last time I sat in this very same spot, looking out across the harbor and trying to make sense of my life and its eccentricities.
On this particular day, the sky was blue, the water was clear, and the sand on the beach was raked to perfection. A bunch of tall masted schooners were sailing out past the breakwater, close to the horizon. The scenery was so idyllic, no one would ever have guessed that this beach was once a hot spot for every ne’er-do-well in town, a place that nice folks avoided like the plague, and that nobody ever bothered to swim at because whenever the wind blew in from the wrong direction the water was loaded with raw sewage. Me and my kids, along with others who had once lived down at the Fort, may have been the only ones who remembered what Pavilion Beach was like in the old days, before they ripped down the Birdseye plant, got rid of the fisheries, and scrubbed things clean enough to replace all of the blood, and garbage, and guts with “The Beauport”, a gigantic, 5-Star hotel.
Watching my friend the sea gull, it hit me that these improvements were making it harder for her to survive. Here she was, panhandling leftover tarts from people like me, when back in the day, the garbage on Pavilion Beach was like an all-you-can-eat buffet for the sea gulls who populated the Gloucester docks. This got me to reflect upon all of the water that had passed under the bridge since the last time I sat here waiting for the tide to turn and ruminating on events that always seemed to leave me isolated and alone, wondering what to do next, and waiting for someone or something to come to the rescue.
Drifting back to that summer, 40 years ago, my memory landed on a two-week stretch during late June of 1977. The whole island was consumed with the schizophrenic energy that overtakes the town during Saint Peter’s Fiesta, the annual blessing of the fleet. Running back and forth between the Catholic rituals and the Bacchanalian revelry that go hand in hand with this celebration, one way or another, everyone in Gloucester was going off the deep end.
At that time, having only recently left, the serenity of an eight year sojourn in a spiritual commune, and soon after, the shelter of my first marriage, it was in the few months before the Fiesta that I landed out on the streets, working as a dishwasher at The Blackburn Tavern. Toward the middle of June, the boss at the Blackburn promoted me to bartender and I made my debut in that role serving drinks to the fishermen, and the throngs of revelers who came out of the woodwork once a year to participate in this orgy.
It was in this atmosphere that the lure of romance that so often mesmerizes women who are naïve and too young to know any better, had already led me down the garden path with a handsome fisherman who was nothing but trouble. His name was Joe and he came on to me like gang busters before I had a chance to find out who he was. Without any sense of caution or common sense, I wound up renting an apartment with this man, right around the corner from Pavilion Beach, in one of the tenements at the Fort. We were totally intoxicated with each other, and under the impression that it meant something before anyone bothered to mention that he was already married. Soon enough there were whispers about Joe Souza and his ‘new girlfriend’, and how the two of us were committing adultery out in the open, right under everyone’s nose.
In the months before the Fiesta rituals, his wife, who a year or so before, had taken their only son and moved back to Louisville, got wind of our transgressions and rolled into town just in time for the Fiesta, hell bent on repossessing her husband and putting an end to our affair. Totally in the dark about them and their story, nothing could have prepared me for the soap opera that unraveled over the next two weeks.
She went by the name of Dina and had once been his history teacher. The two of them occupied the center of a scandal that gave everyone in town something to gossip about right up until they decided to marry. This woman was rumored to be an heiress - to the Coca-Cola Empire believe it or not. The daughter of a wealthy doctor from Kentucky, even though Dina had money to burn, she did her best to keep it real by teaching history at the local high school.
Outwardly totally respectable in every way, she was educated, well heeled, and an expert at keeping up appearances. Underneath the hoity-toity veneer she had a monumental capacity for booze and hard drugs. Her glass was always full, the ice cubes were always tinkling, and as far as drugs were concerned, her father’s occupation made them easy to come by. This woman could drink anyone under the table. Whenever she was out on the town, and the combination of liquor and pills was just right, Dina would hop on top of the bar and do the shimmy for whoever happened to be watching. How she kept her job at the local high school is a mystery, but she and Joe wound up in bed together during his senior year at Gloucester High.
Joe was one of those people who graduated from the public school system without ever learning to read past a third grade level. Raised by a couple of blue collar alcoholics, his father worked in a local factory, and his mother was a full time waitress at a diner in Essex. Back in those days, the elementary school kids whose mother’s didn’t pack them a lunch, were allowed to go home for an hour and have their moms fix it for them there. After her nightly fifth of Fleishmann’s his mom was too hung over to deal with her son and his lunch, so every day at noon Joe would head up to the house at the top of Millet Street, fix himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and pour himself a beer.
Addicted to booze before he turned seven, by the time he got to high school he was a handsome, street smart devil who was strung out on everything under the sun. From that perspective, he and his history teacher were two peas in a pod. Cemented in addictions that were fueled by Dina’s bottomless bank book, their illicit love affair ignited a blaze of alcohol and drug induced fireworks that kicked off in the fast lane, and went into a nosedive in the aftermath of a shotgun wedding, by or before the time their son, who was the only good thing to come out of that marriage, was two-years old.
A stranger in a strange land, up to my eyeballs in people and things that I knew nothing about, little did I know that Dina was getting ready to roll into town with her little boy. Unbeknownst to me, she and Joe had prearranged a rendezvous, which included a reunion with his extended family, all of whom were hoping and praying that Dina and he would reunite. It was on June 20th that she flew from Louisville to Boston, took a limo from the airport, and had the cabbie drive her straight up to Joe’s parent’s house.
The plan was that Dina and Joe would bunk in at Gram and Grampy’s house with their son, and that all of the Souza’s would spend the upcoming Fiesta rituals partying together, to support the patching up of Dina and Joe’s marriage. Joe was informed that he would not be allowed to see his son if he was seen with me, or seen going anywhere near the apartment at the Fort. Nobody bothered to tell me about this – all I knew was that Joe disappeared on the 20th of June and didn’t come home for the next two weeks.
What Gram and Grampy, may or may not have been aware of, is that Dina had a cache of over five-thousand dollars’ worth of prescription and non-prescription drugs packed in one of her suitcases. Morphine Sulfate, Percodan, Valium, Quaaludes, Dilaudid, Black Beauties, Reds, Coke, you name it; everything but the kitchen sink - and the whole stash was ‘For Sale’. Part of her little pharmacy was cordoned off for private use, part of it was to be exchanged for Heroin once she got to town, and whatever was left was meant to be sold to her cohorts, and to various locals who were looking get drugged out of their minds during the Fiesta blowout.
With a few days to go before the annual bacchanal officially took off, Dina played the role of homecoming queen, strapped on her bikini, and treated all of her old friends to her version of ‘Beach Blanket Bingo’ at Brace’s Cove. This wing-ding was a dream come true for anyone who had a yen for booze and drugs. For the next three days, the north side of the Cove was swarming with high freaks, Joe’s sisters and their kids, and all of Joe and Dina’s cross-addicted pals.
Brace’s Cove was one of the Gloucester beaches that I took my kids to most of the time. We would hitch hike over there on the days when I wasn’t working. Not being in on Dina and Joe’s plans, we arrived at the cove around eleven one morning and after walking through the reeds, were totally surprised by a crowd of addicts who were soaking up the sun, sucking down the booze, and rambling around the barbecue pit stoned out of their minds. Dina was holding court in the center of everything, playing ‘hostess with the most-est’, and Joe was wandering around with his little boy, trying to be a father. Fortunately nobody saw us. Doubling back we wound our way down to the other end of the beach, just far enough away to be invisible, and spent the day there.
Setting up our umbrella over by Brace’s Rock, we had that side of the Cove all to ourselves, until my friend Hartley showed up. She plopped down next to us with only one thing to say: “What are you doing here? How can you stand this? Do you see what’s going on over there? Who is that woman? Has Joe lost his mind?”
I filled her in on the soap opera, explained that it was my day off, that I had hitched a ride, not knowing what I would find, and was kind of stuck at the beach until someone showed up to give us a lift back to the Fort. She said, “Let’s hang out here for a bit and you guys can ride home with me when I head back downtown”.
Back in those days I took care of my daughters during the day and tended bar at night. Their Dad took them on the weekends and this month, he would be taking them down to Wellfleet to spend a couple of weeks at his parent’s summer home. They were packed up and ready to leave the next day. This gave me a chance to work extra shifts at the Blackburn and take advantage of the big bucks that every bartender in Gloucester looks forward to during the Fiesta.
I started working doubles and was on the schedule day and night. This seemed like a good idea until the following Thursday when the festivities officially kicked off. We always showed up at ten in the morning to stock the bar, load the kegs, and get things ready for the day. This was especially important at Fiesta time because the doors opened at Noon and the crowds of revelers were lined up outside ready and waiting to get bombed. From that moment on, it would be non-stop and keep going at that pace until closing time.
With more than a few things on my mind, part of me was thanking God that I would have no time to think about anything but the next customer and the next drink for the next 14 hours. The bar was hopping, the tips were rolling in, and Bob Seger was singing “Rock and Roll Never Forgets” in the back ground. Everything was going fine until around 2 PM when I looked up and saw Joe and Dina saunter through the swinging doors, with a flock of their friends trailing close behind. Half-baked and dressed to the nines in their ‘Wasting away in Margarita Ville’ finery, the hostess sat them down at the big table right in front of the bar, and ordered up 10 Bloody Mary’s and 2 Gin and Tonics. Evidently Dina had made a reservation for twelve and was treating her buddies to a late lunch.
Joe’s eyeballs were pinned and he was too drugged up to care about anything but getting higher. Dina’s ice cubes were tinkling and she was looking triumphant, sitting in the center of everything, entertaining everyone with free drinks, and a high old time, with whatever she had in her purse. For about two hours everyone ate and drank to their heart’s content. Every now and then they would take turns going to the rest room to snort a little coke, or shoot up. When the meal was over the ones who could still walk and talk decided to seat themselves at the bar for the rest of the afternoon.
Joe and Dina perched themselves down at the end; Bobby, Linda, John, Janie, Chuckie, Billy, and Trish, filled up the bar stools that faced the street. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember how I managed to get through this ordeal, but the fact that all of them were totally wasted made it easier. Impaled behind the bar, like a butterfly on the head of a pin, I mixed their drinks and emptied their ash trays, until the first half of my shift ended at five o’clock.
With three hours to regroup, I walked back to the Fort, took a hot shower, and cried for an hour before I pulled myself together and suited up for the night shift. Don’t ask me how I did it. Don’t ask me how they did it, because all of them were still boozing it up and going strong when I got back for round two. One day of this would have been enough, but the same spectacle replayed for the next three days right up until somewhere between 11 and 12 pm on Saturday night.
This is where the McCrae’s came in. There were four of them: Roy, Dirk, Craig, and Sean. Right after I left my husband, Roy’s girlfriend, Karen, had taken me in - out of kindness, perhaps, but these men were undomesticated, and notoriously unfaithful. I had already been seen with Dirk and Craig. Running on the theory that it’s best to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, Karen’s hospitality was a strategic maneuver that was designed to keep an eye on me, and to keep me away from Roy. She had a house over on Elm Street and I rented a room from her right up until Joe Souza showed up.
More like trees than men, the McCrae’s spent most of their time on the north side of the island. They hauled timber out of the woods up behind Bennet Street. Sometimes they fished for lobster, or roofed and did carpentry on the side. There was nothing ordinary about the McCrae boys. Mythical creatures, the four of them could mostly be found on or near the Annisquam River, or on the outskirts of Dog town, over near Goose Cove. Back in those days they did their share of booze and drugs. When the Fiesta rolled around they came out of the woods to drink and get high with the rest of the revelers.
That Saturday night Roy showed up at the Blackburn right after the Seine Boat races. I served him a couple of beers and watched him disappear into the crowd. He would resurface for a refill at intervals. When Dina and Joe and their entourage arrived, I was handing Roy a Heineken and he was handing me a tip. A little worse for wear, but still standing and ready to go, as they seated themselves at the big table for the third night in a row, Roy stood at the end of the bar and watched what was going on without reacting and without saying a word. He sucked down his beer, hailed me to bring him another one, and left a ten dollar bill on the bar before vanishing into the crowd.
By eleven o’clock Joe, Dina, and the few friends that were left were sitting at the bar, totally inebriated and looking pretty drugged up. If this made it easier for me, the fact that I was waiting on a throng of other customers kept me from having to remain in their presence for more than a minute or two. Joe was nodding out. Dina was in her drunk groove, circulating among her friends, weaving around from barstool to bar stool, engaging in the kind of conversation that people have when they are totally hammered and on the verge of blacking out. Every now and then she would look over to see what kind of an impact this was having on me, but by that time I was inured to whatever she was trying to accomplish and too busy to care.
It was right around then that Roy reappeared. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, standing down at the far end of the bar. One minute he was there, and the next minute what I thought was the dishwasher nudging me to get by with a fresh rack of clean glassware, turned out to be Roy towering over me with one hand on my shoulder and the other hand on the bar. Thinking he was too bombed to know what he was doing, I looked up at him and said, “Come on Roy, you’ve got to get out of here”. Holding my hand and looking me straight in the eye, he said, “No Cal, you’re the one who needs to get out of here”. At which point everything went into slow motion as he led me out from behind the bar and without giving me time to think, picked me up and carried me right past Dina and Joe, through the crowd of onlookers, over the threshold, out the front door, and into the street. From there he carried me down the hill, past the Merry-Go-Round, and the Ferris wheel, and the carnival rides, beyond the lights and the noise to Pavilion Beach.
The tide was high, the Moon was half full, and the two of us sat there for a long time without saying a word. He put his arm around me and held me close in a way that made me feel comforted and took me totally by surprise. For about an hour this was all there was to it until he said, “Come on; let me walk you home”.
Yes, he stayed the night. He took off my clothes, put me to bed, and laid down next to me till we both fell asleep. I woke up the next morning, fixed him a cup of coffee, and he hung around the kitchen while I got ready to go to work. We walked back downtown, I dropped him off at his truck, and kissed him goodbye. Because people are prone to making assumptions about what goes on when their boyfriend stays out all night, Karen hasn’t spoken to me or had anything to do with me since 1977.
As far as what happened when I showed up to stock the bar on the last day of Fiesta? I was sure I was going to get fired, but my boss didn’t say ‘Boo’ and neither did the bouncer, the other bartenders, or any of the waitresses. No questions were asked. All of them were looking on when Roy McCrae came to the rescue, and what my boss told me a few years down the road is that watching Roy carry me out of the bar that night was one of the few things in his life that made him want to stand up and cheer.
Joe and Dina didn’t show up for brunch that day. In the aftermath of the Fiesta, and the upcoming July 4th parades and celebrations, they kept up with the parties and the booze and the dope until it came time for Dina to fly back to Louisville and time for Joe to come down long enough to go fishing. My saga with him kept going for the next eight years, until he died of an overdose on June 20th, 1985.
So 40 years later, the story of what happened in 1977 is what was on my mind as I sat at Pavilion Beach sharing my raspberry tart with my friend the seagull. The sky was blue, the tide was rising, the beach was perfectly combed, and the harbor looked like a Fitz-Hugh Lane painting, with a flock of tall-masted schooners floating out near the break water. I was soaking up the sun, thinking about how to tell this story, when my phone rang. It was Roy McCrae. He had heard that I was back in town and he wanted to see me. I said hello, and he said, “Hey let’s go swimming!” to which I replied, “I am already at the beach, there’s nobody here but me and this little seagull: come on down”.
Copyright - Cal Garrison: 2019: ©
LOVE, MARRIAGE, and LILITH – by Cal Garrison
The seagull was right there in front of me. There was nothing left of my raspberry tart, but there she stood on her tiny little toothpick legs, waiting for something, wanting more of whatever I had to give her. The rest of the flock was floating near the shore. All of them were dappled with greyish brown feathers that made them look like they were wearing army camo. This may have been why the young boy, fed up with his mother’s tiresome nagging, was running up and down the water’s edge tossing rocks at this battalion of sea birds as if to prevent them from landing on the beach and staging some sort of late summer D-Day.
The gull that stood watch over me was a loner. Gun metal grey and pure white, with a cadmium yellow bill, the whites of her eyes surrounded a small black dot that trembled a little, whenever she shifted her focus. For about two hours, the tide got higher and the two of us became such good pals, it seemed as if she knew what I was thinking, and understood that it had been forty years since the last time I sat in this very same spot, looking out across the harbor and trying to make sense of my life and its eccentricities.
On this particular day, the sky was blue, the water was clear, and the sand on the beach was raked to perfection. A bunch of tall masted schooners were sailing out past the breakwater, close to the horizon. The scenery was so idyllic, no one would ever have guessed that this beach was once a hot spot for every ne’er-do-well in town, a place that nice folks avoided like the plague, and that nobody ever bothered to swim at because whenever the wind blew in from the wrong direction the water was loaded with raw sewage. Me and my kids, along with others who had once lived down at the Fort, may have been the only ones who remembered what Pavilion Beach was like in the old days, before they ripped down the Birdseye plant, got rid of the fisheries, and scrubbed things clean enough to replace all of the blood, and garbage, and guts with “The Beauport”, a gigantic, 5-Star hotel.
Watching my friend the sea gull, it hit me that these improvements were making it harder for her to survive. Here she was, panhandling leftover tarts from people like me, when back in the day, the garbage on Pavilion Beach was like an all-you-can-eat buffet for the sea gulls who populated the Gloucester docks. This got me to reflect upon all of the water that had passed under the bridge since the last time I sat here waiting for the tide to turn and ruminating on events that always seemed to leave me isolated and alone, wondering what to do next, and waiting for someone or something to come to the rescue.
Drifting back to that summer, 40 years ago, my memory landed on a two-week stretch during late June of 1977. The whole island was consumed with the schizophrenic energy that overtakes the town during Saint Peter’s Fiesta, the annual blessing of the fleet. Running back and forth between the Catholic rituals and the Bacchanalian revelry that go hand in hand with this celebration, one way or another, everyone in Gloucester was going off the deep end.
At that time, having only recently left, the serenity of an eight year sojourn in a spiritual commune, and soon after, the shelter of my first marriage, it was in the few months before the Fiesta that I landed out on the streets, working as a dishwasher at The Blackburn Tavern. Toward the middle of June, the boss at the Blackburn promoted me to bartender and I made my debut in that role serving drinks to the fishermen, and the throngs of revelers who came out of the woodwork once a year to participate in this orgy.
It was in this atmosphere that the lure of romance that so often mesmerizes women who are naïve and too young to know any better, had already led me down the garden path with a handsome fisherman who was nothing but trouble. His name was Joe and he came on to me like gang busters before I had a chance to find out who he was. Without any sense of caution or common sense, I wound up renting an apartment with this man, right around the corner from Pavilion Beach, in one of the tenements at the Fort. We were totally intoxicated with each other, and under the impression that it meant something before anyone bothered to mention that he was already married. Soon enough there were whispers about Joe Souza and his ‘new girlfriend’, and how the two of us were committing adultery out in the open, right under everyone’s nose.
In the months before the Fiesta rituals, his wife, who a year or so before, had taken their only son and moved back to Louisville, got wind of our transgressions and rolled into town just in time for the Fiesta, hell bent on repossessing her husband and putting an end to our affair. Totally in the dark about them and their story, nothing could have prepared me for the soap opera that unraveled over the next two weeks.
She went by the name of Dina and had once been his history teacher. The two of them occupied the center of a scandal that gave everyone in town something to gossip about right up until they decided to marry. This woman was rumored to be an heiress - to the Coca-Cola Empire believe it or not. The daughter of a wealthy doctor from Kentucky, even though Dina had money to burn, she did her best to keep it real by teaching history at the local high school.
Outwardly totally respectable in every way, she was educated, well heeled, and an expert at keeping up appearances. Underneath the hoity-toity veneer she had a monumental capacity for booze and hard drugs. Her glass was always full, the ice cubes were always tinkling, and as far as drugs were concerned, her father’s occupation made them easy to come by. This woman could drink anyone under the table. Whenever she was out on the town, and the combination of liquor and pills was just right, Dina would hop on top of the bar and do the shimmy for whoever happened to be watching. How she kept her job at the local high school is a mystery, but she and Joe wound up in bed together during his senior year at Gloucester High.
Joe was one of those people who graduated from the public school system without ever learning to read past a third grade level. Raised by a couple of blue collar alcoholics, his father worked in a local factory, and his mother was a full time waitress at a diner in Essex. Back in those days, the elementary school kids whose mother’s didn’t pack them a lunch, were allowed to go home for an hour and have their moms fix it for them there. After her nightly fifth of Fleishmann’s his mom was too hung over to deal with her son and his lunch, so every day at noon Joe would head up to the house at the top of Millet Street, fix himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and pour himself a beer.
Addicted to booze before he turned seven, by the time he got to high school he was a handsome, street smart devil who was strung out on everything under the sun. From that perspective, he and his history teacher were two peas in a pod. Cemented in addictions that were fueled by Dina’s bottomless bank book, their illicit love affair ignited a blaze of alcohol and drug induced fireworks that kicked off in the fast lane, and went into a nosedive in the aftermath of a shotgun wedding, by or before the time their son, who was the only good thing to come out of that marriage, was two-years old.
A stranger in a strange land, up to my eyeballs in people and things that I knew nothing about, little did I know that Dina was getting ready to roll into town with her little boy. Unbeknownst to me, she and Joe had prearranged a rendezvous, which included a reunion with his extended family, all of whom were hoping and praying that Dina and he would reunite. It was on June 20th that she flew from Louisville to Boston, took a limo from the airport, and had the cabbie drive her straight up to Joe’s parent’s house.
The plan was that Dina and Joe would bunk in at Gram and Grampy’s house with their son, and that all of the Souza’s would spend the upcoming Fiesta rituals partying together, to support the patching up of Dina and Joe’s marriage. Joe was informed that he would not be allowed to see his son if he was seen with me, or seen going anywhere near the apartment at the Fort. Nobody bothered to tell me about this – all I knew was that Joe disappeared on the 20th of June and didn’t come home for the next two weeks.
What Gram and Grampy, may or may not have been aware of, is that Dina had a cache of over five-thousand dollars’ worth of prescription and non-prescription drugs packed in one of her suitcases. Morphine Sulfate, Percodan, Valium, Quaaludes, Dilaudid, Black Beauties, Reds, Coke, you name it; everything but the kitchen sink - and the whole stash was ‘For Sale’. Part of her little pharmacy was cordoned off for private use, part of it was to be exchanged for Heroin once she got to town, and whatever was left was meant to be sold to her cohorts, and to various locals who were looking get drugged out of their minds during the Fiesta blowout.
With a few days to go before the annual bacchanal officially took off, Dina played the role of homecoming queen, strapped on her bikini, and treated all of her old friends to her version of ‘Beach Blanket Bingo’ at Brace’s Cove. This wing-ding was a dream come true for anyone who had a yen for booze and drugs. For the next three days, the north side of the Cove was swarming with high freaks, Joe’s sisters and their kids, and all of Joe and Dina’s cross-addicted pals.
Brace’s Cove was one of the Gloucester beaches that I took my kids to most of the time. We would hitch hike over there on the days when I wasn’t working. Not being in on Dina and Joe’s plans, we arrived at the cove around eleven one morning and after walking through the reeds, were totally surprised by a crowd of addicts who were soaking up the sun, sucking down the booze, and rambling around the barbecue pit stoned out of their minds. Dina was holding court in the center of everything, playing ‘hostess with the most-est’, and Joe was wandering around with his little boy, trying to be a father. Fortunately nobody saw us. Doubling back we wound our way down to the other end of the beach, just far enough away to be invisible, and spent the day there.
Setting up our umbrella over by Brace’s Rock, we had that side of the Cove all to ourselves, until my friend Hartley showed up. She plopped down next to us with only one thing to say: “What are you doing here? How can you stand this? Do you see what’s going on over there? Who is that woman? Has Joe lost his mind?”
I filled her in on the soap opera, explained that it was my day off, that I had hitched a ride, not knowing what I would find, and was kind of stuck at the beach until someone showed up to give us a lift back to the Fort. She said, “Let’s hang out here for a bit and you guys can ride home with me when I head back downtown”.
Back in those days I took care of my daughters during the day and tended bar at night. Their Dad took them on the weekends and this month, he would be taking them down to Wellfleet to spend a couple of weeks at his parent’s summer home. They were packed up and ready to leave the next day. This gave me a chance to work extra shifts at the Blackburn and take advantage of the big bucks that every bartender in Gloucester looks forward to during the Fiesta.
I started working doubles and was on the schedule day and night. This seemed like a good idea until the following Thursday when the festivities officially kicked off. We always showed up at ten in the morning to stock the bar, load the kegs, and get things ready for the day. This was especially important at Fiesta time because the doors opened at Noon and the crowds of revelers were lined up outside ready and waiting to get bombed. From that moment on, it would be non-stop and keep going at that pace until closing time.
With more than a few things on my mind, part of me was thanking God that I would have no time to think about anything but the next customer and the next drink for the next 14 hours. The bar was hopping, the tips were rolling in, and Bob Seger was singing “Rock and Roll Never Forgets” in the back ground. Everything was going fine until around 2 PM when I looked up and saw Joe and Dina saunter through the swinging doors, with a flock of their friends trailing close behind. Half-baked and dressed to the nines in their ‘Wasting away in Margarita Ville’ finery, the hostess sat them down at the big table right in front of the bar, and ordered up 10 Bloody Mary’s and 2 Gin and Tonics. Evidently Dina had made a reservation for twelve and was treating her buddies to a late lunch.
Joe’s eyeballs were pinned and he was too drugged up to care about anything but getting higher. Dina’s ice cubes were tinkling and she was looking triumphant, sitting in the center of everything, entertaining everyone with free drinks, and a high old time, with whatever she had in her purse. For about two hours everyone ate and drank to their heart’s content. Every now and then they would take turns going to the rest room to snort a little coke, or shoot up. When the meal was over the ones who could still walk and talk decided to seat themselves at the bar for the rest of the afternoon.
Joe and Dina perched themselves down at the end; Bobby, Linda, John, Janie, Chuckie, Billy, and Trish, filled up the bar stools that faced the street. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember how I managed to get through this ordeal, but the fact that all of them were totally wasted made it easier. Impaled behind the bar, like a butterfly on the head of a pin, I mixed their drinks and emptied their ash trays, until the first half of my shift ended at five o’clock.
With three hours to regroup, I walked back to the Fort, took a hot shower, and cried for an hour before I pulled myself together and suited up for the night shift. Don’t ask me how I did it. Don’t ask me how they did it, because all of them were still boozing it up and going strong when I got back for round two. One day of this would have been enough, but the same spectacle replayed for the next three days right up until somewhere between 11 and 12 pm on Saturday night.
This is where the McCrae’s came in. There were four of them: Roy, Dirk, Craig, and Sean. Right after I left my husband, Roy’s girlfriend, Karen, had taken me in - out of kindness, perhaps, but these men were undomesticated, and notoriously unfaithful. I had already been seen with Dirk and Craig. Running on the theory that it’s best to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, Karen’s hospitality was a strategic maneuver that was designed to keep an eye on me, and to keep me away from Roy. She had a house over on Elm Street and I rented a room from her right up until Joe Souza showed up.
More like trees than men, the McCrae’s spent most of their time on the north side of the island. They hauled timber out of the woods up behind Bennet Street. Sometimes they fished for lobster, or roofed and did carpentry on the side. There was nothing ordinary about the McCrae boys. Mythical creatures, the four of them could mostly be found on or near the Annisquam River, or on the outskirts of Dog town, over near Goose Cove. Back in those days they did their share of booze and drugs. When the Fiesta rolled around they came out of the woods to drink and get high with the rest of the revelers.
That Saturday night Roy showed up at the Blackburn right after the Seine Boat races. I served him a couple of beers and watched him disappear into the crowd. He would resurface for a refill at intervals. When Dina and Joe and their entourage arrived, I was handing Roy a Heineken and he was handing me a tip. A little worse for wear, but still standing and ready to go, as they seated themselves at the big table for the third night in a row, Roy stood at the end of the bar and watched what was going on without reacting and without saying a word. He sucked down his beer, hailed me to bring him another one, and left a ten dollar bill on the bar before vanishing into the crowd.
By eleven o’clock Joe, Dina, and the few friends that were left were sitting at the bar, totally inebriated and looking pretty drugged up. If this made it easier for me, the fact that I was waiting on a throng of other customers kept me from having to remain in their presence for more than a minute or two. Joe was nodding out. Dina was in her drunk groove, circulating among her friends, weaving around from barstool to bar stool, engaging in the kind of conversation that people have when they are totally hammered and on the verge of blacking out. Every now and then she would look over to see what kind of an impact this was having on me, but by that time I was inured to whatever she was trying to accomplish and too busy to care.
It was right around then that Roy reappeared. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, standing down at the far end of the bar. One minute he was there, and the next minute what I thought was the dishwasher nudging me to get by with a fresh rack of clean glassware, turned out to be Roy towering over me with one hand on my shoulder and the other hand on the bar. Thinking he was too bombed to know what he was doing, I looked up at him and said, “Come on Roy, you’ve got to get out of here”. Holding my hand and looking me straight in the eye, he said, “No Cal, you’re the one who needs to get out of here”. At which point everything went into slow motion as he led me out from behind the bar and without giving me time to think, picked me up and carried me right past Dina and Joe, through the crowd of onlookers, over the threshold, out the front door, and into the street. From there he carried me down the hill, past the Merry-Go-Round, and the Ferris wheel, and the carnival rides, beyond the lights and the noise to Pavilion Beach.
The tide was high, the Moon was half full, and the two of us sat there for a long time without saying a word. He put his arm around me and held me close in a way that made me feel comforted and took me totally by surprise. For about an hour this was all there was to it until he said, “Come on; let me walk you home”.
Yes, he stayed the night. He took off my clothes, put me to bed, and laid down next to me till we both fell asleep. I woke up the next morning, fixed him a cup of coffee, and he hung around the kitchen while I got ready to go to work. We walked back downtown, I dropped him off at his truck, and kissed him goodbye. Because people are prone to making assumptions about what goes on when their boyfriend stays out all night, Karen hasn’t spoken to me or had anything to do with me since 1977.
As far as what happened when I showed up to stock the bar on the last day of Fiesta? I was sure I was going to get fired, but my boss didn’t say ‘Boo’ and neither did the bouncer, the other bartenders, or any of the waitresses. No questions were asked. All of them were looking on when Roy McCrae came to the rescue, and what my boss told me a few years down the road is that watching Roy carry me out of the bar that night was one of the few things in his life that made him want to stand up and cheer.
Joe and Dina didn’t show up for brunch that day. In the aftermath of the Fiesta, and the upcoming July 4th parades and celebrations, they kept up with the parties and the booze and the dope until it came time for Dina to fly back to Louisville and time for Joe to come down long enough to go fishing. My saga with him kept going for the next eight years, until he died of an overdose on June 20th, 1985.
So 40 years later, the story of what happened in 1977 is what was on my mind as I sat at Pavilion Beach sharing my raspberry tart with my friend the seagull. The sky was blue, the tide was rising, the beach was perfectly combed, and the harbor looked like a Fitz-Hugh Lane painting, with a flock of tall-masted schooners floating out near the break water. I was soaking up the sun, thinking about how to tell this story, when my phone rang. It was Roy McCrae. He had heard that I was back in town and he wanted to see me. I said hello, and he said, “Hey let’s go swimming!” to which I replied, “I am already at the beach, there’s nobody here but me and this little seagull: come on down”.
Copyright - Cal Garrison: 2019: ©
"my bad reputation" - by cal garrison
MY BAD REPUTATION – By Cal Garrison
We were living down at the Fort back then; in the ground floor apartment at number 28. The Fort sits right on top of the wharves that line the west side of Gloucester Harbor. If you have seen the movie “The Perfect Storm”, you can spot number 28 in the line of tenements that fill the background in the opening scene.
Pauli and Suzie lived upstairs, along with Rosetta, and Pauli Jr, and Tori, and Stevie, the youngest of their nine children. Angela, and Harvey, had the big apartment on the third floor. That part of the house was split in two, and Harvey and Angela shared it with Linda Parker, the seaweed lady. Linda was the lover and muse of the poet Charles Olson, who up until his death in 1970 had shared that space and written his best poetry in the attic at 28 Fort Square.
It was the weekend so the kids were at Franks. Joe was in from fishing. I was all done bartending for the night. Joe and I had walked home from the Blackburn and were already in bed. It had to be close to 3 AM when somebody came banging on the door.
There was no way to pretend we weren’t there because the bed was set up on the kitchen floor, right under the front window that winter. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because we never locked the door, and the mid night rambler happened to be Minkie, who, after rapping on the window to let us know it was him, just barged right in.
I had made Minkie’s acquaintance long before I fell in love with Joe Souza. Back in those days I had to ride my ten-speed back and forth from downtown Gloucester to Lanesville at least once a day. My ex-husband was a carpenter who worked during the week. He had a big house on the other side of the Cape. My kids were only 2 ½ and 5. Right after we split up, instead of uprooting them and making it hard for Frank to work, it made more sense for me to ride out there to take care of the girls at his place, than it did to keep an eye on them down at the Fort.
I put a good 20 miles a day on that bike. I’d get up at sunrise and be in Lanesville by the time Frank had to leave for work. When he came home at five I’d head back downtown to wash dishes at the Blackburn. It was an unusual arrangement that seemed to make sense at the time. I am pretty sure most of the people who watched me fly back and forth thought I was training for a marathon, but nobody knew, or bothered to ask me, what I was up to during that time – except for one morning when Minkie’s path crossed mine.
It was about 6 AM, and I had to stop the bike to wait for a garbage truck to negotiate a turn with a tractor trailer that was backing into the Bird’s Eye plant. In the middle of this, a tan Roadrunner came out of the Ocean Crest parking lot and pulled up alongside me. I was minding my own business when the window rolled down and the guy in the passenger seat stuck his head out to ask me why I was always riding around town at the crack of dawn. I told him that I had to get to Lanesville every day to take care of my kids.
For some reason the driver of the car leaned across the front seat to poke his head out and ask the same question. Answering him I noticed that both men were totally high on something, but at the time I had no idea who they were, or what they were on. As the traffic pattern opened up, I got ready to keep going, but before I took off, the driver leaned over one last time, and in a sly kind of way asked me if he could sniff my bicycle seat. Inspired by this, the guy in the passenger seat perked right up and offered me ten bucks to do the same thing. This was my first introduction to the driver, a guy by the name of Tommy Trupiano, and to his side-kick, Michael, otherwise known as ‘Minkie’ Randazza.
Having only recently left the safety of my husband’s lily-white wing on the other side of town, with no experience dealing with hard core fishermen and their ways, this off-color request was spoken in a language that was totally foreign to me. What would have been offensive to any other woman flew right over my head without inspiring any sense of indignation or insult. Taking off on my bike, I beat the Roadrunner out of the Fort and headed up Washington Street. By the time I hit the rotary I figured out that from their perspective, what to someone else might have seemed lewd and vulgar, was actually a compliment.
Within a month the boss at the Blackburn promoted me from dishwasher to bartender. The next time I bumped into Minkie, it was a Saturday night and I was tending bar. A little past sundown, Minkie had already parked himself on a stool in the corner near the front entrance. Dressed in a trench coat and wearing a Stetson hat that was way too small for his head, his hair was slicked back and he was all duded up, drinking a White Russian.
As I walked the length of the bar to see if he needed a refill, Minkie adjusted his focus and appeared to be zeroing in on the fact that he had seen me before. Once I got within earshot, in a gravelly voice, that sounded just like “The Godfather”, he handed me his empty glass and said, “Marone; the bicycle girl. Look at you in that dress!”
“Happy Hour” was winding up, and the Saturday night mob had yet to arrive. With the exception of a few dart players down at the far end of the bar, Minkie was the only customer who needed my attention. When you’re tending bar there are two choices; you can mix your drinks and ignore people, or you can strike up a conversation. I learned early on that the time passes more quickly when you converse with your customers so I decided to chat Minkie up and find out what his story was.
I broke the ice by asking him about his ‘get-up’: “What’s with the ‘Top Cat’ outfit? The last time I saw you, you were in your fish clothes; you’re all decked out like Dick Tracy tonight. What’s going on?” He told me he had a date. He was waiting for his girlfriend; that they were going to have a few cocktails and go back to her place. Pulling his mustache and stroking his freshly shaved chin he looked at me and smiled.
In that moment I noticed that Minkie was actually what you would call handsome. As time went on and I got to know him better, I found out that he was also a Scorpio and that the ‘Dick Tracy’ costume, the White Russians, and the seat in the corner, near the entrance were a regular part of his weekend itinerary. He never mingled with the white boys who, between lines of coke that were surreptitiously snorted elsewhere on the premises, drank their Bass Ale, and their Guinness Stout, and their Crown Royal down near the dart board. Minkie kept to himself, and they avoided him like the plague because he was a Guinea. He was also a junkie, and the fine line between their snow-white addictions and Michael’s heroin habit made it totally taboo for them to associate with him.
To tell you the truth, being a captive audience trapped behind the bar for 8 to 10 hours at a stretch, as far as I was concerned, Minkie Randazza was far more interesting than all of the dart boys put together. Not only did he have stories to tell, he was smarter than he looked, and when he wasn’t too high he was one of the most entertaining and congenial men I have ever met. Evidently his girlfriend must have thought so too because when she finally showed up she was beaming with a particular kind of light that only shines through when you’re nuts about a guy.
Gail was her name. She was one of those women with an absolutely beautiful, Dresden Doll-like face. Buxom, blonde, and blessed with an over dose of female energy, she hooked around the Gloucester wharves and made most of her money servicing the old, Italian fisherman. Gail is dead now but back in the day she liked junk as much as Minkie did. At that point her kids were in the hands of Social Services, and her life was what normal people would call desperate – which indeed it was – but on the nights when she got together with Minkie, you would never know it. Like I said, she was nuts about him and he was there to treat her to a few drinks, make her feel like a lady, and then the two of them would head back to her place to comfort each other, do a few bags, and nod out.
I spent many Saturday nights playing hostess to these star-crossed lovers. In an odd kind of way, the three of us got to be good friends. I enjoyed their company, and I enjoyed being part of the part of their life that was sweet, and good – and it was during one of Gail and Minkie’s dates that I first met up with Joe.
Joe and Minkie fished together. They fished on ‘The Three Bells’. They did a lot of dope together too. The bar at the Blackburn Tavern was where they rendezvoused to settle their shadier doings. Neither one of them really belonged there. When they weren’t fishing, Joe and Minkie spent 99% of their time at ‘Joe’s Dugout’, or at ‘Kelleher’s’, or over at the ‘House of Mitch’. The only reason they ever ventured up to the Blackburn is because it was a white man’s bar, and they felt less conspicuous arranging their dope deals, amongst the yuppies, in a place where cocaine was the main point of interest, and heroin was the last thing anyone expected to find.
Back in those days, I was naïve about hard drugs. I wasn’t even into booze. When I tended bar I filled my mug with coffee. Every now and then I would step outside to smoke a joint, but that was it. Totally clueless about everything that was going on around me, I was a lot like a cross between Alice in Wonderland, and Wendy and the Lost Boys. Part of the reason those guys were drawn to me is because I had no idea what their issues involved and I didn’t judge them. Joe Souza fell in love with my innocence, and after that first night, whenever I was tending bar, he started coming around all the time.
On the night that Minkie came banging on our door it was so cold outside the ice-breakers were already warming up their engines down at Rose’s. Joe got up to find out what the story was, and in a half asleep, half-awake haze I heard Minkie tell him that the door was locked at Riggs Street, there was nowhere else to go, and he needed a place to crash. Joe told him he could sleep in the over-stuffed chair in the front room, handed him an old coat to use as a blanket, and came back to bed. I could hear Minkie mumbling in the back ground, growling and moving around trying to get comfortable. Drifting off to sleep, the last thing I remember was the sound of Minkie’s Zippo, sparking up his last cigarette of the day.
It’s hard to say how much time passed between the final Marlboro and what happened next, but it was still pitch dark when I woke up to Minkie, crawling into our bed. Half asleep, and too exhausted to question his motives, in his Godfather voice I heard him whisper that he was freezing to death in the old blue chair, and could he get into the bed with us because he would die of frostbite if he didn’t.
Joe had no say in this decision. After a fifth of VO, and God knows how much dope, he was out like a light. And while, for a split second I wondered what Minkie was really up to, there was no way I could say ‘No’, because it was forty-below, the furnace didn’t work, and the deeper part of me understood that he was just a desperate human being who needed to get warm.
Sandwiched between the two men, I spent about ten minutes ruminating on how strange it seemed for me to be in this position. Minkie fell into a coma and shortly thereafter my thoughts got overtaken by fatigue and put me in the same state. If I was wondering about the strangeness of my circumstances prior to drifting off, what happened next took whatever seemed weird about it to a whole new level.
Anyone who’s ever lived with a junkie knows that they nod out at a moment’s notice. Because most of them smoke, whenever this nodding occurs, they are often found with lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths, or lying somewhere on, or near their body. The last flick of Minkie’s Zippo ignited one of those cigarettes that wound up landing in the old blue chair. Oblivious to the butt, smoldering away in the wadding of the seat cushion, Minkie had already found his way to our bed, long before the tiny little cinder quietly and invisibly turned into a flame.
The ground floor at 28 Fort Square was not what you’d call, ‘up to code’. After all, we had dirt floors in the bathroom and the standards were so low in that district, the place didn’t come equipped with much of anything, let alone a smoke detector. I am not sure how long it took for the chair to light up, but it produced enough smoke to trigger the alarm up at Pauli and Susie’s place. Were it not for this, our little ménage-a-trois would have been burned to a crisp. We were spared that fate because Susie heard the alarm and called the Fire Department right around sunrise.
Ten firemen rushed to the scene. Me, and Joe, and Minkie woke up from a dead sleep to the sight of eight of them standing over our bed in the kitchen. At that point the other two were outside in the street, hosing down the old blue chair. Once the fire was out all ten of them circled around the bed, asking questions, and gawking at the three of us lined up under the covers. Already well acquainted with Joe and Minkie as denizens of the wharf, hard core fisherman, and cross addicted ne’er-do-wells, it was natural for the firefighters to tar me with the same brush. That was the morning that I knew what it felt like to be Gail because all of them were looking at me like I was a junkie and a slut.
The story made the Police Notes. It read something like this: “An early morning fire at 28 Fort Square was extinguished after a lit cigarette ignited inside an overstuffed chair. Three of the occupants, Joseph Souza, Carolyn Garrison, and Michael Randazza slept through the ordeal. The landlord called in the fire at 5:30 am. There were no injuries.”
Reading the report in the afternoon paper, I thought to myself, “They should have added; ‘but a lot of assumptions were made about what Ms. Garrison was doing in bed with Mr. Souza and Mr. Randazza”! If my reputation hadn’t already gone down the tubes, I am pretty sure the night that the chair went up in smoke was when it hit bottom. Who knows? Fifty years down the road, I have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter anymore - but it makes a damn good story. And if my psyche has suffered from being cast in the role of The Fallen Woman, now that I am old and gray, in the words of the immortal Joan Jett I can finally say, “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation”.
Copyright - Cal Garrison: 2019: ©
MY BAD REPUTATION – By Cal Garrison
We were living down at the Fort back then; in the ground floor apartment at number 28. The Fort sits right on top of the wharves that line the west side of Gloucester Harbor. If you have seen the movie “The Perfect Storm”, you can spot number 28 in the line of tenements that fill the background in the opening scene.
Pauli and Suzie lived upstairs, along with Rosetta, and Pauli Jr, and Tori, and Stevie, the youngest of their nine children. Angela, and Harvey, had the big apartment on the third floor. That part of the house was split in two, and Harvey and Angela shared it with Linda Parker, the seaweed lady. Linda was the lover and muse of the poet Charles Olson, who up until his death in 1970 had shared that space and written his best poetry in the attic at 28 Fort Square.
It was the weekend so the kids were at Franks. Joe was in from fishing. I was all done bartending for the night. Joe and I had walked home from the Blackburn and were already in bed. It had to be close to 3 AM when somebody came banging on the door.
There was no way to pretend we weren’t there because the bed was set up on the kitchen floor, right under the front window that winter. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because we never locked the door, and the mid night rambler happened to be Minkie, who, after rapping on the window to let us know it was him, just barged right in.
I had made Minkie’s acquaintance long before I fell in love with Joe Souza. Back in those days I had to ride my ten-speed back and forth from downtown Gloucester to Lanesville at least once a day. My ex-husband was a carpenter who worked during the week. He had a big house on the other side of the Cape. My kids were only 2 ½ and 5. Right after we split up, instead of uprooting them and making it hard for Frank to work, it made more sense for me to ride out there to take care of the girls at his place, than it did to keep an eye on them down at the Fort.
I put a good 20 miles a day on that bike. I’d get up at sunrise and be in Lanesville by the time Frank had to leave for work. When he came home at five I’d head back downtown to wash dishes at the Blackburn. It was an unusual arrangement that seemed to make sense at the time. I am pretty sure most of the people who watched me fly back and forth thought I was training for a marathon, but nobody knew, or bothered to ask me, what I was up to during that time – except for one morning when Minkie’s path crossed mine.
It was about 6 AM, and I had to stop the bike to wait for a garbage truck to negotiate a turn with a tractor trailer that was backing into the Bird’s Eye plant. In the middle of this, a tan Roadrunner came out of the Ocean Crest parking lot and pulled up alongside me. I was minding my own business when the window rolled down and the guy in the passenger seat stuck his head out to ask me why I was always riding around town at the crack of dawn. I told him that I had to get to Lanesville every day to take care of my kids.
For some reason the driver of the car leaned across the front seat to poke his head out and ask the same question. Answering him I noticed that both men were totally high on something, but at the time I had no idea who they were, or what they were on. As the traffic pattern opened up, I got ready to keep going, but before I took off, the driver leaned over one last time, and in a sly kind of way asked me if he could sniff my bicycle seat. Inspired by this, the guy in the passenger seat perked right up and offered me ten bucks to do the same thing. This was my first introduction to the driver, a guy by the name of Tommy Trupiano, and to his side-kick, Michael, otherwise known as ‘Minkie’ Randazza.
Having only recently left the safety of my husband’s lily-white wing on the other side of town, with no experience dealing with hard core fishermen and their ways, this off-color request was spoken in a language that was totally foreign to me. What would have been offensive to any other woman flew right over my head without inspiring any sense of indignation or insult. Taking off on my bike, I beat the Roadrunner out of the Fort and headed up Washington Street. By the time I hit the rotary I figured out that from their perspective, what to someone else might have seemed lewd and vulgar, was actually a compliment.
Within a month the boss at the Blackburn promoted me from dishwasher to bartender. The next time I bumped into Minkie, it was a Saturday night and I was tending bar. A little past sundown, Minkie had already parked himself on a stool in the corner near the front entrance. Dressed in a trench coat and wearing a Stetson hat that was way too small for his head, his hair was slicked back and he was all duded up, drinking a White Russian.
As I walked the length of the bar to see if he needed a refill, Minkie adjusted his focus and appeared to be zeroing in on the fact that he had seen me before. Once I got within earshot, in a gravelly voice, that sounded just like “The Godfather”, he handed me his empty glass and said, “Marone; the bicycle girl. Look at you in that dress!”
“Happy Hour” was winding up, and the Saturday night mob had yet to arrive. With the exception of a few dart players down at the far end of the bar, Minkie was the only customer who needed my attention. When you’re tending bar there are two choices; you can mix your drinks and ignore people, or you can strike up a conversation. I learned early on that the time passes more quickly when you converse with your customers so I decided to chat Minkie up and find out what his story was.
I broke the ice by asking him about his ‘get-up’: “What’s with the ‘Top Cat’ outfit? The last time I saw you, you were in your fish clothes; you’re all decked out like Dick Tracy tonight. What’s going on?” He told me he had a date. He was waiting for his girlfriend; that they were going to have a few cocktails and go back to her place. Pulling his mustache and stroking his freshly shaved chin he looked at me and smiled.
In that moment I noticed that Minkie was actually what you would call handsome. As time went on and I got to know him better, I found out that he was also a Scorpio and that the ‘Dick Tracy’ costume, the White Russians, and the seat in the corner, near the entrance were a regular part of his weekend itinerary. He never mingled with the white boys who, between lines of coke that were surreptitiously snorted elsewhere on the premises, drank their Bass Ale, and their Guinness Stout, and their Crown Royal down near the dart board. Minkie kept to himself, and they avoided him like the plague because he was a Guinea. He was also a junkie, and the fine line between their snow-white addictions and Michael’s heroin habit made it totally taboo for them to associate with him.
To tell you the truth, being a captive audience trapped behind the bar for 8 to 10 hours at a stretch, as far as I was concerned, Minkie Randazza was far more interesting than all of the dart boys put together. Not only did he have stories to tell, he was smarter than he looked, and when he wasn’t too high he was one of the most entertaining and congenial men I have ever met. Evidently his girlfriend must have thought so too because when she finally showed up she was beaming with a particular kind of light that only shines through when you’re nuts about a guy.
Gail was her name. She was one of those women with an absolutely beautiful, Dresden Doll-like face. Buxom, blonde, and blessed with an over dose of female energy, she hooked around the Gloucester wharves and made most of her money servicing the old, Italian fisherman. Gail is dead now but back in the day she liked junk as much as Minkie did. At that point her kids were in the hands of Social Services, and her life was what normal people would call desperate – which indeed it was – but on the nights when she got together with Minkie, you would never know it. Like I said, she was nuts about him and he was there to treat her to a few drinks, make her feel like a lady, and then the two of them would head back to her place to comfort each other, do a few bags, and nod out.
I spent many Saturday nights playing hostess to these star-crossed lovers. In an odd kind of way, the three of us got to be good friends. I enjoyed their company, and I enjoyed being part of the part of their life that was sweet, and good – and it was during one of Gail and Minkie’s dates that I first met up with Joe.
Joe and Minkie fished together. They fished on ‘The Three Bells’. They did a lot of dope together too. The bar at the Blackburn Tavern was where they rendezvoused to settle their shadier doings. Neither one of them really belonged there. When they weren’t fishing, Joe and Minkie spent 99% of their time at ‘Joe’s Dugout’, or at ‘Kelleher’s’, or over at the ‘House of Mitch’. The only reason they ever ventured up to the Blackburn is because it was a white man’s bar, and they felt less conspicuous arranging their dope deals, amongst the yuppies, in a place where cocaine was the main point of interest, and heroin was the last thing anyone expected to find.
Back in those days, I was naïve about hard drugs. I wasn’t even into booze. When I tended bar I filled my mug with coffee. Every now and then I would step outside to smoke a joint, but that was it. Totally clueless about everything that was going on around me, I was a lot like a cross between Alice in Wonderland, and Wendy and the Lost Boys. Part of the reason those guys were drawn to me is because I had no idea what their issues involved and I didn’t judge them. Joe Souza fell in love with my innocence, and after that first night, whenever I was tending bar, he started coming around all the time.
On the night that Minkie came banging on our door it was so cold outside the ice-breakers were already warming up their engines down at Rose’s. Joe got up to find out what the story was, and in a half asleep, half-awake haze I heard Minkie tell him that the door was locked at Riggs Street, there was nowhere else to go, and he needed a place to crash. Joe told him he could sleep in the over-stuffed chair in the front room, handed him an old coat to use as a blanket, and came back to bed. I could hear Minkie mumbling in the back ground, growling and moving around trying to get comfortable. Drifting off to sleep, the last thing I remember was the sound of Minkie’s Zippo, sparking up his last cigarette of the day.
It’s hard to say how much time passed between the final Marlboro and what happened next, but it was still pitch dark when I woke up to Minkie, crawling into our bed. Half asleep, and too exhausted to question his motives, in his Godfather voice I heard him whisper that he was freezing to death in the old blue chair, and could he get into the bed with us because he would die of frostbite if he didn’t.
Joe had no say in this decision. After a fifth of VO, and God knows how much dope, he was out like a light. And while, for a split second I wondered what Minkie was really up to, there was no way I could say ‘No’, because it was forty-below, the furnace didn’t work, and the deeper part of me understood that he was just a desperate human being who needed to get warm.
Sandwiched between the two men, I spent about ten minutes ruminating on how strange it seemed for me to be in this position. Minkie fell into a coma and shortly thereafter my thoughts got overtaken by fatigue and put me in the same state. If I was wondering about the strangeness of my circumstances prior to drifting off, what happened next took whatever seemed weird about it to a whole new level.
Anyone who’s ever lived with a junkie knows that they nod out at a moment’s notice. Because most of them smoke, whenever this nodding occurs, they are often found with lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths, or lying somewhere on, or near their body. The last flick of Minkie’s Zippo ignited one of those cigarettes that wound up landing in the old blue chair. Oblivious to the butt, smoldering away in the wadding of the seat cushion, Minkie had already found his way to our bed, long before the tiny little cinder quietly and invisibly turned into a flame.
The ground floor at 28 Fort Square was not what you’d call, ‘up to code’. After all, we had dirt floors in the bathroom and the standards were so low in that district, the place didn’t come equipped with much of anything, let alone a smoke detector. I am not sure how long it took for the chair to light up, but it produced enough smoke to trigger the alarm up at Pauli and Susie’s place. Were it not for this, our little ménage-a-trois would have been burned to a crisp. We were spared that fate because Susie heard the alarm and called the Fire Department right around sunrise.
Ten firemen rushed to the scene. Me, and Joe, and Minkie woke up from a dead sleep to the sight of eight of them standing over our bed in the kitchen. At that point the other two were outside in the street, hosing down the old blue chair. Once the fire was out all ten of them circled around the bed, asking questions, and gawking at the three of us lined up under the covers. Already well acquainted with Joe and Minkie as denizens of the wharf, hard core fisherman, and cross addicted ne’er-do-wells, it was natural for the firefighters to tar me with the same brush. That was the morning that I knew what it felt like to be Gail because all of them were looking at me like I was a junkie and a slut.
The story made the Police Notes. It read something like this: “An early morning fire at 28 Fort Square was extinguished after a lit cigarette ignited inside an overstuffed chair. Three of the occupants, Joseph Souza, Carolyn Garrison, and Michael Randazza slept through the ordeal. The landlord called in the fire at 5:30 am. There were no injuries.”
Reading the report in the afternoon paper, I thought to myself, “They should have added; ‘but a lot of assumptions were made about what Ms. Garrison was doing in bed with Mr. Souza and Mr. Randazza”! If my reputation hadn’t already gone down the tubes, I am pretty sure the night that the chair went up in smoke was when it hit bottom. Who knows? Fifty years down the road, I have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter anymore - but it makes a damn good story. And if my psyche has suffered from being cast in the role of The Fallen Woman, now that I am old and gray, in the words of the immortal Joan Jett I can finally say, “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation”.
Copyright - Cal Garrison: 2019: ©
"vonnette forrest" - by cal garrison
VONNETTE FORREST – by Cal Garrison
Vonnette hadn’t crossed my mind in 40 years. It was through Theresa that she showed up again. Between West Palm Beach and Gloucester, on their way to a reunion, Theresa Skyped me from Virginia, and there in the background, like a wisp that had drifted in on the mists of time, was a well preserved version of Vonnette Forrest.
Her name alone opened the floodgates. Forty years down the road Vonnette’s face on the screen took my thoughts back to New Years’ Day, 1977. Zeroing in on the memory I could see myself sitting on a barstool next to Terry Hamilton, the man who would turn out to be the love of Vonnette’s life. It was ten o’clock in the evening, there was ice on the harbor, and I was free as a bird after a coin-toss that came up heads and gave me permission to take the rest of the night off.
Somewhere between that moment and Vonnette’s appearance on my Skype machine, she and Terry had gotten married – but they weren’t married at the time. Terry was fishing out of Gloucester in those days. The fact that I happened to be sitting next to him on that freezing cold night had less to do with him than it did with a story that went back to the summer before.
Joe and I were living together down at The Fort back then. Life had not prepared me for Joe Souza. He was a crash course in lessons that give new meaning to the idea that all passion breeds suffering. At that point we were engaged in a publicly scandalous love affair. Both of us were still married to other people, totally delusional, and in way over our heads. A year into that curriculum everything came to a screeching halt when one hot August morning, Joe went out for a pack of Marlboros and never came back.
A week into the experience I still didn’t know where he went. In a state of cognitive dissonance, his disappearance into thin air broke my heart and fractured the atmosphere in a way that drove me temporarily insane. It took a month for a piece of gossip to reach me through a neighbor who had overheard Joe’s sister telling someone that Joe had gone back to Indiana to live with his wife and be with his son. This news sent me into a nosedive of grief and disillusionment that knocked the life out of everything my 28-year-old heart thought it knew about love.
Getting back to New Year’s Day: I took the New Year’s Day shift because it was so cold in the house I knew I could stay warmer tending bar for the last of the holiday party-goers. On that night, by the time I sat down next to Terry, having heard nothing from Joe for close to six months the thought of turning over a new leaf was the only thing on my mind.
Not that I was desperate, or even lonely. I think I was just curious, because, getting ready for work that afternoon I decided to lay the cards out to see what my future was going to look like. This was not unusual for me – I did the cards a lot – but on this day I laid them out for myself because it was the first of the year and the idea of turning over a new leaf made me wonder if there was anything good in sight.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had your cards read, or if you know anything about the subject, but that reading was one for the books: all of the best cards in the deck showed up. Between the Lovers and the Two of Cups, to this day I have not seen better cards than that. They were so auspicious, I stacked them up and stuck them in my pocket just so I could take them to work and show them to my boss.
By the time I got there he was too busy to humor me. Discussing last night’s cover charge with the bouncer he was also a little hung-over, and not the least bit interested in my story. Overriding his indifference, I dragged him and Mickey over to the bar, laid the cards out exactly the way they had fallen earlier that afternoon, looked both men straight in the eye and said: “Don’t you guys understand? If these cards are true I am going to meet the love of my life tonight”.
Five hours later there weren’t enough people drinking at the bar to warrant keeping two bartenders on the clock until closing time. We flipped a coin, and it was me who got to take the rest of the night off. On my way to punch out, with the card reading on my brain, I started to wonder what my romantic hopes might contain. Any thought that Prince Charming was anywhere in sight went up in smoke when my boss poked his head out of the office to say, “So much for those cards, Cal. Good luck with “The Love of your Life”: take a look around! There’s slim pickings in this bar tonight”
He was right. Half way thru my ‘after work’ drink a quick scan of the room left me wondering if there was any substance to the Tarot reading. If Mr. Right was here, I was looking at Bachelor One, Two, and Three, and unfortunately none of them were up to snuff.
Bachelor Number One was Manny. Manny was a strange bird. On the one hand he was brilliant, and even good looking, but he was short, and there was a perverse air about him. Manny was famous for his attempt to rob the local drugstore with a perfume atomizer. He’d been to jail a few times. Everyone thought he was healthy because he jogged around the island once a day in a perfectly ironed running suit. These marathons were fueled by a special concoction of pep pills and pain killers that formed Manny’s own little breakfast of champions.
Bachelor Number Two was Billy. Billy ran the junk yard near the outskirts of Dogtown. He had a bunch of raccoons who lived with him. Billy only came to town once in a while. He was sweet and kind and he drank a lot of beer. I had a soft spot in my heart for Billy, but somehow knew that he wasn’t “The One”
Bachelor Number Three was Buddy. Buddy was what is referred to in Scandinavian mythology as a Berserker. Berserkers are physically powerful, warlike, wild-men. Buddy lived up in the woods near Gronblad’s Pit. He was drunk all the time and stronger than Andre the Giant – so strong that people were just plain scared of him. He looked like a WWF Wrestler and he fished out of Lane’s Cove. Buddy was not good relationship material.
Out of all three, Manny was looking like my best bet – until the realm of possibilities exploded and Terry Hamilton materialized down at the end of the bar. He was sitting next to Sammy the Rat. Terry was one of the handsomest men I have ever seen. He had perfectly blonde and totally handsome good looks. One quick double-take and I knew that I was looking at the love of my life. When Sammy got up to go down to the boat, I sat down in his spot, ordered another drink, and asked Terry for a light.
He told me he was waiting to hear if they were going out that night. I looked at him and said, “There’s ice on the harbor; no one’s going fishing. Both of us have the night off” Terry said something about fishing just being an excuse to avoid going home. Then he started to unravel a depressing tale of woe about his private life that, after twenty minutes at the pity party, sank my wildest dreams under the weight of his sadness and total inebriation.
It was after midnight when I finally stopped waiting for my dreams and predictions to come true. Getting up to leave I turned around to say one last goodbye to Terry, and when I stopped to button my coat, in through the swinging doors walked Joe Souza. After six months of total silence there he was, fresh in from the cold, an apparition with no overcoat, steaming in the golden glow of the bar light. Everyone in the room was blown away. Everyone in the room was waiting to see what I would do.
Did I take him back? There was ice on the Harbor: what would you do?
Joe is dead now. So is Terry. Vonnette and I are the only ones left. Tonight is the anniversary of Joe’s death. This story is a memory, written with love, in his memory - with many thanks to Vonnette (and Terry) for bringing it all back to life.
Cal Garrison
Sedona Arizona
June 20th 2017
Copyright - Cal Garrison: 2019: ©
"thanksgiving" - by cal garrison
THANKSGIVING – by Cal Garrison
Aside from the fact that my husband and I were too young to know about love, or have the slightest clue as to why we took that walk down the aisle, it was the obligatory family gatherings that rolled around in regularly timed cycles that drove me nuts enough to walk out of my first marriage. I swear to God, the holiday get togethers with my snobby In-Laws, or the ones that got spent with my nearest and dearest, who had pushed me into that marriage even though they knew it was a mistake long before I decided to leave it, had a lot to do with what prompted me to hop on my ten-speed one fine spring morning and ride off to see if there was something in this life that didn’t involve pretense.
On that day I wound up in a rented room, about a mile down the road from the house that his parents had bought for my husband. Sitting there, all by myself, not knowing what would happen next, in addition to a few other promises that needed to be made, I vowed that never again would I spend a minute of my time at a family ritual with people who bored me to tears and who didn’t really like me that much to begin with.
Like death and taxes, the annual parade of holiday get togethers with our loved ones is an inevitability that no one can escape. If we decide to opt out of these activities, we wind up trading them in for something else. When I vowed never again to go along with the program, I didn’t let go of the piece that involved celebrating alone with just me and my kids. When my children were otherwise occupied with their father, at those times, if I didn’t work through the holiday, I spent it alone, doing laundry, watching old movies on TV, and catching up on my housework.
A third scenario evolved out of the vow that I made over forty years ago. This one put me in situations that turned me into the invited guest of the friends and relations of whoever my boyfriend happened to be at the time. Since I have the habit of always being attracted to the wrong types, this version of the holidays never failed to plant me in situations that were totally off the wall.
In retrospect, sometimes I wonder if I would have been better off sticking it out with the traditional nonsense, because even though my alternative, free-style holidays were certainly never boring, they were for the most part, stranger than fiction. After over four decades of having to watch myself sit through a cavalcade of surreal holiday celebrations, this fact hit home for me one Thanksgiving when my dinner companion, who happened to be on probation, keeled over, and hit the floor, landing face down on a paper plate full of green-bean casserole, and nobody else in the room seemed to notice, or even bat an eye.
It wasn’t as if I was new to this type of thing. Going all the way back to 1977, at my boyfriend’s suggestion, I put on a turkey dinner for all of the drunks from “Joe’s Dugout”. I set up a buffet with plastic cups and paper plates on the kitchen table and we scrounged up enough money for the feast, which included five cases of ‘Bud’, six fifths of ‘VO’, two fifths of ‘Canadian Club’, three fifths of ‘Cutty Sark’, one gallon of Vodka, two gallons of ‘Bacardi’, some Coke, some Ginger Ale, a large bottle of Club Soda, and a turkey
Back in those days, before the Dugout burned to the ground, it closed down around noon time on Thanksgiving. At 12:00 PM on the dot, there was a line at our door, and the apartment swelled up with a crowd of thirsty fishermen who had no place to go. Sammy the Rat, Tommy Favazza, Edmund Valli, Fernando Da Silva, Kenny Taylor, Bull and Cosmo, Jack Flaherty, Booty and his girlfriend, Vicky, Russell Vino, Skinsy, Charlie Flynn, T. Malloy, and Joe Cilluffo, otherwise known as Joe Bananas, along with others whose names have escaped my memory, all of them had heard about the free booze and showed up at our place with bells on.
I played hostess to this crowd of hooligans, but, God knows what I was thinking because soon enough, things got crazy. After three or four hours I escaped through the side door and headed up to David and Kerry’s with the turkey. Taking refuge there till around 10:00 PM, when it felt safe to go home, I walked back to the apartment, and tripped over Sammy the Rat’s dentures on my way into the kitchen. Sammy was passed out on the couch, lying on his back, snoring loudly, his toothless mouth wide open. Joe was nowhere to be found, the place was empty, and with the exception of a sugary slick of booze on the linoleum, surprisingly tidy, no doubt due to the fact that Vicky was a good soul who even in a drunken state took the time to clean things up.
Another turkey day experience that took place about six years later keeps coming to mind. By that time Joe and I had a child of our own, a little girl who we named Joanna. Born on September 14th, 1983, on Thanksgiving Day she was a little over two months old and Joe was fishing out of New Bedford.
At that point the fishing scene in Gloucester was going down the tubes. NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) laid down a new regulation that increased the size of the openings in the nets. On top of that, for some strange reason the fish were vanishing. Boats that back in the seventies were coming in with forty-thousand pounds of fish, were showing up at the dock with three boxes of fish and nothing in the hold. Anyone who fished for a living was starving.
It was in or around 1983, that most of the skippers in Gloucester were sinking their boats for the insurance money and paying the crew, or paying ‘pirates’ who specialized in these things, to head offshore in the middle of the night to blow them up. If you didn’t want to get busted for sinking ships, the only other option was to head down to New Bedford to fish for the Mafia. With not much of a choice, when Joe made the decision to go to New Bedford, he was doing his version of what it took to be a good father.
That move came with a whole other set of complications. The money was good but there was so much heroin moving in and out of New Bedford, the boat owners used it to keep their crews coming back for more. Joe was already seriously addicted to heroin. Working in a situation where the head honchos had all the dope in the world waiting for him on the dock at the end of every trip, was an irresistible lure that totally changed him. By Thanksgiving of 1983, he was making plenty of money, but worse off than he’d ever been when it came to dope. Fingers was fishing down there too and needless to say, he was in the same boat.
Back in town for the holiday, with a few days off to act like normal human beings, Joe and Fingers decided they would hold a ‘traditional’ Thanksgiving dinner over at Fingers place. Fingers had a long string of girlfriends over the years. At that time, he was living with Sandy Sinagra in a nice house overlooking Long Beach.
I baked three loaves of bread for the feast and had the baby all packed up and ready to go by 10 AM. Joe was down at the ‘Dugout’ getting primed with his morning cocktail of whiskey and pills. He and Fingers showed up around noon and all of us got a ride over to Sandy’s with her cousin, who happened to be new to me, a dark haired woman by the name of Paula.
Once we got there everything looked like things are supposed to look on Thanksgiving Day. There were other guests, some people I had never met, along with Skinsy, Russell Vino, and his bald girlfriend, Suzanne, all of whom had arrived about an hour before we did. We introduced ourselves around and it was then that I noticed that Paula was already half in the wrapper, and high on something that bore a whiff of dope.
I usually put my Thanksgiving turkey into the oven first thing in the morning, but everyone has their own way of doing things. At that point the turkey was still sitting on the counter and all of the fixings were laid out, waiting to be prepared. Sandy was up and about, and appeared to be taking care of business. Half-way through a bottle of Mount Gay Rum, she was full of life and doing her version of being the perfect hostess. As soon as we got there, she whipped out trays of appetizers, invited us to make ourselves at home in the living room, and asked us what we wanted to drink.
In this weird assortment of friends and strangers all of us were on our best holiday behavior, making conversation, and doing what people do when it’s time to pretend to be normal, well-adjusted human beings. If you’ve ever socialized with people who drink and do a lot of dope, you never know when things are going to switch from relatively sane to totally fucked up - but that moment always comes, and when it does the boundaries disappear, the entities show up, and all Hell breaks loose. There with the baby, I was the odd man out, the only person in the room who was sober and straight.
If I did my best to be cordial and friendly, it had something to do with the fact that my parents were good people who taught me about manners and raised me to be polite. Growing up in the 40’s and 50’s I was led to believe that everything about life was in apple pie order, and that all of us were on the same page. God knows what made me think that this situation was anything close to apple pie order, or stood a ghost of a chance of turning into a Norman Rockwell painting, but I can be stubborn about the wrong things. Let’s just say a small piece of me fully expected it to; it was Thanksgiving after all.
A little after two-thirty the turkey was still sitting on the counter, Sandy was slurring her speech and commiserating with Russell on the sun porch, Fingers was shooting up in the bathroom, the people who’d come up from New Bedford were watching the football game and tripping on Quaaludes, Paula was coming on to Joe right under my nose, and the baby needed to be nursed. I left the room and found a quiet spot in the den, where Suzanne happened to be sitting, wiping her eyes, talking about how her alopecia had ruined her life, and crying over the fact that Russell didn’t love her.
For the next two hours I stationed myself on the couch, across from the chair where she was sitting, listening to this poor woman come unglued. When she wasn’t co-depending with Russell, or crying over what he did to her sense of self-worth, Suzanne was a drug counselor. She was also a “White Winer”; one bottle of white wine and she went from being an intelligent, interesting female to a total cry-baby. For some reason her drinking habit was less of a problem than it was for the rest of the guests, because she knew when to stop.
In her presence all I had to do was listen without having to engage. This was a relief because I just wanted to focus on Joanna, bring myself back to center, and get out of the madness that had overtaken the afternoon. It turned dark around four-thirty. Suzanne was beginning to come to her senses and so was I.
Taking a peek into the next room, the turkey was nowhere to be seen. I could see Joe, Fingers and the rest of the guests, but the darkness that had descended on the day made it seem like they were in another dimension. Draped across the ottoman in a state of total disarray, Paula looked like an ‘extra’ from a horror movie. Everyone had nodded out or passed out. The TV was the only source of light in the room, the talking heads were doing the evening news, the table was set, with beer-cans and ashtrays full of cigarette butts where the dinner plates would have been, and the booze was all gone.
I felt like I was in one of those scenes from an old cowboy movie where the main character finds themselves in an abandoned saloon, in an old ghost town: the tumble weed is piled up in a corner, everything is covered with sand and dust, the bar and the tables are jam packed with fully clothed skeletons, but no one in the place is alive. Like an alien spirit, floating through a crowd, with Joanna in my arms I made my way to the wall phone and called a cab.
We were back home within an hour. Joe didn’t blow in until the next day. Come to find out, the turkey made it into the oven but it stayed there for close to twenty-four hours and from what I heard, came out hard as a rock, looking like a cadaverous ball of beef jerky.
By now you may be wondering why an intelligent woman like me would be stupid enough to keep landing in situations like this. Who knows? I have been asking myself the same question for close to fifty years. It could be that I get stationed in these nutty scenarios just so I can be the one to wind up in that neck of the Third-Dimension and use the experience to remind people that God really is everywhere. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I have a delayed emotional response mechanism that doesn’t pick up on how messed up things are until five or ten years down the road. We could chalk it up to Karma, for sure – but what’s harder to fathom is why time and experience haven’t taught me to just say “No”, get back to Square One, and figure out how to do things the Norman Rockwell way.
Which gets me to my most recent Thanksgiving freak show. They say “We grow too soon old and too late smart”. All I can say is “Ain’t it the truth”, because this last round of insanity was one of those things that I should have seen coming. Then again, “There’s no fool like and old fool”. I must be the poster child for that expression, because I am here to bear testimony to things that began when I was sixty-four and that didn’t come to a screeching halt until I was sixty-nine.
It all started one day, outside the local coffee shop. I was in a conversation with two good friends, when a man appeared in front of my face, standing about a foot away, staring at me without saying a word. His jeans were tied up with a piece of clothesline, he was emaciated to the point of being skeletal, and the whites of his eyes were yellow. I looked at him, he looked at me, and then all of a sudden he dashed off, disappearing into the coffee shop.
My friends looked at me with “what-the-fuck was that all about” expressions on their faces. All I could say was, “I see a whiff of hepatitis in his eyes”. Before they could respond, there he was again, on his way back out, standing wordlessly in front of me, with a small cup of coffee-to-go in hand, his yellow eyes drilling themselves into the back of my skull, for no apparent reason at all. In a matter of seconds he turned on his heels, made his way across the parking lot, hopped on a motorcycle, and peeled off in a cloud of smoke.
The next time I bumped into this guy I was out yard sailing with a friend. Half way through the morning it started pouring rain, so we decided to take shelter in the same coffee shop until the storm blew over. This little bistro was one of those scenes that had couches and chairs all around, set up in a friendly, living room atmosphere. We got ourselves a couple of Lattes, plopped into our chairs, and were just getting comfortable when the yellow-eyed-man vaulted over the back of the chair across from me and started staring again, this time with a big grin on his face.
There were other people there, half-baked acquaintances, regular customers, a few grifters, and others, with whom we were already chatting, the way people do in those situations. When yellow eyes entered the picture, he seemed to be familiar with this crowd of misfits, enough to create the impression that he was someone everyone knew, someone of importance, in fact.
As the light social banter cranked up, the conversation bounced back and forth, and eventually the subject of LSD got me and the yellow eyed man into an exchange that marked the beginning of what turned out to be one of the hardest and most humiliating lessons of my life. By the time the rain stopped, I found out his name was Beau and he was a hot shot guitarist who, despite his lean and hungry physique, looked a lot like Sam Elliott, had a voice like Sam Elliott, and could play the guitar like Jimi Hendrix.
I’ve already mentioned that I am terminally attracted to the wrong types. Whatever it was about Beau that I needed to avoid got erased by his face, by the sound of his voice, and by what he could do with a guitar. Those three things, along with the mystique of the white ‘Cop Bike’ made it easy to overlook the yellow eyes, and numerous other red flags that were there from the very beginning.
You’d think that an old gal with her PhD in tough customers would have left well enough alone, but all of my previous mistakes were dead and gone. Nothing had entered my heart for at least five years. The resurrection of feeling that got stirred up by this sick, but strangely attractive man was so strong that I actually had a stroke within 24 hours of our second encounter. Anyone else would have read this as a real bad sign, but I was so desperate, and so dying for something to love, I missed the point and conned myself into believing that this near death experience was a sign of rebirth.
But, let’s dissect that cadaver some other time. Beau is part of this story because within the strangeness of what happened while we were involved, in the same way that I played hostess at the Thanksgiving blowout with the Dugout crowd, and sat through the party that we had over at Finger’s place on Long Beach, I was stubborn enough about the wrong things to show up with Beau whenever it came time for a holiday ritual, and whenever it became important for him to make it look like he was a good father.
The following scenario took place one Thanksgiving when the two of us were invited to break bread with BJ, Beau’s oldest son, at the house that BJ shared with his wife, Crystal. Having just been released from jail, BJ was on probation for selling a bag of weed to the wrong person. Recently married, he and Crystal, an ex-con herself, wanted this Thanksgiving to be particularly special, because BJ’s mother had set them up in a new house and was footing all of their bills so that together, they could turn over a new leaf, and get off to a whole new start.
I didn’t really want to go to this shindig, but I didn’t have any other plans and Beau needed a ride. Crystal and I got along just fine, but BJ was another story. When he was a child he must have been a sweet boy, but forty years of neglect had turned him into a toothless ball of flesh who had been totally stupefied by drugs, and booze, and all of the prescription drugs that the state had put him on to keep his behavioral issues under control.
It wasn’t his fault, but the God’s honest truth is that BJ had absolutely nothing going for him – except for Crystal - who didn’t have much going for her either, but who was kind enough to volunteer to oversee his needs and tidy up the house. She went along for the ride because BJ’s mother paid the rent and covered all of the bills to make up for the fact that she and Beau had totally abandoned their first born son. Beau had nothing to contribute to the situation because he couldn’t even take care of himself, but he felt guilty enough about BJ to show up and act like he cared every now and then.
Their house was situated on a knoll in a neighborhood full of rundown trailers on the wrong side of town. It too, was falling apart, cheaply constructed, and not worth fixing. The porch drooped, and this matter was exacerbated by the fact that BJ weighed over 300 pounds and the more he went out there to smoke, the more it sagged. The outdoor carpeting that covered this area was decorated with cigarette burns and raggedy holes that made it easy to trip on the way through the slider that led into the living area.
Like so many trailers, this one was narrow and long, so once you opened the sliding glass door, the other side of the room was two steps away. With a gigantic, wide-screen TV situated opposite the main entrance there wasn’t much room for anything else. It was surrounded by plastic knick-knacks, and artificial flowers, all of which formed an altar that rose up the wall behind the TV, to showcase photos of Crystal’s children who had been taken in by the state long before she hooked up with BJ.
To the right of the front entrance was the door to the bedroom. Its color scheme was purple and black. Trimmed with shiny purple polyester drapes, a few plastic skulls, and mega-death accents, the bedroom door was rarely open because Crystal suffered from chronic fatigue. When she wasn’t maintaining BJ and keeping house, she was fast asleep in the inner sanctum.
A coffee table filled the space between the TV and a ‘Herculon’ couch that was covered with sheets and old afghans on the left side of the room. This was BJ’s throne. This is where he sat and smoked when he wasn’t on the porch, and where he spent most of the day, watching television, playing Candy Crush on his I-Phone, and making phone calls to anyone he could think of who might still want to talk with him. He called Beau at least 20 times a day.
BJ’s throne room opened up into the kitchen area, which extended from there to a long hall that led to the bathroom and to a second bedroom that was currently occupied by a homeless couple, friends of BJ’s, who panhandled down at the traffic light. On Thanksgiving Day the kitchen area was decorated with paper cutouts of turkeys and cornucopias that Crystal had picked up at the dollar store. There were festoons of crepe paper leaves draped around the perimeter of the ceiling, and the table was set up buffet style in the center of everything with paper plates, plastic cups, and boxes of pumpkin pies.
The turkey was sitting on top of the microwave. It looked like it was made out of foam rubber and loaded with GMO’s. A bowl full of instant mashed potatoes was sitting next to it, along with a plastic squeeze bottle of “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter”. The green bean casserole was still getting warmed up in the wall oven. Frozen coconut cream and chocolate cream pies were thawing out next to the sink. Bottles of soda were in the fridge, and the coffee maker was on.
There didn’t appear to be any liquor because Beau was an AA freak and, with the exception of the homeless couple, BJ, Crystal, and the rest of the guests were not supposed to be drinking because they were all on probation and getting tested for drugs and booze once a week. As it turned out, everyone except Beau was spiking their Mountain Dew with something because all of them kept going into the back bedroom every time they got up to get a refill of soda. Aside from that booze has a way of leaking out of the pores, so you could smell it. I never went back there so, who knows what was going on, but, the pan handlers appeared to be running a speak-easy and a small pharmacy down at the end of the hall.
Like I said earlier, none of this was new to me. I had been in similar situations so many times before, I had no problem spending the afternoon at BJ’s Thanksgiving feast. At the same time, I was a fish out of water, who, in order to get through this type of experience had developed the ability to bring all of my good breeding and manners into a room full of individuals who had never had an intelligent conversation with anyone, let alone someone like me, someone who just happened to be there, but who didn’t really belong there. In spite of all of that, and in spite of our differences, deep down inside I was running on the idea that we are all God’s precious children, and along with my sick desire to be the answer to all of Beau’s prayers, it was this that made it possible for me to sit there and do whatever it took to connect with every single one of them.
This was part of the reason why Beau always dragged me along to these get togethers. A text book narcissist, he had a hard time mingling, or condescending to be with anyone, especially his own son, whose monstrous, 350 pound, despair-filled presence was the elephant in the living room that blew Beau’s cover, and made it more that clear that this man was not who he appeared to be. Underneath all of the “I love you sons” and the “I love you Dad’s”, the two men hated each other. BJ hated Beau for leaving him out on the streets of Denver to suck dick at the age of eight or nine, and Beau hated his son for being a constant reminder of who he really was and for being a monument to all of the unforgivable things he had done to annihilate BJ’s spirit.
Every time I went along for the ride, I was there as the queen of codependence, an ambassador of sorts, sent to compensate for the fact that Beau couldn’t handle it. While I was busy bringing my heart to the table, and trying to win his approval for being indispensable at times like this, Beau lurked in the corner, like an underweight gargoyle, smoking cigarettes, saying nothing, and waiting for it to be over.
It took me five years to wake up to the fact that I was an accessory to a crime that almost killed me by the time it all came to an end - but on this particular Thanksgiving, I was 100% there for it. Beau stayed out on the porch to bond with BJ over a smoke, and I wound up tripping over a woman named Val, and her girlfriend Tina, who happened to be sitting on BJ’s throne and were right there in front of the TV, when we arrived that afternoon. Stationed there to stall Beau and keep him from getting wind of the fact that there were alcoholics in the house who were not in the mood to be anonymous, Val and Tina, were the only people in the place who hadn’t already retreated to the back bedroom to load up on vodka and pills.
We introduced ourselves to each other and I found out that the two of them had met, and fallen in love while they were in prison. Since that time they had been on probation, living in a homeless shelter, and working at a fruit stand, part time. Val was dressed in a Canadian Tuxedo, and Tina was wearing a sweat shirt with an air-brushed picture of a wolf and her cubs, over a pair of acid wash jeans. Both women were plump enough to fill up the couch, in their late forties, and high on something. It felt to me like they were on some kind of anti-depressant, or maybe Oxycodone because they had ‘the lights are on, but there’s nobody home’ look in their eyes. Even so, the minute I asked them what it was like to be in jail, they perked right up, and took turns telling me how they wound up there.
In the midst of their story telling, Crystal and the panhandlers filed into the kitchen, with a warm welcome and an announcement that we could line up and fill up our plates as soon as the green bean casserole was out of the oven. Hearing this, BJ squeezed through the slider and waddled past us, making his way over to the mashed potatoes, commenting on what a good job Crystal, who he always referred to as his “Baby Girl”, had done with the cooking. Taking on the air of the King of the Castle, he stood in the center of the kitchen and swept his right arm over the food in a gesture that for a split second made it seem as if he had something going for him, and that it was through his largesse that we were all about to sit down to this genetically modified, feast.
Beau never ate anything at these get togethers. His alimentary track was an internal maze of soft tissue that got tied up in knots whenever anything passed his lips. This condition made it impossible for him to eat anything, which had a lot to do with why he looked like a skeleton. His anorexia may have been a blessing in disguise at this particular event because everything at BJ and Crystal’s Thanksgiving buffet came out of a box that might as well have had a skull and crossbones etched on the label.
After a quick glance at my food choices, I decided the green bean casserole was the safest bet, poured myself a cup of coffee, and went over to squeeze in next to Val and Tina on the couch. Beau parked himself away from everyone on a stool near the fridge and smoked his way through the meal. Crystal and the Panhandlers unfolded some lawn chairs that were brought in for the occasion and seated themselves wherever they could find room between the TV and the couch. With all of the extra people, BJ was too big to fit in the house so he retreated to the porch with two plates of food and a super-size plastic cup full of vodka and Mountain Dew.
Needless to say, no one said Grace. Instead, we listened to Dickie, the homeless guy, tell us what it was like to panhandle for a living. By the time we sat down to eat, his girlfriend, Sandy, a slightly tarnished, but nice looking woman in her thirties, was too far gone to be social. Like the Door Mouse at the Mad Tea Party, whatever she was on, she kept nodding out. At intervals Sandy would snap to it, jump up, and head for the back room to refill everyone’s cups. Meanwhile Dickie, who I finally figured out was a Meth-head, kept the conversation rolling at a fast clip and regaled us with stories that made it seem as if being homeless was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Crystal was stiff and speechless. Wide-eyed and staring, every now and then she would go out to the porch to see if BJ needed anything, but her hostessing abilities had gone down the tubes along with her medication, and she had turned into a zombie. Holding my own on the couch, I kept looking over at Beau for a signal, or a sign, but there was nothing coming from his end of the room, where he lurked, slouched over his cigarettes looking dark and disturbed. Turning to Val and Tina for some sign of life, the two of them were totally out of it too. Like a giant pair of stuffed animals, they were staring straight ahead, their plates on their laps, and their eyes fixed on the altar of family photos, behind the TV.
Listening to Dickie’s motor-mouth go on and on about how much money he and Sandy were raking in down at the traffic light, trapped between Beau’s all-consuming darkness, and the prospect of joining BJ on the porch, it had to be in that moment that I finally saw what I was doing to myself, and had been doing to myself, for over forty years. To punctuate this epiphany, in the very same moment, Val rolled across my lap, her plate clutched tightly in her hands, sliding over my knees, down to my feet, and onto the floor with her bum up and her head planted face down into a cold pile of green bean casserole.
Beau didn’t make a move, or even a sound. Neither did BJ. Dickie kept rattling on, oblivious to anything but the sound of his own voice. Tina, Crystal, and Sandy were so completely anesthetized by whatever their cocktails contained that they might as well have been dead. Looking at Val, lying there, like a huge, denim clad manatee, I wondered if she might die of asphyxiation. Getting up to rearrange her head and keep the pile of casserole from blocking her breathing apparatus, I looked at Beau and said: “Should we call 911?” To which he replied, unmoved, and not the least bit surprised: “She does this all the time”.
Rolling her over on her side, I wiped Val’s face with my napkin and grabbed a pillow off the couch to put under her head. I could tell that she was breathing because I could hear a soft snuffling sound coming out of her nose. Beau got up to go to the Jon and while he was in it, my whole life flashed before me. Moved by an invisible force that had been there with me me since the day I was born, without waiting for him, I said goodbye to Dickie, stepped out onto the porch, thanked BJ for his hospitality, and got in the car and drove home.
Within a day or so, Beau showed up at my door ranting and raving about his life and needing more than I had to give him. Instead of twisting myself up in knots trying to be the answer to his prayers, I asked him to leave. Dumfounded, he looked at me and said, ‘What’s your problem?” To which I replied, “I finally woke up”. He said, “To what?” And I said, “To myself. It’s time for you to leave. Do me a favor and don’t come back”. I haven’t seen him since.
The Earth is a strange place. We get our lessons in weird ways and everyone has their own unique curriculum. Time, repetition, and experience are the only teachers here, and no one gets it right the first time. It took me sixty-nine years to find God and earn my PhD in places where one would least expect to find them. And I am here to give thanks to the spirits who were patient enough, and loved me enough, to keep an eye on my Soul through all of my mistakes until time and experience taught me enough about life and love to finally get the picture.
Copyright - Cal Garrison: 2019: ©
"The blue lake video"
I found my way to the Flower of Life work back in 1997. These teachings were being disseminated by Drunvalo Melchizedek. The essence of the Flower of Life work centers around the Mer-Ka-Ba meditation, and it is described in full in Drunvalo's first books, 'The Ancient Secret - The Flower of Life" Volumes I and II.
So taken by these mysteries, I got trained to be a Flower of Life Facilitator so that I could teach others how to do the Mer-Ka-Ba. After 5 years as a facilitator, I got an invitation to move from Vermont to Arizona to work as the Editor-in-Chief of Drunvalo's magazine, "The Spirit of Ma'at". In all the time that I taught and worked for him, what struck me most about Drunvalo was his gift as a story-teller. Many of you know about this and have had the opportunity to watch Drunvalo's videos. "The Story of England", "The Origins of Drunvalo", "The Ultimate Love Story" and many of his other videos have long been available, and are still in the public domain.
The one video that never made it into the public domain is called, "The Blue Lake Video". For some strange reason, it fell through the cracks, and I could never figure out why. I used to cook popcorn and pop it in the VCR on the last day of all my Flower of Life Workshops, because for me, it was the most amazing story Drunvalo ever told and I felt it was important for all of my students to see it. I have saved "The Blue Lake Video" and kept it with me for over twenty years. I have watched Drunvalo tell this story again and again.
Recently I had the "The Blue Lake Video" uploaded to a private link so that I could post it here and give those of you who have an interest in these things an opportunity to watch it. If you click on the link below you will be able to tune into a story that will open both your heart and your eyes, blow your mind, and that just might move you to tears. Enjoy!
1 Hour 30 Minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMUI2OfpxjE&feature=youtu.be
So taken by these mysteries, I got trained to be a Flower of Life Facilitator so that I could teach others how to do the Mer-Ka-Ba. After 5 years as a facilitator, I got an invitation to move from Vermont to Arizona to work as the Editor-in-Chief of Drunvalo's magazine, "The Spirit of Ma'at". In all the time that I taught and worked for him, what struck me most about Drunvalo was his gift as a story-teller. Many of you know about this and have had the opportunity to watch Drunvalo's videos. "The Story of England", "The Origins of Drunvalo", "The Ultimate Love Story" and many of his other videos have long been available, and are still in the public domain.
The one video that never made it into the public domain is called, "The Blue Lake Video". For some strange reason, it fell through the cracks, and I could never figure out why. I used to cook popcorn and pop it in the VCR on the last day of all my Flower of Life Workshops, because for me, it was the most amazing story Drunvalo ever told and I felt it was important for all of my students to see it. I have saved "The Blue Lake Video" and kept it with me for over twenty years. I have watched Drunvalo tell this story again and again.
Recently I had the "The Blue Lake Video" uploaded to a private link so that I could post it here and give those of you who have an interest in these things an opportunity to watch it. If you click on the link below you will be able to tune into a story that will open both your heart and your eyes, blow your mind, and that just might move you to tears. Enjoy!
1 Hour 30 Minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMUI2OfpxjE&feature=youtu.be
