Crank

Marty II was crying as she talked on the phone when I wandered out into the heat and across the concrete of the pool deck. Loren was listening impassively to the news, which had just arrived via a distinctive ring-tone from a residence in New Jersey about a death in Texas .

The sun was brilliant, and there was a breeze that moved some of the air over the blue water of the pool, cooling it marginally. The chlorine and turquoise tile gave it the aspect of the waters near the Maldive Islands , once a component of British India , and quite independent when the warship I lived on exercised the right of innocent passage to cut through its lovely waters.

Marty had tears in her eyes when she closed the flip-phone. She had two phones with her, and both continued to jingle with distinctive ring-tones. Her wireless landline could still connected to the base-station in her unit the overlooked the sparkling water.

“I might have been the last to talk to him,” she said. “He never unpacked. He always goes to the ranch on Fridays, and he always checked in with me. He was slurring his words, and I thought he might be drunk. He was dying.”

The story flowed like a river someone describes, placid at turns, then turbulent as it drops quickly. I got part of it as an unwilling participant on her side of a dozen or so conversations. Sometimes they happened simultaneously on the handsets.

“Was he Christian?” I asked, when there was a lull. “That would affect the timing of the funeral if he wasn’t.”

She misted up again. She said he signed his e-mail as her Goy Toy. I thought it was ambivalent, but I kept my mouth shut.

“It might have to be soon, then” said Loren, turning on her lounge. The funeral was to be in Texas , and the only way to work the logistics was a private jet. Marty put on her cover-up and went back to her unit to work on arrangements. She was supposed to take Jack for eye surgery this week, and obviously he couldn’t drive, and there was an important business call that had to be re-scheduled.

The sun was hot enough to soften the rubber of my flip-flops. It took me two plunges in the pool to get through an article on the methamphetamine abuse crisis. The Newsweek was a couple weeks old, so I was not sure if the drug was still the crisis de jour. But it was certainly bad enough that I got a chill despite the heat.

The drug gives users the illusion of invulnerability, and superhuman strength and enhanced sexual prowess. Apparently the drug also corrodes the teeth, and now there are serious un-programmed dental expenses in the prisons. Some inmates cannot chew the food.

The Emergency Rooms are filled with burn victims, since the stuff can be made by rendering ordinary household chemicals at high heat. It is very combustible, and high as kites, the users are blow-torching themselves at an alarming rate.

They also call the stuff crank, since the outlaw bikers who pioneered its production used to hide it in the crank-cases of their Harley-Davidson motorcycles. The more I read of the ravages of crank, the more it seemed oddly familiar.

The strangers who come and go by the side door near my unit certainly meet the profile.

I wondered if there was something going on in the building, something we wouldn’t normally consider. Maybe an illegal meth lab in one of the units, a covert place to cook things. The men I saw were scruffy and nervous–looking, like they had not slept in a long time but were far too busy for grooming.

I blinked at the brightness, and decided to read another article before taking the dog for his mid-day break. I did not think he would last long in the heat. I looked at the Post, which featured a desultory recap of the disconcerting slow-motion avalanche.

I had to rectify the old Newsweek article with the Sunday compilation of woes. The Cypriot airliner had probably crashed not because of terrorism, but from the failure of the cabin pressurization system. I thought darkly that the cause of de-pressurization could be any number of things, but the news was upbeat about the death of the hundred-odd tourists. It was only a maintenance failure, not terrorism.

The Drug Czar was in trouble because he had deemed marijuana the number one threat to America ‘s Youth. It seemed pretty obvious that was not the case. Crystal Meth has the direct effect of melting the users, apparently tens of thousands of them. There was a picture of a young woman with lovely hair whose features appeared to have sagged like a chocolate bunny left out in the sun. I never heard that to be the case with pot.

I guess that is a problem with a ponderous government. It gets locked into policies that are perhaps well-intentioned, but wrong. The Drug Czar is concerned that marijuana is a gateway drug.

Don’t worry about the gateway, I thought. Worry about the inferno that is happening beyond it. Sometimes even when the Feds are trying to do the right thing, the village idiot could tell them they are wrong.

I saw a bumper sticker about village idiots, and that somewhere one was missing one. I don’t recall precisely what the punch-line was.

The FBI was supposed to be helping to break up the distribution rings and share the information from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the local police. But the Feds seem paralyzed at the moment. The Bureau is under attack from the Judiciary Committee, the thunder somewhat muted by the moist sodden blanket of humidity.

Most of the arguments are stale; the failed Information Technology update is old news, but even the staffers who generate point papers must take a break, as do the reporters who generate the stories.

Alice Fisher, the nominated prospective chief of the FBI Criminal Division, is being held hostage in the Senate. The confirmation game that seems so fifteen-minutes ago in the larger struggle over Judge Roberts.

The job is arguably the most important in the old Core Bureau, the one that helped lock up traffickers, but that is old-think. The establishment of a domestic intelligence service is something Director Mueller has been artfully trying to duck. That is the stick that Senator Arlen Specter is using as a bludgeon in the Post.

I understand that Ms Fisher is on the pillory because of a meeting she may or may not have attended and a memo that might or might not have been signed approving exception measures in questioning some of the detainees in Guantanamo .

It is an imperfect way of governing, but as Mr. Churchill observed, the ponderous motion of democracy is preferable to all others. Particularly in Washington in August. I felt myself getting light-headed and turned over. Marty came back, and said the man who died was 47 years old and he had five wonderful children.

It looked like a private jet to Love Field in Dallas would be the way to go.

My nose just fit between the plastic yellow rope of the pool chair and it smelled like an old garden hose. They say that this weather system is beginning to break up, the temperatures will plummet ten degrees this week, and the inexorable movement toward the summer’s funeral pyre of Labor Day will sweep over us in the mouse-click of the Microsoft Outlook calendar. Then it will be on to the fun and games of the Autumn, and the return of the turkey vultures to the dome of the Capitol.

This was the only way I could find to commemorate the twin observance of the end of the war with Japan , and the creation of the states of India and Pakistan. The Raj of the  British King-Emperor always had a fascination for me, and I found the midnight deadline under which Viscount Mountbatten labored to be a curious thing, leaving large and unhappy minorities in each dominion.

I squirmed on the yellow recliner, slick with sweat. I was going to have to get up and get the dog outside or there was going to be trouble. I could imagine his deep chocolate eyes beseeching me for relief.

The Green Line of division was never completed. At midnight on the 14th of August, 1947, it trickled out in the foothills to the glorious mountains, and thus leading to the continuing crisis of Kashmir . It is interesting that the last Viceroy did not consult the court astrologer, or perhaps the Indian Civil Service had abolished the position.

The Hindus would have told him- they noted it at the time- that there was an inauspicious mating of the stars on Aug.15. The matter received little notice in the West, and Nehru and the rest were eager to get on with independence.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, the architect of freedom, chose to spend his independence day with the Muslim poor of Calcutta . It must have been hot there.

Just before three, I threw in my towel. The dog was efficient in his business, and we were back in the coolness of the air conditioned unit in less than a half hour. I turned on the television to see what had happened in the PGA. There was an update on CNN about the eviction of the Israeli settlers from Gaza .

Then the dog and I settled down to watch the golfers sweat out the course in New Jersey .

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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