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October 8, 2007

MINDSET First Chapter (prologue)

October 14, 2007 10:50 AM EDT (Updated: October 15, 2007 11:35 AM EDT)

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MINDSET - ACCIDENT OF BIRTH PROLOGUE The generals and the politicians reached an accord in January of 1973 and finally signed a cease-fire ending the official shooting war in Viet Nam. The prisoners of war were released in February of ‘73 to return to their homes, to get on with their lives and to seek a more peaceful existence. The last of the standing troops came home in March, many of them ashamed to have been there, fighting an unpopular skirmish in an ungrateful country. Many of the soldiers were confused and frustrated. All of them were glad to be back in the United States, glad to meld into civilization, into an ordered life, a life free from fear.The Ogallala Sioux, ensconced on their reservation in South Dakota, prolonged the dreariness of the harsh plains winter with protests, unyielding demands and threats to the peace in their homeland. They were reasonably quiet, by springtime, with negotiated settlements and once again ready to pursue lives, little changed from those they had led before the uprising. Many of them were glad to be left alone again, to go about their business as they had always done. The Watergate conspirators were exposed in the spring. Their misdeeds were widely publicized in the press. Most of the folks of the mid-west paid little heed to the matter and less to the people involved. Those that supported Mr. Nixon at election time continued to support him and his administration. They were driven to voice their support at the union hall and the corner tavern while others had less flattering words to describe the man and the events. In May, the Senate began its interminable debate until finally the scandal was laid to rest. The residents of the lower east side of St. Louis, Missouri were glad to get their young men and women back from the vagaries of war and the jungles of Viet Nam. They were mildly interested in the uprising at Wounded Knee but largely unaffected and only a few noticed when the incident faded from their TV screens and the headlines. A few of the denizens were markedly more interested in the Watergate affair. The men were especially elated as the big shots, the bureaucrats were slated to spend some time in jail for their crimes. They were smug because so many of the local boys were wards of the prison system, victims of their environment, caught and incarcerated for much less important violations of the law. Things were almost back to normal in St. Louis on the Saturday before Mother's Day, except for the weather. It was unseasonably warm while the moist earth and the Mississippi River contributed humidity to the air and created a day that, by midmorning, was much like one in late July. The incessant sun broiled down on the community, unfiltered, unabated by clouds. It softened the tar in the cracks of the city streets so the car tires made ‘snikety’ sounds as they passed. It baked the apartments, or the tenements as some were called and the inner-city houses to the point that windows were agape to the top their sashes. Most of the adults were outdoors sitting on concrete steps, porches, iron railings and on the curbs. The kids ran around, as kids do, taunting each other, playing in the gutters and eating Popsicles; sweating profusely. The sun wilted the flowers and dulled the edges of the Mother's Day preparations that didn’t amount to much in a community that had little money for gifts and none for eating out. The hot rays warmed the black iron accordion barriers that protected the windows and doors of the shops around the commercial center of the community. The pawnshops, shoe stores, liquor outlets, drug emporiums and most of the other stores were open as usual. Their iron grills screened the sun while they served notice to the would-be thieves and vandals that thoughts of foul play would be stymied with hard steel. The grocery stores were open and doing an energetic bit of business in soft drinks, ice cream and junk food. One particular part of St. Louis was once a thriving industrial center. Its factories poured out products for American consumers by the tons. They employed most of the eligible males in the neighborhood and paid them a decent wage. The workers were of multi-ethnic backgrounds whose income was spent on survival needs with little to spare except for an occasional draft beer with the boys. The racial mix in the community caused an uneasy air of tenuous tolerance. The young people gravitated into gangs, their membership determined by race. The gangs practiced anarchy although none understood the term. They were mostly occupied with turf protection as though their bit of the miserable landscape had some value. The older residents married early and took great pride in their fertility. They often produced families whose needs exceeded their means. As their offspring aged they worked at the same jobs, occupied the same dingy rooms and the same buildings. They seldom left the area, even as the factories closed and the jobs dissolved in the effluent of society. Many of them existed only on the benevolence of their neighbors, on the welfare programs and on the results of their late night raids on the more fortunate. They worked at short-term menial jobs. They loitered on the streets and sidewalks to wile away meaningless lives and to mingle with others whose dwellings were less pleasant than their own. They gravitated into self-protective groups to insulate themselves from the growing numbers of militant malcontents, the youth who resorted to theft, mugging and vandalism to vent their frustrations and to obtain the wherewithal to buy drugs and the ultimate escape. Most of the residents of East St. Louis were caring people caught in the vortex of ignorance and decreasing incomes fueling still more ignorance and poverty. Those were the people who were most appalled on a hot Saturday in 1973. It was an almost normal day except for the heat and for the construction paper greeting cards the youngsters had made in school for their Moms and had hidden away in the dingy corners of battered bedrooms. Things were normal right through the afternoon and up until dusk. It was then when things went bad, really bad. A scream filled with terror and intermingled with pain parted the stagnant pool of humid air like a shark’s dorsal. The sound came from the throat of a woman and carried with it an unmistakable terror. The scream grew in intensity and power until its edge, honed by hysteria, cut its way into the consciousness of the loiterers and the passersby. It was a sound that carried far more distant than science would have predicted. It was a desperate sound borne by forces unknown to man and possessed of the power to arrest motion. It brought everyone within its sphere of energy to a sudden stop. It demanded their attention. It took precedence over the conversation and over the stereo speakers blasting rock and roll into the streets. The second scream was less powerful than the first but it brimmed with a larger serving of agony. It cascaded down the canyons of brick buildings, rebounded from glass storefronts and metal car bodies. It filled the voids of silence left by its predecessor and it rammed life back into the horrified souls standing in stunned silence. It caused heads to swivel in search of the source. It elicited motion in some, driving the brave to move toward the place of its origin and the meek toward the most distant haven from it. The third scream contained the elements of waning strength, of despair and of capitulation. It was a sound different from its sisters, one forbidden to human ears and seldom heard even in a hardened community of veteran survivors. It was the sound of dying. It spewed from the mouth of an alleyway that was just south of the Old Time Tavern and across from the U-Save second hand store and pawnshop. It was a sound that jolted four men and a woman into action leading them to the alley where the neighbor, who was lying there, unable to scream again, would have need of them. The alley was a narrow one. It was a canyon, open to the street, walled on both sides by three stories of filthy, crumbling brick. The canyon channeled a river of refuse. Broken glass, rusted cans, newspapers, wrappers and containers of every imaginable human consumable. A mattress resided there—a grotesque form of discarded padding, suppurating puffs of gray cotton, spewing molding, rotten cloth from reddish stains and blackened holes. There were old and new condoms lying shriveled among the debris and unsanitary sanitary pads that were marked with congealed matter, both bearing evidence to desperate couplings that happened there. There were orbs of bright orange scattered amid the filth, incongruous with the grays and browns, pure and out of place. There were six of these, their pocked skins reflecting their wholesome color and their promise of nutritious juices synthesized from sunlit orchards. The fruit lay in a random broken path leading to a torn grocery bag, an unharmed box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, a dented can of pork and beans, a frozen turkey pot pie in its aluminum dish and a loaf of brown bread, enriched with vitamins. The violated bag laid just beyond the reach of the sprawled and bleeding body of a young woman, her belly distended by an unborn fetus, eyes agape and staring but filmed over with a grayish veil, pupils dilated, limbs flung outward like a discarded Raggedy Ann doll. She was a black woman, her mouth open in a grimace of pain, her last, unexpressed, unheard, caught in the depths of her soul, her lungs incapable of surfacing the terror that once dwelled there. The body was inert except for the bumpy expanse of flesh pulsating with a river of blood snaking through the folds of a cotton blouse. A garment, once Christmas red but now rapidly darkening in ever increasing area around the bulbous breasts, swollen with mother's milk intended for the little person that was unmoving in her lower abdomen. The woman's right arm lay almost touching the rotten mattress. Her breast was exposed, its nipple limp and retracted amid the bloody lace of a red bra. Most of her right breast was covered with fresh arterial blood as it flopped in an unnatural way as though it was flung there from a distance. It was lying flaccid, almost separated from the body, the whitish viscera undulating in liquid red. It had been partially ripped away by a violent, merciless force. A garden tool with a red handle and four sharpened tines, bent like an eagle’s talons was lying on the edge of the filthy mattress. Its gleaming cadmium prongs were coated with coagulating blood and something else that defied description. The five rescuers raced into the alley spurred by the unknown juices that drive certain people to become heroes, eager to be of help, to come to the aide of one of their own. These champions rushed in while others scurried away to shelter, to security or to obscurity. One young man, alien in that neighborhood, was already well away from the grisly scene, the one near the tavern. He was hunkered down in another alley, insulated from the aftermath of the screams that disrupted the daily lives of the folks who resided in the lower east side. This distant alley was similar to the first. It too was a space between two buildings. The one on the right was once a neighborhood grocery, now closed as a result of the competition offered by the added convenience and lower prices at the newly opened Red Owl super market just up the street. The building was boarded up at the front, the entryway littered with debris. The alley-side was a solid wall of tarpaper embossed with a brick pattern and embedded with brown colored sand. The siding was torn away in big gaping wounds exposing black paper flesh and rotting sheathing boards. The opposite building had been converted to an auto body shop. The sign above the dingy, glass storefront simply proclaimed, " Fred's Auto Body and Glass." The alley-side wall was reddish brown, brittle asbestos siding, overlapped and cracked, with some of the corners broken away. A padlock secured to the office door was evidence of business hours ended and a harried owner who had gone home for the evening. The hour was late, the sun hung lower in the sky now, casting black shadows, night-like, into the alley. The shadows obscured the piles of car parts, mufflers, tailpipes, bumpers, bent and rusting, a bucket seat, twisted and blood stained. The scattering of alley trash, the rotting paper, garbage and discarded containers lost their identities, became inconsequential amid the mounds of steel and chrome and upholstery. Piles of dog feces added the aroma of decadence and attracted the flies that brought a soft buzzing to the scene. The back of the alley was closed by a high chain link fence standing sentry to ward off any casual visitor from dropping by Fred's back lot where bent and battered patients were lined up waiting for Fred's practiced surgical procedures. The fence, the abandoned grocery and the pile of body parts formed a protective haven at the rear of the alley. A warm place, quiet, private, secure, a womb, separate and hidden from the real world. It was a perfect place where a young man could be alone. Mark Gilbert, a 16 year old, white male was hunched over in the dark, quiet corner. He was a silhouette of blackness in the shadows. His denim pants, black T-shirt and scuffed brown wing tips blended with the shadows. His tanned face and arms were pale gray in the dim light but still obscured from the view of passers by. His supple body was bent backward at the knees and forward at the waist. His torso was tensed to stiffness, leaning forward as though to examine something on the ground. The head of tousled brown hair, long and greasy, was an extension of the torso perched on a stump of thick muscle that pulsed at the distended carotid artery. The eyes, almost totally black, stared intently at a section of wall, inspecting a spot barren of its black asphalt shroud, the black tar paper edges showing ragged boundary and the weathered boards sketching a pattern of wood grain in blended grays. A single black ant policed the area. It was carrying something and didn’t seem know what to do with it. Gilbert focused on the insect. His mind saw images of bright red funnels that formed at the vertex, expanded in rings like ripples on a pond until they burst around the thing the ant carried. The funnels formed and burst again and again intime with his rapid breathing. The constant buzz of hordes of flies feeding on the buffet of dog shit was the orchestral background music to the guttural human sounds. It was a puffing noise of short, quick breaths, syncopated with a light slapping sound like gentle waves breaking on the side of an anchored rowboat. The odor was of urine, feces, motor oil, decay and sweat. The young man's jeans hung open at the waist with flaps splayed out and down from the lower ends of the fly. Both of Gilbert's hands were buried in his crotch. The left hand held his scrotum tenderly in a bloody nest while his right hand pumped and slapped and punished his distended penis in a rhythm that matched his spastic breathing. It took a long time it seemed, for the boy's nerve endings to separate the pain from the sexual stimulation of abrasion on the raw end of his penis. When climax finally occurred, the spasm of ejaculation jerked his body erect and caused the spurt of white seminal fluid to splash against the wall, centered on the bare spot, blackening the gray wood. A long, low moan spewed forth from the boy's mouth and dissipated in the buzz of the flies and the humid air of the alley. The impossibly red funnels stopped forming and Gilbert’s eyes left the ant to its labors. Mark took a deep breath as he fastened the metal snap at his waist. He stretched backward slightly and drew in his abs as he poked his beaten organs into his jeans and pulled the zipper home. He thrust his hands into his pockets and hunched his body forward. The deprecating posture pulled his head down to nest between raised shoulders. He scuffed his way to the opening of the alley, looked both ways, turned right, passed the body shop and walked along the broken concrete sidewalk, scuffing his heels like his mother told him never to do. The sirens whooped and blared from three blocks to his rear and a block north. The sounds bounced off his hunched back, reflected, not powerful enough to penetrate his consciousness. As the Gilbert boy shuffled south on the sidewalk that was a path of heaved and shattered slabs of ancient concrete, he made a point of stepping on the cracks (to break his mother's back?). The distance increased and his head began to rise on its muscular pedestal, his shoulders fell gradually, his back straightened and a grin spread across his tanned, young face. The boy came alive like Pinocchio might have done, gradually, metamorphosing from a stiff, wooden marionette to a pliable human form, bouncing. Mark Gilbert began to feel really good about himself.