Uhm, No, Before That

Before I get started, a little housekeeping. First, to keep Yoast SEO happy, painful claws. Next, I started this post while it was still too hot to stay at home. It was still summer. I don’t have air conditioning. My house gets hot. 90°F outside and my house will also be 90°F.  Tucker was published before this one. So while I’ve edited this post to fit its place in the blog it was originally written as the episode before Tucker.

You need to know this because the conversation below happened in August. Losing my job was fresh. It’s November 2018 as I continue working on this post. Being fired is old news. Tucker was written last week, in October, when my world shifted to my old trade of cab driving. I added the wrinkle of starting a small business.

That’s some backstory to help you understand the conversation below, that is published in November when the events in it happened in the summer and precede the Tucker post.  Confused? So am I. Let’s get on with it.

Cat Scratch Post

The kitten is just playing. My forearm is an imaginary mouse trying to get away. Ow. Painful claws. Inger keeps coming over with more stuff related to her meddling in the investigation of the finger she found in the whip. My spare bedroom was clean. I gave the bed away. That’s done. Why does it take three houses to investigate an abandoned car? Why does one of those houses have to be mine? Can I have my extra room back? The kitten feels that she needs my extra bedroom for her investigation. Feelings, lately, have become irrefutable facts. So the need for my extra bedroom is now an irrefutable fact.

Where I had a clean room there is now an olive green, four drawer filing cabinet, a mid-century task chair that looks military surplus, a desk that isn’t a desk, more like one of those tables I remember from metal shop in high school, and a twin bed covered in expensive cotton bedding with an eruption of pillows.

All the man-cave feels of my house are being disrupted. It even smells nice. Luscious Pumpkin Trifle? Seriously?

✠ ✠ ✠

This happened: I’m not working at Altria anymore. I haven’t told Inger/kitten. But . . . she’s making dirty dishes as I type this in the kitchen. Wait. Do I have an espresso machine? When did that happen? Now she knows, “when did you lose your job?”

Last summer.

“How do you lose your job. I thought you were this awesome enterprise computer tech dude. Who loses a job like that. Are you stupid?”

I kinda want to talk about fingers in whips.

“No. We are talking about you losing your job.”

I don’t know. It was Friday, my bosses boss calls me and says that Altria asked that I be let go. No explanation and I had 5 minutes to get my stuff together before being walked out of the building.

“So . . . you are not awesome? Any idea why they let you go?”

No clue. The only thing is my running fight with a guy I nicknamed “banana slug” on this blog.

“What did your boss say?”

That it was an HR matter now.

“Oh. Yeah, you pissed somebody off.”

Probably. Anyway, I’m self-employed now.

“What do you mean?”

You were still living on Stewart Street when I set up Baugh Holding Company in 2016. It was a paper tiger until I lost my job. I got discouraged and threw away the paperwork.

“What the fuck!? I don’t understand. How do you lose your job if . . . unless you have been lying to me about doing well there. And . . . why would you throw away the company’s paperwork?”

✠ ✠ ✠

Can we talk about your case?

“Nope. Not done yet. Ok, what’s Baugh Holding Company? And you didn’t answer my question–are you a liar?”

Truth? Baugh Holding Company is a way for me to do the money right with my various revenue streams and whims.

“Answer me. Were you lying to me about Altria?”

No. I had problems but they weren’t the sort of things that get one fired.

“That sounds sketch. Somebody isn’t telling the whole truth.”

Maybe so. Nobody said anything other than, “it’s an HR issue.”

“So you call yourself self-employed and the company is Baugh Holding Company?”

Kinda. Baugh Holding Company owns other businesses that make money. Right now it’s Transit Webb, an UberX Rideshare Partner (3ea79). I have other ideas in the pipeline.

“And that’s enough to keep this place going?”

I hope so. So far, yes.

“You better. I’m not carrying you. Is that what you’ve been doing weekend nights?”

Yes. I’ve booked $2300.00 since I started full time.

“That’s not a lot. I hope it gets better.”

Agreed. Inger missed her calling. Her cappuccino looks awesome, “So, what’s up with the case?”

“Not much.”

Right. Since returning to UberX as my job, I am taking Sunday through Wednesday off. It’s Tuesday morning. I’m not expecting anybody. There is a big door knock on my front door. A cop door knock, “Mr. Webb, are you home?”

Officer Harris

Fuck. What now? The kitten suddenly gets a look on her face and disappears out the back door.

Kitten has a court appearance for her assault arrest after the thing at Black Hand Coffee. AFAIK she’s not wanted. So her quick exit out my back door is odd. Officer Harris is at the front door with another cop I recognize from when that guy got shot and died in a neighbor’s backyard.

I open the front door, “Hey, Khalid, how are you?”

“Good. Is Inger here?”

“She just left?”

“Mind if I come inside?” Now, he’s a cop and needs a search warrant but I don’t mind so I open the door wider and let him in. My house is 670 sq ft. You can search it in a couple of minutes even if you toss the bed.

“3624, the resident stated that the suspect just left,” The radio crackles an acknowledgment.  We are in the kitchen and I sense a flurry of activity in the alley. “3624, the alley between east 15th Street and East 16th, an officer needs assistance.” If that’s Inger this isn’t good.

Officer Harris radios, “3624″, as he hurries out my back door.

Inger’s Ghost

Inger was gone for a week after that. There was a local news story about a woman being arrested in connection with a murder investigation. I ran into Inger again on a Monday. She was in the line at the Urban Farmhouse in Scott’s Addition. I was there for coffee and their WiFi so I could write. I tried to get her attention and after giving me a hard stare she pulled out her phone and dived into it. I’d been ghosted.

Two weeks later I saw her in her front yard at the 16th Street house murdering the overgrown plants that had infested her chain link fence. This wasn’t a kind pruning. This was a plant genocide. I stopped the car, “Inger, what’s up?”

Through sweat drenched bangs, “Nothing. How are you?”

“Good good. Any news on the finger case?”

“Not really. The DNA came back and Charles was in the car. It’s not clear if he’s a perpetrator or a victim.”

“Oh ok. Keep in touch, ok?”

“Yeah. Take it easy.”

“You too,” and I drive off.

Black Hand Trouble

Then at the end of August, the kitten started spending more time at my house. She hadn’t found anyone who could fix the weird problem with her TV where it would show tweets about her that could only come from someone that knew her. Not a smart TV so that’s not it. And in a panic, she disconnected the TV from the way, the Internet, the cable box, everything. And yet it displays tweets that defy explanation. So, there is that.

I dunno. A lot of the way she acts towards me feels like more than just a safe space. I don’t think she’s got Daddy issues, but who knows. Her Mom is the big ovary, Momma Grizzly Bear type. Very helicopter. The Stuart Avenue place was her Mom’d doing. Dad works in DC for Altria on tobacco products. He’s up there a bunch. So, maybe not “my Daddy abandoned me” the way I hear it in my neighborhood. But mayhaps.

Things had been quiet with her until Black Hand Coffee happened. A little Patsy Cline to close out this post:

Black Hand Coffee

I picked up Inger from Tucker. She was hanging out with friends at Black Hand Coffee and had a breakdown. She started out explaining the abandoned car that was in front of my house last spring. In short order, it turned to a story about the car belonging to Donald Trump.

Prezzy Darling, she said, stole the car to escape the Secret Service and hook up with her at her East 16th Street house. The drugs and money the cops found belonged to the Donald. Ditto the used condom.

Then . . . she got triggered. There was a guy in line for coffee at Black Hand who had a scant resemblance to the Donald. Not Trump, obvi, but with Inger, once she launches there is no stopping her. She bolted from her table and ran up to the guy, trying to jump into his arms, “Donny!! What’s Up!”

False Positive

Dude was stunned. Total deer in headlights. He didn’t catch her, Inger stumbled into the coffee counter and hit her head, “why didn’t you catch me, Prezzy Darling!? I thought we were a thing!”

Inger touched her scalp and saw the blood on her fingers, “what did you do?” Dude didn’t, but now he was caught up in Inger’s reality distortion field, “DONALD!! Are you trying to kill me!?” He was not. Black Hand Coffee just become a crime scene.

Some of the cafe customers started to rush the guy believing Inger’s accusing tone of voice. There was some pushing and shoving as opposing narratives embodied were litigated in the cafe. The barrista pulled on the hand of Dude and both of them headed for the kitchen at the back.

Not the Donald

Friends of Inger sat her down away from the guy. There are cell phone videos and it’s clear that Inger is the aggressor.  Someone in the cafe called the cops to report an assault.

Officer Khalid Harris got there in a half-hour. It took another ninety minutes to collect statements and fill out the police report. Inger was still amped so her statement didn’t make sense. She still thought Dude was the Donald and that he had tried to kill her by shoving her into the coffee counter. Khalid listened to her and quietly requested medical transport, ‘Khalid! What the fuck!? I’m the victim here. That guy tried to kill me! What are you doing! I’ll have your job! Fucking asshole!” And so on.

Inger was cuffed, searched and placed in a transport van while they waited for the ambulance. That just enraged Inger so they had to pull her from the van, pepper spray her and put her in a hobble. All on YouTube with the usual recriminations about how the cops are brutal, uncaring asshats.

Broken Windows

The Twitter Outrage mob kicked into high gear. The evening after Inger was hauled away there was a mob that threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at Black Hand Coffee. They finished the night on Monument Boulevard chanting, “No Justice, No Peace” on the median near the J.E.B. Stuart memorial. 3 arrests were made. Black Hand Coffee suffered some broken windows and a bit of charring from the Molotov cocktails.

CBS-6 interviewed one of the protestors who claimed that Black Hand Coffee was a racist cafe oppressing minorities. This was based on the name and an unchallenged assumption that Inger was brown and a lesbian. When the reporter tried to tell the protestor he was incorrect he shoved her in the face. The protestor also attacked the photographer. Riot over at that point. RPD stepped in and began pushing the crowd away from the J.E.B. Stuart memorial.

I drove by Black Hand this week. They are open. The broken windows are boarded up and the char scrubbed off the tan brick.

Sugar Cookie Finger

Inger is out. I picked her up last Monday. In her things were some summons charging her with assault and public intoxication. She’d stopped taking her meds because she was feeling good.  That bomb kept ticking all summer. Then she started talking about Halloween and it got weirder. Then Black Hand Coffee. The Secret Service said, “meh.” They looked into what Inger was saying and dismissed it.

Now, the finger. I’m in the First Precinct. Inger’s Stuart Avenue house is in the Third. She’s created her own cross precinct footprint within the police department. The finger is in the hands of RPD and is evidence. Inger has Officer Harris’ card. She’s convinced that the Russian Mafia had something to do with the abandoned whip and that it is connected to the Donald. Officer Harris is convinced that Inger needs better meds. Inger is on the Secret Service’s radar now, though.

Officer Harris came to my house and spent a half-hour asking me what I knew about the whip and Inger. I pointed him to the two prior blog posts on the story: Inger’s Finger and No Pulse, Just a Finger.  Khalid said they had DNA from the whip and were investigating. It’s not clear who the stray finger belonged to.

Bougie Breakfast

So, Inger . . . has turned her East 16th Street house into her own private detective office. She doesn’t have the evidence that the cops have so she’s been using her social connections to follow up leads. This is not making friends and influencing people within RPD. I mentioned Inger to Khalid and he let out a snort then an annoyed look flashed across his face. He doubled down, “we are looking into it.”

I’m writing this from my desk in the extra bedroom. Door knock. I hear the back door unlock. It’s her, “Alan I’m hungry.”

Kitten has a dry pantry you could eat out of for a  year. She throws away food in her fridge because it’s gone bad. The last time I was over there her trash was full of Chinese takeout containers.  She had wings and veggie fried rice circled on East Villa’s menu, “And you want me to cook?”

“I mean, if you want to.”

Not Cooking Today

“There is plenty of stuff in the fridge, help yourself,” I guess I didn’t want to fast enough. Inger gives me a dirty look and then starts opening and slamming closed the few cabinets I have in my galley kitchen. She bangs pots and pans as she works. My stove has a drawer on the oven that makes a satisfying bang if you aren’t careful closing it. She wasn’t careful.

It’s 11 am on a Monday, my day off. Since getting fired in August I’ve been working six days a week doing Uber and Lyft. I was up at 6:30 as usual and ate breakfast then.

I find this interesting. On Stuart Avenue everything is pretty. Nothing is ever out of place. The fridge is immaculate. Everything came from either Whole Foods or Ellwood Thompson’s. Inger tells me that her Mom and her people take care of Stuart Avenue. If she was there she could get her Mom’s chef to cook for her and it would be lovely. 16th Street? Not so much.

Wingz

And this is the thing for Inger. She wants something of her own. Something she made. It would be so easy to slip into her lane, use her Gender and Sexuality Studies minor and Political Science major to work on K-Street, hook up with Charles, and slow walk through a career in lobbying, some kids, and retirement with a nice GS5 pension. All that went away when Inger lost her shit and claimed that a co-worker raped her. Plus, the stench of Charles still lingers on Stuart Avenue.

East 16th Street is a dump. It smells of hickory smoke, greens, and bacon. For the neighborhood it’s bougie. But Inger is from Old Gun Road. Her Mom thinks the house is a dump. This pleases Inger. Plus, the neighbors don’t really care what goes on inside her house.

She made two french omelets, “You are out of eggs. I made Orange Juice. Hungry? ” she asks me while doing something on her phone.

Not really, but the omelet looks good. Again with the tablecloth, cloth napkins, and service from Saks. Inger has upped her toothbrush game to include one of my kitchen cabinets. I seem to be the middle path between antiseptic and photogenic Stuart Avenue and chicken wings East 16th Street.

Stray Finger

“What’s the latest on the stray finger?”

“Khalid is looking into some leads that point to Charles. I hope so. Asshole.”

Chuck E Cheese, last I heard, was off the radar in Taipei competing in Fortnite. Inger is good there, “what points to Charles?”

“The cops found an ac adapter for an XBox One and some dandruff. I had a swab of the back seat that I paid to have analyzed. Some of the DNA matched Charlie boy. He’s in ancestry.com. Creepy bastard.” You can say the evidence points to him being in the whip at some point. It doesn’t explain the expired New Jersey temporary tags or the pile of fast food leftovers with a receipt from Earl of Sandwich. “Plus, I found evidence of blood all over the way-back. I couldn’t get a sample, though.”

“Topic change. How are you? That was a pretty nasty scab on your scalp.” I haven’t heard anything more from the local news about what happened at Black Hand Coffee. Inger seems to have let it go except for the cut on her scalp, “I’m good. Scalp cuts bleed a lot so they look worse than they are. I got a couple of stitches and have to go to my doctor next week.”

“How about your meds?”

“Yeah, uhm, can you take me to the pharmacy? It’s CVS on West Broad at Boulevard.” Sure. Woo. Inger didn’t clean as she cooked. I don’t bother to ask who is washing dishes. I already know. Dirty dishes in the sink for just us two. I start to wash up. That gets me a hug.

Dotty Postage

You won’t get the reference unless you are old enough to remember Herb Caen. No worries. I’ve been trying since early April to find more to say about five stars. I got 600 words or so. So . . . like Herb I’m just going to be adhd about it and mash together a few shorter ideas into this post.

Working With a Brahmin Five Stars

First, an apology. It’s been a couple months since I posted anything in this space. I pay my bills with a job called Deskside Support. What that means in practice is that I get work because something is fucked up. Most of the fuckups are things that can be fixed in forty hours and the stakeholders are our clients. These last two months have been ass-puckering for my bosses because they got caught out covering for a couple coworkers who had patronage jobs.

I’m not used to working alongside someone who has a job because he has attributes that fit the current fashunabull identities. Nor am I used to someone who is effectively tenured because they fall into the right adjectives and are friends with someone important enough to protect them from layoffs. Until this job. Holy crap. It hasn’t happened yet. But, I swear, these two swinging dicks could be caught fucking each other on a table in the cafeteria and nothing would come of it.

I’ve had two months of late nights at work dealing with the fallout of these two princes. Self care things like working out and cooking for myself so I don’t eat crap have been ignored. Too many nights I get home, change into pajamas, and crawl under the covers to wait for dawn. I’m in a cafe writing tonight because if I don’t I’ll do something self-destructive. So . . . moving on.

Five Stars

Five Stars is a thing. The thing is, it’s gotten silly. Every place that has a presence on Yelp wants to get a five-star rating from you. So many that a five-star rating has become stupid.

I stay at the Paradise Hotel in the Valley. I have a room over the Last Chance Saloon. The Paradise Hotel has a five-star rating from TripAdvisor. We are a spring break destination because of Saito-San. Those five stars come from the cheap well-drink prices, generous happy hour and indifferent attitude of Saito-San towards bacchanal.

Pro-Tip: If you are married, married with children, this is not the hotel for you. It is a dump. The maids clean every few days. You can’t tell. The sheets are threadbare. The rooms that don’t have bedbugs stink of pesticide. Don’t drink the water. The most reliable toilet is the outhouse in the alley. You get the idea.

Not Your Paradise Hotel

The Paradise Hotel’s 5-Star Rating is a joke. The Valley is a shit-show. Saito-San has had a blood feud with the cartels for a decade. Waking up to a body in the street is a regular occurrence. You can find feces along the curbs near the hotel. The alley beside the hotel stinks of piss, shit, and puke.  Behind Saito-San’s gas station is an outhouse littered with used needles. It’s not safe here. People get hurt.

So . . . what’s up with that 5-Star rating? We are a spring break destination. People come here to get drunk and screw. One month out of the year we grow from a few hundred regulars to nearly ten-thousand. For that month we are a vibrant, pulsating mass of partying youth. Gringo prices for a room at the Paradise will run you 400 pesos a night off-season. During spring break it will be at least 1500 pesos per night. We charge the parents $250/night for room and board. Liquor is extra. For your 1500 pesos, though, we keep the Last Chance Saloon open. The hotel buffet is open 24/7. Good stuff.

We are also a 5-star missional tourism destination. We put on quite a show for the white-monkeys who show up in their chartered buses from churches like the New Pentecostal Deliverance Evangelical Bible Outreach Center. They build houses, churches, and wells we tear down after they leave. They feed the starving children. We don’t have to buy toiletries, socks or underwear. And certain of their leadership has a running tab at the Last Chance Saloon.

A Dollar a Day

Somebody asked me how the town makes money. Well . . . when you are a town that does fine on pesos it doesn’t take much to keep the lights on. When the white monkeys go home we go back to farming and barter. Off-season the regulars pretty much know each other and what everyone needs. We do for each other.

You can easily live on a couple dollars a day if you don’t try to live like a white monkey. You can live even cheaper if you can maintain a garden and some chickens. What you can’t do is keep your white monkey life. For that, we have the Paradise Hotel and we charge for that.

So, to answer the question, we earn enough over spring break to carry us through the year. We also do nicely with the missional tourism. There are also some things that Saito-san does to help manage money for the cartels. But the big thing is the stark contrast between a livable income on pesos and a similar livable income on dollars if you are a gringo. So, that’s a thing.

✤ ✤ ✤

One last thing. We seem to have settled on male attributes as normal and acceptable while reserving femininity for taboo. A woman can wear men’s clothes and be butch and not draw scolding eyes. She can wear pretty much anything she wants and it’ll be ok. A guy, though, still can’t dress in drag without attracting gossip and uncomfortable stares.

There is also this, that in Mecca, to be with the fashunabull crowd, you have to signal inclusion in some way. Guys have to be brown skinned or a bit fem or both to be accepted. It’s bad if you are a cis-hetero male WASP. That bunch, the ones that drive Subaru’s with four doors and live in cul-de-sacs with detached homes–those guys are on their face evil. This explains the pink golf shirts of some.

I’m friends someone who lives in the mecca of PUDFARB. Berkeley is the spiritual capital of PUDFARB. San Jose is its financial center. The real power of PUDFARB is in the South Bay where she lives. A thread of our conversation is gender identity. What defines a man? What defines a woman? Is it the costume? Mayhaps visible genitalia like dicks or boobs? Are surgery and cosplay enough? What of those who say they can declare a gender identity regardless of the body they reside in?

IRL my friend looks like a Scottish farm-girl who could wrestle a bull and win. A lot of what is fun to her falls into the realm of guy stuff. She’s an accomplished yacht captain and a mucho multi-rated GA pilot.

♂ ⚥ ♀

So, she’s not very girly. But she is a girl, no question. So, what defines a woman? Doing woman things—house-frau, Mary and Mary and such? The clothes? It’s not hard to walk around SJW Mecca and see a person with a beard and Adam’s apple wearing heels, stockings, a short skirt, a silk blouse and a bra. Guy or girl? More frequent is a person who clearly has hips and boobs and no Adam’s apple but is wearing a button-down Oxford, boyfriend jeans, and Converse All-Stars. Girl or guy?

I’ll give you my answer: a woman was born with the potential to make babies. She had a womb at birth. Whether she keeps it or uses it to make babies isn’t material to my definition. Conversely,  a guy is born with the potential to get a girl pregnant. The central difference for me is children.

I really don’t care who you marry. I really don’t give a shit whether you yourself have a sausage or an oyster between your legs, whether you were born with a body that might one day nurse a baby or not and who you choose to partner with. Partner with the one you love, gender identity shouldn’t enter into it.

Are You Now or Do You Plan to be a Parent?

That said, what I do care about is this: are you going to have kids? No? Go away. Do you. Just . . . please don’t shove your life in my face and demand that I love your chosen path.

And . . . please find a spiritual life of some sort. The second thing I care about is evil. If your chosen lifestyle includes darkness that bleeds into the community around you then please repent. Do what you have to do to get spiritually healthy. I happen to be Christian and believe it is the best way. The topic of ways is vast. Find a spiritual way and stick to it.

So, for me, the binary divide is between those who were born with the potential to carry a child and those who were born with the potential to initiate a pregnancy. If you were born with a uterus you are a woman. If you were born with a dick you are a dude. All the rest of it is foolishness.

✤ ✤ ✤

There was a news story this morning about the Supreme Court deciding that Ohio can purge its voter registration rolls of people who have not voted in a while and also have not responded to attempts to contact them.

This is horrendous. How are dead people supposed to vote if Ohio just deems them illegible to vote? How dare they! It’s outrageous. Dead people have rights too. Dead people matter!

What do you mean dead people can’t vote?! Who is going to vote for reasonable leaders who will do right by the people? Somebody has to make sure the welfare checks get mailed and our grandparents can still buy cat food. I mean, seriously.

Last, I find it curious that politicians who campaign on populism, on being a champion for the people, once elected, turn out to be vicious imperialists. There is a class of elites in this country who will do anything to protect their caste. Letting dead people vote is just a piece of it.

Father Thomas starts on the Yucatan Peninsula. Yah, yah, I read Koontz’ Odd Thomas novels. Literary coinkidink. Thomas Chan was born to Mayan parents in the Hospital General in 1983. He is average height and build for the Mestizaje. Tommy was born with a cleft palate that explains two things: falla exógena para prosperar and a nagging suspicion that he is a symptom of generations deep curse on his parents.

It is fashionable to tag a fate as immutable and thus, Fr. Thomas ought to be pitiable. He also ought not to improve his position beyond the photo of him at age 3 staring up at a gringo photographer. The cleft palate repair was remarkably good. He was adopted by an American family when he was four. Bit by bit, all of the medical problems he had at adoption were treated and cured. He was a favored child in his Southern Baptist Church. One thing I’ve learned from Fr. Thomas is that priests don’t talk about their studies unless pressed. Protestants are in love with credentials. We would use a Doctor of Divinity as a marker of authority. Priests sing the Psalms end to end every week. Fr. Thomas, like his church, has that quiet authority that comes from a history that goes back to the cross.

Poor Father Thomas

More than a few missionaries have arrived in the village sure that they can bring us to Cheeezus and a first world paradise. They think he is one of the villagers needing Cheezus. Then the missionaries ask Father Thomas if he is saved and the fun starts.

Here is the thing. Some of this first world largess makes a mess of things in the third world. Missionary tourists have expectations of us. The village in our valley is small. No traffic lights, one gas station, the club where I stay when I am there, and a smattering of squatters huts. When missionaries show up to build a church it’s a huge deal. It costs us a lot. As much as the missionaries bring they eat us out of house and home. Then they build a church that we can’t keep open because there is no way to pay for the water, sewer, heat, and electricity for it. The last group’s church is a depot for the village’s trash.

Which explains why Fr. Thomas isn’t at the head of the line to greet another group of Evangelicals who think we need a church. He leaves that to Saito-san. Saito-san gets saved every week in the summer by one more group of missional tourists. It’s something to see. Saito-san does a great job getting healed by the spirit.

The Only Correct Bible is the King James

One adamant missionary from a beautiful non-denominational mega-church asked Fr. Thomas if he was saved, citing John 3:16. “Si. ‘Porque tanto amó Dios al mundo que dio a su Hijo unigénito, para que todo el que cree en él no se pierda, sino que tenga vida eterna‘. ¿Recuerdas 1 Corintios 13: 4: El amor es paciente, es bondadoso. El amor no es envidioso ni jactancioso ni orgulloso. ⁵ No se comporta con rudeza, no es egoísta, no se enoja fácilmente, no guarda rencor. ⁶ El amor no se deleita en la maldad, sino que se regocija con la verdad. ⁷ Todo lo disculpa, todo lo cree, todo lo espera, todo lo soporta‘?“, asked Fr. Thomas.

The adamant missionary knew Leviticus by heart. He’d heard Matthew 28:19 as an accusation that he not done enough. Fr. Thomas got accused of being evil. To which Fr. Thomas agreed. He is evil to those whose literary eyes never drift from the KJV and whose soul cowers at the slightest whiff of dissonance as a sure sign of the devil.

The next day that missionary boy spent the day in the cathedral learning about the stations of the cross. The boy who would save us began to learn that his small life in Christ obsessed with coming correct was a tiny lamp nearly out of oil. The light of Christ given off by the whole church was brilliant. He who would save us began learning how much he didn’t know about Jesus. It shook him.

 

The Other Odd Thomas

Fr. Thomas is odd. He left the valley and learned to live in the light. The blood of the cross transfused his valley water. He hurt as he surrendered to the blood of the lamb. The pilgrimage out of the valley started with Baptist missionaries who adopted him.

Tommy’s gringo parents flipped through a couple different New Age utopian communities a year. They hungered for simple living and self-reliance. Mayhaps not the fault of the communities they chose, but of those Eros was king of the gods. They came to Cheezus in a small town, Southern Baptist Church with a preacher who was sure every day was the day of rapture.

Tommy ran away at age 13 to ricochette from jail to church to street to the beaches of Vietnam to Antifa to a bar in Merida seeking purpose and vision or at least something to numb the chronic angst. He only knew that he did not want the gestalt bestowed on him by his barely present adoptive parents.

Weaponized Feel

One of the deep lessons he learned is that feelings were weapons. He had to be perfect for his parents because a backslide would devolve into hours of cray-cray prayer where even asking for water was a sign of the devil. So, Tommy became an overachiever. The devil can be incredibly motivating while he eats your soul.

The Baptists have a trope they ache for. The one where someone in the pews is overcome with spirit and makes a public prayer of acceptance. It doesn’t always happen that way. Jesus is, if anything, an absurd, thick-necked and stubborn revolutionary. It would be out of character for him to stick to a Baptist trope in every case.

I argued with God for decades. He won. For a while I needed my questions answered. Over time, Christ’s love and mercy leaked into my valley water and turned it into wine. For the last decade, I have been slowly letting Jesus fill me with the blood of the cross. It hurts much of the time. Things that are not of the cross die. I won’t have it any other way.

Right Between the Knockers

Tommy’s altar call happened at station Twelve of the Cross. The Southern Baptism of his adoptive parents just never felt right. It could not be that the only way to view the world was as a table offering souls to eat. Death had to have a meaning beyond the threatened fire and damnation burned into him if he did not come correct. He was in Merida during the Festival of the Dead, staying with a Mayan family as an exchange student, and went to a cathedral out of curiosity. There was a monk in a pew near the Twelfth Station.

My love of Christ has been a slow surrender. Tommy’s turn came in a nervous breakdown. One moment he was taking selfies of with the icon of Christ’s death and the next he was in on a bed in the priory. Sometimes Jesus kicks you in the nuts. Tommy became Fr. Thomas after such a kick.

Tommy returned to the US hungry for the body of Christ. His new love of Catholicism and taco de pescado got him shunned by his adoptive parents. He could not go home again so he made is way back to Merida and the twelfth station. It began as a novice. The journey continues as Fr. Thomas serves as clergy for the valley. We keep him busy.