Why I was always a band rat

I'm from New Orleans. It will always be my home even though I haven't technically lived in the city since 1958. My parents and I lived in Ruston, Louisiana and then Metairie, which is a suburb of New Orleans between 1959 and 1970. I attended LSUNO/UNO for four years to maintain my draft deferment and to try to figure who I was and what I should be doing. I wasn't ready for much else at 17. 

By late 1969 I was out of school, better educated but not altogether sure who I was. The good news was I was no longer 17 and was not an immediate hazard to myself or others (when I wasn't drinking). What wise professors did teach me, however, was how little I knew and how far I was from achieving it. What I would be doing was then decided by outside forces. Leaving school meant I was no longer draft deferred but rather I was draft bait. When my draft number for 1970 was announced as 65, I either had to join the military or be drafted by late winter.

The Air Force seemed like a good place to receive training and avoid being a foot soldier. Men, boys?, drafted in Louisiana went straight to Fort Polk (Tiger town) and a lot of them became reluctant 11-Bravos in Southeast Asia. It's not like I didn't want to lose a leg or a foot, it was more like if I had a choice in the matter, getting a better deal with the Air Force was a practical decision. For the record, I could have gone Army and I could have and would have fought.

Like most of my life I would have approached it as a challenge and tried my best to be a razor sharp killer. There are those who think I was a draft dodger who joined to avoid a fight. There is a grain of truth to that, certainly since I was attempting to avoid getting killed or maimed. But the other truth is I simply made a tactical decision to improve myself and avoid death. I understand those who don't want to fight or kill. I respect their decision but it just isn't me. I studied history for four years in college and those unwilling to fight, pave the way for slavery.

When the O'Jays' sang "War, what is it good for, huh, absolutely nothing" seem to overlook the words and deeds of Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain who could have avoided killing in the Civil War, as he had both status and position but stated, "I fear, this war, so costly of blood and treasure, will not cease until men of the North are willing to leave good positions, and sacrifice the dearest personal interests, to rescue our country from desolation, and defend the national existence against treachery."

War is the horrible price men pay for freedom, THAT's what it's good for even for those who fail to recognize it. In any case, I took the oath at the customs house downtown and rode the Airport Downtown Express bus to the airport to board a plane for San Antonio. I knew the bus line well. I rode it every weekday from Metairie Road to Phlox Avenue to attend East Jefferson High School for three years. I also rode it into town on weekends and the summer to see movies and hang out, ala' Petulia Clark's biggest hit. 

Several decades later I would, after working there for over 25 years, be President and General Manager of Louisiana Transit. Transit buses tended to be an artery that fed me throughout my life.  After Air Force basic training at Lackland AFB (San Antonio) I was bussed to Wichita Falls, Texas to Shepard AFB for tech school. Joining the Air Force to fly and then finding myself on a bus riding across Texas from one base to another seemed humiliating at the time but again, buses (I also worked for Trailways for a while) were my conveyor belt. 

Since only college graduates with 20/20 vision were trained to be pilots and navigators and since I hadn't gotten my diploma in four years, what I could do in the Air Force was defined for me in a class we took at Lackland. It was to be a memorable experience. Basic Training is pretty serious with a lot of screaming. But we'd been through a few weeks of it by now and I guess the Sergeant who put on the class for us to fill out our wish list for school assignments decided to give us a little entertainment. 

He came in in uniform but he took on the persona of "Reginald Van Gleason" comedian Jackie Gleason's alter ego that is pretty much Johnny Carson's tea time movie host "Art Fern" or Ernie Kovac's "Percy Dovetonsils." A completely over the top impersonation of a high class, huckster dufus with high tonsil talking and nonsensical attitude. Here's a Youtube sketch of Gleason portraying Reggie:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4VUCZRasLs

You have to wait a minute and fifty for Reggie to appear but I think it's worth it. To this day I think about a third of the class thought the guy was actually like the character he was portraying while he conducted his class. It was a tremendous comedic relief for me and gave me hope that the Air Force did actually have a great sense of humor. You'd never know it from our DIs. 

I filled out my request form for several choices from 1 to 5 or something. Computer Operator was my third choice for duty assignment and what I wound up with. First choice was language school. They said you'd learn languages like Russian. I took the test and didn't feel that I did really well but came within 1 point out of 100 (off by 1%) of making the cut for the school which lasted 10 months. One of my ideas was to select the longest school I could get. Turns out the only language they taught was Vietnamese, which I guess is why it takes 10 months to get fluent. 

Not sure if I would have chosen language school knowing that was the only language they were teaching. Even though my bold words above say 'I'd fight, if asked,' I was still avoiding death and dismemberment rather instinctively because I wasn't looking for overseas assignments.  I wanted to go to the Florida panhandle, not Viet Nam. And yes, I am fluent in hypocrisy. The next longest school was Air Traffic Controller. 

If I joined the Air Force for training, why not go all out and it was the next to longest school after language school. I had to take a flight physical for that school. I technically passed the physical but the doc said he was not going to recommend me for the position because he knew if I flew a lot and couldn't clear my ears well, I didn't handle the altitude changes well, I shouldn't be doing it as my primary MOS. Turns out air traffic controller was to be forward air controller in Viet Nam and they flew you out to call in the strikes. So I got my third choice. 

This triggered my ride to Sheppard on a bus. I also spent a few extra weeks playing in the Lackland Drum and Bugle Corps. I am a band rat. When I hit a base or a campus I seek out musicians and look to join. It is an affliction that came upon me in Junior High. I joined band because my Dad picked me up from first day tryouts for basketball on instructions from my Mother who felt that I was too frail to compete safely. 

I had a heart murmur which was similar to my Dad's. He got rheumatic fever in the navy while training to be a dive bomber in WWII outside Chicago. They ran the trainees out into a wet field at night in the cold and left them out for a few hours for an air raid. He caught pneumonia and got rheumatic fever. It left him with a bad heart. Similarly I was thought to have had rheumatic fever when I was 6 years old. I missed a few months of school. By the time I was 12, I got a clear bill of health but by then it was too late. 

I wasn't running up and down a basketball court, I was marching in a band with a trombone. In junior high, before we chose instruments, they had an expert come in and look at our embouchures (teeth and mouth alignment) to recommend an instrument to match our mouth's foundation to an instrument appropriate to the player. I was told I had a woodwind embouchure. I chose trombone which is a brass instrument. I sorta wanted trumpet but so did everybody so trombone was a little different. To this day, after playing seriously for decades I don't have a good upper register. I guess the gal who made the recommendation could tell me she told me so. In defense, I went bass trombone as soon as I could lay my hands on one because I have a fantastic lower register. After that it was love.

I played baritone bugle in both the Lackland and Shepard AFB drum and bugle corps. I’d never been accused of being a prodigy with a horn. I sat either 2nd or 3rd trombone through much of high school. By the time I was a senior, I was 2nd chair 1st trombone but that was more based on seniority than anything else. I also played in the stage band in high school. Our director, Martin “Mike” Clancy had been a lower brass player himself and took a liking to me because I wasn’t an out and out thug. Unfortunately our high school had it’s share of thugs. 

My Dad sat on me most of my youth and I had grudging respect for authority because I hadn’t been given much of a choice. We called Mr. Clancy “Prof.” Prof had given me some music for trombone to practice. It was “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” I had a couple of Si Zenter albums and I would ape his style, which was heavy on the vibrato, using the slide to produce the unique sound. The night of our stage band’s senior concert, which preceded the regular band’s concert, Prof told me I would be playing Red Roses as a solo with guitar chord backup. 

I knew he did it because I was a good kid and I played the solo but to this day have no idea if it was really any good or not. I’d always questioned my worth, throughout most of my early years. The same year I played that solo, Mr. Clancy asked me and another trombone player to play with his Dad’s band in Mardi Gras parades. That year, my senior year, I played every day or night for eleven days and nights in a parades throughout town. From Carrollton on the first Saturday of carnival to both Rex and Comus on the final day of carnival, which is Mardi Gras. 

Some nights I marched with my high school and other nights with Clancy’s jazz band, which was Mr. Clancy’s father’s group. We were the king of carnival’s band behind the lead float in Rex. After Comus on Mardi Gras night I was soot black. The Flambeaux carried either fusee flares or oil burning rag lights. Both produced light but also produced a lot of soot. When my Dad, bless his heart, picked me up after Comus, he didn’t recognize me. I’d lost ten pounds by the end of the week and I was jet black.

I played at Lackland while on TDY for a few weeks on voluntary assignment. They let us delay our tech school for as many weeks as we wanted to stay at Lackland and play in the corps. One of the guys I played with accepted an assignment to play in the Air Force academy drum and bugle corps in Colorado Springs rather than get his tech school training. It would be his permanent duty assignment. We marched in graduations, parades and played to the colors when the flags were raised and lowered. In time, however, I felt I needed to move on and get the training for which I had joined the Air Force. It turned out, however, that Shepard AFB, where I would get eight weeks of computer training had another music assignment in store for me.

When I got to Shepard, I heard they had a corps and I sought them out and managed to catch on. To join the corps at Lackland you had to audition. If you had corps experience in the Air Force, you no longer had to audition, you were a legacy. The guy who ran the flight I was in initially was pissed off at me and gave me grief but in the end I got the orders and he had to let me go. I moved myself on foot across base to be in the corps. I was about five or six weeks into playing with the corps when we were practicing in a big room. 

We were working on a fairly new march. The bugle had a key and a rotor, in the key of G. You had to under or over blow it now and again to get subtle notes just right. By now all bugles are in the key of Bb, just like band instruments but back then it was traditional for corps to have G instruments. G bugles don’t have the tonal range a regular band instrument has. For one thing it lacks the three keys a Bb instrument has. It just has fewer ways of producing mid tones. By now I had been playing on a bugle for a few months and had played trombone for nine years prior to that, including college. 

Perhaps I’d never been outstanding but by now I was competent. The Master Sergeant who had the corps had guys coming and going all the time. Troops came on base to get training, stayed a few weeks and moved on. Turnover was constant. He didn’t know me very well and for that matter didn’t know a lot of the baritone bugles of which there were about a dozen. The other thing I’d always done defensively is play out. Filling the horn hid struggles for range. Once you put enough air from your diaphragm into the horn you could pretty much blow any note you wanted, even if you struggled to hit upper range notes. It was defensive. It also meant I’d better know my part because you could hear me from just about anywhere. When I was at Ruston High School Mr. Barnes always knew when I hit a clunker because he could always hear me anywhere he was in the football stadium at practice. I was on the upper edge of whatever we were playing whether a high “piano” or a stronger “fortissimo.”

This day at Shepard, Sarge was directing us and was trying to figure out who was playing a certain phrase in the music and he couldn’t figure out where in lower brass it was coming from. Rather than embarrass anybody by making us play our parts one at a time, he had one bugle lay out each time we played the twelve bars of music as a group. We didn’t sit first chair or anything and I sat toward the end of the line. As we played the phrase over and over as one by one each bugle laid out, we played it over and over about nine times with a fair consistency. 

Then it became my turn to lay out. The other eleven horns began to play the phrase and little by little as they got two bars then three, it began to unravel and by the fourth bar the whole thing fell apart. Kind of like a musical train wreck. It then got weirdly silent. Nobody had said stop playing, it just fell apart when one out of twelve bugles laid out. I had been so loud for so long, I was carrying the entire section under me. When I was playing, I was the umbrella to play under. When I quit, the safety blanket was pulled. It was a strange moment. Most of my life I wasn’t sure of my worth. Sarge just shook his head and said, “look, don’t ever lay out again, okay?” It brought the house down. It was a defining moment for me. I was needed.

One night we went to town to play at a function in Wichita Falls. A school bus picked us up, we went to town, played our dozen or so marches, it got dark and we were picked up again by the same driver to return to base. I remember none of the details of where we played or what. On the way back to base on a fifteen minute ride, some of the guys in the back started to sing. It was kind of unorganized but one by one everybody started to fill in. We were musicians after all and most of us could hit the notes. 

The guys on the bus were a wide cross section of America. Tall, short, white, black and everything in between. A couple guys broke out with “Dixie.” You’d think the black guys would be offended but most of them had great voices and we hit two choruses and the volume picked up and well, it was amazing. The acoustics on the bus were like being in a sound chamber and our voices filled it to the breaking point. It was both loud and well, impressive. We were actually better singing than we were playing the bugle. 

Not a second after the last chorus of Dixie died, than Battle Hymn of the Republic began. If Dixie had been loud, the Battle Hymn became even fuller. Goosebumps raised on my arms as we sang three verses. I don’t know how I or anybody else on the bus knew all the verses of Battle Hymn, but there it was, in amazing harmony and it was stirring. As stirring as anything I can remember. As the final chorus wound down we realized we’d arrived at our barracks a couple of minutes ago and no one got up until we finished the final chorus. I was in the second row toward the front sitting behind the driver. As we began to rise to get off, the bus driver stood up in the middle of the aisle to address us. I sat close enough to see he had tears in his eyes. He told us he’d take us anywhere at anytime and consider it a privilege. It was an amazing, special moment in my life. It is almost indescribable to see such emotion in a perfect stranger but that’s what music is capable of. It’s why I was always a band rat.

No, I'm not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that. I guess it's the beret or the neck scarf or the whole getup. Peter Allen would have loved it, for sure. Took me several decades to find a Getzen G bugle to replace the one (holding here) I left behind in Wichita Falls. Ebay. I love the thing and play it regularly. Bugles are an acquired taste.

My Graduation from Weenie to Worker

From late 1978 'til early 1980, I worked for an engineering firm in Omaha. Water treatment. Sewage treatment. I’d just quit working for Trailways, American Bus Lines, as lead transportation supervisor and camped out for a few days at the employment bureau. The guy who was assigned my case was used to people registering for unemployment compensation visiting next door at employment because it was a requirement to draw your check. After a couple days he realized I really wanted work and began to review the screens for me as soon as a job became available. He sent me out to western Omaha to interview for the “order expediter” job at HEMCO. Carl took my application and did the interview. Carl was office manager. Carl was tall and thin, dark-haired and whip smart. He just couldn’t keep up with all the orders the firm had outstanding and needed somebody to work full time just calling the manufacturers to get the orders expedited. He worked with three engineers who were in the process of buying the firm from Whitey Menshing, who had recently retired. Whitey was the prior and nominal owner of the H.E. Menshing Company, or HEMCO. After calling my references and saying ”well, you haven’t burned any bridges and people at your old job said you were conscientious,” he offered me the job. I tightened up with my employment counselor with a fifth of Jack Daniels black label. I was glad to be employed again and set up working at a desk next to Carl and began the job of moving our orders forward and getting them fulfilled.

Within a month the guy who did inside sales took a flyer when he experienced an early life crisis. He wasn't old enough for midlife crisis but he blew town anyway. I moved into his old office and did order expediting and inside sales. I learned how to design blower packages using engineering manuals and how to specify mostly submersible pumps. We were the manufacturing representative for Flygt pumps from Sweden, probably the best submersible pumps in the world. I also sold water measuring equipment using flumes and weirs. I had my own take off table to do the design work. I had never considered being an engineer but working for the firm and with the other engineers was both fun and stimulating. In another month I began working with our shop to assemble the stands, motors, and blowers which I had specified for sale and which were put together in house prior to shipping. I got to know Eric Wren, our shop foreman fairly well and got to like him and the other mechanics. Eric was amazed by our maintenance manager who would take on jobs in the field, go out and camp out in various cities in Nebraska and Iowa taking what seemed like forever to do a job. His name was Ole or Swen or something. I forget. He was a big Scandinavian guy with blonde hair. He’d get up late, have coffee and hang out a lot. Ole went to the same church as our lead engineer, Bob Frisk, and was thought of as his friend. Whether this friendship caused the manager to feel he could be comfortable or not about skylarking on the job was the question of the day. I got tired of listening to Eric complain about him, so I braced Bob in his office about it and told him the shop could get these projects finished in under a week. We’d send more than one guy and save some money. It was taking closer to a month and some jobs never got done. Bob called his friend in to his office when he got back from his latest field work and discussed it with him and the friend got mad and quit. Beginning Monday the next week I was order expediter, inside sales manager and service manager. When I came in Monday to assume the role, Bob told me Eric wanted to see me in the shop. I dressed in shirt and tie, like the other office weenies. I learned in the Air Force there were two kinds of employees, office workers, who did all the work and office weenies, who wore shirts and ties and sat around and drank coffee all day. The workers were the enlisted and non-coms. The weenies were the officers. Eric, a worker, was waiting for me, a weenie, at a work bench. He had a small submersible pump pulled apart in pieces called the impeller, the volute, the rotor, and the stator. I watched him work for a couple of minutes and he said “so you’re taking over the shop?” I told him only with his help. I wasn’t stupid enough to think I knew enough to take over without a ton of help. One of the reasons I did it was to empower the guys working in the shop to get the job done better and quicker. He said “maybe. Let’s see what you know about pumps.” He offered up the greasy, oily middle of a bearing area for me to look at it. I took it from him, looked at it and tried to describe as best I could what I thought it did. He shrugged and nodded and took the part back from me and offered me a rag to wipe my hands. He said I could go back in and finish up with Bob on the job offer. After going back inside Bob explained Eric didn’t expect me to know it all, he just expected me to be willing to get my hands dirty and make a good faith effort. I wouldn’t be much of a worker but I wasn’t all weenie either since I was willing to get my hands dirty. I had passed Eric’s test and would now be considered the “acting” shop manager.

Every few weeks HEMCO would take on big jobs designing water and sewage treatment plants and working with the construction companies to build them. We also refurbished older plants. That and represent manufacturers of equipment that ran these plants. Getting these jobs was a majority of what our three engineers, Bob, Dean and Jim did. It was the engine that moved our company forward. The shop supported these big jobs and we actually would do some the smaller STP (sewage treatment plant) refurbishments in house. One of the other big jobs the shop tackled was cleaning STPs which had been allowed to stop working properly and overflow or freeze up.  One my first field operations was to take on the job paid for by the Jimmie Dean Pork Sausage STP in Shenandoah, Iowa. We got the call that the plant’s own STP had quit working and began discharging raw sewage to the town’s own STP causing it to overflow. The town’s plant needed to be cleaned up and put back in order. We put together a crew of a couple of mechanics, an electrician and some local high schoolers who traveled with us to help do some of the heavy labor. We loaded three trucks and a fifth wheel with various pumps and devices used to clean a digester. As we prepped for the job I asked Eric if he knew where the plant was or had ever been there. Eric said he found them without a map, en route, most times. Eric didn’t believe in instructions or maps. He figured he could figure things out without a drawing and if he couldn’t he wouldn’t want to fool with it anyway. He had never needed instructions to assemble anything. Eric had been in the Navy when I was in the Air Force. I was a computer operator. Eric worked on nuclear submarines. He was the first guy to suit up and go in when the reactor was malfunctioning. Eric was a very good mechanic. When we got to Shenandoah, I was interested to see how we were going to find the STP.  Eric said in his experience, most town's local STPs were run by the Mayor’s brother-in-law, who wouldn’t be there. This was normally why we had to clean things up. The brother-in-law had the job to collect his check and little else. Most BILs figured the plants ran themselves. Many did, for a little while anyway. So rule one was the Mayor’s BIL was in charge but wouldn’t be there. The second STP rule was that it would be located on the south side of town, adjacent to a river running north to south, where it discharged into the stream what was supposed to be treatment effluent. This was pretty much the way it was everywhere he went.

Eric pointed our lead truck toward the south side of town and when we were a mile or so from the river, we saw a black cloud on the horizon. I had never seen a black cloud before. In a couple minutes we were within a block and the overflow from the flies was making it’s way into our trucks. We rolled up the windows and pulled into the industrial area where the STP was located. The sky was darkened from several thousand flies that were circling the top of the STP’s digester. The pig offal from the feed lot runoff had traveled through the pork sausage plant’s STP untouched and went into this small town plant, overwhelming it and then filled the sewer digester to the top and then overflowed everywhere. Our crew sat in their trucks, dumbfounded. The digester was covered in liquid, tan pig shit and lord knows what other processed pig entrails from the slaughter house. The fly maggots covered the pig shit in thousands of white dollops.

One thing about management I learned in the Air Force. Your men expect you to lead, not follow. I had to get out of our truck and stand there batting away the flies. I had been on one other job prior this one to clean a digester at an institution in Iowa. The mental patients at the institution had flushed shredded sheets down the toilets over and over and had clogged the digester. It was a pretty simple job and Eric taught me about digesters there. Most digesters we visited were anaerobic, which meant sealed off from outside air and oxygen. The bugs inside the digester broke down the treated sewage, or sludge. The process gave off methane, which when combined with oxygen was explosive. Methane, is quite simply, natural gas. The methane could be piped off and used as natural gas. The first job that needed to be accomplished at any anaerobic digester was to vent the digester to atmosphere and allow the methane to bleed off for several hours until our sniffers detected very low presence of gas and it would be safe to go inside. You could normally go inside a digester and walk around a cat walk to see what the sludge looked like inside the digester. This one was overflowing however and there would be no gas as the offal had displaced all the gas inside with liquid. It wasn't sludge inside, it was raw sewage. It still had to be opened however and we had to work at locating all the top ports to lower our pumps inside to pump out the pig juice. I wore the uniform of our shop, as we had Cintas outfit me with the same uniform as the rest of the mechanics. Bob said he had an old friend in the business who always wore white suits to job sites involving sewage. Not sure what the point was there but Eric said we wore navy blue. I also had on leather engineering boots that I wore when I rode my motorcycle. While everybody stood around and discussed what a shitty job this was, I began climbing the ladder up to the top of the digester and when I got there began crawling through the pig shit and maggots at a 45 degree angle to get to the top of the digester vent to open it. Halfway up I realized Eric was right behind me and when we got to the port we spun the wheel together to open the hatch. I can still smell it. Once we came back down the guys had already hooked up the fire hoses and hosed Eric and I off and began the job of hosing off the digester so we could get a crane to pick up the pumps and drop them into the digester to begin the job of pumping out the pig offal. Guys don’t hesitate to pitch in when they see you’re there with them.

Working at HEMCO was fun and exciting. It was also dangerous. Working with sewage can make you sick. We worked out of doors in below zero temperatures where water froze if it stopped moving for more than a second. We did the huge digester in Iowa City and worked a couple in January when it was 15 below. Riding in the back of a truck at the end of the day meant risking frostbite.

While working to rehab a small STP in Walthill, Nebraska, I climbed up and down a wet well a dozen times. Walt Hill had been an Indian agent on the Omaha Indian reservation there. The town bore his name, just concatenated from Walt Hill to Walthill. I had on many layers of clothes and two pairs of gloves, the outer pair of which was rubber coated. It was about 5 below zero. The wet well was over 25 feet deep. It was made of concrete sections with a metal ladder running down one wall. The cover was flipped open all the way so I could get in an out quickly. I had to go to the bottom to adjust the float switches and come back up and go inside to run the pumps to see if I had the adjustment done properly. The inside pump controls were in a control room. You would climb a short set of ladders over to the top of the wet well which was a concrete platform about 12 x 12. The well was on the south side of the plant and adjacent to the control rooms. it just went down into the ground another floor or so below the rest of the plant. So you went up a floor to access the well from the plant and then climbed down the ladder into the well to get to the bottom. Overall it was about two stories from the top to the bottom of the well. At first it was pretty scary to look down all that way from the top to the darkness of the bottom but after you go up and down a few times, you acclimate. Having the lid open aided in seeing the bottom. Because it was a pain to set your feet down the narrow rungs of the metal ladder embedded into the concrete while putting your hands on the upper rungs, I put a broom stick handle across the opening of the top. I would grab the broomstick handle with one hand and swing down to put my foot on the lower rung and grab the upper rung with my other hand. Sort of a stretched out monkey grab. It would have made more sense to have one guy down at the bottom shouting up to another guy on top but there were only two of us at the work site and my co-worker was getting the blowers going while I got the pumps working right. We were working short-handed because I had given Eric a hard foul on a layup in a shop basketball game during lunch one day. Eric had welded up a base for the basketball goal and it stuck out below the goal on the floor like a trip hazard. Our shop was like a warehouse and we could play indoor basketball during lunch. When I fouled him as he went in for the layup, he tripped over the steel goal base and broke his foot. It was hard to do field work in a leg cast and I told him we’d switch jobs until his foot healed and the cast was removed. He could do weenie work with a bum foot, just not worker work. And so I found myself running up and down steel rungs embedded into a concrete wet well in Walthill, Nebraska in December.

On what I hoped was my last float level adjustment, I hustled over to the top of the well, I grabbed the broom stick handle with my one rubber-gloved hand and swung forward to the embedded ladder rung a few feet down with my foot as my hand grabbed the topmost rung. Except my bottom foot slipped and my top hand missed and my broom stick hand’s rubber didn’t afford enough grip to hold on by itself and my grip slipped off and I found myself suspended, face up, laterally across the top of the wet well without anything holding me, suspended, very momentarily, in air. At that particular moment I realized I had made a fairly severe tactical mistake and was calculating the possibilities of surviving the fall as gravity quickly took hold of me and I began to see if I could fly backwards without wings. I couldn't fly but I could sure drop. Brain alarms went off when the realization of survival looked dim. Sort of a “feets don’t fail me now” moment without any way to flee the hazard. I’d have the extra adrenaline but no way to use it save flapping my non-existent wings. I began my gradual drifting down and down the well, “flying” backwards, looking upward toward the top, as I descended, affording me a great look at the four walls of the well as I receded down and down and down. My reaction to the situation, spoken internally was, “Oh shit.” It quickly occurred to me that these were not profound last words. I fell and fell and fell. The entirety of my experiences to date seemed to want to play itself forward for me as I fell. Images raced through my mind. It was as if my brain knew I didn’t have long to think, so let’s rethink everything, like an all core dump. It was a fairly amazing experience but all such things are transitory and I hit, flat, with a bone-crushing double thud and blacked out. I came to as the well began filling up. My shoulders had broken the metal support for the float controls and triggered the pumps and sewage was rushing in. My hard hat had cracked on impact and one of the float prongs that held the loop for a float control had passed through my winter coat an inch from my back and I was semi-stuck on it. I knew I had to get up and get out or drown. My problem was my brain told my body to get up and well, things weren’t working so good. At that point it was get up or die and through a lot of swearing and teeth gritting I managed to roll onto my side and then sit up and then get to my knees and grab the bottom ladder rung and begin the very slow and very painful ascent of the ladder. The shock kept the pain at bay but my muscles didn’t want to respond to command. To be honest I don’t remember climbing the ladder at all by this date and working my way up the ladder and onto the concrete deck up top hurt pretty badly and I was doing everything slow motion. I do remember that but when I laid on my back on top and began to freeze in the sub-zero cold I had a sense of elation it’s hard to describe. Either I was experiencing post death experiences or I had cheated death. Either way I felt honored and privileged to be experiencing anything because just a minute before I had no expectation of survival when my rubber glove slipped off the broom stick handle and my other hand just couldn’t quite grip the metal rung of the ladder. For the first time I started to call out for help. I shouted and shouted until my co-worker heard me and came running up to the top of the well from the plant. He saw me laying there and asked what the hell was going on and I told him I had fallen into the well, hit the bottom and then climbed back out. I had a hard time talking and I couldn’t move any more. He just laughed and said “the hell you did. What happened? Why are laying here?” I don’t think he ever believed me. He helped me get inside the control room and I laid down on a table and couldn’t get up. I still have a funny place on the left side of my lower back where something isn’t quite right. I had on tons of clothes because it was so cold and the floor of the wet well was covered in sewage which cushioned my blow. The float prong missed skewering me by an inch and my hard hat kept my head from cracking on impact. Just dumb-assed luck kept me alive, plain and simple.

But back to the pig plant overflow job. When we finished at Shenandoah after two days of pumping orange pig offal into drying beds we loaded the trucks up and began the drive back to Omaha. We pulled over at the first filling station we came to and I went inside to give them the company credit card for all three trucks. The uniformed gas station attended was sitting at an old desk working on a parts order and his mechanic was outside in the shop pulling parts for a car that was in the first bay. As I stood there watching the guys pump the trucks full of gas, I looked at myself in the mirror. My uniform was a clean one but my boots were the same. I needed a shave and I had a few dark areas on my skin that hadn’t cleaned up well. The attended started to sniff the air. He looked at me and looked around and shouted out to the guy in the shop. “Hey, Larry? I thought I told you to dump that bucket out. It still smells terrible in here.” He got no response from Larry but I looked at the guy and said “That smell is me. My boots stink like pig shit and I guess I do too, at this point. Sorry.” I’ll never forget his expression when his eyes got wide and he looked up at me and said. “Hey, mister, I didn’t mean anything with the stink thing, you know?” He was stammering. He was genuinely afraid of me. It was at that point in time when I realized I had finally graduated from weenie to worker.

Lessons from the new Star Trek movie

In the latest Star Trek movie, “Star Trek Into Darkness,” Captain Kirk is told to follow Star Fleet directive by Mister Spock and not expose a primitive civilization to their unauthorized and upsetting presence to avoid altering the primitive society's history. It means Spock will die and the planet may be destroyed but adherence to the rule is Spock’s main and only priority. Kirk questions destroying the planet rather than showing themselves and also wants to save his friend. It seems win-win to him but if he must adhere to rules, he can’t do it. Because heroes save planets and their friends, Kirk disobeys the directive and of course, loses his command. So it should be understood that there are consequences for making it up as you go along. A person making a decision to go against rules or morality or ethics or decency or laws will always have to pay a price. It is often the price of freedom. Free thought isn’t at all free. It never has been. What it came down to for Captain Kirk is a priori vs. a posteriori decision. One means true by rule, the other is true by observation. Objective vs. subjective. One means removing one’s own personal opinions from any decision making process. The other means to use your personal opinions or beliefs in the decision making process. Rules do tend to objectify any decision making process. Making the rule might have been fraught with the subjective evaluations of the law-makers but once established, it becomes a priori true and therefore closer to objective than subjective.  One example would be federal, state or local laws or regulations. You are given a job and told to follow the rules. No one pays you to think, you follow orders. Failing to do so subjects you to punishment. Here’s the thing. If you can only follow the rules, without question, there is no point to having a brain.

Are mass murderers, pedophiles, perverts, and dictators free thinkers? You bet they are. So there’s the rub. If Captain Kirk is a hero for using his powers of observation and logical thinking to disobey policy to save a civilization and a friend but serial murders who cut up their victims for fish bait are heinous and reviled sub-humans, is subjectivity safe?

Religion traditionally provided believers with an ultimate set of values that a believer could rely on when tempted by personal leanings. In the recent mass-murder bombing at the Boston Marathon, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving bomber, scribbled notes to himself in the boat he was later captured in describing his brother and co-bomber as a martyr who was in heaven enjoying the fruits of his jihad. Crusaders rode their horses through palaces in Jerusalem chopping the limbs off infidels to the greater glory of God. Societies provide laws for direction. Our society believes that “thou shalt not kill” until it becomes necessary to put murderers to death as punishment or declare war on another country when it feels threatened and reward medals to sanctioned killers. So even societal laws are not absolute. They are subject to the majority's subjective interpretation.

As rules go, I think the golden rule is pretty cool. Living to serve others in equal proportion to serving yourself, or if truly heroic, even more. Avoiding inflicting pain. Being a positive force for truth telling. Trying to listen and understand others. Being empathetic. That came from a religion.

But here’s the thing about religion. It needs to make sense. I also personally think it needs to make sense both globally and universally. Let me use an example. You are born and raised a Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian, Church of Christ or other flavor of Christianity. You have the one “true” God. You are promised ultimate forgiveness for sins if you believe in the resurrection of Christ and you are truly sorry for your sins. One other thing, you will have life everlasting for your belief. Also: other religions are just plain wrong. They worship false gods. Unless or until they reject their native beliefs and convert to yours, they will not achieve the kingdom of God and if they are sinners, may spend eternity in hell, being punished.

So let’s check the sense of this. There are 7,086,000,000 people on earth, 578,000,000 of which are some form of Christian. That leaves 2 out of every 3 persons alive on earth today left out of concepts and ideas some of them will never be exposed to. But Muslims believe their god is the one true god. Buddists, Jews, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Sikists and another dozen or so major religious beliefs tend toward a certain exclusivity of true knowledge of the metaphysical. If I were born in a society and raised a particular religion, it stands to reason I would hold my beliefs dear. If not then I would be one of those “free thinkers” I referred to above. I would not adhere to rules, I would reject my upbringing, disavow my parent’s core beliefs and using some personal exclusivity I have that my peer’s lack, adopt foreign orthodoxy as my own. So there we have it. If Christianity (to use as an example) is the one “true” religion, it means 2/3s of the world’s population needs to reject their core values and adopt the one “true” God. Not their own god, somebody’s else’s. It would be true not because Western Europeans and North Americans are like the rest of the world. No, it’s the opposite. it means their superiority of thinking, culture and beliefs trumps the rest of the world. It means the rest of the world, the 2/3s majority of people alive on earth are just plain wrong. Their societies are based on untruths. Their histories and cultural growth was misguided for centuries and centuries. If this makes sense to you, then God bless. It is on the face of it, exclusively chauvinistic, jingoistic and totally illogical but then if you only follow rules and don’t think about it, it doesn’t need to make sense, you need to follow it without question. I assume Western Europeans and North Americans want Muslims to abandoned jihad, even though it is, like, proselytization, a tenet of their religion. But of course some people are just "right," by rule and others are just wrong, again by rule. We stand by and observe the horrors brought on historically by religious differences but it just has to be that way until one religion finally wins out over all and then everything will get a lot better. Not sure how many millinea people will suffer through but still.

There’s another thing about it though. Go out at night at look up at the sky. Check out the stars.

You can't see them all, or course, but there are in the neighborhood of 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets and stars surrounding earth in every direction. Much of what you're seeing no longer is active, it takes so long for the light to get to us, we are viewing the past. That means they no longer exist in a recognizable form and in some cases, reversed their energy and are eating the planets and stars around them. So here's the hubris part. Get ready. Several million to over a billion people believe in a document that says a big guy, looks like us, rolled up a ball of clay and created "heaven" and earth. You have to assume we're looking up at what must be considered heaven in that document (or not, up to interpretation). Anyway, the earth is the center of the universe and the rest was created as a side show for us to marvel at. Next, all you have to do is flip a mental switch and believe something and when all the rest of the show has burned out in trillions and trillions of years, you'll still be around, living eternally with God. Others, who disagree with you, will be gone or suffering eternally in a hot and hellish place, perhaps somewhere inside the core of our planet.

So human beings, who are likely to be extinct in a fairly short period of time, if you use a shelf life of 4,500,000,000 years for earth, during which between 50,000 and 200,000 years of which "humans" walked around. Since humans got intelligence, they now are in the driver's seat, controlling their universal destiny. Humankind will one day be gone. Might last another 100,000 years (a hiccup in the life cycle of the earth). Then, eventually, the Earth will be gone. The universe will be undergoing changes we can't conceive of and certain people, who read and understand certain orthodoxy will outlast it all. Wow. Individual human beings who might catch cold and die in 24 hours, will outlast the entirety of the universe, which is so vast we can't even begin to describe it's magnitude in our puny lifetimes. For me, I don't think so.

Is there a point to this? Yes. The more we learn, the less we realize we know. Any belief that excludes a majority of humanity is misguided. Any belief that claims eternal life for fealty is over-promising. That's an understatement. Exclusive religions that promote "us against them" and require everyone else to be wrong, are intolerant.

People need something to believe in? Believe in inclusion. Believe in an open mind. If you consider yourself a loving, decent person, adopt what you can of all the wisdom of humanity from Christ to Buddha to Mohammad. The Ten Commandments, zen koans, meditation, the golden rule, the reverence for all life of Hinduism, on and on. Listen. Absorb. Read. Seek understanding. Not just of your culture. Of others, too. Embrace the ideas of others as valid. Understand that an accident of birth put you where you are. Had you been born on the other side of the earth, you would be different. Stop believing you have the "truth" and everyone else is "wrong."

Do you seek eternal life? You have it. In the space/time continuum you are living your life over and over in another place in the universe no different than seeing a star that has burned out long ago. You will be spinning along at incredible speeds reliving every phase of your life somewhere out there for a long, long time. Is that not enough?

Fill your heart with joy, every day. Help others by listening to them and trying to understand them. Adopt from them what makes the most sense. 

This will require making it up as you go along. Learn from Captain Kirk. Abandon a priori truths and adopt a posteriori truths that tend to make the most sense. The ones that save your friends. That save alien societies. Because All Universal Truths are not always adequately defined by mortals. Some, like animal sacrifice, which was required in the old testament, no longer make much sense to us. We guess and we conjecture but a lot of the universe if still unknown. If we re-trench to old idioms and dogmas, it will stay unknown. Seek new truths. Adopt the things that work best. That's how you'll save your friends and others you don't know. Don't let old tired axioms rule your life. Reach beyond your current grasp. Life is a miracle and a fabulous gift. That's the best secret of our universe, as I know it. Open up to the promise of it all. Continue to learn all you can even if it seems foreign at first. Love your neighbor as yourself, while always understanding that your neighbors circle the globe. Embrace new knowledge for the gift it is. The rest will take care of itself as you "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

Don't be surprised if your tongue gets nailed for jury duty

February 28 (almost a decade ago) I got called for jury duty. I had been in jury pools previously in Jefferson Parish, but never in Washington. We moved to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain in 2000. That morning, rather than cross the lake to go to Metairie to work, I pulled over in Covington at the relatively new parish office building. I waited with my fellow potential jurors most of the morning in the jury pool waiting room. I then got voir dire'd (something like that) and rejected for a cocaine possession panel because I'm too white and too conservative. Prior to that rejection, I watched from outside the proceedings awaiting the Q&A. Like most people, I was interested in the proceedings. In Jefferson it seemed most of the time we were waiting for a civil case, which isn’t quite as interesting as criminal. Because this was my first criminal case exposure I had a heightened level of curiosity about what was going on. These were some interesting looking people in the courtroom. I was fascinated by the defense attorney, particularly. He was a bit of a performer and a pretty funny guy. Very entertaining. I would have liked to have stayed on a bit longer because the guy was both charming and authoritative. He definitely had a way about him. The defendant he represented this day was one guilty-looking dude (sorry but central casting would have sent him out for every cocaine possession role). In fact he looked more like a dealer. Since I was rejected from serving on that jury, I, along with my other rejected poolers, went back to waiting and reading magazines in the potential jury panel waiting room, the dullest place on earth. In Washington Parish, when you get called for jury duty, you are there for a week. By 5:00 PM all the panels had been assembled and the rest of the pool was released. After my first day of sitting around and waiting, I got in the Jeep and drove home to Folsom. Using the power of the internet that night, I looked up Marion Farmer, the defensive attorney. Turns out he used to be the DA for Washington Parish years ago. In fact he was the DA when Faith Hathaway was murdered and left in Fricke's cave by Robert Lee Willie and Joe Vaccaro. Needless to say, I spent a couple hours reading about the murder, the cave and putting it together with “Dead Man Walking.” Willie was one of two murder row inmates that were combined into the main character in the movie. It stared Sean Penn as the composite, fictional murderer and Susan Sarandon as Sister Prejean, his “spiritual advisor.” I had seen the movie. I hadn’t really read about what Willie and Vaccaro had done to Faith Hathaway. When you’re picked for a jury, you’re not supposed to go home and do independent research on that or any other case. Since I hadn’t been picked and since I was reading tangentially about Marion Farmer’s history, it seemed kosher. I must admit I wanted to drive up toward Franklinton and find Fricke’s cave but I didn’t have time. I had to go back to the courthouse the next day and get bored to death. It did focus my mind, however, about how serious some of this stuff was.

The next day I get called back down to court with about a hundred other potential jurors and again, the voir dire took several hours. As we sat in the the jury box and got asked questions about who we were and how we felt about various issues, including capital punishment, I (in retrospect) got stupid and asked a question about an issue that they were going over and trying to get us (as layman) to understand. I wasn’t sure I understood what they were saying and wanted it to be clear. By now I realize I should have looked grumpy and kept my cotton picking mouth shut. But I was confident I was a white fat cat that the defense would like to see back at work. Besides, they asked us to pick a number from 1 to 10 to indicate your enthusiasm for serving on the jury. Several people were very interested. Many weren’t that interested. I picked a 1. Not interested. Out of the 120 prospective jurors they took 16. Like Chevy Chase said in Nat Lamps Xmas vacation, I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d woken up with my tongue nailed to the floor when I was picked. We were told to get our stuff and we would be taken home by deputies to collect what we’d need for a week or two of sequestration.

Ruth saw the cruiser pull up to our house in Folsom and watched as I was escorted by two deputies inside to get my clothes and toiletries. I wouldn’t be communicating with the outside world for at least a week and maybe longer.

Condensed version of what the trial was about:

Guy named Jesse Montejo (23, six feet tall, long ugly nose with sinus trouble, skinny, covered with tattoos from long prison sentence, shorts falling down around his waste showing his underwear, head bandana and "f" word every other word, this from video taping of the period just after his arrest, he cleaned up okay for the trial) is our defendant.  Louis Ferrari, Jr. (61, toupee, youngish-looking with dyed black hair, wearing sandals with socks, owns a string (22) of laundries called Corporate Cleaners in and around Slidell, Louisiana, one of which is run by his wife Pat) is our victim (we see Louis from his autopsy photos and crime scene photos wherein his right eye is a red blossomed Ojo de Dios (where the 357 magnum bullet penetrated his skull) looking out at us from the grave.  Ugly.

Jesse gets out of prison in Florida after serving six years for so many armed robberies my head swam trying to grasp them all after having been incarcerated at the ripe old age of 17.  Grows up in prison, eh?  He moves to Louisiana to get some help from his Mom and Dad who don't have the same name (they sat in court, apart, he wouldn't look at this Mom, he don't like her, eh?) and gets an apartment (we got shown pictures, he can't keep house) and drives around in a van belonging to his Dad but which he gets the full use of.  We see lots of pictures of lots of things over the course of the week, all blown up in a Powerpoint show.  We also watched over twelve hours of video of questioning of the "suspect."  The police can lie with impunity to any suspect.  They tell him every lie they can think of to confuse him.  "We can put you there.  We can time DNA evidence.  We got gunshot residue.  Others put you there.  They're talking right now.  And so on. Keep lying to him until he begins to think they might really have something.  They just can't promise him something they can't deliver and they can't threaten or intimidate him into a confession.  Why Montejo didn't immediately get an attorney is anybody's guess.  He did ask for one after about five hours and a detective jumps up and says, "okay, you're being charged with first degree murder, Jesse."  Jesse then pleads for them to let him finish his "story" about what went down.  Jesse is dumb, stupid and oh yeah, a murderer.  Kind of fits though, huh?

Meanwhile details of the crime as reviewed from the start.  Mr. Ferrari (the laundry owner) uses an ex-con (how many mistakes can Lou make?) named Jerry Moore to fix his dry-cleaning machines. Jerry's a crackhead, eh?  Beats his wife. Don't pay his traffic tickets.  Loses his driver's license.  Damn good at fixing dry-cleaning machines but quits fixing the dry-cleaning machines cause he's lazy and druggie.  Begs for advances from Lou Ferrari.  Lou has a buncha' cleaners and drives to each every day to check ‘em out and also to collect his daily receipts, checks, and oh yeah, cash.  Keeps the cash in a bag in the trunk of his white Cartier edition Lincoln Towncar.  When Jerry begs him for money, he opens the trunk of his car, takes out his blue Corporate Cleaners laundry bag (right in front of Crackhead Jerry), extracts a wad of cash and gives him 20-40 bucks and tells him he's going to have to "work this money off Jerry, this ain't a gift, okay?"  Soon they argue a lot over money.  Lou tells Jerry, "Hey, I ain't afraid of you." (uh, he should have been)

Meanwhile because Jerry's lost his driver's license because he don't pay his traffic tickets he gets picked up hitchhiking by our boy Jesse Montejo who works locally (immediately after moving to Slidell after being released from prison in Florida) for one week at changing tires at a tire dealer and two weeks as a roofer but gets discouraged at how hard all that work is.  Jerry says, "hey, Jesse, I make 40 bucks an hour fixing dry-cleaning machines but I can't get around to the cleaners because I can't drive, so how about driving me around for 50-60 bucks a day.  You'll be my "wheels" dude."  Jesse says, sounds like easy money Jerry, let's do it. He quits the roofing job.  But Jerry doesn't always pay up well.  He tends to smoke up all his money. Crack can get expensive, apparently.

Meanwhile one day while driving him around, Jesse witnesses Louis Ferrari pay Jerry out of his Lincoln's trunk with a wad of cash.  Jesse remarks to Jerry, "I wish I had it like that."  (exact quote from the trial) Jerry says, you don't know the half of it, that old guy keeps more money in his house AND in the trunk of his car than you'll ever need dude.  He's loaded.  AND, He don't lock his house.  He don't even close his garage door.  One day if you feel like it, you might want to check that shit out.  I want a cut though, ‘cause I'm filling you in on a sweet thing.  Remember, Thursday is the day he has the most money from weekly receipts.  He even goes out for dinner every Thursday.  Look in his closet too.  Big stash there.  Remember me when you do it.

Oh yeah.  Jesse spends way too much money.  Oh yea, He is also shacked up with his step-sister and her illegitimate daughter, uh, an "extended family" if you will.  So he can't pay his rent and is being evicted and the little girl cries a lot.  He also can't pay his $538.00 cell phone bill (more than his $450 apartment rent).  He can't pay his utilities either.  Oh, and he needs to upgrade his stereo and buy drugs. These are economic imperatives.

So, in order to get well, he gets his 17 year old step-brother to drive him over to Lou Ferrari's house.  He will eventually give the boy a third of the proceeds of the robbery and a third to Jerry Moore.  He shorts both of them of course.  He keeps more than his share.  They are both eventually charged with murder one (accessory).  Their trials will come up eventually.

We get presented the crime something like this:  Thursday September 5, 2002 at 4:45 PM Jesse enters the Ferrari house through the opened (probably) garage door.  At 5:10-5:15 Mr. Ferrari comes home to drop off groceries he just bought before driving over to meet Pat and his son for supper at Cracker Barrel.  Montejo kills Ferrari at 5:15 - 5:20.  Takes Lou's car keys, steals his car, signals his step-brother to follow him out of the neighborhood.  Small neighborhood.  Lots of people see these strangers driving around.  Lou's car following a blue Chevy van with a cattle guard on the front.  Cleans the car out and dumps it three blocks from where he lives (phew, that's dumb).  Pat Ferrari finds the body at 5:50 or so when Lou doesn't show up for supper at Cracker Barrel. She drove around looking and went home to find him dead.  The police arrest Montejo at 3:30 PM the next afternoon and interrogate him for 12 hours.  Jerry Moore gives him up as the killer.  The family knows Jerry Moore might well have had something to do with it because it was pretty obvious he and Lou were falling out about money all the time.  At 3:30AM the next day, Jesse confesses on video tape.  He looks like a very tired, very lost kid finally trying to tell what he did.  Except his story is one of about nine he tells.  He is an ingrained, pathological liar.  When he took the witness stand he told another version.  Utterly ridiculous.  A black guy from the ghetto did it and said if he told on him he'd kill his family.  What it came down to was Mr. Ferrari scratched Jesse in a struggle and got his DNA under his fingernails.  Three shots fired in the house.  Two hit Mr. Ferrari.  One into the couch.  Several stories about how it went down.  I cried when Pat Ferrari took the stand and told her own, very personal, very difficult version of what happened.  Waiting for her husband at the restaurant where they ate every Thursday night with her son and daughter-in-law.  Re-tracing her husband's normal steps to backtrack him to their house in case he had a flat tire.  Finding his body slumped down in the kitchen.  Hard on her.  Very, very brave.  Tough autopsy photos blown up on a projector in the courtroom.  Tough crime scene photos.  Evidence envelopes with skull fragments in them.  I cried again the next to the last day (confined it to the jury room) when Scott Gardner, the assistant DA, cross examined Jesse Montejo.  I sorta believed Jesse's lie number seven or eight about Lou Ferrari catching him ran-sacking the house and during a struggle he shot Lou in the side and when he wouldn't stop coming forward, shot him in the head.  Then on the way out of the house the gun was cocked and he had to stick it in his pants and felt he had to discharge it first so he fires into the couch.  There was bullet hole in the couch, the (?third?) shot fired, according to Jesse's eighth or ninth version.  Version one: he wasn't there.  Version two: Jerry Moore did it.  Version three: it was an accident, and so on and so on.  But Scott got Jesse to re-tell lie number ten on the witness stand, about the black guy named "DP" who forced Jesse over to the couch and put his head down on the couch and warned him that if he ever told anybody, he'd kill him and all his family, and fired a shot, right next to this head into the couch to scare him.  And Scott said, hey Jesse, that's what you did to Lou Ferrari.  That was the first shot, not the third.  The one you used to try to scare him, intimidate him into giving you "the big stash".  And then it all came crashing down for me.  The confused, stupid, lying kid executed Lou Ferrari.  The third shot traveled through his right eye socket and through his brain, through a bag of potato chips and into the wall.  He'd served two co-terminus five and six year sentences in Florida for armed robbery.  He was identified by the people he left behind.  He now knew "never leave a witness behind."  It made me as sad as anytime in my life.  Sad for Lou.  Sad for Jesse.  Sad for humanity.  I wanted to believe he had had such a struggle and he had a gun in his hand and it was just something that happened.  I wanted to believe the kid wouldn't just kill like that, in cold blood.  And when it came to me, it bothered me.  Between the time he left Lou's body behind on the kitchen floor, lying in a pool of blood, looking out on the world with a huge big red right eye staring at eternity for Pat to discover and the time he was tracked down by a discount card he used at a local grocery store, he managed to buy a new stereo system for his van.  Big shaker speakers and amplifier.  What a fucking waste.  And yeah, everybody says, how stupid can you be to carry cash in your trunk, leave your house unlocked, with a 357 magnum in your bedroom (Lou was shot with his own gun).  I hear that.  I hear that.  But I can't think it.  I don't care if it's true.  Not after seeing what happened to Lou and Pat Ferrari.  I'm sorry but nobody deserves that.  I was an alternate juror.  Sat through the whole proceeding, right front row, immediately next to the witness box, but didn't deliberate.  Was sequestered for a week.  Took me home on a Friday with two deputies and more or less placed me under house arrest for a week at Holiday Inn.  We were in court Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and part of Thursday.  The jury found him guilty in two and half hours and sentenced him to lethal injection the next day in three hours.  I became friends with a few people on the jury including the foreman, an ex-Delta pilot.  We talked for a while about the deliberation.  I might have argued against the death penalty.  I don't really know but it just doesn't matter.  Nothing really matters for Louis Ferrari any more.  I can forgive Jesse Montejo, I guess. He really never had a chance to begin to understand how people are supposed to act. He learned most of what he thinks in prison. They revealed to us after the trail that Jesse had a prison tat on his back about never leaving a witness alive. I hope that one day Pat Ferrari can get some peace.  But I doubt it.  If they really kill Jesse in ten to twenty years after automatic appeal after appeal, I hope it brings closure for her.  I argued with another juror that a man's life isn't about its end, no matter how horrible, it's about what went on every day of those sixty one years. Lou had a lot of good days before his last.  That final day is really no more important than the day his son was born, or his daughter.  God, I hope I'm right.

Post Script

I learned that jurors get coloring books. That they throw up a lot in the bathroom. We ate well most every night at decent restaurants, one of which I took Ruth to to try out after the trial. One morning for breakfast two guys shouted out to us to fry the “guilty sumbich” and got arrested on the spot. They looked surprised. The judge told us to ignore it. Wasn’t hard. One of my juror mates, the retired Delta pilot, flew his Navy fighter jet over his carrier inverted (and went on report) and popped his back jumping a motorcross bike when he was a kid. Another one them (retired army) got run over by a tank (crushed his leg). He had also been cleaved in the head by a machete when he broke into a building occupied by rebels when we invaded Granada. Split his helmet but he emptied his M-16 into the guy. The guy had a very hard head. We played Texas Hold Em at night. While the jury deliberated (I sat through the whole thing but was one of the alternates who wasn’t needed for deliberation) I played pool with police officers in the lounge at the Holiday Inn. One or two of the deputies were pretty good if they were winning. One or two games I ran so many balls in on them that they started to hit me when I was going to shoot and picked up the pool balls before I could run them in any more. Made me feel pretty good. They also cheated the pool table so we wouldn’t have to continuously put in quarters. What can I say, they were the law. I got filled in on the robberies that had occurred in the area. I was fast becoming one of the boys. I ran on the treadmill a lot. When the jury came in, they all sought me out to share with me what had happened during the deliberation. The guy who flew the carrier jet (the Delta pilot) was the foreman. They didn’t need many votes. The big argument was over the death penalty, not over if he was guilty, just over whether to kill him or not. I’m glad I didn’t have to vote for the death penalty. Probably would have because I said I would when I was picked for the jury. But you never know. Getting picked for the jury was an inconvenience. I know if I had had the chance to get out of it, I would have. It would have been a terrible mistake on my part. The experience was one of the singularly most educational weeks of my life. Not everything I learned was pleasant but it was all important, especially to Lou and Pat Ferrari and their daughter. I won’t hesitate next time to serve but I'm sure if I show any eagerness to do it, they'll reject me out of hand. But that won't surprise me.

After posting this story, I became aware that the capital murder case, on which I was a jury alternate, eventually made it's way to the Supreme Court, for appeal. The unsuccessful appeal is chronicled here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montejo_v._Louisiana