This was Spike’s last night in the old house he remembered as he typed. The serendipity, the epiphany of finding a treasure wasn’t in his mind as he followed his instincts on this night. Tule fog is like a grey ghost in Reaganville at this time of the year. It is cold and wet, breathes and appears like the inside of a monster’s lungs. Headlights of cars reflect off of the particles of moisture and taillights illuminate like dissipating blood mixed with white wine and club soda of the night. Streetlights rain down yellow color, and all is mixed together in a wash of a painter’s pallet spilled into a grey wet world. Losing oneself in this is otherworldly, and you can feel like you have been left between heaven and hell waiting.

I have slipped through the front door without a sound. Skippy is asleep, and I have a pocket full of “Bush Sucks and Dick too,” “Bush/Cheney 04 For Prison,” “Bush Kicks Ass for My Gas,” and “I don’t care who I bomb for this stuff…” bumper stickers. I have decided to blanket the neighborhood one last time before I leave.

I was told, by the Unitarian minister where we once went as a family to church every now and then, that the best thing to do was to mourn with my son, mourn for the loss of our family and go from there. To not cry with his father or mother would not be good, but Faith can’t cry more, as she is happy with Samuel and she does retreat into that wet and slimy place of non-disclosure.

So Skippy and I cried for hours together, he laying on the couch, and I on the rug with a pillow. I would wake and cry; he would wake and cry with me bitterly, on and on for hours into the night until we were exhausted. I knew there was nothing left to do but to purge Skippy. I had to let him know deep down that his family was to end up broken and I had sworn never to let this happen, but Faith had other plans. I would never purge myself, I thought, but around my son, sooner or later I’d have to appear to be over it. I engaged my son in the realization of a horror.

So like a drunk I was now roaming the streets of Reaganville looking for one last tag fest, and I couldn’t care less if my fingerprints were on the stickers as I used to be careful of being caught so I’d wipe them clean. I hoped I’d get caught; it really felt like justice to be caught. Maybe they would execute me for it. There was no reason, at 54, to have lost a grey angel, to live, so I was looking to really smash a window and kill a republican.

These kinds of nights should either be avoided or embraced, and in my state of mind I thought that the fog was like a blanket of wet solace, an almost solid fixture I was walking through. Midnight is the perfect time for vampires and someone with the cross and garlic of verbal death for a W04.

Faith had sworn to me that we would leave the US if Bush won as I emphatically begged her to. She had no intention, though, as she had the sense of adventure of a deflated square tire. She was just placating me, keeping me from arguing with a blatant lie. Where was America now? I asked 1000 times as I looked at Skippy as fodder for an endless war on terrorism, Army recruitment down 40 some odd percent and a draft was sure to come. Faith had lied to me so many times because she was scared to disagree with me, as she knew I was right, but she was in fear of losing her one dimensional family in Sanger and her health insurance. Canada had national health insurance, and that was the direction I was looking towards.

My goal was just to leave and stop the fight, the fight I waged with mere bumper stickers and a vociferous cry to those who were on the fence. Faith knew what I felt about white people, and she was white, and she had always wondered why I was still married to her after this discovery was nailed down completely. I was Jewish, I said, not white so, self-loathing was her answer to my statement I dispelled with my Jewish-ness. How could I self loathe the culture that were branded communists and union agitators throughout American history? I was not white and that was that!

Faith, the Arkmenian, half Grapes of Wrath and half genocide chiseled Armenian was not a white woman in my eyes, but I was blinded by the woman’s color that I adored as if she were a new spectral creation unseen in the visual world.

She, at my request had grown her hair long again, and it hung over her marshmallow shoulders like brown gold over silk. I grew myself more in love with her every day, and as my business venture in the mountains was failing, my Internet power was growing and I could even absorb spending money on New Sierra Guitar and still make a profit. But Faith, her heart broken over money and a man of grave anger and frustration, was moving away as fast as I was moving towards with lungs cleared of pot and cigarettes, a store hell bent on closing, and a heart ready for a family. Timing is everything. Fatherly instincts honed to raise a complex 11 year-old precious boy of high intelligence and Marlon Brando looks of deep romanticism. He was a boy misunderstood and strange to his classmates, read biographies of people like Mel Brooks and Marcus Garvey, the top 1% in testing reading and comprehension in the US. The little brown boy with my father’s nose, his mother’s father’s chin, and a complexion that was mine kept me alive. I’d be dead by now if it wasn’t for him, and I told him so as we cried through the night hugging each other like the world was about to be hit by a gargantuan comet. Don’t tell me that it is wrong to start a boy out telling him that love is everything.

Eyes of a poet, he had already shown strong signs of complexity in his school dealings, and we knew we were in for it, and I was sullen because the divorce was going to complicate things even further and Faith had the sense of timing of a Mongolian comedian in a Jewish sitcom. She could have waited, but she needed to be fucked, and Samuel had no chance in hell of getting a woman, so in spite of his pledge that he was going to respect the sanctity of marriage, he was a raccoon. I had told him I wanted to put a bullet in his head and he understood. I could never understand how men could do such things, and now I was living the life of an enraged husband.

So for one last time, I was the scourge of Reaganville, and I didn’t care about being caught. It was after midnight and I was looking to kill republicans or paste ‘Republican the Party of Lincoln-Now it just be Stinkin’ on an American flag that in measure of my mind was flown by Tory trash and disgraced as the Torah was by a Nazi. This fog was especially thick as the yellow streetlamp and the blue headlights of a newer luxury car mixed. The car passed, and the color changed from yellow blue to yellow red of the taillights. The fog billowed and rolled by the disturbance and made more ethereal the scene. A vision that I was in Hell passed through my mind as Reaganville was my personal Hell as I had begged so often to leave this place forsaken by everyone’s gods in cold consumerism and fake supplication to the Christian god. A place that was a test market for everything as people with clipboards roamed the malls looking to recruit consumers for market tests that had always managed to stay away from me because of my furrowed forehead.

Tonight I walked into a section that I had not previously been to, a simple right turn avoided on other nights of tagging, a cul de sac of no particular interest as I had a preference for straight runs of blocks with outlets as criminals always look for cover and a way out. So yes, I am a criminal now and it fells good! A criminal like Castro! Tonight the fog was my cover, and I didn’t care to have a way out and was looking for even confrontation.

Here is this house that is a gold mine! A Hummer with a W04, a Ford Excursion, a jacked up Ford 150, and the latter two with BUSH/CHENEY 04, Proud to be American, Support Our Troops, empty fish, and the house has an American flag hanging from the roof. I am salivating. There is something recognizable about the only car in the driveway, and I walk up to take a closer examination. It is a grey Acura with a Fresno City College faculty rear view mirror tag hanging from it, and I recognize this car to be Mike Stratton’s car, music department head! I recognize the jacked up Ford 150 to be Van Borgstedt’s truck. The Jazz Republicans!

Van Borgstedt and I, last year before summer break, had this long discussion about the oxymoron “Jazz Republican,” a phrase that came to me when I discovered that he had voted for every republican for anything since Reagan.

“Van,” I asked, “how can you vote republican and be a jazz pianist? Haven’t the republicans been the party of the KKK and segregation?”

“No, it is the party of God and I am a Christian,” Van said smiling as if sanctified.

“Is Jesus a republican and does Jesus drive a Hummer?” What else was I to ask of this simple minded person?

“Well Spike, I don’t know. Maybe Jesus would walk.”

”But what if Jesus was an insurance salesman and he needed to be places very fast off of the public transportation lines; what would he drive?” I answered, “A Hybrid.”

Van laughed. I said, “Jesus was a man of his times; therefore he used donkey and sandal. If he were of this time, he’d ride a bike or if necessary use a hybrid.”

“Furthermore,” I said, “Jesus was the first socialist. His message was about as far from neo-conservatism as sand is to diamonds. Remember, Borgstedt, this was an egalitarian message; it is harder for a rich man to get to heaven than a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Didn’t Jesus say that?”

Van Borgstedt looked perplexed because the republicans had become the party of the Christians.

“And Van,” I continued, “jazz has it’s origins in slavery, freed blacks of New Orleans and Creoles. Republicans are the party of segregation, the KKK, and every piece of legislation that would foster equal rights for blacks throughout history, and you undermine every advancement for African-Americans every time you vote for some fat white bastard republican fuck head!”

Van Borgstedt had turned red, and I just walked away, and now, a year later I am facing his jacked up truck sprayed with designer mud from Johnson & Johnson. Sierra Pink aerosol designer mud for those who never use the jacked up nature of the wilderness tearing truck and merely haul a Fender Rhodes electric piano and amplifier to improvise African-American originated jazz for republican fund raisers.

I stood there in rapture and readied my choicest bumper sticker, the one with the oil derrick spewing oil on the left side reading in black lettering “See, we told you what the war was about!” At the bottom where the black oil spill was read “I am a stupid ass who voted for Bush.” All of a sudden I hear the sound of a jazz guitar coming from the house and heard the wanna-be Phil Evans chord changes and knew that I had hit pay dirt. This is where The Jazz Republicans practiced. My marriage had ended and my wife was fucking a balding English teacher with Buddhist proclivities, but that didn’t matter right now. I was in ecstasy!

I pasted from Hummer to Ford Excursion to Ford F-150. With sheer delight hidden from view, I made war on these metal beasts that were responsible for the deaths of soldiers from poor families and innocent children in Iraq. I left my fingerprints everywhere.

Mike Stratton car I left alone. He was too whitewashed and cautious to have any political or deeply philosophical views on anything. He made progressive motions, wore Hawaiian shirts and Ray Bans, and was secretly planning to run for City Council, so it’d be best for him to act neuter, and it wasn’t an act. He was a sexless couch of a person and had no grit and fire of even a Van Borgstedt. He was the son of a grape farmer, you might say, a farmer with a guitar and a Son of the Valley.

Next: Mayor Bubba and his son