All Entries in the "Soft News" Category

The Ant, the Grasshopper, and the Bar Fly

  So this guy comes into a bar…actually the two of them had been lounging for most of the afternoon flexing what was left of their pale muscles, pumping wisdom like a tired old well about to call it a lifetime. Both were heavy into self-absorbed. But swashbuckling tomcats like Don Juan were light on scrutiny preferring the other side of the looking glass to the mirror.

     These were very important men. Don Juan had an opinion on everything which he shared with the less fortunate like Candy, his shell-shocked drinking buddy who had eager ears but little as backup.

     “Yeah, I’ve damn well got her made,” started Don Juan. “Got my bank roll, my trailer house is paid for, and my pickup is runnin’ great.”

     He turned his neck ever so slightly and caught a glimpse of Candy who looked like he was trying to crawl into his cloudy pilsner glass.

     “For crying out loud, man, sit up straight,” he cuffed. “Look at your body language. It says everything about you. It tips your hand.”

     Candy looked at his body. He didn’t see or hear anything but he came to attention anyway following a pattern that had begun early on. Candy was there as a human reaction, to do as he was told. He was all but transparent because it had become easier that way.

     “Look at this,” said Don Juan, scanning the local gazette as he reached for his beer. “They sent a probe to Mars but it blew up when it got close. Idiots! I wonder how much that cost. I pay taxes and I’m damn sick and tired of the government shooting off space ships like they were butterflies.”

     Don Juan thought about what he had just said and smiled at his linguistic flair.

     “I don’t like bugs,” said Candy, “especially flying ones.”

     Don Juan continued to read the paper, his glasses fallen down around his cantaloupe nose. To him the expression on his face while reading was far more important than any information extracted from the experience. He wore a somber frown accentuated by hush puppies and a cap that read Cheyenne Frontier Days.

     “Winter’s comin’,” he soapboxed. “Look here. It snowed three feet in Duluth just yesterday. I’m glad I’m ready…got my wood all in and new mud and snows on the Power Wagon. How ’bout you?”

     Candy looked into the bar mirror. He had a propane heater in his small apartment that was paid for by the Veteran’s Administration because of the war. He didn’t drive and the last time he tried to can a batch of tomatoes, given to him by his sister over in Delta, he’d almost blown up the place. How could Candy prepare for winter? One season just plowed into another.

     “Oh, I’m fine,” he choked with a uncertain voice, all but drowned out by the television.

     “Fine, huh?” barked Don Juan. “Just like last year when you never got around to taping your windows and your pipes froze. Then you had to sleep on my couch for the whole month of January. Your like the man who had a forest of firewood at his fingertips but forgot to discover fire.”

     Don Juan was on a roll.

     “Security doesn’t just wander up into your yard,” he preached. “You gotta go get it. Whether it’s financial, social or romantic there’s a brawl going on and you just as well join in right away. Lead with your left, boy!”

     He slapped Candy hard on the back. The tiny toothless aperture just under his road map nose was not to be stopped now.

     “Take money, for instance,” he continued. “I worked for thirty-five years to get me a nest egg and now I’m gonna enjoy it. I got stocks and bonds, 40 acres up on the Plateau, a great retirement, CDs, credit cards, a fat bank account and even some of them annuities. Everything I got is paid for and I don’t have any kids to leave nothin’ to.”

     Candy stared into his empty glass. Don Juan ordered two more beers and companion shots. He had a captive audience and the four dollars was a well spent investment to keep it that way.

     “You might as well spend it all,” quipped Candy breaking into a smile.

     “Hell, we might just do that this afternoon,” smiled Don Juan who continued to peruse the paper. He was a man smart enough to do two things at once.

     “Yeah, you got to be ready for winter around these parts,” he said glancing in the direction of his doleful disciple who smelled like an empty case of Pabst. “You still got time and maybe I’ll even lend a hand but first let me tell you a story. I know you don’t like bugs but it’s called The Ants and the Grasshopper. It’s by some fella named Aesop. He was a Greek a long time ago.”

     Candy perked up. “That’s a funny sounding name,” he mumbled.

     Maybe you’ll get the connection here. You’ve got to have your affairs in order. You never know when your card will come up. What would you do in an emergency? What do you have to fall back on?”

     Don Juan went on to tell Candy the story of the industrious ants and the lazy grasshopper. Despite the fact that Candy did not like bugs he listened intently. Don Juan told him about the ants drying grain on a fine winter’s day. The grain had been collected over long, hard days throughout the summer months.

     “Then along comes this grasshopper, half starved, begging for a handout,” he explained. “One of the ants asked him why he had not stored up any food during the summer. He says he had not leisure time enough and that he had passed the days singing. The ants scorned him saying that if he had been foolish enough to sing away the summer then he must dance supperless to bed in the winter.”

     Don Juan waited for a response.

     “Mean little bastards,” said Candy.

     “You miss the point,” said Don Juan. “The ants worked at getting their ducks in a row while the grasshopper wasted his time. It’s just like you and me,” he added. “I’m the ant and you’re the grasshopper. My house in order while your roof is caving in.”

     Suddenly Don Juan clutched his chest, executing a poignant plunge from his prosaic perch at the bar. A swan dive in a dive. He hit the floor hard, his satellite brew crashing beside him. He was a goner.

     At the funeral a lot of people that Candy had never seen talked about what a great man Don Juan had been. They said he had grit. They said he had enjoyed a full life. They said he’d be missed. What they were really doing was a little preheat jockeying for position with regards to his assets, which ended up going to an uncle and aunt Don Juan had never liked.

     Meanwhile Candy wandered home and spent the rest of the day putting up visquine over the peewee windows of his ratty chamber. Were there no end to the chores? Don Juan’s old pickup sat propped in the driveway, a gift from the counterfeit relatives who didn’t want to haul the thing back to Salida. Now he would have to put gas in it. How would he ever get around to that.

– Kashmir Horseshoe

     

DUDE NEWSPAPER SEASON BEST ON RECORD

(Ouray) The San Juan Horseshoe is reporting staggering profits after completion of its third Dude News Session held in July and August. The 2-week seminars give newspaper buffs the opportunity to get a little ink under their fingernails here in the computer age.

     Participants, who must apply for the minimal spots as early as April, undergo the pain and joy of real news men and women. Deadlines, logistical nightmares regarding circulation and subscription correspondence and layout are covered. Perhaps the most useful experience is in the dude ranch venue where students actually herd advertisers into a pen for branding.

     “That was my favorite,” said Bennie Ratshoe-Hummingway of Clovis, New Mexico. “How they got all those people in that small veal shoot is beyond me!”

     The regular staff enjoys a slight break from the tedious too. Many prefer to spend lazy afternoons sitting around the camp jug shouting encouragement to the tabloid rookies.

     “We just chill and let these overachievers overachieve,” said darkroom analyst, Earl MacAdoo. “Last week we ran a Bad Blood Drive in Crested Butte where residents mooned everyone and we took photographs. Before that we had a campfire feast where we charged our clients in a grand fashion and served them only humus and choice of Guinness Lite or tepid ditchwater. Staying on top of food cost is everything these days. Branding, or bovine tattoo handicraft as we like to call it, was optional.”

     The management of the paper feels that corporate America needs to find out how jerkwater operations like this paper are carried out. Survival techniques, social skills and alcohol control are a side-effect as is extensive vocabulary use.

     “And all of our delivery wagons run on methane gas, taking advantage of the hayseed culture that’s all around us,” said MacAdoo.

-Fred Zeppelin

Local Airport Gears Up For Halloween

Rather than, as a precautionary measure, ban costumes from departures and arrivals on Halloween Day the Cookie Tree Airstrip has announced it will beef up security in and around the facility.

“This will consist of bringing in about 50 head of cattle and bovine accessories,” said Fred Zeppelin, Director of Homing Pigeon Safety for the military gov’ment. “We figure with all those Herefords hanging around the X-ray machine nobody’s gonna sneak through our radar.”

Airflow officials expect traffic to be heavy and disguises to be common on Halloween, a holiday stolen from the pagans and turned into All Saints Eve by early Christians in 54 AD.

“It’s hard enough landing a 747 in mined skunk cabbage fields without having a bunch of loonies running around dressed like witches or Frankenstein,” said Zeppelin. “What if someone dresses up like an Arab? Some might even try to dress up like us. This could get ugly.”

– Melvin “I’ve been on vacation since 1950” O’Toole

Brunot Agreement Rescinded

After more than 150 years courting appeals and petitioning higher powers the Blue Sky People have won an unprecedented legal battle which effectively negates the Brunot Treaty and returning some 3.5 million acres of land to its rightful owners. The questionable agreement, signed in 1873 under blatantly false pretense, called for the removal of all Utes from the area of mines, which included all of the San Juans, most of the foothills and everything else that wasn’t tied down..

     Even though a previous Treaty (1868) guaranteed that the land “would be theirs forever” the newer entente, hatched by newcomers such as Governor Frederick Pitkin, called for the expulsion of the seven Ute bands to reservations along the New Mexico and Utah borders.

     At the time the Utes did not understand what the government had done. It had been their understanding during negotiations that they would give up land on which the mines were actually located, not all the land that contained mines. The situation was further clouded by a government decree recognizing Ouray (of the Uncompahgre Band) as chief of all Colorado Utes. This designation allegedly helped grease the smooth transfer of lands to white settlers.

     “If Ouray was chief of the Utes then my ass chews gum,” said one Ute sheep herder living near Ignacio. “He was never elected to anything. I was all a giant hoax to grab our land, which we feel cannot be owned in the first place.”

     During the last few days of hearings, Supreme Quart justices apologized to the Blue Sky People for “unparalleled grievances, rampant violence and methodical racism”. Saying that the land in question was stolen they declared all treaties starting with the Calhoun Treaty of 1850 to be null and void.

     “We can’t give these native peoples back their culture, their murdered families or their way of life but we can damn sure give them back their land.

     In keeping with the ruling, the town of Ouray will be renamed Colorow and the city of Gunnison to Tomichi. Colorow was a real chief and Gunnison had been named after early white explorer John Gunnison, a man of questionable moral fiber.

     “Tomichi sounds better,” continued the herder.

     “We expect it will take about 100 years for the land to return to its more natural state,” explained one Ute councilman from what was once called Cortez, and will now be named Weeminuche City.

     The white folks currently residing on the effected acreage will have until Friday to vacate the premises or be forcibly moved to reservations in the desert.

– Kashmir Horseshoe

     

MOST BLACK BEAR LIVE BELOW POVERTY LINE

(Denver) A majority of Colorado’s 20,000 black bear are indigent, penniless and otherwise destitute according to Division of Fur, Scales, and Feathers here. The Office of FSF, a division of the Colorado SOW, says the problem is increasing with sub-substandard snow pack yielding less food and fewer acres of ample ground cover in which to hide from burgeoning human occupiers.

     The black bear, the smallest and most numerous of the overall species, has been living hand to mouth, trudging through the milenniums long before statistics as to fiscal well being were collected. In the years when worth was measured not in material wealth but in spirit, this did not present such a gaping problem but today the disparity runs rampant like a hungry child with his bum hanging out.

     Although the bear is inquisitive, very adaptive, bright and social, he is up against the wall of progress. Despite the inequality he is remarkably tolerant of humans. A shy omnivore, the bear will eat just about anything plant or animal. Chronic problems emerge when the animals get used to eating human garbage and thus have more contact with the main predator, which, of corpse, is you and I.

     Able to run in bursts exceeding 35 miles per hour and climb trees like nobody’s business, black bear are great swimmers. Often living up to 25 years in the wild, the bear exhibits incredible smell, sight and hearing.

     “The bear may be proud beasts but are basically stinky deadbeats, like most other forest mammals,” said Durango biologist Lexy Brooine, head of the Fur and Feathers segment of SOW, a state component of Boneland Security.

     “If you give a bear a fish you create dependency. If you teach a bear to fish you create a functional creature who embraces independence. With cuts over at welfare and unpredictable gov’ment assistance qualification (compliments of the incompetent trumpies currently in power), it is difficult to cater to our wards even with the above mentioned free-lance, expansion of the traditional bruin cusine ,” she explained. “There is only so much honey to give away.”

     Often considered reasonably affluent in comparison to smaller mammals as well as fish and flying things, the black bear have fallen onto hard times due to bad investments, outsourcing, lack of leadership and a gradual departure from scrupulous survival instincts that have served them well since the species began to evolve.

     “Sounds a lot like the current human quagmire,” said Brooine.

     “In addition to human garbage and abandoned cars, ski areas and mountain golf resorts have mercilessly killed traditional habitat leaving the animals reliant on the gov’ment,” added Brooine. “Think of all the money diverted into already deep pockets on these endeavors, and it’s easy to see why the bear are where they are, at least in a financial sense.”

– Uncle Pahgre

For more on this sad subject see Indian, Buffalo and Bear: Subtle Suburban Genocide by Melvin Bedwetter Toole, Testosterone Bros., Boston.

     

THE MOONSHINER’S SONG

  In 1925 Ouray was still unmistakably a mining town. There had been ups and downs but the mines were still employing hundreds and yielding almost immoral tons of precious ore. There were plenty of churches and plenty of brothels. The Utes had long gone, replaced by new immigrants from Italy, Ireland and Eastern Europe. Most were thirsty fellows and ladies.

     The only thing missing were the boisterous saloons of frontier living. The temperance folks had had their way. Prohibition was in full swing with ax-wielding do-gooders saving the population from the evils of demon rum. They had failed to convince the thirsty and the great unwashed as to the moral implications of boozing, so they  simply legislated them into dusty submission. The noble experiment doomed to failure.

     One man, set on making a living in his hometown, saw a window of opportunity. His family had made what they called mountain dew, or hooch since coming to the San Juans in the late 1880s. Then they sold it more out in the open. Today’s whiskey runner would have to be more careful. Although the authorities generally turned their backs when it came to the sins of the populace, one never took that benefit for granted. Only last spring the police had reluctantly arrested two Montrose men for selling bootlegged whiskey. Now the two were in jail and their families were hungry. What good did that do?

     Abe Morrow had served in France during the war. He was convinced that the teetotalers had conspired against the doughboys during a time of national emergency. They had stabbed them in the back with all this Prohibition. If men in France forgot the horror of war with a good bottle (or three) of French wine what harm was done?

     By 1925 the nation had settled back into what historians call the Great Dry Spell. Morrow, now approaching 3o years of age had a thriving business. His stills ran all day and he ran around all night satisfying the needs of his customers from Silverton to Dallas. It always amazed him how happy they were to see him. Very little sales work. Just a good sense of public relations and jugs of excellent souma, white lightning or poteen.

     Most of his elixir was safe enough to drink and varied in quality and barter capacity. It was rumored that he distilled a sort of kosher whiskey and some powerful bailie, distilled from sorghum, that he sold to the Chinese in town and even up n Silverton, when the opportunity presented itself. He had to be careful not to step on the toes of other moonshiners who did not appreciate the intrusion into their territory and often met Asian customers at the top of Red Mountain Pass.

     But most of his customers were miners, good hard working people in need of a good whistle wetting after a long shift underground.

     He was looking good, but he needed to take on a partner, someone who could run the operation when he got too old. A bachelor, Abe had no kids to bring into the business. His prospects must know about hard woods and where to get them for a smooth taste. They had to study his bottling procedures. They had to be good in the woods at night. They had to shut their mouth about this and that. They had to be aware of what cops were also customers and which ones would be trouble. Most of all, they had to be honest…yes honest, with the customers and with Abe too.

     Since most of his potential associates were employed, he would have to search the ranks of newcomers, or teach some kid the grist mill and mash trade before he embraced some other profession. The population of newcomers was peppered with a sad assortment of ragamuffins and scalawags and that was on a good day. He didn’t want to hook up with his competitors, the Carlson Boys, down valley because then he would have more than a partner, he’d have a boss. The same would go for alliances in San Juan County.

     One afternoon as he was headed up to work up Hayden Mountain he noticed a young man coming out of the miner’s union. He knew the kid. His name was Richards. The two had stopped and talked before. His father had been killed at Belleau Wood in 1918. His mother had died of scarlet fever a few years later. Like many of the town’s younger men he had been rustling a job at one of the local mines. At present he said he had few prospects other than nipping at the Old Maid or tending to cranky mules up at the Camp Bird.

     There were always jobs in the coal mines but that was far more dangerous work and besides, he had hard rock mining in his veins.

     Morrow told Richards he was on his way to work and that he might be looking for some help later in the week. He was afraid to say more, but he needed to start somewhere. He felt like a high wire performer, sans net at his first practice session.

     “I know what you do,” said Richards. “I see you coming and going. I don’t drink myself or I might have sampled your wares.”

     Abe was dumbstruck. He thought he had covered his tracks better than this. He always took the back roads and never even drove his empty delivery wagon into town. He figured that the miners thought he was a rancher and the ranchers thought he was a miner. He hauled around an assortment of serious-looking tools that he had no use for simply to keep nosey sniffers off the scent.  This kid was paying attention.

     “So what is it that I do?” he finally asked.

     “You deliver milk,” was the answer. “Mother’s milk, I suspect.”

     Both men laughed. Abe carefully cross-examined Bobby Richards, attempting to sort out opinions on the morality of the liquor business.

     “You looking for a job?” he asked.

     “Yeah, I’m getting tired of sweeping up and hustling newspapers at the brothels. I think I’m ready for a new career, something stable, with a future.”

     “Have you checked at the bank?” smiled Morrow, looking Richards square in the eye.

     “No money in that,” said the younger man. “Is this a job interview?”

     “Maybe, but I’m having trouble with where to start,” said Morrow.

     “Got some deliveries tonight?” asked Richards. “I can drive, you can drop.”

     “I’ll think on it,” said Morrow without sharing further secrets.

     Although his recent successes were closely aligned with keeping his business to himself, Morrow knew his prayers had been answered. The next day he approached Richards on the street.

     “Still want that job?” he asked.

     “Sure, except for the fact that I start my policeman training on Monday.”

     Abe’s heart stopped. Was the kid serious? Nobody was smiling. Here in his first attempt at expanding his services he had just hired a cop, or at least a rookie one. He froze.

     “Don’t worry about me, Mr. Morrow. Everyone knows about your war record, how you were a hero and all. Even my dad talked about you in his last letters from France,” he said. “I have no problem with you. Even a cop takes a drink once in a while, illegal or not. Ain’t none of us voted for this Prohibition business anyway.”

     Abe began to sweat. He had been so careful and yet this kid knew all about him.

     “Lot’s of people know who you are and what you’re doing,” said Richards. “As far as they’re concerned you’re not hurting anyone…You’re just providing a needed service. The marshal and a lot of others don’t want anyone else coming in here upsetting the cart, no matter what the cargo.”

     “So you won’t turn me in?” he choked.

     “What for?” laughed the kid, “and if my new job doesn’t work out I might consider going to work for you. I think I’d be good at it.”

     “No doubt,” thought Abe as the two parted ways. “I’d better move my copper kettles nonetheless,” he mused as he headed out of town.

     As he made his way up past Ironton Park, Morrow took time to reevaluate his security procedures wondering how many other people knew his business. The money was too good to stop smuggling booze but he might have trouble sleeping from now on. Prison was not a part of his agenda.

     He was far too afraid to conduct any more job interviews. He would remain a one-man enterprise, at least for the time being.

     From time to time over the next few years Morrow would watch a young railroad cop walk his beat in Montrose. It was Richards. The new job had worked out fine but neither felt comfortable to resume earlier conversations.

     Life goes on.

     On February 20, 1933 a Lame Duck session of Congress passed the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, repealing Prohibition. It ended an era of gangsters and widespread disregard for the law. It also killed Abe’s moonshine operation and he was forced to find another, more suitable occupation. One place he didn’t look was in the area of law enforcement.

– Uncle Pahgre