“I’m getting bad as the president,” Justin said.

Lisa looked up from the sink where she struggled to scrub barbecue shredded pork grease from the supper dishes.

“Germs,” Justin said. “I’m worried about germs like Trump.”

“Yeah, Trump’s a germ all right,” Lisa said.

“No I mean the president’s a germaphobe. So’s Biden from what I hear. Can’t say I blame either one.”

“Oh, honey, you just got back from your yearly doctor’s checkup, that’s all.”

“No, it’s worse than that,” Justin said.

Watching her now he noticed she only used one squirt of lemon dishwashing liquid on the sponge. He would have used three or four, maybe. And he wouldn’t use the fruit-scented stuff. He’d use some kind of extra strength bleach-based detergent or one with ammonia in it if you could buy such a thing. He wouldn’t use a sponge, either. You might as well scrub germs off your dinner plates with a petri dish loaded with Escherichia coli bubbles.

“E. coli,” he said.

Stopping in mid-scrape, Lisa scrunched a puzzled look on her face.

“You might as well ladle bugs on the dinnerware like gravy,” he said.

Embarrassed, Lisa wasn’t sure what to say.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

Turning abruptly, Justin stormed into the bathroom to wash his hands. Pulling down and using four squares of toilet paper to touch the faucets for the right blend of hot and cold water, he worried about picking up the bar of soap that lay in a glass dish shaped like a seashell Lisa bought at a Gen X hipster shop downtown. Spotting the quarter-inch mud smear, he knew Lisa must have last washed her hands after gardening that afternoon and contaminated the Dove with a streak of real outdoor germ-infested backyard dirt. Without turning off the water he bolted back into the kitchen where he caught Lisa off guard while she wiped her hands on the dishtowel.

“You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?”

Before she could ask if he lost his mind, Justin was back in the bathroom, this time locking the door behind him. Justin’s condition didn’t happen overnight. For the past few weeks he felt germs looking at him, crawling on his arms during the day, sometimes walking on his legs in the morning or when they woke him up at night sashaying up and down his back like fashion models on the runway. Germs looking at him bothered him the most because they could see him but he couldn’t see them. It was only a matter of time before he encountered one face-to-face in the living room while he was watching the Discovery Channel on television.

Lisa’s light tap on the door startled him.

“Are you OK, Justin?”

Checking his watch he knew he’d been in the bathroom a long time. Turns out 20 minutes had passed from the time he first sensed germs on the bar of soap and Lisa‘s halting knock.

“I’m washing my hands,” Justin said.

“Just checking,” she said.

Twenty minutes later, she knocked again.

“You’re starting to worry me,” she said. “At least unlock the door.”

As he was turning the lock he saw a germ the size of a pepper fleck wearing what looked like a crewcut jump off the wall before it disappeared behind the shower curtain. In a panic Justin looked under the sink for the plunger. He had to fight back. Facing the shower curtain, his left leg began to shake. His fingers trembled. Tightening his grip on the plunger, with one hand he tore open the curtain, ripping it from several plastic rings. Jumping onto the edge of the tub he raised the plunger.

There they were, about 12 more germs, round buggers with legs, beady eyes and vicious scowls, hanging out by the drain mocking him like an outlaw motorcycle club taunting a weak potential victim while pounding down beers at a bucket-of -blood hillbilly bar. Backing up, Justin opened the door and eased slow motion into the hall.

Lisa met him with a lemon sponge cake in her hands.

“Surprise,” she said. “Your favorite dessert.”

Justin raised the plunger over his head.

Lisa held up the cake like a battle shield.

“Lemon, huh? Like the dishwashing liquid? Sponge cake, Lisa? Like a homemade treat designed for culturing bacteria and other microorganisms? Do you have any pathogen loaded botulism whipped cream to go with it?”

“It’s only a cake, honey, dessert.”

Justin was still holding the plunger when police pulled up beside him at midnight parked outside the high school where he graduated in 1982 and taught biology for the past 30 years.

“I plead self-defense, officer,” Justin said.

The cop looked puzzled.

“For what?”

“Breaking into the chemistry lab.”

“What did you do that for?”

“I needed to cook up an antidote for the pestilence.”

“You mean the pandemic?”

“Sort of.”

“Yeah that’s getting to everybody,” the cop said.

“I mixed a batch of antitoxin to kill germs,” Justin said.

“Think it will work?”

“Somebody’s got to try,” Justin said.

“There you go, Mr. Good Citizen. More people need to get involved in their communities,” the cop said. “Make it like the America we grew up in.”

Justin sensed an ally and went for broke.

“Is there a chance you have an extra pair of them gloves you’re wearing?”

“Always” the cop said. “I wear the disposables because I don’t want to touch the criminals when I yank them out of the car. You never know what you might catch.”

“Exactly,” Justin said.

The cop peeled off the throwaway gloves.

“You can have these if you give me a jar of that bug neutralizer cure,” he said.

“You got yourself a deal, partner,” Justin said.

When the cop snapped a salute and pulled away, Justin drank from the magic potion that would protect him in a world full of germs. You can’t be too careful. Justin put on the gloves. Watching the cop disappear in the rearview mirror Justin felt safe from germs for the first time all day.

Say what you will about police brutality, in this case at least somebody understood.

Lisa would just have to get her own damn gloves.

“Here’s more bottles, mama,” Kateryna said.

Svitlana reached for three empties her daughter held out.

Marveling at his family over a flickering blue flame that lit his last cigarette, Andriy crumpled and stuffed the pack in his down jacket pocket. Exhaling white smoke through his nose he spoke to Kateryna in a voice as low as his mood.

“Don’t you have ballet practice?”

The child looked at the linoleum floor.

“I forget how to dance,” she said.

“You’re upset,” Svitlana said. “When this is over you’ll remember every step.”

Jerking her head toward her husband Svitlana snapped words like whiplash.

“Watch that cigarette.”

Andriy pointed to a dozen more bottles on the floor.

“Where’d you learn to make petrol bombs?”

“Natalka next door,” Svitlana said. “I cut up your oldest jeans for wicks and siphoned gasoline from the car. I took packing peanuts from boxes I keep in the closet.”

“Packing peanuts?”

“Natalka says the foam sticks to skin and burns into bone when you catch fire from Molotov cocktails.”

Excited, Kateryna spoke up.

“To kill Russians,” she said.

Andriy turned on his daughter.

“How old are you?”

“Almost eleven.”

Looking at Svitlana, Andriy struggled to hold his temper.

“You teach our daughter to make explosives to kill Russians?”

Svitlana flared with defiance.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”

Folding his hands as if in prayer, Andriy said, “Go to your room, Kateryna. Decide what to take if we must leave.”

“Fine,” Kateryna said. “I’ll see if any of your empty beer bottles rolled under my bed.”

Svitlana filled another green bottle with gasoline. She used a sharp potato paring knife to cut the white foam peanuts into tiny pieces which she shoved into the neck. She capped the top with a twisted blue strip of faded denim.

Shocked, Andriy stood in awe.

“Do you really know what you’re doing?”

“Defending my country,” Svitlana said.

Andriy felt alone for the first time since he and Svitlana married in the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv 12 years ago.

“I’m resisting war like you should be doing,” Svitlana said.

Andriy wanted only to surrender.

“You’re making deadly weapons with our baby girl,” he said.

“Show some courage,” Svitlana said.

Andriy’s voice broke.

“Do you know what you’re doing to Kateryna?”

“Preparing her to stand up for what she believes in.”

“Which is?”

“Freedom.”

“Is freedom won by making others suffer as much or more than we do?”

“You twist everything,” Svitlana said. “You sound like Putin.”

Squealing with excitement, Kateryna raced back into the room.

“The men outside my window blew me kisses. Oh, my God, they’re so cute. They have rifles.”

“They’re our heroes,” Svitlana said.

“They’d be better off at dance class,” Andriy said.

Svitlana burned with anger. Or was it patriotism? Or hatred? Or all three?

“You really don’t understand, do you, Andriy?”

Within three days the family separated. Andriy and Svitlana said a strained goodbye at the railroad station. Kateryna, never before having traveled by train, looked forward to the trip to Poland. Before they boarded Svitlana kissed her husband lightly on the cheek.

“Glory to Ukraine. Glory to the heroes,” she said.

“Call me when you arrive,” he said.

Fearful with foreboding doom, Andriy never expected to see his wife and daughter again. As he turned from the slow moving train packed with women and children, the automatic rifle hanging from his shoulder slipped. Grabbing the barrel, he worried the used Kalashnikov he picked up that morning at the library might accidentally go off. That’s all he needed, to finally agree to fight and get shot and killed by one of his neighbors who mistook him for an invader. In the eyes of many he was a saboteur hindering the struggle with a bad attitude.

Andriy hated guns, fighting, violence, even arguing. Chess, reading, writing poetry and cooking Chicken Kiev (even spelling the city the Russian way in his handwritten recipe book) appealed to the deepest reaches of his spirit. Bold gold patriotism sounded nice but the concept got complicated, even lost, when you asked people to explain what responsibilities came with wrapping yourself in the Ukrainian flag.

Did the Porsche owners, mostly bankers and financial brokers who fled the country under cover of darkness carrying suitcases loaded with cash, bear the same burden his wife and daughter hauled in their knapsacks packed with stale bread, hard cheese rinds and what was left of Svitlana’s blood pressure medication? Did Russian Mafia bosses encounter difficulty getting out of the country? Did mob enforcers wearing thick gold chains stick around to help save the nation or escape with their mistresses to stroll the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, New York, by next weekend?

Checking his watch, Andriy looked for the truck that would transport him to his post, a bridge where he would stand guard against the coming tanks. Out of cigarettes, he wondered where he could buy more. Or steal more. Looting crossed his mind for the first time in his life. If need be he’d steal cigarettes if other looters left any for him. A citizen soldier now, Andriy could do anything; take anything, loot, pillage, rape, kill, torture all in the name of upholding liberty. A disturbing sense of power stunned his brain.

So did a sudden urge to empty his bowels. Where could he go? What would he do if he failed to find a toilet? He imagined his bloated intestines pushing against his growling belly. How many others must feel the same as they smelled themselves ready to explode? What if he just weakened and let go? Would anybody notice or shame him if they did? Andriy’s nation had turned to shit. So embarrassed he wanted to cry, he wondered what Svitlana would say if she knew of his dilemma? Worse, what would Kateryna say?

A Russian armored car turning the corner jolted Andriy from his thoughtful misery. Before he could turn and run, the vehicle detonated. A lone Ukrainian soldier ran across the street holding a smoking shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon. One Russian survivor struggled to stand in what was left of his still sizzling uniform and stumbled forward, heading straight for Andriy who pointed his rifle at the man’s face. Old for a soldier on any side, with soft cheeks that once shined rosy in winter, the Russian Marine coughed blood and spoke in Ukrainian.

“Please,” he said.

Andriy thought of calling Svitlana on the cellphone in his pocket, asking to speak with his daughter and telling Kateryna he had captured an enemy prisoner but didn’t know what to do with him. He’d tell her that more than anything in the world he wanted to take ballet classes with her when she returned home and peace resumed. In his mind he heard Kateryna laugh knowing he must be kidding when she said, “You are so funny.”

All around Andriy people screamed, fired guns, fell in the street. A Molotov cocktail flew through the air from a doorway. Watching the green glass sail high beneath a burning wick, Andriy wondered if his daughter helped make that bomb.

How could she do such a terrible thing?

Kateryna wore a peace symbol T-shirt.

She loves books.

Katetyna brought joy to the world.

At that very moment she must be practicing ballet in Warsaw.

Today is what many Irish-American Scranton residents and their cabbage-headed supporters call “Parade Day,” as if dawn in the Electric City broke as a high holy day they celebrate by pulling the nails from their hands, ascending into heaven and sitting at the right hand of God.

One problem: snow postponed today’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.

So there’s no better time to ask when in the name of Jesus Scranton Irish Americans will stop wearing kilts and fawning over bagpipe bands?

The Scots wear kilts.

Members of the British army, including the Scots, play bagpipes.

The Irish play a very different traditional musical pipe, unique Irish uilleann war pipes the English outlawed as part of their savage and failed attempt to eradicate the Irish culture and people. In ancient times Irish warriors painted their skin with wild berries and ran into battle naked. You didn’t see them posing in plaid kilts at weddings and parades and groveling over bagpipes.

Streaking actually dates back to the Garden of Eden which of course was located in the village of Cornamona, County Galway, where my grandfather was born.

No kilts there, lads.

So stop with the kilts and cheering Brit bagpipes, shallow amadon behavior that trivializes Irish history by supporting another nation and the Brit war machine that tried and failed to occupy Ireland forever – a monarchy that still holds onto six counties in the northeastern part of the island that one day will rise as a nation once again.

Uniting Ireland is where attention should lie, not in importing cigar-smoking out-of-town pipe bands (often made up with New York cops and firefighters who really should know better) with beer on their breath as they march into local bars and American Legion halls.

In 50 years of visiting Ireland, other than parade pretenders, I’ve never seen any Irish man or woman wearing a kilt. Here at home I’ve never seen the style in the countless Irish bars across America I have visited where Irish immigrants drink.

I’m also confident saying no Scranton Irish immigrant ever wore a kilt to work in the coal mines or even drinking their tea among lace curtain swells in President Joe Biden’s dull Green Ridge neighborhood when he was a kid and his old man held down a full-time job.

Let me repeat: British troops play bagpipes.

Colonial oppressors apparently need a soundtrack when they try to conquer native people. I picketed a Black Watch bagpipe concert in Hershey once to draw attention to that cruel Scottish infantry battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland that completed 11 combat tours and fought against freedom in Northern Ireland.

So knock it off.

Give Ireland back to the Irish.

Let the Scots take pride in their ancient heritage as they continue to fight for nationhood and take back their country from the Crown.

Let English war pipers pipe their last refrain as they lose control over their lost empire and realize once and for all that self-determination and not their pompous blowhard behavior defines liberty.

If my ruffian Irish attitude gets your kilt in a twist, may the road rise up to meet you and kick you right in your stage Irish arse.

Put that in your bagpipe and smoke it.

Speaking into the crackling microphone on the small plane’s radio, the Russian heavyweight wrestler spoke guttural Russian as we flew low and over the stacks of Three Mile Island.

“That ought to get somebody’s attention,” I said.

The wrestler’s laugh sounded coarse as Cossacks dancing on broken vodka bottles.

Ivan and his comrades had rolled into town for an exhibition just a few years after the 1978 TMI nuclear accident. Those men in the small aircraft had recently returned from combat tours in Afghanistan where “mujahideen” freedom fighters eventually handed them and their country a huge loss. The wrestlers came to the U.S. looking for a win, at least on the mats.

I was working for a small weekly newspaper in Harrisburg, Pa., and wound up onboard as part of a makeshift local tour that somehow sent us flying over the damaged nukes. The pilot and his 16-year-old son, two more Russians, Ivan and I packed the six-seater and took off.

I wondered if we overloaded the craft but nobody seemed to care. A few years later the same pilot and his son crashed into electric wires and died flying from the same airport where we took off.

But that day the friendship force flew high, the sky beaming bright blue among scattered clouds. That night, though, even under bright banquet hall lights, the atmosphere grew dark and stormy.

“Daddy hates Russians,” said the woman sitting beside me at a long table.

Shippensburg University hosted the dinner where the wrestlers prepared for an exhibition the next day. None of the Russians except their chaperone spoke English so the well-trained bruisers smiled and dug into their bloody prime rib.

Daddy just grimaced, hating Russians to his core but disciplined enough to control his ire. Don’t ask me why Daddy even showed up at the event but he did, clutching his greasy fork like a sharpened battle ax.

Depending where you lived in those days you quickly got the impression everybody hated Russians. Pennsylvania Dutch rural Central Pennsylvania overwhelmingly hated the anti-God Commies long before the breakup of the Soviet Union. At almost 71, I’m old enough to remember Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev threatening the West with the loosely translated words, “We will bury you.”

I also remember hiding beneath my grade school desk to prepare for nuclear attack. The teacher assigned me the responsibility of lowering the shades. Armed with comic books and chocolate Tastykakes, I also built a personal bomb shelter under the forsythia bush in my backyard.

Nobody in my neighborhood had yet heard the word “détente.”

But Daddy didn’t pose the worst threat to the Russians that night. The rock band hired for the occasion did. Redneck country rockers who normally play biker bars with bourbon on their breath can do a lot of damage to the goal of uniting nations.

Neither American stars and stripes nor the Soviet hammer and sickle hung on the wall behind the musicians that night. A huge Confederate stars and bars battle flag rippled from ceiling to floor as the band kicked into a Credence Clearwater Revival tune, maybe “Born on the Bayou” or “Run Through the Jungle.”

But when our long-haired, scraggly bearded lead singer in a cut-off denim vest finished the song, he pointed the microphone like a cocked Colt pistol, put on a kiss my grits smirk and addressed the Russians.

“We might one day all be killing each other,” he said.

Daddy’s ears perked up.

Ivan and the other Russians smiled.

I pushed back my chair, ready to spring into action at the first sign of a thrown beer pitcher.

The crowd got quiet as a den full of sleeping Siberian tigers.

“Yeah, we might one day all be killing each other,” he repeated.

Increasing tension pounded in a long few seconds.

“But not tonight,” he said.

I drained my beer and headed to the bar for more, relieved that war might come another day, but not that night a long time ago.

Russians recently started a new war in Ukraine.

If Ivan and his comrades are still alive, I wonder what they think. Maybe their children and/or grandchildren are leading the Russian charge, firing missiles, dropping bombs on civilians. Maybe some of their descendants married Ukrainians and live beneath bombs that drop from the sky. Maybe Ukrainian grandchildren make Molotov cocktails to throw and incinerate Russian soldiers.

The madness continues.

Thankfully, TMI failed to melt down.

Ivan and his comrades rode out Afghanistan.

Let’s now hope the world makes it through the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Or maybe “we might one day all be killing each other.”

Stop the war.

Now.

Fifty years to the day after Nguyen Van Minh shot and killed Anthony Venezia in the village of Ben Suc, the former Viet Cong soldier knocked on the front door of the house where Venezia grew up.

Anthony Venezia’s sister Angela answered.

“Yes,” she said.

“These are for you,” he said.

Overcome with soft emotion, Nguyen Van Minh’s eyes welled as he stood at attention the way he did when he joined the fight as a boy. He extended the manila envelope he bought that morning at a strip mall discount store.

Angela looked from his wet black eyes to the envelope and back to his face. Lifting the copper-colored clasp, she opened the flap. The wallet-sized black and white photo showed her brother Tony riding a new wooden hobby horse on Christmas morning when they were four-year-old twins living in Scranton in the same green aluminum-sided house where Angela still lived.

“Where did you get this?”

“Look more,” said Nguyen Van Minh

The next photo showed her mother, Gina, and father, Tony Sr., at the party she and her brother threw for them on their parents’ 17th wedding anniversary. Gina told Angela over chocolate cake with peanut butter icing how she found rice in her hair for days after the wedding. Tony admitted to his son he was so nervous he almost fainted at the altar.

Angel stepped back from the door.

“Who are you?”

“And these,” Nguyen Van Minh said, handing her Tony’s dog tags.

Angela screamed.

“So sorry for your war,” Nguyen Van Minh said.

Police caught up to him at the convenience store four blocks away. Four squad cars rushed to the scene in response to Angela’s frantic 911 call. Five armed officers circled the small man with the stringy beard he sometimes told people made him look like legendary Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. The supervising sergeant did all the talking.

“You have ID?”

 Nguyen Van Minh handed over his American passport.

“You’re a citizen,” the sergeant said.

“I vote every election,” Nguyen Van Minh said.

“Where did you get the photographs of Tony Venezia?”

“From his wallet.”

“Tony died in Vietnam in 1972.”

“I shot him in an ambush.”

“You killed Tony Venezia in Vietnam.”

“Yes.”

“Then you stole his stuff?”

“I wanted souvenirs. Now I return them.”

“Fifty years later?”

“I was wrong to take from the dead.”

The sergeant wasn’t sure what to do.

“I’d like to go home now,” Nguyen Van Minh said.

“You’re under arrest,” the sergeant said.

In his mind Nguyen Van Minh saw himself blending with the jungle that day, a bold 17-year-old freedom fighter waiting to pounce as he tensed and watched the American squad move closer. The 19-year-old walking point, laughing, smoking a cigarette and not wearing a helmet made the most noise. Squeezing one shot from his rifle, Nguyen Van Minh saw the enemy’s head snap back. With the firefight erupting all around, he settled into the adrenaline rush that always came with combat.

All 12 Americans died.

After picking through their bodies, taking what they could use in their continuing fight to rid their land of invaders, Nguyen Van Minh and his guerrilla compatriots moved on. Nguyen Van Minh took photographs and other papers from the body of the young man he killed. After stuffing the personal belongings into the Chinese-issued rucksack he retrieved earlier that week from a comrade killed in action he returned to the body, ripped the dog tags from his enemy’s neck and took them, too.

“Put your hands behind your back,” the police sergeant said.

Nguyen Van Minh, 67, set his jaw and stared straight ahead, not complying but not resisting.

Americans would never express sorrow for their wars.

Nor would they understand those who did.

Imagine the squeaky sucking sound and explosive pop a champagne cork makes when it blasts from the bottle.

Now envision the noise a human eyeball makes when it’s freed from a tight socket after Wally Wilson inserts and turns the corkscrew, twists the orb and removes the unsightly sphere.

Envision?

Unsightly?

Get it?

Gross, don’t you think?

Exactly.

That’s what writing and reading disturbing fiction is all about.

Original, authentic, creative free expression must be understood for what it is – a sometimes vicious attack upon raw propriety we should face. Racism and violence comprise only two bitter facets of America’s harsh reality that’s getting worse instead of better as society relinquishes its hold on sanity, discipline and the common good. Societal insanity now prevails to one degree or another.

The eye-popping reality of a lovable serial killer on the loose horrifies normal decent people. But what defines normal? COVID deaths? Fatal school shootings? Murder occurs every day, all brutal, but some far more grisly than others.

As a decades-long newspaper columnist I covered murder for a living. Sadly, I’ve forgotten too many names of too many dead. But the lessons of their demise remain. All those deaths are warnings, all designed to help me share the admonitions of their lost lives.

These ghastly signs provide the words of Blood Red Syrah, my first novel presented as a “gruesome California wine country thriller.”

What turned mild-mannered Wally Wilson, who loves his mother, into a mad, bloodthirsty killer? What planted the sweet voice of she-devil Syrah into the depths of Wally’s brain? What makes him exchange bloodlust for enlightenment in the vicious struggle to find peace of mind?

Violent death lives in the far reaches of insanity. But what turns Wally Wilson into a psycho killer? Chemicals run amok in Wally’s haywire brain but never poison his heart.

As for Syrah, she loves Wally deeply but will never carve their initials on the trunk of a mighty redwood. Syrah might carve the letters into your face but never on the bark of a tree. Although Syrah and Wally both love nature, human nature is another matter entirely.

Not long after Avventura Press published Blood Red Syrah in October 2018, my wife, Stephanie and I hit the road to California to promote the novel. We set off on a Central Coastal adventure where the book is set and where we used to live, walking the same path we once walked and where Wally Wilson and Syrah walk in the book.

The story is a psychedelic trip through the chaos of an increasingly ruthless society marred by violence, bigotry and hopelessness. Yet, the search for truth prevails, resulting in enlightenment and peace of mind. The moral of the story is that struggle is always worth the ride.

A sometimes difficult read because I take you inside the heads of difficult people, my book opens doors of perception some readers want to keep closed. To remain shut off from the forces of hatred is foolish. Narrow minds only allow you to flee down narrow hallways. Freedom means openness. Liberation comes from facing demons that inhabit and inhibit us all.

That’s why I’m reintroducing Blood Red Syrah.

Never let sleeping books lie.

Awakening takes place with our eyes open. And the odds are slim some maniac will try to cut one out with a corkscrew. Still, beware.

I said slim, not naught.

From where white boy Jimmy Ray stood at the back of the nightclub dance floor he could see the two-tone couple glistening beneath the blue spotlight, dancing slowly, sweating, hardly moving pressed that tight against each other.

In a dress that matched her pale freckled skin, the white woman confused Jimmy Ray by keeping her eyes closed. He couldn’t figure out if she was just trying to be trouble out on another cheap night on the town or was she scared, not knowing what to do to get away from the Black man’s grip?

Jimmy Ray eased his way through the crowd. Close enough now to watch the Black man’s hands, he felt uncomfortable, embarrassed at the way the man held the girl against him with his large palm pulling at the small of her back.

None of this would be happening if the owner didn’t let Black people in the club. Why make normal white folks uncomfortable by mixing races in the first place? Not everybody wanted to mingle. I bet Black people don’t even want to be with white people most times unless you’re a Black man looking for white women. Then you crave it. You need it. You take it the same as heroin or robbing a liquor store.

Jimmy Ray moved closer.

It’s 1945. The war’s over. We won.

Does that give Blacks the right to dance with our women? Go dance with the Germans or the Japs. We got rules here, even laws that say no crossbreed marriage. That includes slow dancing. I was too young to enlist after Pearl Harbor but I would still love to kill some Japs. Just look at them, not even human with their teeth and thick glasses.

The Germans at least look like us except for the pretty boy Aryan blond hair and blue eyes like Swedish pinup girls. Not like guys I work with at the shoe factory. Nobody I pal around with looked like those spit-shined Nazis.

And nobody I know is Black dancing with white women. Who does this tramp think she is unless she’s dancing with him because he’s holding her hostage? Blacks play on white women’s guilt. What, you won’t go out with me because I’m Black?  Somebody better save white women before it’s too late. These girls don’t know better and don’t sense how dangerous it is to be out alone and vulnerable without somebody like me looking after them.

Jimmy Ray would have tapped the Black man on the shoulder real hard and cut in had he known how to dance. His mother tried to teach him when he was about 14, but he felt silly there in the living room trying to learn how to dance with his own mother, holding her at arm’s length moving two steps to the left and two steps to the right like some country clod. Dropping his hands after a few awkward minutes of feeling like a pervert and ducking his head so his mother wouldn’t see him blush, he ran out back to shoot targets with his deer rifle. Now, that he could do. Jimmy Ray sure knew how to shoot. Blasting bullets through beer cans made him feel better than learning to swing and sway with Sammy Kaye.

When the song ended the Black man and the white woman turned and went in separate directions. Jimmy Ray followed the Black man outside where they stood smoking cigarettes at opposite ends of the parking lot. The Black man walked one way up the street. Jimmy Ray walked the other.

The feelings that made him sick to his stomach and dizzy with anger that night stayed with him.

All those years later, for whatever the reason, Jimmy Ray thought about the white girl as he loaded his rifle.

He thought of the Black man as he pulled the trigger.

Fate didn’t care which Black face came to mind, the dancer or the preacher.

As far as Jimmy Ray was concerned, they all looked alike.

News of the ceramic baby Jesus stolen from the church manger scene broke like five-dollar dinner plates in a drunken wedding anniversary argument. In the chilly aftermath, Big Mike’s words went viral, shooting off from his big Pittsburgh mouth like fireworks or foam from a shaken can of Iron City popped the day bosses at the last steel mill within driving distance laid him off.

All over Pittsburgh, especially in his Southside neighborhood, Big Mike’s bold edict lives each year at Christmas when countless celebrants repeat his words as they raise a glass and toast the Nativity. That day in history Big Mike made three little words famous.

“Take me, jagoff,” he said.

Big Mike locked and loaded his favorite word as soon as he read the Sunday paper reporting the theft, registering raw contempt in his limited manner of expression. But that’s all he needed. Pittsburghers got the point.

“Jagoff,” he said.

Looking at his wife Alice he lowered his voice to a cross between a rattlesnake hiss and a psycho whisper the way he always did when he was ready to snap even when he didn’t have too much to drink.

“Do you believe this shit?”

“Excuse me,” Alice said.

“Some jagoff stole the baby Jesus right out of the manger scene at St. Pat’s.”

Alice stiffened.

“Where was Little Mike when it happened?”

Hunched over an overflowing bowl of Lucky Charms, 14-year-old Little Mike picked his nose and took immediate offense.

“Mom, I’m on juvenile probation, OK? I’m on my best behavior. I pee in a bottle every day.”

“Don’t blame the kid,” Big Mike said. “The cops profiled him because he’s Irish and looks like me.”

With all the work involved in baking gingerbread men Little Mike left headless and strewn all over the kitchen, shopping and everything else Alice had to do that her family didn’t appreciate this time of year, she couldn’t be bothered with a swiped statue normally stored in a musty Catholic Church closet.

“So some jagoff stole Mary’s little lamb. What do you want me to do about it?”

“Show some respect,” Big Mike said.

“OK, what are you going to do about it?”

“Don’t push, Alice.”

“I’m not the one daring Mr. Jagoff to take me.”

By dusk Big Mike was stretched out on his postage stamp-sized front lawn, lying in the manger he built from two-by-fours he stole from a construction site and planned to sell. He stuffed the manger with pink and green colored straw left over from the Easter beer can roll the guys at the Irish Club did for the poor kids each year. A handmade sign Big Mike made with Little Mike’s graffiti spray paint and stuck in the grass beside him said, “TAKE ME JAGOFF!”

Reclining in what Alice derisively called his “waddling clothes,” he drank a six pack before anybody in the neighborhood stopped to ask him what he was doing.

“Using myself as bait for the jagoffs,” Big Mike said.

Wrapping himself in an itchy tan Army blanket he bought when the marriage counselor suggested they try camping in the state park a couple of years ago, he tied a white clothesline around his belly so the front wouldn’t open and expose his privates. That’s all he needed, to expose his privates in the manger while portraying the Christ child at Christmas.

“You’ll freeze to death,” Alice said.

Big Mike pointed to the five lumps in the Army blanket.

“Hot water bottles,” he said. “I duct taped them to myself like a suicide bomber.”

By Christmas Eve, thanks to cable TV and social media, the whole world knew Big Mike’s name. The Steelers didn’t matter. Neither did the Pirates or the shuttered steel mills for that matter. National television newscasters debated on the air whether Federal Communications Commission rules allowed them to quote Big Mike. A local historian explained how The Oxford English Dictionary acknowledges the Three Rivers slang as a legitimate word meaning an utterly “stupid, irritating or contemptable person.”

Big Mike didn’t need a dictionary to explain the difference between right and wrong and the breakdown of 21^st Century society. He could smell a jagoff coming a mile away. Standing on the steps of his red brick row house in his bare feet in mid-December, he used what academic linguists called fighting words every time a newscaster shoved a microphone under his nose and he repeated his challenge.

“Take me, jagoff,” he said.

As you might expect, the reviews were mixed. You were either for him or against him. Men mostly rooted for Big Mike. Handmade signs went up all over town, in bar and office windows and even on a couple of billboards. Women saw him as just another big goof like their husbands or boyfriends, overreacting, loaded and making an ass out of himself for the holidays.

Big Mike saw himself otherwise, of course, and explained his pure intentions to Alice.

“I’m like them Christmas mice ornaments we put out each year my mother gave us, the ones I thought were real stuffed rats when I was a kid,” he said.

Alice looked at Big Mike like he lost his mind, found it then sold it on EBay at a discount.

 “How are you like the Christmas mice, Mike?”

“Weird but lovable,” he said.

Within two days news crews started showing up from all over the world.

“I’m a Christmas miracle,” Big Mike told the BBC.

And so he was the reason for the season, confident enough to drink two six packs of Iron City a night and let people take pictures and selfies for free. Not an argument or fist fight broke out at Big Mike’s Christmas crèche while he sprawled in the manger. Senior citizens sometimes blessed themselves when Big Mike belched.

“If that doesn’t signal world peace, nothing does,” Big Mike told CNN.

“You know what you’re doing is sacrilegious,” Alice said one night when the crowds went home and Big Mike came back inside.

Incredulous, he highlighted his success.

“You been counting the cash in the donation basket at the end of my shift?”

“Three grand so far,” she said.

“It’s a godsend,” Big Mike said.

Alice saw the opening and tried to lay hands on her own Christmas miracle.

“Can I buy a new vacuum cleaner?”

“And a crock pot for the kielbasa,” Big Mike said.

That was their best Christmas ever.

Little Mike even got sprung from juvenile probation.

And nobody stole Big Mike from his gala Yuletide display.

Not even a jagoff would want him.