I’m having a flashback.

A blinding California sun hangs like an exploding navel orange in the boundless sky, making me squint in the sweltering summer glare of celebrity.

I think I see a zebra. 

This afternoon in 2005 I’m a guest at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch near Los Olivos, about 125 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

Googly-eyed, cramped and sitting with my knees to my chin, I’m riding the kiddie train that chugs through the sprawling 2,700 acre estate.

FOX television blowhard Geraldo Rivera is sitting behind me. Raymone Bain, Michael’s glitzy public relations spokeswoman who invited me to visit, is sitting in Geraldo’s lap. They’re giggling.

I spot my reflection as we pass a polished children’s sliding board. I am the man in the mirror. I’m also a member of the press.

Twenty minutes later I’m standing in Michael’s private Neverland movie theater where countless poor Black and Brown children from inner-city LA race through the lobby grabbing all the free candy bars and free popcorn their tiny hands can carry.

I’m getting antsy.

Heading to the men’s room, I face the wall taking care of business at the urinal when sappy slaphappy music assaults my ears. The following lyrics warble through the loudspeaker: Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay; My, oh, my, what a wonderful day; Plenty of sunshine headin’ my way; Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay!

Ill at ease that Mister Bluebird’s on my shoulder, I want to scream but worry I’ll frighten the kids who by virtue of Michael welcoming them to his house have more than enough reason to be afraid. Looking skyward I scan the flashy toilet for hidden cameras, hastily zip-a-dee-doo-da my unzipped fly and flee.

Next stop the merry-go-round where calliope boop beep beep boop beep beep blasts overload my senses. Ready to freak out I call my partner Stephanie.

“You hear that?”

I hold the cell phone to lunatic tunes and the rising and falling of wooden horses. Painted colors swirl licorice red, sweet pea green and hazy purple. Stallions sneer, showing carved teeth in hideous grins as they call me to trip the light fantastic like I’m Peter Pan refusing to grow up.

Temptation beckons.

”Can I go on the merry-go-round, Stephanie?”

She talks me down the way acid guru Timothy Leary once guided countless mind-blown wayfarers to a safe space.

“Breathe,” she says. “Breathe.”

Now I run to one of many fully-stocked ice cream carts Michael has placed around his amusement park near a flock of dirty flamingos that run frantically back and forth like wild turkeys sensing the holiday ax. I reach deep inside, grabbing two white paper snow cone cups as mementoes to one day remind me I really was there.

And I really was there.

But other than flashbacks all that remains of my adventure down the fairy tale rabid hole are those cups. All these years later I’m suffering yet another Neverland hallucination. LSD isn’t the only mental power source to instigate bad trips to yesteryear. Harsh reality easily jars brain cells and sends me crashing face-forward through the looking glass.

Back in Scranton, PA, for almost 15 years, my inner vision too often returns to when Michael stood trial on child molestation charges in 2005 in Santa Maria, CA, where I lived and worked at the daily newspaper. Now, instead of covering the Jackson trial and spending each hectic day for four months in a courtroom with the so-called King of Pop, my main news concern is whether President Joe Biden will talk to me.

This flashback kicked in after I emailed the White House a September 30 request asking to be the first Scranton hometown journalist (Gonzo Today White House Correspondent, in case you forgot) to score a telephone interview with the President. Amanda Finney, chief of staff for the White House press office, quickly wrote back.

“Thanks so much for reaching out!”

That triggered my non compos mentis reaction. What? What did she say? Did she say, “reaching out” like in Michael’s classic hit where he sings “I’ll just reach out my hand to you?” As in, “Just call my name, I’ll be there. I’ll be there?” Just call my name, I’ll be there!!!

Fueled by sneaky Washington bureaucrats, Finney’s trite government response sparked more than simple personal distress. Her inane sentence propelled me into a psychotomimetic spiral I will forever endure as a result of severe frontal lobular encounters of the worst kind with Michael.

These ABCs of my freaky brush with fame loom large in my mind, often forcing me back to the once-in-a-lifetime day Michael and I found ourselves alone and staring into each other’s eyes.

That day I decided to be the last person in the courtroom before Michael left on a break. I stayed in my aisle seat near the back of the room as he turned from the defense table and began his slow walk, not as slow as the day he showed up in his pajamas, but slow nonetheless. I watched him approach with his long bobbing black hair, his dancer’s delicate balance and huge pale hands with fingers that reminded me of Mickey Mouse hands.

Captivated by his finely tailored suit, the bright armband, the glittering sheen of his shirt and medallion, I kept my eyes peeled as he drew near. Thick fingers the size of sausages on his left hand twitched as he slowly raised his arm.

I first met Michael during his 2002 concert contract dispute civil trial when we talked briefly in a courthouse hallway about a wild spider that bit him, causing his hand to swell. This time, though, with his hand long healed, his jumbo mitt dangled grotesquely by his side as he got closer and closer, continuing to slowly raise his arm higher and higher.

Then, with all the potent power of bodi mindfulness, instant karma and enlightenment rolled into one, I knew. Just like the song, Michael was reaching out to me!

That’s when I sensed his fear – fear of me and what I might do to tell the world what I believed. Michael now knew I believed he had committed the sordid sex crimes against the child he stood accused of molesting.

Before the trial began, back before I visited Neverland, Michael had instructed his PR agent Baine to call me and say he read my columns and liked them. But the columns I wrote during the trial as well as live daily commentary I provided to Sky News and its massive European audience insinuated and eventually proclaimed his guilt. My words laid bare mounting evidence against him prosecutors presented at trial.

Yes, jurors should convict Michael on all ten counts. Yes, he lived a sick and dangerous life. Yes, he should go to prison. Michael knew if I believed he did it the jury might believe he did it.

That’s why he was reaching out.

And I was there, reaching back the way a chaplain reaches out to a condemned inmate or a hospice worker reaches out to a dying patient. Taking Michael’s left hand in my left hand, the same hand on which he wore his white glove when he debuted the Moon Walk in 1983 during a live Motown TV special, I felt his firm yet soft grip.

Our eyes locked as he spoke in a throaty off-the-wall whisper.

“How are you?”

Leery and taken by surprise, I responded.

“Good,” I said.

We continued to hold hands.

I kept looking at him.

He kept looking at me.

The handshake began to feel awkward. Two long seconds passed. Our firm fixing-of-the-fingers felt embarrassing. I sensed Michael’s pulse, his heartbeat. And our handclasp just got downright weird. When the grip felt more like a grope, I pulled back from his slick touch. Michael moved on, a sad ghost floating through a tortured fever dream.

A few weeks later I sat in the row behind Janet and La Toya, Katherine and Joe and other Jackson family members and watched when jurors acquitted Michael on all counts. A conviction could have imprisoned him for life. This stunning victory for him and his army of fans that still believes in their idol’s innocence validated all their illusory lives.

Four years later, on June 25, 2009, Michael died at 50 of a propofol drug overdose at the hands of another bloodsucking enabler, this time a physician who helped the global superstar permanently self-destruct.

At 70 I’m alive and well despite the cultural chaos surrounding my meeting Michael forever imprinted on my aging psyche, including getting assaulted by a uniformed, on duty Santa Maria cop, cursed by chanting throngs of Michael’s international supporters as I walked into the courthouse each day and hounded by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

https://classic.teamcoco.com/late-night-with-conan-obrien/season-12/episode-121/triumph-the-insult-comic-dog-michael-jackson-fans?playlist=x%3BeyJ0eXBlIjoidGFnIiwiaWQiOjEwMzN9

When a new year blossomed after the 2005 trial, new corporate owners bought my newspaper and, failing to recognize my worth, fired me without advance notice.

Although Joe Biden, trying to be funny during a 1985 fundraiser, introduced a Black band member as “our vocalist tonight, Michael Jackson,” I’ll bet the President never held hands with the real superstar. If not, I’ll gladly reach out my hand when he invites me to the Oval Office for an interview. The President can hold the hand that held the hand of a world-renowned star.

Maybe Biden’s approval ratings will rise.

Either way, just call my name, I’ll be there.

I’ll be there.

Rusty received the letter Saturday afternoon, read the hand-printed message on smudged white copy paper folded three times, went back to bed and lay awake staring at the ceiling until 6 a.m. Sunday morning. When he got up for early Mass the scrawled words still flashed in his head.

“Remember me in Vietnam? You rape me. You burned our hooch at Zippo party. My mother and father die. Call me Rusty from Scranton you say. See you next week Rusty from Scranton.”

At St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church that morning 77-year-old Rusty sat alone in the back, remaining seated during communion sweating fat drips that stained the knees of his dress pants. He dropped a $5 bill into the basket for the collection and left as soon as the priest told him to go in peace. Earlier he ignored other parishioners’ extended hands as they offered the sign of peace.

That night Rusty put the Phillies game on TV, but after eight innings couldn’t tell you the score. The ham sandwich on a hard roll he made for dinner made him cough when a chunk of raw Bermuda onion went down the wrong pipe. His eyes watered from choking and crying as he pushed away the plate.

The second letter arrived Monday.

“Want to see you soon,” the letter said in blood red marker.

Heavy in the front pocket of his short sleeve shirt, the thick square of his silver Zippo lighter felt like a hot brick burning into his heart. The smooth and scratched engraving across the front said, “Kill ’em all. Let God sort ’em out.”

The girl would be 66. That day in the rice paddy she said she was 13. He had just turned 24.

Rusty pulled his old deer rifle out of the closet, his mind banging irrational thoughts against the walls of his brain like a demolition derby at the fairgrounds. He didn’t remember telling the girl his name or his hometown. Wild on adrenaline, running amok in a killing frenzy, he watched his men bayonet toddlers, execute crying mamasans and praying papasans. He ordered his men to machine gun young women and children they pushed into a ditch. One soldier cut out the tongue of a teenager. Another scalped an old man. He should have shot her when he finished but he just pulled up his pants, turned and killed other children.

And babies?

And babies.

The pounding on the door made Rusty jump. Needing to pee but rushing to open the door just a crack he faced Fred from the neighborhood American Legion post saluting on the front porch.

“You ready, Sarge?”

“I’m not going,” Rusty said.

“What do you mean you’re not going? All the guys are waiting at the Legion ceremony for you senior citizen ’Nam vets. The congressman’s going to give you a commendation for all those medals you won in the war. You’re a real hero.”

“No, no I’m not,” Rusty said.

The truth hurt.

Rusty knew who and what he was.

The third letter came Tuesday.

“Almost time boom boom,” the letter said.

Rusty went into the bathroom and threw up.

The last letter arrived Wednesday.

“Get some,” it said.

Soldiers said those two words all the time, U.S. Army talk for killing North Vietnamese regulars, Vietcong guerrillas and anybody else who deserved to die: men, women and children all less than human animals that would kill him so he killed them first. In those days Rusty Collins stood for power, for glory for America the beautiful. Back then he did as he pleased. In return his men and his country loved him for his service. Fifty three years ago he felt invincible.

Today he just felt scared.

No letter arrived the next day. Rusty hid crouched behind the coal bin in the cellar of the house where he was raised. No letter the next day either. Rusty knew because he crawled on his belly like a snake to open the door, jump up to check the empty mail box, slam the door behind him and drop to the floor to slither back to his hiding place.

She was coming.

She was on her way.

Rusty didn’t know her name.

He just knew he was doomed.

Five days later, watching a slim visitor approach his house from the attic window where he set up an observation post, all Rusty could really see looking down was the top of the hat, one of those Non La conical leaf hats VC women wore on search and destroy missions. The visitor walked slowly to the front steps, climbed in a swift motion to the porch, rang the doorbell and waited.

That’s when Rusty turned away from the window, tied the blue nylon rope around his neck, dropped to his knees, closed his eyes and thrust his big body forward until severe pressure on his neck shut down the oxygen flow and he blacked out. Falling forward as dead weight, he went still with the anguished cries of the dying pounding in his ears.

Rusty didn’t leave a note.

The visitor did.

When nobody answered the door the skinny caller in the camouflage jacket, jungle boots and faded farmer jeans wrote a few words and stuffed the paper into the mailbox.

“Sorry I missed you, buddy. I wanted to surprise you after looking for you all these years. Then I remembered Rusty from Scranton. I even wore one of them gook cone head hats I took as a souvenir to help bring back the good times. Remember our little virgin of the rice paddy? Bet she remembers us. Haha. I’ll stop back later. Get some. Your combat brother, Ernest.”

“You’ll scare the kids, Lester.”

“Good.”

Five-year-old Lucy, whom both parents spoiled, bolted into the room giggling and wailing at the top of her little lungs as she sang her Halloween melody.

“Trick or treat. Smell my feet. Give me something good to eat.”

“Oh, my God, she’s so cute,” Nora said.

Lester put down his beer.

“I taught her that song my father taught me and his father taught him,” he said. “I loved back when I was a kid going to all the neighborhood bars trick-or-treating for cash, potato chips and Mounds bars. That’s all gone now. Nobody lets their kids go to bars alone anymore. Then there’s the pandemic.”

“Lester, please, she’s just looking for approval.”

“I’m looking for approval.”

Starting to sing again, Lucy stopped mid-word.

“What’s in them sheets, daddy?”

Seven rolled dummies between five and six feet long, wrapped in white sheets and stuffed with worn holey underwear and ripped T-shirts Nora used for dust rags, lined the floor by the front door. Lester had tied twine around their necks and ankles.

“COVID corpses,” Lester said.

“Lester!”

“What’s corpses, daddy?”

“Dead people.”

Little Lucy backed up, raising chocolate-smudged hands in front of her face.

“Me don’t like dead people, daddy.”

Nora ran to her daughter’s side, clutching her tightly as Lucy hid her face against Nora’s blue-jeaned hip.

“Goddammit, Lester, knock it off.”

“Kids today need to learn. Their dumb parents need to learn. Thomas Jefferson said the masses are asses. It’s in the Constitution. I’m killing two birdbrains with one stone here.”

Picking up the spray paint, Lester shook the canister over his shoulder like he was mixing martinis in a James Bond movie. Pointing the can, he pressed and held down the black plastic button. “COVID 19” appeared dark and ominous across the first dummy’s chest. Like a man possessed, within minutes Lester finished spraying his message across all seven fake cadaver chests.

“You’re sick, Lester,” Nora said.

Lester took immediate offense. Hyperventilating, his fleshy cheeks flushed red as the dunked Mackintosh apples he bobbed for at the Halloween party where he first kissed Nora in the hay loft when they were 14.

“They’re 21st Century mummies, Nora. Old movie mummies don’t cut it anymore,” he said. “Everybody laughed at them. Nobody better laugh at these. COVID’s some serious shit”

“We’re vaccinated, Lester,” Nora said. “We’re safe.”

“I’ll wait in line for dog shots if I can get them,” Lester said. “Every one of these little buggers out trick-or-treating could be infected, their bodies bloated with germs just waiting to give us the COVID. You want that, Nora? You want to open us up to the COVID?”

Propping open the screen door, Lester dragged each dummy down the front steps. Lining one next to the other like a mass grave on the news in Bosnia or Serbia or some other Third World massacre scene, he reached for the sign he painted earlier and laid out to dry on the driveway. Sticking the wooden stake into brown grass on the tree lawn beside the sidewalk, he stepped back and admired his work.

The sign said, “WEAR A MASK OR DIE.”

“Who’s the dummy now, Nora? Huh, Nora? Who’s the dummy now?”

The first response hit within seconds. A woman holding a lit cigarette in the same hand as her small daughter’s hand screamed. Her husband, with whiskey and blue cheese dressing on his breath, squared thin shoulders above a bloated beer belly and advanced on Lester. Just moments before the family had been belching together coming home from eating chicken wings at the bar up the street that had set up outside dining picnic tables for the pandemic. Quickly getting wound up, the man looked like he was about to have a stroke yelling and spitting droplets at Lester.

“You scared my kid! You scared my wife!”

Lester screamed back.

“Where’s your mask? Where’s your mask?”

Little Lucy ran back into the house, down the basement stairs and hid under the ping pong table. Nora fainted, losing her fluffy Star Trek Captain Kirk bedroom slippers when she fell, hitting her head on the concrete porch step on the way down. When police and paramedics arrived, an EMT waved smelling salts under Nora’s nose.

Nobody smelled her feet.

Nobody knocked on their door to trick-or-treat on Halloween, keeping social distance – just the way Lester liked it.

Each first and last name etched in black on each plastic tombstone lit by purple lights on Stewart Pinsky’s Halloween display in his front yard represented a real person who lived on his block.

“Not funny, Stewart,” Vera said.

“I think it’s hilarious,” he said.

“Take them down,” his wife said.

“Not on your life,” he said

Stewart laughed a staged monster laugh.

“Bwahahaha.”

“Fred Lewis already called to complain,” Vera said.

“Screw him. I purposely planted his marker in the center of the cemetery.”

“Dawn Hastings called, too.”

“She’s an old bat,” Stewart said.

“And Loretta Ricardo.”

“A full-blown witch.”

“Take them down, Stewart.”

“I’m just having fun.”

“This won’t end well,” Vera said.

Stewart got huffy.

“I’m tired of them looking at me every morning when I pick up the paper off the porch. Just because I’m not working, like they’re better than me. A man needs respect, Vera.”

“You pick up the paper at noon sometimes with a beer in your hand.” 

“You’re the one who wanted to go to work, Vera. Somebody has to stay home with the dog.”

“We both used to work full-time at the warehouse. Vicki told me you told her husband you retired. That was six years ago.”

“I’m not going to waste my life on a forklift,” Stewart said.

“Yeah, now I’m driving the forklift,” she said.

“A victory for women’s lib, I’d say.”

Stewart headed to the refrigerator for another can of Bud when the phone rang. He answered after he grabbed his beer and listened for about 30 seconds, holding the receiver to his ear as he popped the tab and took a long sip.

“Go chase yourself you old bat,” he said.

Vera winced.

“Dawn Hastings?”

“Said she’s selling her house and moving,” Stewart said.

Across the street Barbara Lewis started to cry.

“Why is he doing this to us, Fred?”

“Because he’s an ass.”

“I’m afraid of him,” Barbara said.

“We have nothing to fear from that goof.”

“Do you still have his hammer you borrowed last year?”

“That’s one great tool he’ll never see again,” Fred said.

“Maybe not,” Barbara said.

Fred gave her a quizzical look.

At 10:30 the next morning four city police officers showed up at Stewart’s house, two carrying shovels. Pointing to the tombstone marked “Fred Lewis,” the sergeant spoke in a heavy growl.

“That looks like a fresh grave to us, Mr. Pinsky,” he said.

Stewart finished his beer and walked to the edge of the porch to take a closer look. Sonofabitch if the dirt wasn’t piled up in a mound of still moist earth. In an hour the cops had completely unearthed Fred Lewis. Blood congealed in his dyed black hair from the deep claw hammer wound to the back of his head. His killer wrapped his body in a hefty garbage bag.

“Over here,” a young officer said.

Under the rhododendron bush a blood-stained silver claw hammer with a sturdy wood grain handle glistened in the purple Halloween lights.

“Bag it as evidence,” the sergeant said.

Fred Lewis, already bagged, awaited the coroner’s wagon.

Barbara Lewis stood on her porch, wide-eyed with both hands covering her mouth. Good thing. With all the gin she had consumed before, during and after she dug the grave you could have smelled her from across the street. Her hands covered her smile as she muttered to herself.

Men! Stewart with his slovenly, lazy attitude and Fred, who she thought she’d be saddled with for life, especially Fred, with his endless bullshit and mansplaining everything from baseball to politics. Herman Munster would have been a better husband.

Sensing a smudge out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a speck of blood beneath her thumbnail. Losing her balance a bit when she turned, she staggered into the house to wash her hands before detectives came to interview her, the grieving widow.

But first, to celebrate being single, she’d have another drink.

When the world gives you lemons, make another gin and tonic.

A deluge of fourth-grade tears rolled with the ease of boulders cascading down a mudslide stricken slope – powerful, even deadly, if you knew what was to come. Even the kids in class who refused to cry, and they’re always a few of them, sat frozen in their seats either vowing revenge or simply panic-stricken by the lessons they learned at school that morning.

Mr. Eugene Richardson stood at the front of the room like always. This morning, though, he wore a brand new XX T-shirt over his blue long-sleeved dress shirt and matching plaid polyester necktie. Before he left for school at 7:00 he used a new black Magic Marker to write his message across the front of his shirt in such large print you could still smell the strong scent of alcohol in the block letters when he started class.

“Save The Manatees,” the message read.

That night at dinner, Shirley Alexander, aged 10, announced to her mother, father and younger brother Chuck that she would not eat her peas, potatoes or pot roast. She refused apple cobbler for dessert and pushed aside her grape juice drink.

 “If Mrs. Manatee can’t eat and can’t feed her children, I’m not going to eat,” she said.

“Go to your room, young lady,” her father Josh said.

Shirley awoke for school the next morning with her belly growling. She refused breakfast and left without her favorite Lebanon baloney and peanut butter sandwiches, chocolate Tastykake cupcakes and potato chips her mother packed that morning.

Principal Brenda Davis waited for Mr. Richardson when the fourth-grade former teacher-of-the-year pulled into the faculty parking lot.

“We have to talk,” she said.

Pounding his chest with both fists the way Tarzan used to do in the movies, he pointed to the inscription scribbled in block letters like a ransom note across his chest.

“It’s about my shirt, I bet,” he said.

A reporter from the local paper stood by the door as the two school district employees entered.

“Do either of you have a comment?”

“I’ll give you an exclusive after school,” Mr. Richardson said.

“No, you will not,” Mrs. Davis said.

You could already hear the din of chanting little voices echoing from the classroom at the end of the hall, a virtual cacophony of protest and agitation. Nothing like this ever happened before. The last time any disruption occurred even close to this uproar, the fifth-grade jazz band woodwind section walked in on Miss Ember in the music room in conflagrant sexual congress with Mr. Rice who everybody thought was a homosexual. Now the children’s voices sounded like a George Floyd protest.

“Save the manatees!” Save the manatees!”

Incensed, Mrs. Davis sputtered spittle as she closed her office door behind her.

“You see what you’ve done?”

Mr. Richardson beamed, so excited he bungled his words.

“Some of the kids in class said on Facebook last night they want to rent a bus and drive to New York City and appear on Good Morning America,” he said.

Irate parents began appearing in the hallway, milling around near the office front desk demanding to see the principal. Several women threatened violence. Several men hinted they were armed. All stood in solidarity against what Mr. Richardson had done to their children.

Mr. Richardson pointed to the mob.

“See them?”

Mrs. Davis went wide-eyed and pale.

“How can I miss them?”

“They don’t understand their own kids,” he said.

“And you do?”

 “All I did was teach them how hundreds of Florida manatees are starving to death because adults killed the sea grass. Manatees survive on sea grass, you know.”

Actually, Mrs. Davis didn’t know but let on like she did – the mark of a slick, politically-connected school administrator whose only survival concern focused on her own future.

“You can’t wear that shirt in class,” she said.

“Then I guess you’ll have to find a substitute,” Mr. Richardson said.

Within minutes the best teacher ever stood smiling by his used Volvo in the parking lot surrounded by raging parents. In addition to the local newspaper reporter, a cameraman from the ABC affiliate stood ready for action news and film at 11.

CNN showed up at Mr. Richardson’s door a few weeks later. Doctors put Shirley Alexander on a respirator when her kidneys started to shut down. Her little friends at school drew countless pictures of manatees and sent them to her by the hundreds. Japanese elementary school children massed in public squares wearing T-shirts with “Save Shirley” scrawled on their shirts in black Magic Marker.

But the only way to persuade Shirley to eat and offer her a new lease on life would be to save the manatees. Who among society’s powerful corporate adults would commit to doing what it takes to replenish the sea grass? Who would reduce pollution, stop fertilizer runoff or block raw sewage that poured into the Florida water creating red algae that killed the grass that killed the gentle creatures by taking away their only form of sustenance?

The kids knew nobody would help.

Nobody would help them save the manatees.

One day as time ran out, District Attorney Chester Zimmerman, who prosecuted criminal cases in the county where poor Shirley lived, held a press conference in his tuxedo before heading off to a cocktail party fundraiser for his re-election campaign.

“If that dear child passes I vow to prosecute this alleged teacher who killed her,” he said.

Mrs. Davis stood by his side.

Scores of parents in the massive crowd cheered.

The next day‘s New York Times front page headline sent shock waves around the world.

“Child Hunger Striker Dies to Save Manatees.”

That night a small army of youngsters refused to eat their peas or anything else on their plates. One defiant sentence spit across the dinner table by untold numbers of tykes glaring at their parents began with these simple words: “If Mrs. Manatee can’t eat….”

Soaring high above Scranton, Air Force One carrying President Joe Biden looked like a flying piss ant in the sky.

Look at the picture of the plane I took Wednesday.

Think for a moment about the infestation of publicly funded White House staffers about to land and tell me you don’t feel like bugs are crawling over you.

Here’s the official White House list of taxpayer-funded pests who made the trip “home” with Biden:

“Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania

Bruce Reed, Assistant to the President & Deputy Chief of Staff

Jen Psaki, Assistant to the President & Press Secretary 

Sasha Baker, Special Assistant to the President & Senior Director for Strategic Planning for the National Security Council

Ashley Williams, Special Assistant to the President & Deputy Director of Oval Office Operations

Stephen Goepfert, Special Assistant to the President & Personal Aide to the President

Travis Dredd, Special Assistant to the President and Trip Director

Dan Cluchey, Senior Presidential Speechwriter

Elizabeth Jurinka, Special Assistant to the President & Senate Legislative Affairs Liaison

Meghan Hays, Special Assistant to the President & Director of Message Planning”

The American people own the company for which they all work and Biden’s an expert at ruining our company picnic.

The people own the democracy. The people pay the taxes. The people are supposed to run the show. But we don’t matter to Biden and his political acolytes who bow down to his power and glory at our expense.

Scranton can’t even keep lit the multicolored LED lights in the massive “Electric City” namesake symbol mounted on the roof of an architectural wonder located on Courthouse Square.

The building is vacant, too.

Until a few weeks ago, the lights were on but nobody was home.

Now even the lights are off.

I sensed bleak darkness as I waited for the traffic light to change on Adams and Linden on my way home from Biden’s speech.

Like it or not, darkness, not light, still defines Scranton.

Biden has used Scranton and its people for his own selfish political purposes for his entire political career. And the people here refuse to see his manipulation. National, state and local elected and appointed officials welcome his sentimental pining, wallowing in shallow storytelling that makes a stereotypic laughingstock out of our proud history as a city. They willingly help Biden turn his time in town as a child into an adult tale of victorious Scranton values.

We’re nowhere close to winning here. Or there, for that matter, wherever you live. From sea to shining sea we lack the leadership to progress and strengthen our nation and its people.

Is democracy as we know it doomed?

Maybe.

Shady and gloomy as the once powerful symbol of my Electric City that now sits dark atop an empty Scranton building, will the last one out of my nation please turn out the lights?

If nothing else, cutting back on power will help with climate change.

Twangy country song lyrics ricocheted off the hospital’s sixth-floor ceiling and bounced up and down the hall.

“Tell me you don’t love me no more, darling. Make it hurt so I’ll remember you,” the patient sang at the top of his lungs.

Head nurse Tammy Willows rushed to the single room and almost fainted when she stumbled inside, tripping and crashing into the IV unit standing like a lone pall bearer beside a coffin. After eight months in a stone cold coma the patient had opened his eyes in bed and started singing just like that.

“Mr. Dillon, Mr. Dillon,” Nurse Willows said, sounding like Chester on the old “Gunsmoke” television show reruns she watched on MeTV.

“Call me Skeeter,” he said with a smile.

One week later Nurse Willows and Skeeter Dillon were living together in the comfortable disarray of his double-wide trailer with a faded foreclosure notice still in the window. Absolutely convinced his latest tune would be a bigger hit than “Hello Ma,” they prepared for fame and fortune – a surprise miracle if there ever was one especially since the coroner had pronounced Skeeter dead after the tow truck accident that left his face looking like rare ground beef on a bed of crushed tortilla chips. Lucky for Skeeter the pill-popping morgue attendant detected a pulse when going through the deceased’s coverall pockets looking for cash.

Little did Skeeter know after lying stiff in bed like a stiff all those months that the two chiseler record producers in Nashville thought he was dead, too, after reading the news online in a local country chat room. Looking to make a quick buck they released Skeeter’s song “Hello Ma” without authorization, promoting the tune as a tribute to Afghanistan combat veterans out there in America fighting PTSD. The song went viral and soon made it onto countless country western bar jukeboxes and local yokel radio stations across the South. That quick, quicker than you can say spicy possum jerky, the song shot up the charts on its way to going gold.

Skeeter’s sister Twyla, line cook at the truck stop, had sold the publishing rights for $500 as soon as the record producers called her. As Skeeter’s next of kin she seemed on firm legal ground. During those eight months when Skeeter hung on to breathing by a dollar fishing line, everybody in the record business made money cept’n Skeeter who the music industry “executives”
 expected to die at any moment.

Then like the Lord rising from the tomb the way them Phoenix birds from Arizona do, the old boy came to.

Skeeter got himself a real good lawyer who had been disbarred during the disco craze in the 70s for snorting cocaine off the lime green sleeve of his leisure suit. The attorney was now back with a vengeance practicing law part-time under the table at his Assembly of God church and counseling needy rural senior citizen opioid addicts as a Medicare-reimbursed drug counselor. The old folks loved Skeeter’s hit song, by the way.

All Skeeter needed to get the show back on the road was more words for his new number.

Popping a seventh can of Double Yellow Line Lager he sat alone at the kitchenette table in the mobile home with Tammy working the graveyard shift which almost always ended in a graveyard for some poor soul. Skeeter wrote slowly, crafting heartbreaking lyrics for his next gold record, the words bubbling from his soul like leaky transmission fluid on a sweat-soaked summer day.

“Stick a Buck knife through my broke heart, darling. Twist it like a drywall screw.”

Then he put the two lines together, singing at the top of his voice.

“Tell me you don’t love me no more, darling. Make it hurt so I remember you. Stick a Buck  knife through my broke heart, darling. Twist it like a rusty drywall screw.”

So thrilled with himself he jumped from his wheelchair, Skeeter toppled onto the sticky linoleum floor dappled with dried white lumps of spattered bacon grease. Rolling in Double Yellow Line Lager suds he crawled to his knees and dialed a number he knew by heart on his phone.

“Connect me to Raylen John,” he said.

One minute later the best hillbilly disc jockey this side of the New Buffalo Diner came on live.

“Line two, you on the air, boy!”

“This here’s Skeeter Dillon.”

“Well gawddamn and call me crazy, we all thought you was dead.”

“I’m already readying up the B side for the new song,” Skeeter said.

“Might as well give us a little taste of that sweet sound, too, boy.”

Skeeter began to sing.

“Kiss my ass and buy me a beer. Drunk or drunker I have no fear.”

Then he yodeled like a singing Perry County muskrat trapper. And whistled like a back road country mother with Jim Beam on her breath calling her little boy home to supper after a hard day shooting ground hogs in the head with his BB gun. Then Skeeter yodeled some more.

“Wooooooie,” Raylen John said.

Now Raylen John joined in yodeling and whistling and Skeeter Dillon yodeled some more, this time in harmony with Raylen John, the two of them squealing like a couple of losing muskrats in a death match swamp hunt.

Skeeter never felt so alive, the adrenaline rushing from his need-to-be-clipped toenails – or tow nails as he called them – up through his hunting socks before striking deep into the gray brain matter like a lightning bolt slamming into an electric barbed wire fence.

“Sumbitch, partner, you still the best worst country singer/songwriter I ever heard, but this time I do believe you’re on your way to the Grand Old Opry,” Raylen John said.

That night Skeeter and Tammy celebrated at home with a fresh case of Double Yellow Line Lager returnable bottles he put in the freezer until they almost exploded and then took out to drink “ice cold” although he forgot sometimes. Tammy put her foot down last week, though, and refused to clean up the glass when the bottles exploded.

“I work in a hospital all day cleaning up after dementia patients and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to clean up after you when I get home. I’m a professional,” Tammy Willows said.

“A professional pain in the ass,” Skeeter said.

“I saved your life,” she said.

“You just happened to be there when I woke up,” he said.

“Why you ungrateful wrinkled redneck you,” she said.

“OK, be like that,” he said.

One day soon Skeeter Dillon planned to get himself a new girlfriend – a country music queen who loved him for his mind.

On Monday morning Skeeter set out again for Nashville on a spanking new used 1987 Harley-Davidson Evo Softail he bought from a widow in Duncannon, PA, for $2,500 he put on his only credit card, heading South to take back what rightfully belonged to him. Heading back to the scene of the tow truck accident that almost clipped him for good, he easily located Lester’s cowboy boot, fetid foot included, that had rolled and landed in a stagnant gully. Burying the remains and saying a little prayer, he wiped off the money he had stored in a freezer bag and shoved in the boot. Pocketing the cash he took off on the long trip through rebel country.

Yesiree, 44 year-old Skeeter Dillon was gonna be a star.

So was psychic Earline Pickett, though she surely didn’t know her future at the time.

Now she stood on the verge of a new career, this time as a backup yodeler to an up-and-coming country legend who never quite figured into her crystal ball.

You’da thought she would’a seen him coming.