In a garish courthouse office stinking of cigar smoke and loaded with cheap golf trophies, Republican Trump confidant and Lackawanna County President Judge Stanley “Stash” Dombroski opened former Scranton Mayor Harry Davies’ letter.

The judge quickly read the contents then nervously picked up the phone.

A woman answered.

White House switchboard, how may I help you?

Over in the Hill Section of Scranton, Casey Weatherhogg sat stoned on the couch beside his mother, Mabel. They watched CNN in silence as pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Casey stood and did some impromptu yoga postures before heading to the kitchen for some carrot sticks.

Want your medical marijuana, Ma?

And two beers, honey, Mabel said.

In West Side, Earl Schmidt, self-proclaimed pastor of the new Cathedral of the Eternal Donald, brandished a loaded AR-15 and pointed the rifle at the TV. A man wearing a blood red flag emblazoned with the name TRUMP and tied around his neck rappelled down the side of the U.S. Senate press gallery. He landed on a 200-year-old mahogany desk with a thud.

We got your back, brother, Schmidt said.

About 71 miles south on Interstate 81, behind the gate of a penitentiary near Frackville, former Scranton Mayor Harry Davies went to work at the prison carwash. With two clean wipe-down rags stuck in his back pockets of his matching khaki pants and shirt, he stood waiting for other inmates to do the soap and water wash before stepping forward to help dry the car. Strictly against the rules, of course, inmates washed the cars of certain VIP guards and other prison officers for free.

A black 1985 Cadillac with a “Scranton (heart) Biden” bumper sticker immediately caught the mayor’s eye. Harry Davies didn’t know who owned the car but nobody other than a full-blown Scranton yahoo would put a Biden bumper sticker on his car and drive it to work at a prison where you’d be asking for trouble because most staff and inmates hated Biden.

Strange as it sounds, the guards simply turned over employees’ car keys to the inmate cleaning crew. The inmates returned the keys when they finished because inmates usually obey the law in prison. Harry Davies used the Caddy’s key to pop the trunk, inserted the key back in the ignition, crawled inside and pulled the lid closed behind him. After pushing aside two cases of Keystone beer and a 12-pack of beef jerky, the mayor settled in for his ride to freedom.

Ten minutes later he felt the car move, then stop, parked in an adjacent lot to wait for the vehicle owner’s shift to end as he or she heads back home, presumably to Scranton. After a nap, Mayor Davies awakened to the sound of the driver gunning the engine. At first he thought he’d suffocate from the thick fumes swirling around his head burning his eyes, choking and gagging him. Then he realized he wasn’t inhaling most of the noxious exhaust because the toxic vapor was getting sucked out the rust holes in the big boat’s undercarriage. Mayor Davies popped his first beer and stretched out to enjoy the ride.

Looking forward to two days off, Gino wanted nothing more than peace. At about 4 p.m. on the second day, Gino headed to the Caddy’s trunk for more beer. Screaming before the lid fully opened, Gino jumped back, assuming a fighting stance like in the Kung Fu movies. Whatever wild beast found its way into the trunk now found its way out. Reeking of stale beer and strong urine, the creature struggled to sling one leg over the fender and roll out, knocking over empty beer cans and spilling pale yellow liquid on the garage floor. Gamey, with spicy dried meat on his breath, Harry Davies rose slowly in a living version of the evolutionary chart showing man’s upward climb to civilization.

Screaming now in recognition, Gino tried not to pass out.

You’re him, you’re him, you’re the mayor.

Harry Davies looked worse than the beef jerky.

I’m calling the cops, Gino said.

I wouldn’t if I was you, the mayor said.

Gino lowered his voice.

What do you want?

I beg your pardon.

I said what do you have in mind?

Pardon me.

Exasperated, Gino raised his voice.

I SAID…

No, no, said the mayor, stop repeating yourself. I’m talking about a real pardon, a presidential pardon. 

Stunned, Gino stood trembling with his heart pounding like a Led Zeppelin song in his throat.

Give me your phone, Mayor Davies said.

Who you calling?

Judge Dombroski, the mayor said.

Trump’s golfing buddy?

A grizzled Harry Davies snickered.

They’ll love me at Mar-a-Lago, he said.

Finally mustering the courage to confront Timmy Kelly face-to-face, Gino stood trembling on Woodlawn Street outside Hank’s Hoagies where they picked up take-out to eat in the car after their walk at the Little League field where Joe Biden played as a kid.

Gino bought a Hank’s Italian. Timmy got a Hank’s regular. Each hoagie on a National Bakery roll with Hank’s special sauce cost $4.25.

Your campaign slogan’s racist, Gino said, his words muffled through his mask.

Timmy only wore a mask if somebody made him put one on.

Scranton lives matter?

Black lives matter, Gino said.

But Scranton lives matter, too, right?

Black lives matter, Timmy.

Don’t all lives matter, Gino?

We’re pro-life Catholics, Timmy. Of course they do.

Then Scranton lives matter.

‘Black lives matter’ means we should pay attention to the wholesale slaughter of Black people.

Timmy smirked.

Like they’re baby seals?

Gino knew he’d lose this argument.

Mostly armed white cops kill mostly unarmed Black men, he said.

So that makes it OK for them to loot?

Most protesters don’t loot, including Black people.

You’re taking sensitivity training courses at the prison again, aren’t you, Gino?

I’m reading and watching the news more since my wife died. History teaches us a lot if we’re willing to listen. We weren’t friends with anybody Black growing up in the neighborhood, Gino said.

Yeah, you Italians were bad enough.

Gino closed his eyes like he was trying to hide from his father when he was little and being bad.

C’mon, Timmy, I’m serious.

You think Scranton voters will call me racist because I tell them their lives matter?

The Black ones will.

How many is that? Two?

Most people we know will vote for you for mayor.

Then why change my campaign slogan?

You’re twisting the meaning of the words. You’re disrespecting people of color.

Timmy raised his eyebrows in an overly dramatic fashion.

People of color?

Gino flinched like a timid boxer expecting to get hit.

That’s right, people of color.

That’s racist, Timmy said.

What’s racist?

You said people of color.

That’s what we’re supposed to call them.

Then why can’t we call them colored people?

That’s different, Timmy.

Sounds the same to me.

Like all Black people look alike?

You said it, Gino. I didn’t.

You really don’t get it, do you?

What I do get is that ever since the George Floyd riots white people are getting blamed for everything. My family never owned slaves. I’m Irish. We were slaves. White men particularly need to know we still matter. And I’m just the guy to tell them.

You sound like a Trump supporter, Gino said.

Timmy reached into the pocket of his blue sport coat, pulled out a cheap pair of aviator sunglasses he bought online, put them on and kicked into his best Joe Biden imitation.

Look, man, here’s the deal, he said.

Gino rolled his eyes.

Timmy spoke in the old-fashioned Scranton accent the way everybody’s lace-curtain Green Ridge parents sounded back when Biden was attending St. Paul’s Elementary School. They said ScranTun with a hard T instead of SranUNN the way the working-class pronounced the name of their hometown.

Listen, Timmy said. And this is no malarkey. Scranton lives matter because all lives matter especially Scranton lives because Joe Biden’s from here and we take care of our own.

Gino started to respond.

Will you shut up, man, Timmy said.

Gino gave up.

Whatever you say, Mr. President, he said.

New Year’s Day or no New Year’s Day, Mabel wanted her vaccination.

Pampered U.S. Sen. Bob Casey who lived just down the street got his shot and he’s only 60 years old, slithering his way into line ahead of her and every other vulnerable senior citizen in town. Smart-ass U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, that smirky little weasel, got the vaccine, too.

COVID or no COVID, me-first politics never changes among flunky establishment political hacks in hard coal country.

Dressed in a red K-Mart sweat suit matched with leopard print slip-on sneakers and no socks, Mabel grabbed an old-fashioned metal bottle opener from the drawer, popped the cap on a Stegmaier Gold Medal Beer and pulled up a chair to the kitchen table. Opening the yellowed scrapbook she kept since she was 12, Mabel started to read. A proud retired public librarian, Mabel knew her local history.

She knew about the Algonquin-speaking Munsee Indians (a subgroup of the Delaware) and the white settlers who entered the region in the mid-18th century. She knew the Electric City got its nickname when blood-sucking capitalists in Scranton developed America’s first electric-operated trolley system in 1886.

One of Scranton’s shrewdest elders, Mabel also knew Joe Biden’s past.

Sipping the first beer of the day while her son Casey secreted himself in the work space he created by the coal bin in the basement, Mabel paged through the thick chronicle she compiled and reviewed occasionally to remind her where she’d been. Some of those memorable times sparkled as some of her happiest times living with her mother and father in the Hill Section in the very same house where she lived after she married and gave birth to her boy, the very same house where she cared for her parents and husband until they died, the same warm home she and her son still shared.

Some of those times also broke her heart.

Polished brown oak stairs and amber floors shined almost golden in the afternoon sun. The house pulsed with character. So did Mabel. Draining her brew, she stood and went to the refrigerator for another bottle. With a snap of the wrist the cap flew into the air and bounced off the floor. Taking two long swigs, savoring the foamy, bitter taste, she licked her lips.

Mabel sure loved her lager.

But she loved equality more.

Tomorrow she would notify the Biden transition team of her request.

She already wrote the first paragraph of the email.

“I’m a nonagenarian feminist volunteering to help Joey lead the world, the nation and Scranton to a better place. That’s why I’m inviting him to accompany me to the next all-male Lackawanna County Friendly Sons of St. Patrick dinner.”

Holding up a magnifying glass to a page in her scrapbook, Mabel read a Biden quote from an interview the then vice president did a few years back with a weekly Irish-American newspaper.

“Edward F. Blewett my grandmother’s father, was the first Irish Catholic state senator. He was also the co-founder of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Scranton around 1908. There is still a plaque in existence in Scranton showing he was one of the founding members,” Biden said.

Mabel knew Blewett was not the first Irish Catholic state senator in Pennsylvania. That distinction belongs to the Hon. William McSherry (McSherrystown, Adams County), 1813-1817, according to the official state Senate website. And she never met anybody who could locate the plaque Biden claimed existed in Scranton.

Mabel despised the Friendly Sons.

To this day these misogynistic misanthropes continue to inflict traditional Scranton Irish-American male chauvinism on the community. The dinner has grown each year into a must-go-to business and political event, so much so that about 1,500 tuxedo-clad sexists now gather to shovel ham, cabbage and potatoes into their fleshy gobs while swilling down drinks carried to their tables by underpaid women servers, the only females allowed into the party. Thus continues the lads’ dominant role in Scranton society where no women need apply for equal opportunity.

Mabel would show them the error of their patriarchal ways.

Time for change was long overdue, especially since Biden appeared three times over the years as the Friendly Sons’ featured dinner speaker, more than anybody who ever graced the dais with stale jokes and a heavily starched ego. Mabel pitied even the smartest, strongest women in town who feared these men and refused to confront the brazen injustice carried out by their husbands, fathers, brothers, lawmakers, judges and other elected and appointed public officials, including company men Sen. Casey and Rep. Cartwright.

Mabel long ago pegged her hometown as America’s death bed, a thick, lumpy mattress on which social evolution ends its run. Despite the city’s funeral parlor décor with pasty pallor, loyal natives loved the place. Scads of these male supremacists attended the segregationist Friendly Sons’ gala. Mabel called them pale penis people like they were some sort of alien life form that descended from outer space intent on taking over the globe. Maybe they were creatures from another planet.

Biden’s two faces might be all the proof civilization needs.

Mabel watched closely when Biden wormed his way into former President Barack Obama’s world as vice president. She knew Obama needed a back-slapping white man to pull votes from blue-collar white men like the Friendly Sons who might hesitate before voting for a Black candidate. She knew Biden often played up his phony white working-class roots on the campaign trail, especially focusing on Scranton and Pennsylvania, a battleground swing state that could determine the outcome of the presidential election.

Willing to say and do anything to become vice president, Biden said and did anything to become vice president.

Incensed when Biden swore he had an uncle who worked in the coal mines, Mabel became more livid at his lie when she saw Biden laughing on national television about how he made up the story to ingratiate himself to voters. Mabel took the insult personally because she did have family members who worked in the mines. After 45 years as a coal miner, her father died from black lung that collected anthracite dust in his lungs and formed deposits around airways called bronchioles, scarring and destroying portions of his lungs and blood vessels. Pneumoconiosis, known as black lung disease, eventually killed him.

When Biden’s overwhelmingly white middle-class cheerleaders boasted, “He’s one of us,” Mabel would sizzle with contempt and say, “No, he’s not.”

Mabel re-read the words she had pasted in her book when Biden’s mother died at 92 in 2010, and the vice president issued a statement. One sentence caught her eye and stuck in her craw.

“Together with my father, her husband of 61 years who passed away in 2002, we learned the dignity of hard work and that you are defined by your sense of honor.”

Guzzling the last of her beer, Mabel slammed the empty bottle on the table and again re-read the phrase “sense of honor.”

Yes, Joey, Mabel said. You are defined by your sense of honor.

That’s why Mabel would refuse to take no for an answer as to whether Joe Biden would be her date for the Friendly Sons’ dinner. Vaccinated and ready to shatter the banquet hall glass ceiling, Mabel and the new president would break new ground whether he liked it or not.

Mabel and Joey would attend the Paddy’s Day bash together.

And she wouldn’t wear a bra.

Lake Scranton lured Casey Weatherhogg even when it rained.

Now the weather changed.

The water froze.

Every morning back in August all you could see of Casey in the middle of the otherwise calm reservoir that provided drinking water to about 77,000 people was his bare behind, rising and falling like a hump-backed whale breezing through the open ocean. Diving and surfacing up and down across the big drink, Casey took great solace in the natural pool, a sacred substance where life began and would one day likely end. Humans are almost entirely water so, in Casey’s mind, when the world’s water turns toxic, life no longer exists.

Death prevails.

Eternal silence ensues.

Call it a day forever.

Casey always peed in the water before swimming to shore, a personal ritual that contributed part of his being, or peeing, as it were, to the body of water, the substance that provided existence in the first place. Giving back, if you will. Or, as the French philosophers say, wee wee. Stepping on land, Casey then dressed for his morning part-time job at the medical cannabis dispensary where he swept up, cleaned employee toilets and ran whatever errands his young hipster boss asked him to undertake.

Breaking for lunch at noon, Casey occasionally ate a homemade postage stamp-sized windowpane of acid with a picture stamped on the front of a multi-colored psychedelic baked potato with kaleidoscopic eyes. Casey dug spuds as his favorite vegetable and sometimes saw visions of dancing baked potatoes cavorting their way into the psyches of seekers who partook in the continuing Merry Prankster-inspired acid test of America. Over the years Casey slapped his trademark tiny hand-drawn baked potatoes on countless window pane blotter tabs of acid he cooked up and stored for a rainy day. A few thousand hits made their way to California where they are to this day considered cult classics by vegetarian trippers and others who value edible produce.

Making blotter acid gave Casey joy. But his cartoon drawings no longer sparkled. His poor little taters often looked like mashed blots rather than blotter, faded ink spots and amoeba purple haze, a scraggly mist hanging over the cold mountains of his mind. That’s why he worked feverishly to manufacture a better brand of acid to distribute more equitably to the masses, a sacred pursuit on which he spent years. Then last week, Christmas week, Casey hit big time. Untold liquid LSD doses now filled a 55-gallon stainless steel drum he bought with $739 of his pension and Social Security savings and kept in the basement laboratory he put together over the summer.

With a decent high school teaching retirement, Casey still struggled to stay sane. Like LSD itself that sometimes breaks down in direct light, Casey regularly resisted mental disintegration. Cracking up scared him so he tried to stay calm. Working to perfect the “Scranton Sunshine” he called his brand made him something of a gourmet acid aficionado and ready for the big time.

Still tripping after all these years, just last night Casey watched a strobe candle flicker madly against the walls of his room, dripping hot wax down the sides of an empty Bali Hai wine bottle he kept from Berkeley as a good luck charm. As the candle dissolved he pressed the button on an old can of shaving cream he found in the medicine cabinet until it emptied a thick white mountain of foam that covered his roll top desk top and oozed to the floor. Laughing so hard his cheeks hurt, Casey realized how insanity would own him if the drug failed to wear off or dragged him so deep he couldn’t climb out of the abyss. But he eventually regained equilibrium. The time he tripped before that he drove his van alongside three running horses led by a white stallion that raced him on the other side of a farmer’s fence. Watching their thick manes blow in the winter wind, Casey wasn’t sure if the acid had taken hold or whether he transcended the holy chemical concoction. Whinnying loudly, he was one with the galloping herd, the only time he consciously wanted to stay with the pack.

LSD isn’t for everybody but everybody can take a lesson from wanderers who open the doors to perception. Casey never advocated wholesale acid consumption for kids or pets or even adults in the 21^st Century. But the continuing corporate assault on the environment pushed Casey to action, turning him into a guerrilla eco-warrior who targeted everybody in command of the business world. That went double for politicians in cahoots with the system. Casey might not be right but he wasn’t wrong. OK, he was wrong, but that only fueled his Kamikaze sky pilot high-holy crusade to defend Mother Nature by any means necessary. Malcolm X would get it.

With a half-poached brain after all those journeys to the corners of his mind, with his brain stem parboiled but not yet completely fried, acid in the Scranton water supply made perfect sense to Casey. One final mission remained before Casey blasted into the ozone like Timothy Leary’s ashes heading into space for one last adventure at the tip of a rocket because, like the heads say, a trip is never a fall.

Especially in Scranton.

That stupid NBC television show “The Office,” set in Scranton but shot in and around LA, helped brainwash America into thinking Scranton was a happening place embodied by one memorable line from the show.

“Ain’t no party like a Scranton party.”

Casey knew better.

Goofy Joe Biden also helped indoctrinate the world about Scranton, too.

Casey would soon educate the planet about the difference between dumbass comedy and the president-elect’s hey-man silliness a truly civic-minded America didn’t really want or deserve.

If only Casey could figure out how to skinny-dip in winter. For now, he just skated nude on tissue-paper thin ice, waiting for the right time to make his move to walk on water. Tripping allowed you to walk on water all the way to Woodstock, bubbling memories that brought back three days of fun and music.

A little Scranton dysfunction (LSD) never hurt anybody.

In Casey’s world, ain’t no party like a Weatherhogg party.

A crown of bullets trumps a crown of thorns any day.

Earl Schmidt adjusted the fake gold tiara sitting snug on his head, gently touching the solid copper tips of bullets that encircled his noggin like cubic zirconia diamonds. Christ could have easily taken out those brutal Roman legionnaires if instead of a wreath of thorns he wore a wreath of armor-piercing rounds to load into a rifle and open fire before they pulled hammers out of their cloaks and started pounding nails into his hands and feet.

Earl’s new bride Zerelda sat snuggled close in the pew at their church in the Poconos, the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, also known as the Sanctuary Church.  The newlyweds met on Thanksgiving at the corner of Moosic and Meadow streets in Scranton during a pro-Trump rally. Joined by two dozen other church members, mostly natives of South Korea and Japan, they railed against communism and voter fraud. They praised Jesus and Donald Trump (not necessarily in that order) and demanded the commander-in-chief  be declared the winner in a crooked election.

Founded by two brothers who broke away from their father, Sun Myung Moon’s, Unification Church, Sanctuary believes in standing in the gap between what they determine to be good and evil. Earl saw evil everywhere he looked, even in Zerelda’s big amber eyes that made her look like one of those yellow-eyed tigers Adam and Eve kept in the Garden of Eden before Eve ate the apple and blew paradise apart forever. Earl and Zerelda would have eaten the apple before it even ripened, worms and all.

But, in a surprise move, Earl planned to break away from the church, packing up Zerelda and their meager belongings, mostly survival gear including fully automatic weapons, ammunition and cans of 13 different varieties of Spam to make the move to a new home in Scranton, just 25 miles away. If two Moonie escapees could do it, so could he.

Starting a new action church would be easy. All Earl needed was a couple-hundred-a-month in mortgage money for one of those dumps that once housed a robber coal baron and now sat empty and decrepit just waiting for demolition or a new owner. Whackers who refuse to accept Trump’s defeat would be easy pickings to recruit to the Cathedral of the Eternal Donald.

Earl Schmidt dreamed big. Together he and Zerelda would rule the universe. Or at least make enough money to retire in Atlantic City when the pandemic ended. Such lightning bolt enlightenment doesn’t happen every day.

A week later on Christmas Day Earl Schmidt stood before a packed living-room church loaded with “lost sheeple” praying for redemption. A cross between a local gun show and a high-holy hillbilly snake-handling ritual, the ill-advised and technically illegal gathering in the midst of the rapidly-spreading coronavirus brought tears to the eyes of the faithful.

Earl wept the loudest.

Zerelda also sobbed fat tears that rolled down her face and stained the front of her horizontal- stripe camouflage field jacket. She cried so hard she lost her breath. Pointing at his wife, pistol-packing Pastor Earl Schmidt spoke.

Speak to us in the tongue of the Savior, Earl said.

Zerelda inhaled and screamed the golden gospel taken from the exact capitalized words of a recent Trump tweet.

THE DEMOCRATS DUMPED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF BALLOTS IN THE SWING STATES LATE IN THE EVENING. IT WAS A RIGGED ELECTION!!!

Devotees high on conspiracy went wild.

Hallelujah, sister! Sing it, sister! Fire in the hole, sister!

With eyes bugging out in rapture, the Right Reverend Earl Schmidt rushed to his wife’s side, knocking off her red and white Santa Claus hat equipped with a blitz action trauma (BAT) bullet headband. Wearing a tight tank top so his new hand grenade tattoos glistened red, white and blue like biceps of mass destruction, he consoled Zerelda. Again he commanded her to deliver the word. Spinning with the ease of former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on the season premiere of “Dancing with the Stars,” this armed evangelical madman faced the crowd to demand additional scripture from his wife.

Who is Satan?

Zerelda answered.

Joe Biden is Satan!

Earl Schmidt went ballistic.

Where is Satan from?

From Hell!

Where is Hell?

Now Zerelda’s eyes bugged out as she wriggled like a lap dancer and hyperventilated the naked truth.

Scranton, she said.

A motley congregation of misfits, dishonorably-discharged military veterans, recovering addicts of all stripes and assorted other troubled and easily-led extremists began to chant.

Scranton!

Scranton!

Laying his hand in a healing gesture on top of his wife’s head of stringy blond hair, Earl Schmidt raised his eyes to the heavens and addressed the multitudes.

Looks like 2021’s going to be some hot new year in Hell, he said.

Grinning fiendishly, he corrected himself.

I mean Scranton.

Santa Claus is wearing a mask.

So why does Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey risk infecting his own neighborhood despite his protestations to the contrary?

Concerned for myself and others, as I always do before going out in public, I wore a black mask Wednesday as I headed out on my regular afternoon walk. At almost 70, I’m just another senior citizen in the Hill Section of Scranton trying to stay alive in this deadly age of COVID-19. Staying healthy always matters, but commitment to the common good is now crucial to survival.  

Sadly, not everyone behaves conscientiously. Too many of my neighbors, postal carriers, FedEx drivers and others who should know better recklessly flaunt their ignorance, defiance or both by refusing to wear a mask.

Bob Casey is one of the sloppiest offenders.

As I walked up North Webster Avenue at about 3:15 p.m., my powerful Hill Section neighbor stood in the street chatting amicably with a gray-haired man. They stood about two feet apart, not at all socially distant or seeming to care about risk. In his black topcoat, hypodermic-needle-thin Casey looked like a stuffy professional pall bearer.

Casey wore a thin surgical mask under his chin like one of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame back when the team wore leather football helmets. Last of the legends Jim Crowley is long dead and buried near Scranton. I don’t want to join him anytime soon if I can help it. Casey, 60, shouldn’t want to run the risk of dying or killing his neighbors, either.

Casey didn’t adjust his mask as my wife and I drew closer. As I passed on the other side of the street, I tried not to inhale the stench of Casey’s brash carelessness, too close for comfort for my underlying medical conditions. Geisinger doctors have diagnosed me as suffering from hypertensive heart disease without congestive heart failure and nonischemic cardiomyopathy (HCC). Excellent health care, medication, daily exercise, a good diet and a disciplined lifestyle make me strong – as long as potential fatal disease spreaders keep their distance.

Steering clear of Hill Section feral cats fighting fleas is one thing. Worrying that my neighbor the senator might breathe on me is a different kettle of droplets entirely.

On July 2 Casey appeared with other Democratic senators in a video Casey highlighted in a Twitter message touting the civic responsibility to wear a mask.

Casey wrote: “Wearing a mask shows:

1. Compassion – the person near you could have, or care for someone with, an underlying health complication.

2. Humility – you could be asymptomatic.

3. Community – mitigating COVID helps us all. TOGETHER, we will beat this virus.”

In yet another show of humility, in a subsequent July statement released by Gov. Tom Wolf’s office, Casey said, “Public health experts continue to recommend mask-wearing in public, and ongoing research continues to support that recommendation. When you wear a mask, you are sending a clear message to others in your community that you care about them and their well-being as much as your own. I know that if we each do our part, we will beat this virus and be able to start safely rebuilding together.”

The death toll climbed.

The fight continued.

Science discovered a vaccine.

In a Dec. 20 statement, Casey said, “This morning, I received the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. I will receive my second dose in approximately three weeks. I encourage all Americans, in consultation with their doctor, to get the vaccine when it becomes available to them. I will continue to press the Administration to work to ensure that all Americans can receive the vaccine in a timely manner and insist that vaccines be distributed in an equitable fashion, particularly at nursing homes where residents and workers face an acute threat from the virus.”

Equitable?

How equitable is VIP vaccine distribution when I’m more at risk than he is? And I’m willing to wait in line while those even more at risk get their shots first. Despite whatever law or privilege gives Casey special vaccine status, our local blueblood should be standing in line with the rest of us. Not only does he jump the queue, he mocks the vaccine with his own smug dangerous behavior.  

This is the same guy who says he likely already survived the coronavirus.

“My fever went away on its own by mid-April, and it was never recommended that I be tested for the virus,” he said in a published statement. “I was able to work during my illness, remotely engaging with constituents and staff and keeping a full schedule.”

Casey said the anitbody test “revealed substantial levels of COVID-19 antibody in my blood, significantly more than the amount required to qualify me as a plasma donor.”

“In an effort to help others fighting this virus, I will be making my first donation today in Taylor, Pennsylvania,” Casey said. “I encourage others who have recovered from COVID-19 to consult with their own physician to see if they may also be eligible to donate.”

“I will continue to follow the guidance of public health experts by wearing a mask in public and observing social distancing practices, and I hope that others will do the same to help slow the spread of this virus,” Casey said in the statement.

I, too, will follow the guidance of public health experts.

I, too, will continue to wear a mask in public.

And, I, too, will social distance – particularly when it comes to “Our Bobby,” an oblivious, inoculated white, male politician living the dream as a hypocrite.

No doubt about it, your honor, I am guilty as charged.

Former Scranton Mayor Harry Davies bowed his head and closed his eyes as if in deep, powerful prayer.

U.S. District Court Judge James “Big Jimmy” Flynn scowled.

You understand I will take your recent cooperation with the FBI into consideration, the judge said.

Yes, sir, your honor, sir, I sure as hell hope so.

Big Jimmy the judge banged the gavel three times, each crack louder than the last, so hard he worried he sprained his wrist and injured his normally limber vodka-pouring hand.

Order in the goddamn court, Judge Flynn said.

With his chin touching his chest, Harry Davies stood slouched and unsettled, unconsciously picking lint off his blue sport coat as the judge spit words dripping with scorn.

You also understand your status as a former Scranton mayor, if you want to call getting elected mayor of Scranton status, makes no difference in the sentence I am about to hand down.

Sir, yes, sir, sir, Harry Davies said.

Harry was ready for anything but figured Flynn ought to give him the benefit of the doubt since Harry used to play cards with the judge’s loser brother back when Harry was a Democrat before he flip-flopped and registered Republican and then switched back to Democrat again to run in the primary.

Big Jimmy Flynn grinned.

Twenty years for public corruption with no possibility of parole, he said.

Former Scranton Mayor Harry Davies’ eyes rolled back in his head faster than the spinning cherries on a classic casino slot machine. His knees buckled as he dropped, slamming his chin off the edge of the defense table on the way down. Rising from the bench, Judge Flynn stared with disdain at the unconscious convicted felon and hissed a harsh goodbye

For the record, you puke, my sentence has nothing to do with your not hiring my wife’s brother in the zoning office, either, Judge Flynn said.

When Harry Davies came to, new Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate number 76927-067-15008-067 vowed to get even with the whole goddamn system that oppressed, tortured, disrespected and stuck him in a minimum security prison camp. Not wasting any time on his second day of incarceration, Davies wrote a letter to President Donald Trump requesting a full pardon.

What better way for Trump to get even with Joe Biden than to pardon the most crooked mayor in the history of Biden’s birthplace? Check that: the most crooked mayor ever caught and imprisoned in the history of Scranton. What better way for Trump to get even than to unleash a pathological former crooked Scranton mayor to run amok in Joe Biden’s childhood heaven?

Harry mailed the letter in care of his buddy Lackawanna County President Judge Stanley “Stash” Dombroski, a die-hard Republican and Trump confidant. Besides, with a full pardon Harry could run for mayor again.

He could run for Congress.

Maybe even president.

Harry Davies started to feel powerful again.

If Joe Biden can win, anybody can win. If the so-called crappy kid from Scranton can pull off a presidential victory, a bona fide scrappy kid from Scranton can do likewise. Besides, after all Harry did for Scranton, the feds had the gall to indict him, convict him, sentence him and lock him up for what amounts to a life sentence. With all the phonies, bagmen, pervert priests and two-bit grifters running around just in the downtown alone, the government grabs him?

If Judge Dombroski knew what was good for him he’d come through like a champ and immediately pull the necessary strings to persuade Trump to cough up a full pardon. That old crook Dombroski would know Mayor Harry Davies had in his possession stockpiles of incriminating evidence to support a variety of crimes countless city, county, state and even federal elected and appointed officials committed during the time they corrupted every notion of public decency, citizenship and civic duty.

Who could forget that night at the county/city prayer clam bake when Judge Dombroski drank 12 lime vodkas and Mountain Dews and let that floozy red-haired hairdresser Shannon Kelly spank him with wet halusky whips? Harry Davies got video of that in living color so vivid you can see the buttery yellow marks the thick, cholesterol-rich egg noodles made on the judge’s bare behind.

And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of documented bold bribes, years of brassy kickbacks and careers made on audacious quid pro quos, bad behavior that backslapping Democratic tribal elders and their flattering flunkies in the Electric City ignore as they sing the praises of Scranton values learned at the kitchen table.

President-elect Joe Biden swears he learned everything he needed to know about life at one of those Scranton kitchen tables.

Under the table is more like it.

In the meantime, former Mayor Harry Davies had an immediate plan.

A prison break sounded good. Escape became the first order of a new day. Harry felt like a new man already.

In Scranton everything depends on how you look at it.

Here’s the deal, man, said Timmy Kelly.

Gino looked up from lacing his black high top Converse sneakers, having trouble reaching the laces over the bulging expanse of his belly that heaved from the minor exertion.

You sound like Joe Biden, he said.

Timmy Kelly did a jaunty Irish jig.

Exactly, he said.

Gino grinned his big fat grin that got him all the girls in high school when he weighed 100 pounds less and his face didn’t look like a doughy deep-fried Italian pizza fritta.

For whatever reason, maybe because each man thought he might get interviewed on national television, each morning since Election Day Timmy Kelly picked up his buddy Gino Maraschino and the two men drove the half-hour from their Minooka section of Scranton neighborhood through limited city traffic, singing along to their favorite best of Bon Jovi CD to walk for 15 minutes at the Green Ridge Little League field where Joe Biden played baseball as a kid.

News reporters had been flocking to the field for months to do flat color pieces about Biden’s flat childhood. Since the election, national and even international media competed to interview anybody from dull college students to creepy retired priests. Even guys stooping to pick up dog shit got interviewed on CNN.

Timmy and Gino knew each other since childhood sledding days but weren’t close. They played varsity football together at Scranton High School and got along well enough over beers and subsequent decades to be willing to share five minutes of fame if they got lucky and stumbled across a television crew from Sweden.

Timmy Kelly looked Gino in the eye.

Scranton voted for Biden because we want something, he said, a return on our investment. Little things, like private White House tours, selfies with Joe in the Oval office and low-level government jobs for worthless kids.

What do you want, Timmy?

I want Biden to endorse my candidacy for mayor.

Go on, he won’t do that.

He’ll have to, Kelly said.

Why?

Simple, I’m from Scranton.

So is your opponent, Gino said.

Yeah, but she married into the city. She’s from Oregon. Waving around that Harvard business degree and rubbing our noses in her poison ivy league education like she’s Caroline Kennedy.

She’s also the incumbent mayor, Timmy.

What’s incumbent mean?

Current.

For now she is, Kelly said.

You got a campaign slogan yet?

Timmy Kelly got so excited he stammered.

I… I… I sound like Joe Biden, he said.

Tell me, Gino said.

Scranton Lives Matter!

Now Timmy Kelly rose to full height.

You know what else I got?

Don’t tell me, Gino said.

A career.

Doing what?

I’m a Joe Biden impersonator.

You’re shitting me.

My first appearance is online Sunday. I’m Zooming a stand-up show as a fundraiser for the inauguration.

The Biden transition team hasn’t announced details about the inauguration, Gino said.

You know me, Timmy said. One step ahead of everybody.

The leader of the band, Gino said.

I got front row VIP swearing-in tickets to give away, too.

Where’d you get tickets?

I designed them on the computer last night.

How many you make?

A hundred.

I heard on the news that even though Joe and Kamala will be sworn into office on the steps of the Capitol, the inauguration planners want Americans to stay home, Gino said.

Tell that to the Green Ridge moochers.

You don’t even look like Joe Biden, Gino said.

Timmy pulled a pair of aviator shades from his pocket and slid the frames over his ears.

I been putting the whitener on my teeth so they’re bright as headlights. I bought a gray wig at my sister’s beauty parlor that flips up in the back like Joe Biden’s hair. I’ll keep repeating here’s the deal and look, man. I’ll repeat some of his dumbest quotes, like the one about not being able to go into a convenience store for coffee unless you got an Indian accent. I’ll say it in an Indian accent, too, like them call center scammers from Bangladesh who call you at the house.

Gino seemed concerned.

What if people drive all the way down to Washington for the swearing in and can’t get in?

I’ll tell them Joe called me personally and asked me to apologize for him. I’ll blame the Secret Service. Say they haven’t been right since Trump gave them the COVID. Then I’ll drop the bomb.

What bomb?

I’ll tell them Joe’s coming back to town for an invitation-only post-inaugural ball at the Cultural Center.

You got invitations for that, too?

Soon as I get the printer working again, I will.

You’ll be as famous as them Elvis impersonators in Vegas, Gino said.

Remember what Joe told Barack when Obamacare passed?

Gino drew a blank.

This is a big fucking deal, Timmy said.

Retired Scranton High School chemistry teacher Casey Weatherhogg rooted for the revolution.

Burn it down, start all over again.

But the revolution never arrived.

Filling out his mail-in ballot on Election Day, Casey hoped for the best, voting for Scranton native son Joe Biden. Actually, he voted for Kamala Harris, a strong West Coast woman of color who could take over if Biden got shakier. Casey never forgave Biden for lying about having an uncle who worked in the Scranton coal mines and later laughing about his scam on a late night television show, mocking local yokel coal crackers who bought his story hook, line and anthracite. Casey still wanted an apology. But what could he do? Refuse to vote knowing Donald Trump might win re-election and take us all with him on the road to the apocalypse? No, Casey sucked it up and went with the man Barack Obama called the scrappy kid from Scranton. Maybe one day Casey could get even.

COVID changed everything. Life didn’t go as planned. The world shifted even without the benefit of mind-altering drugs. Such cultural chaos was no malarkey.

At 75, Casey Weatherhogg weighed 172 pounds and stood 6-foot-4 in his Birkenstocks. Thin, frizzed gray hair fell below his shoulders. Tufts stiff as last year’s robin’s nest protruded from both sides of his head. Wearing nothing but a thin leather headband adorned with a silver peace sign, faded blue jeans and vintage T-shirts with classic rock band names emblazoned across the front, Casey threw on a stained fringed suede jacket whenever he went out. Since March he added a tie-dyed surgical mask he bought online from a vegan music commune in Maine.

Shoppers snickered at Gerrity’s Supermarket where Casey bought tofu. Smart-ass kids called him names like Space Dick. Casey danced his way through the aisles to the psychedelic music that always played in his head.

Other than his 95-year-old mother, Mabel, no other Weatherhoggs of ancient Anglo-Scottish breeding lived in Scranton. Mrs. Weatherhogg seemed to fit quite nicely into the established social order, though, being a proud Marywood College graduate and retired city librarian and all. Local business and political leaders viewed her eccentric yet obviously brilliant boy as just a cultural aberration. For the most part the Weatherhoggs minded their own business. People in town mostly ignored them.

Until the COVID hit, Casey took Mabel out to get her hair blue-rinsed each week and stopped at Cooper’s Seafood House for fried flounder and a bowl, not a cup, of clam chowder. Mom liked red; Casey liked white. Since the coronavirus, though, they became cloistered, isolated, housebound recluses who dug deeper and deeper into themselves, exploring internal grievances and trying to comprehend the meaning of life. Unmarried with no heirs, Casey stood alone, just the way he liked it. Mabel fussed over her baby like always.

Named after the downtown Hotel Casey where his parents conceived him after their wedding reception and overnight honeymoon, Casey longed for yesterday. Stories of shining streetcars, men in fedoras and ladies in dresses and white gloves seemed glorious. His own favorite memory of watching Bonanza in blazing color on 1959 television collapsed under the weight of an onslaught of so-called progress. Nowadays Casey felt doomed with the new spliced generations X, Y and Z, aimless cubs foraging through clear-cut forests of technology, a glut of menacing social media and teenage angst poisoned with attention deficit drugs, college loans, chronic unemployment, zero goals, low aspirations, foodie pretention, and TikToc obsession. Some of the current breed never heard of the Beatles. The Hotel Casey existed only in crusty photographs and memories cherished by an aging cadre of senior citizens. A snotty well-used Hilton stands in its place.

Casey’s long ago decade of California dreaming had provided unparalleled adventure. Yet all that remained of that radical trip was strategy, a simple yet ominous plan to take down whatever little piece of the establishment, what Casey called “The Power,” he could level. Casey plotted the best way to take out “The Man” and make a spiritual impact in the process. Right on, right on, right on.

Ecological injustice continued to run amok throughout Northeastern Pennsylvania. A stinking, sprawling, garbage-juice-spewing monster landfill loomed large in Dunmore, Scranton’s backyard. Elite political hacks like U.S. Sen. Robert Casey Jr. (who lived down the street from Casey) and Rep. Matt Cartwright only paid lip service to liberating the people from the pollution and economic slavery practiced by evil environmental masters.

Casey needed revenge.

Both the senator and the congressman stopped responding to his heartfelt landfill emails. Nobody from their offices returned his respectful phone calls. Ignoring his concerns, they marginalized his civic duty. They mocked his sincere activist existence. Neither of these officials would have pulled that shit back in 1968 when Casey went by the nickname “Molotov.”

Nobody knew his past, of course, not even Mabel. This once bold and now washed-up radical often thought about the free-wheeling subversive existence he relished when he majored in organic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and blew up freeway rest stops along U.S. Route 101 in his spare time. Every Highway Patrol officer from Stinson Beach to Santa Barbara was on the lookout for Molotov, who truly expected to get caught. Casey still had an FBI wanted poster featuring his grinning mug that he stole from a post office in Santa Maria. But nobody tracked him down. Decades later, this former Weather Underground soldier who once helped Patty Hearst hide out in the Poconos, this veteran freedom-fighting bomb thrower, this hometown guerrilla, just chilled at home with his mother in Scranton, a couple of golden agers waiting for the end.

Both wanted to go down fighting. You wouldn’t know Mabel was capable of anything. Casey, too, craved one last mission to defend against “The Power” that would send him into the great beyond of clear consciousness where he became one with the universe.

The only question was exactly how much LSD to dump into the Lake Scranton drinking water supply. A little 21^st Century-style acid indigestion ought to throw open a few doors of perception.

Like Casey always said, you don’t need a Weatherhogg to know which way the wind blows.

Say hello to 75-year-old Casey Weatherhogg.

A retired Scranton High School chemistry teacher and 1967 University of California at Berkeley graduate, Casey once followed the Grateful Dead.

Now he follows Joe Biden into the White House as “The Power,” as writer Tom Wolfe called it, bears down on  Scranton, the birthplace and childhood home of America’s soon-to-be 46^th president.

Casey mistrusts Biden. Casey hates the system. Casey wants to spread truth and light in hard coal country but doesn’t know how… until he does, of course.

Man, does he ever figure it out.

Thus shapes the bones of Scranton Lives Matter! a scrappy kind of novel and free online serialization starting Monday at theoutlawcorbett.com website where I’ll post a new chapter every Monday and Friday until the end.

That sounds ominous because it is ominous.

The novel tells the tale of a city born of ashes and coal dust, a town always on the ropes in one way or another because of money and politics. Political corruption remains the lifeblood of the city.

Despite a hip new mayor, the city’s first female, The Power flows like the creature in The Blob, the 1958 horror movie that oozes sticky, clinging mayhem through every cultural crevasse of our town.

Professional Joe Biden impersonator Timmy Kelly wants his piece of The Power. Prison guard Gino Maraschino wants to cash in, too. Who knew Black blood flowed through Gino’s veins until Timmy Kelly laid out why the family pedigree mattered? Timmy’s sister, Shannon has already carved out her piece of The Power during a hot affair with married Lackawanna County President Judge Stanley “Stash” Dombroski. Federal penitentiary inmate and former Scranton Mayor Harry “The Ninja” Davies has a comeback plan as well.

Like her son, Casey’s 95-year-old pot-smoking militant senior citizen mother Mabel hates the Establishment, too.

Together, these characters provide an inside look at a city and a nation on the verge of greatness or implosion. Scranton is but a microcosm of the national chaos that now defines our republic.

Don’t miss chapter one in Monday’s news blog.

News?

Is this novel really news?

Is Joe Biden really scrappy?

Scranton Lives Matter!