Sunshine on an Open Tomb. Tim Kinsella

anything, nodding to Aaron at the door.

      And the complaints re: his lower back standing over the sink set at the perfect wrong height.

      He’d call me “Mr. Sinatra” if simplifying my math ever caused my tip to peak above 5%.

      Every day for years we spent hours together.

      I never did get how and why O’Malley and The Greek tolerated That Mike.

      The thing about That Mike, he just always thought about my money.

      It’s kind of interesting what things cost, but I really never thought about money.

      And however dim our daily energies, O’Malley and The Greek and me were freed by our hacking laughter and our rollicking song and screech.

      We gave ourselves permission to strut and blurt small brags in passing, spinning in the limited palette of beer sign lights and ze Tube, dancing with one another and our empty stools.

      I’d shout over the jukebox, “Duh, unga-bunga?”

      And they both fell for it every time.

      You know that old joke, Lewd Reader, where you ask a guy if he remembers his first blowjob and then, dewy eyed, he answers something like, ‘Oh, like it was yesterday. It was just magic.’

      And then you ask him, How’d it taste?

      That same gang of us, wishing each other the best with our boredom, said goodbye each night with affectionate gravitas that far exceeded our nods hello each morning.

      My old friends were all the misfit kids of neo-cons, and I’d ignored messages from most of them long enough, they’d given up on me.

      Though I did still sometimes wake to Gore Vidal’s desperate late-night messages.

      I’d become accustomed to the pizza and cartoons that block out all the corpses.

      And The Family was not, by any means, a daily topic of conversation.

      Occasionally a gregarious stranger cocking his head toward Aaron would be like, What’s up with the spook?

      But when everyone shrugs it off, security fades into the background exactly as it’s supposed to.

       CHAPTER 15 Pops Visits The Bahamas

      Capsizing regimes all over—Guatemala, Iran—The CIA needed middlemen to support its preferred rebels and maintain its plausible deniability.

      And by the late ’50s it’d exhausted using esoteric adventure travel as cover stories.

      People will believe only so many quests for Yeti and Eurasian leprechaun gold.

      So it routinely set up international businessmen as fronts.

      The CIA would invest and sometimes outright own foreign-based corporations in Haiti or wherever.

      The corporations mostly operated as legitimate businesses, the employees oblivious to the spies they provided cover for.

      And the equation simple: Business + Politics + Friendship = Intel.

      And with their global sales and acquisition efforts, Pops’s companies DrSSr and Zappatoes offered the perfect excuses for globe-trotting and question-asking.

      Dullis was at Gulf Oil.

      Same Dullis Bro that seduced The Queen of Greece or his brother?

      Which one helped found The UN?

      One is famed for having over 100 extramarital affairs and that’s probably the same one whose Cuban Task Force was created to exert psychological, economic, and diplomatic pressure on Cuba.

      But I can never keep those two straight.

      The Dullises aren’t Bloodline, but they and The Family conspired in investment Banking and Law for decades— generations even—before both turning to “Government.”

      And whichever Dullis Bro that was—a master of assassinations, cozenage, and camouflage—after the hulking misadventure of The Korean War, he was made commander of The CIA.

      Pops and his friend Divine had founded Zappatoes with money from Pops’s Grandfather, some from The Ruckafellas, and the rest from various Bonesmen.

      And Gulf Oil leased a platform from Zappatoes and kept it parked in the most far-flung cluster of The Bahamans, 54 miles north of Cuba.

      The CIA handed Young Pops a list of names of specific Cuban oil workers that they wanted him to hire and train.

      In fact, the original code name for The Bay of Pigs Thing was “Operation Zappatoes.”

      But realizing that was not the best cover, Pops changed the name of the secret ship that carried the contraband, naming it after My Mother George Washington, same as both planes he piloted in WWII.

      Pops resigned and sold all his shares of Zappatoes when he realized that to become Prez someday, he needed to first get elected to “Government.”

      That Dullis in charge at The CIA put Ruckafella in charge of The Psychological Strategy Unit.

      This Ruckafella with his bright green office and bright red penthouse and pet tiger Esso was grandson of the Ruckafella that founded the Federal Reserve.

      And this Psychological Strategy Unit he helmed recklessly and enthusiastically explored the use of psychotropic drugs, especially the truth serum Scopolamine, hoping to engineer unwitting assassins like The Manchurian Candidate.

      But after the hulking misadventure of The Bay of Pigs Thing, King Arthur insisted that Dullis resign.

      And all parties involved understood this move as King Arthur’s divorce papers from The Wall Street-TX-CIA nexus.

       CHAPTER 16 Re: Cuba

      By the time that The Family moved from Midland to Houston in the summer of ’59, it was as much a hub of extremism as Dallas.

      The John Birch Society, the anti-communist Christian proselytizers that preached unrestricted Capital-ism, had a grip on the city like a vice.

      Some people believe that the ancient Sumerian word that The Hebrews translated into “salt” also meant “vapor,” which they take as proof that Lot’s wife was vaporized, proving that nuclear war destroyed Sodom and Gomorra.

      Tolstoy chose poverty, seeing ascetic morality as the only path to holiness.

      And The John Birch Society believed that unrestricted acquisition of material wealth was a Christian’s primary duty.

      After getting booted from King Arthur’s administration, Dullis’s interest in TX intensified.

      He contacted a couple Houston-based officers.

      And he visited Dallas just weeks before 11/22/63 to give a reading from his new book for The Council on World Affairs, the only event to promote the book’s release.

      In 1895 Henry Cabbage Lodge, who would become the first Senate Majority Leader, already foresaw the dominoes of colonial expansion: “In the interests of our commerce... we should build the Nicaragua canal, and for the protection of that canal and for the sake of our commercial supremacy in the Pacific we should control the Hawaiian islands and maintain our influence in Samoa…and when the Nicaragua canal is built, the island of Cuba…will become a necessity…”

      In 1898 The Homelan not only supported Cuba’s revolt against Spain, but Ruckafella even goaded Spain into the conflict.

      Black Gold was oil and White Gold was sugar and access and control of this prized gold yin-yang was solidified by the yellow press.

      The explosion of The USS Maine, docked in Cuba, was blamed on the Spanish, even though they’d