Sunshine on an Open Tomb. Tim Kinsella

      This was all quite common and none of it was illegal- illegal.

      Coca-Cola invented Fanta to continue to sell cola to the German market.

      And the NAZIs depended on IBM’s punch cards to organize the mountains of census data the holocaust required.

      But it didn’t look too good.

      And even more delicate for public appearances was The Family’s connection to a mining company on the German- Polish border that depended on slave labor from the camps.

      We couldn’t let The Reds get them first, so The Homelan made a deal with Hitler’s intel chief in ’45: More than 100 war criminals would be protected and no charges pressed, so long as they all worked for The CIA.

      And by ’46, The Joint Chiefs gave orders to hire 5,000 NAZI scientists.

      NAZI rocket scientists, NAZI Public Relations specialists, NAZI doctors and graphic designers and assassins: with The Catholic Church’s help, we found jobs for all of them.

      Remember Mengele’s nickname among the children at Auschwitz: The Good Uncle.

      And in ’47 The National Security Act became law.

      ’47, what a year!

      The crash at Roswell; that postmodern occultist Crowley died; Churchill coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” and The Cold War began; The House UnHomelan Activities Committee got aggressive, in effect admitting that culture is weaponized; and The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in West Bank caves, shaking up the history of The Old Testament.

      The National Security Act changed the name of The War Dept. to The Defense Dept. and with these ex-NAZIs as its cornerstones, The CIA was founded.

      How Grandfather relished the newspaper as a boy!

      Tracking the misadventures of Wyatt Earp and Pat Garrett.

      He chuckled at Mark Twain’s political opinions and marveled at the fantastical inventions of Jules Verne.

      Controversy over Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic philosophies crammed the columns.

      And Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker kept busy defending his best friend Darwin’s ideas against ridicule and slander.

      Grandfather was a man born into the wonders of The Mechanical World.

      Anything could be built.

      Anything was possible.

      And so it came to be so.

      He’d saunter into Nxn’s Oval and kick his feet up on the desk and grin and grin and grin recalling one of the last traveling versions of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley that he’d seen when he was 7 years old.

      Pops and his siblings never did shake their terror and amazement of hard-drinking Grandfather, 6’4”, looming over them with vigilant judgment.

      Grandma denied his binges, insisted that the children were not seeing what they knew they were seeing.

      And this lesson in denying Reality went a long way in shaping Family policy.

      The secret of Grandfather’s alcoholism made Pops pathologically phobic of personal examination.

      And this profound fear of analysis, coupled with his inherited reverence for public image, honed some fundamental spy skills.

      Secrecy itself became a fetish.

      That constant pressure, the sustained grip like a vice, such tightly coiled control takes endurance.

      Such repression couldn’t possibly lead to any other outcome than the logorrhea Pops suffered when his man undressed and sponged him.

      And Pops’s one real power—that blank, prolonged eye contact—that’s simple after a childhood too afraid to look at your own father above his neck.

       CHAPTER 5 My Diana

      As the years accrue, increasingly I think about nothing at all except fucking with The Act of Love, while at the same time, I never feel like actually fucking with it.

      Still, most nights crescendo the same: grinding my King Charles up against the flimsy closet door at The Other Greek Place.

      I’d grunt and throw my head back and howl, biting at O’Malley over my shoulder while he spanked me.

      It was all a wild performative ritual for my posse’s sake to wedge the slimmest gap between my flushed and fleshy self and my self-awareness of my ridiculous irrepressible impulses.

      The Greek hooted gruff kudos from a few steps back.

      Aaron guarded the door.

      That spinning was always the last I remember before Aaron and That Mike would drag me to the backseat of my minivan.

      And then the window cold against my forehead, the streets all tilting down on me, rushing at me.

      Like some clueless, stuttering, cartoon pig Casanova flirting with a spiked hedgehog, I wrecked myself into completion for that woman.

      That was her simple command.

      Like how fire cultivates a forest’s floor, she just appeared.

       My Diana.

      One night, all at once, radiating her weaponized beauty in profile, she was hanging on that flimsy closet door, a sweaty beer bottle dangling from her grip, her slick skin stiff and thick as if she’d gotten a chill in her patriotic bikini, the moon low and huge behind her.

      When I was 5 years old, I saw her face in my mind.

      When I was 13, I was so confused that I couldn’t find her.

      I was sick on my wedding day cuz it wasn’t her.

      Trusted Reader, imagine a public touch between two men, strangers, nothing big, just a glancing touch on a bare forearm.

      It’s impossible to translate even something so simple as that into language, to filter the charged ping of bone thru the troubled scrim of wordage.

      But, I let someone in.

      You ever been touched inappropriately, Scrupulous Reader, an unwanted touch?

      It tears you in two.

      You partition.

      You set that touch moment aside and get on with the moil of your cycling days. It’s always Ash Wednesday or Tax Day or something.

      But you never can integrate that touch moment into your smiley ho-hum, and all your impulses and habits bloom in response to it—everything.

      That touch defines you.

      Let The Barbarians drool.

      My Diana was as real as anything’s ever been real to me.

       CHAPTER 6 I Got Tapped, But Bolted

      As a boy, I’d always found a way to linger at Pops’s door.

      And every night as his man sponged him, Pops erupted, ranting, disgorging and heaving his nefarious admissions— a spastic logorrhea.

      Proud of his hidden work, he needed someone to commend his cleverness.

      But every few months, Pops’d get paranoid and slit his man’s throat.

      And again, he’d muzzle his pride best he could after hiring a new man, but inevitably, when the relentless endurance of constant appearance came to be too much, undressing, in transition to nakedness, Pops gushed.

      And each new man needed context, so Pops’d retell the old stories.