Who Killed The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Was It Dick Cheney?

Was it any of these hard working Americans?  I don't think so!

Huh?

by Homeless T
2015-09-30    Video killed the radio, but who remembers what killed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)?  Think, America, think!  Surely you remember the USSR--the commie rats, the "Evil Empire," the arch-enemy of freedom?  It was a nation bigger even than Texas, stretching from East Germany to Siberia.  It just fell off the map in 1989, and next thing we all knew, it was plain old Russia again. Was it Lucifer? Lucille Ball?

Can you remember how it happened?

• Was it an asteroid the size of Manhattan that fell smack on Moscow?  The same one that killed off all the dinosaurs too, and that's why you don't see 'em anymore?  
• Was it a series of calamities like the plagues visited upon arrogant Pharaoh by God? Culminating in the death of all the first-born goyim?  On behalf of his captive Hebrews? Mmm--even that doesn't seem
  like enough to knock off a super-power like the USSR.

Super Ronnie Goes for the Long Pass!

Okay, so I'm asking rhetorical
questions!  Everybody knows that what really killed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was Ronald Reagan and his terrific acting.  He dealt the death blow to Soviet communism with his heart-stopping threat to launch his Star Wars Death Star into orbit. Once he got it up there, keeping it aimed squarely at the Kremlin--with the Death Ray joystick right at his bedside, he wasn't about to let it go. Those dumb commies couldn't know that he was bluffing. Ronnie's make-believe ray-gun scared the Evil Empire literally to pieces.

Whew! That's a load off my mind! Because I dreamt again last night that it was plutocrats on a whim that forced the USSR to go belly up--much like an old dowager moving her dead husband's fortune from one trustee to another, because . . . she doesn't like her private banker's shade of lipstick--or like the two rich old uncles in the movie Trading Places, betting a buck that they can ruin one man and elevate another by manipulating circumstances.  But no, it wasn't any of those bad actors. It was the superlative acting of Ronald Reagan that knocked out the Sovietniks.

I for one will sleep much better when Ronnie Reagan has been chiseled into Mount Rushmore with extra large eyes, so he can keep watch over the country; because lately, I've been waking up in the wee hours, in mid-scream. 

Why?  I've been having nightmares that it is our turn.  You know, our turn to . . .  fall off the map.  Certain parties have known all along that sooner or later the United States will have to refund principal to its international debt-holders--or "suckers," as those shorting the dollar call them.  I'll bet they all have their copies of Hyperinflation Dead Ahead!

Even with its minimal imagination, "smart money" can foresee how massive quantitative easing provides the perfect opportunity to knock the US off the map, just like the USSR.  Especially once short interest on the dollar begins really to snowball.  And look what's coming down the canal!  It's the QE99!  And I never even got to sail on the QE2!  Sooner or later, the dollar will be lowered by rating agencies to "funny money," and when it egregious legerdemain prompt the whole world to dump the dollar-peg--fire sale in the futures pit! And civilization's natural response?--a move to the new currency peg.  The question is of course, which one?

So, hello Q99.  Goodbye, dollarsaurs!  Hello, Planet Peso!  So long, global preeminence!  Greetings, Most Honorable Rulers!  Whose turn is it to be 'it'? Gee, I wonder!  Since I am still as poor and homeless as I have ever been--how shall I say it?--it makes me no never-mind no-how.  Plus, I love rice.



For readers who have made it this far, a definition from the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia:

plutocracy: 1. government by the wealthy class; the rule of wealth; also, a class ruling by virtue of its wealth. Also plutarchy.  2.  A form of government in which the supreme power is lodged in the hands of the wealthy classes; government by the rich; also, a controlling or influential class of rich men.

Anybody for etymology?

Greek ploutokratiā : ploutos, wealth; see pleu- in Indo-European roots + -kratiā, -cracy.

Okay.  Now comes the truly ugly part of my recurring dream.  The hidden-away powers responsible for this dirty business all along have engaged in a side-helping of cave-man thinking too. They put a person of color into the US presidency just so they can blame the collapse of the United States on non-white leadership.  (Update, July 2014--add in female Fed leadership.) This change of gender/complexion will eventually infect traders of global capital with the pressing sense of urgency profiteers need to get all the suckers furiously reallocating to safer shores at the same time.   

How will budget directors explain to their chairman: why only get 2.643 yuan for a dollar?  They had to get out!  The Federal Reserve was going to hell fast!  Colored leadership!  Female chairpersons!  They were lucky to get even that! 

So, in the spirit of a radicalism that nobody will ever attend to, I offer unsolicited advice to President O'Bama on how to head off their plans.

I urge you, Mr. President, immediately to declare a state of emergency, suspend the constitution, and send a gang of the Chicago boys out to round up all the known plutocrats, wherever they may be hiding.  You'll find Dick Cheney on the Saudi royal yacht, cruising the Gulf with his harem.  Take 'em all into custody--every one of them that your people can lay their hands on.  Then arrange a spectacular trial, and bring these perpetrators before the public, out in the open, for everyone--even us coolies--to see.  And turn them over to a world court loaded with judges from the People's Republic of China.  They'll know what to do.

I don't think I'm alone in my eagerness for a fine show of Chinese justice done Chicago-style.  You may as well, Mr. President--you've got to be weary of taking the blame for those rich elitists.  Not that I can any longer exclude you from that class.  Still, you seem to have a heart, and they're . . . well, they're the kind of people who will poison a well--once they've cornered the market on bottled water.

Don't let privilege-gone-wild win!  Get 'em, gut 'em, hang 'em high, and set an example for the rest of those pluto-rats.  Tell 'em even the bedraggled homeless of America figured out their treachery long ago, and they recommend no pardons.

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Politics for a prophecy

2016-01-13.  We poor Americans living under Obama have had the good fortune of his protection in many ways. His health care reform has given me back my health, personally speaking.  Further, his failure to endorse an enforcement order for Fed meddling in states with legalized pot has made the underclass a lot more mellow. He has kept us as neutral as possible in the Mideast. Geez, if he could only fix South Chicago.


I love my president, because he has taken me from a life of hopeless and homeless to my present life of ease and comfort: cozy in a government-subsidized apartment in a town with an angelic aura.

I know his mandatory insurance for middle-class income-earners can be tough. But that is entirely to blame on the private sector intoxication with unlimited prices.

I pray that he continues his work in American medicine by regulating hospital charges.  That should help bring down the premiums for those who must pay their own way.  Look at your next itemized bill!

Now I suppose we will have to face war and near-extinction with our new tough-guy President Don Trump.  . As much as I admire the individual corporation he embodies, he better be spending on his global due diligence already, I fear he may be the super-capitalist that ends capitalism, along with all other non-barter financial systems.  I fear he will reduce the human population by some 85-90% in an event of nuclear how the hell did that happen.  But I guess we need a good purge! I will be voting for him, the first time ever I will vote Republican--or independent, as the case may be.

I urge all good people to follow my lead.

So thank your lucky Obama whilst ye may, misguided detractors.

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Grande Ballroom Detroit to Feature the Wha? at Reunion

by Homeless T 2016-03-25: Waverly, Iowa. If you remember splendid times of ballroom dancing at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, Michigan--and harbor a desire to reexperience the days of less sophisticated means of brainwashing used 50 years by all known agencies--the FBI, the CIA, the Communist Collective for the Training of Youth Leaders, Young Americans for Freedom, and the Symbionese Liberation Army--your mind is truly a confused morass of misguided nostalgia. Where are the original bands of the Grande? Harry Lauder, Paul Whitefield, Benny Goodman, etc. had this ballroom swaying with depression area couples, dancing on a cloud as far back as 1934. 
My parents caught the act I was in, The Wha?, playing there in 1966. In 1967 I was dispatched to a military academy--so frightening was this new counter culture to my folks.

Russ Gibb, a schoolteacher who wanted more than the Standard Strands and Objectives for his students, reopened the Grande long after the first wave had passed out to sea. Nonetheless many will be in attendance.
PS This may be the swan song for a avis rara two-and-a-half score years gone. I will be flying in from wherever I may be in the world and renting the entire top floor of the former Marriot. Come on up!  

A Waste of Love

Hey! I was shafted, I telz ya! Somebody made it their life's work to knock the crap out of me--old Homeless Me, who never hurt nobody, once upon a nightmare--until all that remained was a pair of dirty flip-flops, the red spot on my forehead, and a mournful catch in my throat. I only mention the nasty transformation because I cannot forget it. The horror returns as I reread this blog entry, dating back from 2008 with several updates, including today, January 28, 2015:

by Homeless T

Most nights after I've crawled into an upper bunk of the closet-sized room I share with three other aging, flatulent, homeless men--but before my 200 milligrams of Seroquel has put me down--I find myself buzzing within a bleak, preconscious mental space that is busily compiling all I have lost and have not learned, whether I will to consider it or not.

This twilight state shrouds my soul in oppression. Sadness--despair--impotence---overtake me, producing sensations similar to what others feel when they've lost someone dear to them to death: anger, denial, and frustration that I am powerless to bargain with Fate. In the end I must resign myself to a new role as a non-person, heartbroken yet utterly forgotten--like an insect in throes of dying, insignificant as a housefly.  Of course, these words are a lot of dramatic piffle, but you can imagine. 

But thank God, I've lost none of my best-loved ones to death. What was temporarily stolen was my relationship with my children, and my stature among long-standing friends and colleagues. Thanks to the industry of a brilliant horror writer, I found myself rewritten as a villain, and the new role had even me going for a while.  But . . . 

I was never violent with their mother--quite the opposite, she was fond of throwing and breaking heavy objects over my head, which stupidly I tolerated--but when she learned of the trumped-up offense against me (of injuring a policeman in April of 2007), she threw together a very effective "Violent-T" promotion, and her gullible attorney filed for the family's protection, ex parte against me, resulting in my ban from the family home.   I wasn't invited to the hearing because such proceedings ban if a party 'provides imminent physical danger' to another.  By the way, I supposedly opened a can of whip-ass on three 250-pound officers of the law. You know what a palooka I am.

I've never been dangerous to anybody, and abhor violence. This little lie was deeply dishonest, for I have never been dangerous to anybody (but myself, on occasion). Nonetheless, in December of 2009, the judge made permanent my ban from the family home in his Order, Judgment, and Decree that ended our marriage. Nor may I telephone or even speak directly to the alleged protected person, a real crock of cold injustice.

My kids must've felt I no longer loved them, or even think about them. This notion rips my heart in twain, and my brain still crumbles from law that authorized her to guard all of our former life like the proverbial dog in the manger--useless for anything but to deny accommodation to me. 

If any of my children should read this, I plead now: realize that I miss you terribly; and when somehow, someway--by the grace of God, the Holy Virgin, or Lucifer--I get back on my feet, we will reacquaint ourselves with the civility, accomplishment, and family love you all deserve. I admire all of you--each vastly superior to your dad in some important way. You have grown into attractive, intelligent, and decent people.

I empathize with how your hearts must regard me now--at a comfortless arms-length. You must feel bewildered at best, and weary, weary of the flash-flooding poison at the mere mention of my name. Your mom is a woman of talent and power, both of which demand respect. She remakes the world in her image; but on our journey, she lost her faith in her partner.

I'm sorry guys, so sorry. I love you all more than you can know. I hurt over my lost Pater Familias role--and from having been tumbled into a bleak, wandering state. None of us can turn back, but please, let's try to make the best of what remains.  You all have my unconditional love and support, and should ever I regain the needed wherewithal--I'm taking the whole family on a trip to Boblo!

Affectionately yours forever,

Mr. Homeless Daddy Nobodaddy.
Tom Tasseff

And here's wisdom from the old geezer--this bit of common sense addressed to disengaging spouses, and any estranging couples who might be a-lurking:

Please don't work to poison the minds of your children against a former spouse.  The pain that some work so doggedly to inflict, one upon the other, by any means possible--including badmouthing of the former partner, and hyperbolizing hurt to gain the sympathy of others--is too blackhearted to succeed for long.  Karma will not abide undeserved wounds to go blameless.

The children you try so hard to disaffect eventually will understand that something important has been taken from them; and also, in time, that you chose to disfigure their paternity and cast it like waste into the gutter--for reasons of your insatiable anger, hatred, and spite--all of which, ironically, began as love . . . of some sort.

Should your effort to whip up grief ever succeed, the triumph will be hollow.  It is the innocent family members who must bear the untruth you spin--not only concerning the absent parent, but to a degree, the distorted reflections of themselves.  Children are, after all, half you and half me.  

Hatred destroys the hater.  Don't be a raging malefactor.  Any compassion you can muster will return to you in respect, love, and achievement. Mendacious vengeance--sadly, madly, and in lost powers of love--will also return to you.

Don't give up on love.

Pictures of Harlots 2016

Some men are not quite the gentlemen they appear. Then again, some women just love schizoid personalities--at a peril they may not even see. Learn to understand the duplicity of narcissistic love in all its irony in Tommy George's 

Pictures of Harlots

Click the Title for a Novella Manuscript

Hawking Turns Bird-Brained

by Homeless T

Stephen Hawking displays a paucity of imagination in his book-plugging Guardian interview of May, 2011 as he dismisses the notion of a personal God (one attendant to individual needs and supplications) as improbable in light of the volume of petitions, prayers, and personal reflections made unto the various divine agencies nominated by man.  
Further, Hawking characterizes God as "unnecessary" to creation of the universe.  Ouch.  Maybe the incomprehensible in non-semantic reality doesn't attend to Stephen's crowded universe either. 

If there ain't no divinity, what the hell shaped your ends, Stevie?

I won't say that Hawking's opinion is wrong-headed or even radical.  On the contrary, it is deceptively logical, well-articulated, and a hypothesis that grows ever-more ethically comfortable over time for the jaded among us who have come to view their lives as sui generis projects, and their successes as the products of personal philosophies, innate superiority, and smarter social cultures.  Their own ego-driven industriousness provides sufficient explanation for their earthly laurels and material accumulations.  So they believe.  With nothing to contradict their view, it becomes a persistent habit of mind.  This is why so many among the well-to-do become such colossal bores--they see nothing beyond their own worldview, and thus their existences become a self-reflecting panorama.

Hawking's floccinaucinihilipilification--or dismissal as worthless, of any power beyond the fanciful unifield theory peddled in his new book--is easy to assume.  As the son of an atheist, I was so indoctrinated, and long cleaved to a godless universe myself.  As a sassy youngster, I made light of scriptural expressions.  As an adult, I pitied the pious as deluded.  To do so was less intellectually embarrassing than subscribing to their dogma and struggling to answer questions like

• How could God attend to the prayers of so many individuals?  What about the rest of creation?  Do mosquitoes have a divinity that watches over them?
• Why would God abide the horrors that human beings inflict on one another?  Or on other species? 
• Why (in the Christian religion) would He sanction the torture and execution of His own son?
• How did He happen to choose an obscure band of desert nomads to become his chosen people?  
• Why would God create man alone in His image, and not the rest of the creatures--say, the octopus?    

The limits of logic by analogy taught me that a godless universe is a state of affairs that no man has the facts to impose, and only a fool would bother to contend.  Even though theological education has always seemed to me like one dog teaching another how to drive an automobile, I still wouldn't dare condemn it, or even try to explicate the why or wherefore of our unknowable, infinitely complex universe.  Consequently I believe that popular religions are dreamt-up, marketed, and led by charlatans--a belief I generally keep to myself, especially since I aspire to found the world's saving belief.  However, Hawking's absolute stance on a universe devoid of any divinity warrants an answer.

I cannot deny the existence of a higher power, even if my words will not represent it because I haven't any inkling of its nature.  I immediately declared myself an agnostic when I learned the word, but recently I have begun to suspect that there may be a personal God after all--beyond realms of religion, shamanism, unifield theory, or coincidental miracles (such as Hawking's sale of a half-million books on the subject of Physics).  As one playwright put it, "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”  

That divinity would seem to have shaped an admirable niche for you, Steven--thus my disappointment in your latest remarks on the subject.  In any case, Hawking-the-theoclast, hear the dusty epiphany of one no longer so certain about declaring the certainty of nothing:

An Remarkable Coincidence: November 19, 2007

The District Court let me out of jail on personal recognizance the morning after my arrest for domestic abuse, yet they provided no transportation for me to get back home.  I had no car, having days before sold it and given the money to my new house-mate/enamorada so she could make her car payment.  I couldn't risk trying to thumb a ride , because hitchhiking is against the law in this state; and the hicks and pricks of this state would sooner report a hitchhiker to the sheriff than give him a ride, so I had to hoof the twenty-one miles back to the house recently rented for us--one very close to my fiance's parents, so she and her children could ease into family life with new stepdad--me--without too great a shock.  That dream of a new family was on hold now, along with everything else.

A spanking new no-contact order prevented me from calling my love for a ride, or even passing a message to her.  I had been charged with domestic assault against her.  She had been in the midst of moving her things back to her parents' house (for the third time in 10 days) when we had our spat.  Quite accidentally, I  fractured her pinky finger as I tried to pry the house-key loose from the key chain that she had interwoven among her fingers.  The next four years would enlighten me as to her pathology, but then I was still in the dark about what I was up against, and greatly anguished over the sudden turn of events.

So I walked along that long, dusty rural highway feeling low indeed.

 Twenty-one miles was a long journey on foot, so I had plenty of time to mull things over.  After about 6 or 7 miles, I found myself ranting aloud to the universe, to this improbable omnipotence called 'God'.  Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ was on my mind.  I had seen it several days earlier, and its ghastly imagery was somehow mixing itself up with my own betrayed domesticity.  It disturbed me that torture and crucifixion would be heaped upon Christ by the leave of his father-god; it disturbed me that this was my woman's favorite movie, and it puzzled me why she had chosen for us the house where her last fiance went insane, and why she was calling my by his name in many slips of the lip.  Rotten treachery all around, I felt.

Although I had quit drinking by praying to the Virgin Mary in 1980, even that seemed a mere coincidence now--for here was I, not a bad man, but nonetheless being sued for divorce by my first, vengeful wife; and arrested and accused of assault on my new fiance.  I might add that lately I had lost my job, my car, my home, my few friends, my children, and even my wardrobe.  So on I trod down that friendless shoulder, feeling that I had been spit out of life, like a bad taste in the mouth.

The improbability of any personal god was on my mind, too, Steven; and like yourself, I was haranguing aloud about the naivete of those who so believe--albeit, haranguing into an empty sky, where presumably divine providence dwells--when a pick-up trucked pulled up beside me.  "You look like you need a ride," the driver said.  Of course, I did.  The man driving the truck had also spent time in the same county jail on the same charge, years earlier, and he confessed that he really had assaulted his wife, so he couldn't plead innocence.  And although he had long detested Bible-thumpers, he found peace of mind through reflections and prayer, which he recommended.  I didn't have to go to church, spout dogma, or affiliate with a religion, he said.  All I had to do was restrain the skeptical impulse within, and open myself to the possibility

And so I have done, ever watchful.  In the time that has passed since that day I have learned that there are far more tears shed over answered prayers than those that go unattended--so be careful for what you pray, because they may be heard after all, by some angel more attentive than you care to acknowledge.

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Better Homes and Hillbillies

The Next Thing You Know, Your Stinking Life Will Become the Unlovely Thing You So Despise

by Homeless T

My bewitching first wife of nearly twenty-eight years' marriage--or as I prefer to remember our moments together, more than 88 million precious seconds--has always believed that anything unbeautiful deserved no place in her home. She was forever banishing any unlovely object that dared to fall under her gaze to somewhere she wouldn’t have to look at it—usually the garage, the basement, the crawlspace, or in cases requiring special rendition, a hole in the backyard, dug under moonlight, to strains of Mozart.

Thus and so you are to me

Her view was, who needed to look at decrepitude and decay? Wasn't it bad enough that she had sometimes to look at me? Only a home-decorating genius like her could have figured out that the easy, practical way to control the unsightly debris of everyday life--the dirty diapers, trash, encrusted sauce-pans, dust, husbands, and mold--was simply to purge the mind of their presence by hiding them.

She also treated the common implements of domesticity--brooms, trash cans, dustpans, and vacuum cleaners--in much the same, see-no-evil manner. When she ran out of places to conceal messes, she started stashing them in a new place where they fit in--my room! She wasn't about to make them the centerpiece of our home!

I suppose she chose my room because I was always dragging them out anyway. I considered myself tidy, and appreciated the convenience of wastebaskets and brooms and clothes hampers. Even the limpest, most unattractive dish-rag held a certain attraction for me at one time or another, so it may have been from jealously that she did as she did. She just couldn't compete with a dust-buster.

She got so fanatical about immediately putting them far out of sight, that I found myself fantasizing about readily available brooms, trash cans and other such forbidden fruit. I confess now that I'd become quite dirt-minded.

 * * *

The real Jesus Christ—who, by the way, may have looked and acted more like Osama Bin Laden than Madison Avenue ever dare acknowledge—might not have approved of the wild-eyed, squealing pagans who swarm in His Name on Christmas morning like Santa's spawn, of questionable worthiness to faith. Naturally, these otherwise normal children monkey-paw all those fussy wrapping jobs to shreds, and rip the boxes within from stem-to-stern in their haste to unseal them. These piles of instant trash are a monument that even the most visionary home improvement specialist can't mentally block. I took drastic action on Christmas day.

Big trash called for serious measures. When the avalanche of rumpled foil wrapping paper, frayed ribbon, and shiny shards of smashed ornaments hit the floor, so did I—dragging behind me the rolling, black Yard Boy, a trash can giant. My wife quailed and quavered in the face of its all-devouring, cavernous maw. How dare I? Get that fuckin' thing out of here! I could’ve stuffed her in and carted her off, and nobody would’ve been the wiser. But Yard Boy had been summoned for the hallowed purpose of containing the Christmas morning refuse--not to conceal her bony, unholy cadaver.

As those 88 million seconds crawled by . . . second . . . by . . . ecstatic . . . second, my wife Calloween not only banned discouraging objects from sight, she often did away with them altogether. During our seconds together, I never once saw her sweep a kitchen floor. When it got so dirty that her moon boots stuck to it, trapping her like a roach in a roach motel, she would drop to her knees and play the role of long-suffering scrub-woman, dabbing at the spots with a moist tissue, and smearing the dirt around with some wet paper toweling for good measure.

When buckled edges and indelible stains finally overwhelmed her, she ripped the whole floor up—only to discover another layer of linoleum, equally appalling, beneath. Up it came, unleashing anachronistic molecules of the fabulous fifties. Up that came, too. When finally she rested, she had torn up a half-dozen layers of flooring that dated back to 1899—that she dragged, sheaf-by-filthy-sheaf, out to the back yard and dumped in a hole.

Some long-dormant whooping-cough bacillus must have found its chance to escape as she was pulling up layers of flooring, and we all came down with it. When CNN reported the inexplicable whooping cough epidemic in the heartland, its epicenter looked suspiciously close to our little town.

Soon she’d ripped up all the carpeting and buried it in the back yard, too. She pulled down the awnings that shaded the west-facing windows and buried them--why, I'll never know--but finding the westward view still uninspired, she got rid of the window screens, too. A clear view at last!

The bathroom tile apparently failed to evoke the spirit of harmony in her, so she pried it up, and again stripped away multiple layers of floor beneath that--only to find the original floor, circa 1899, that had been cobbled together of mismatched scrap wood recovered from a burned-down chicken coop. Gaping, ragged holes had been pecked out around the fixtures. Into these unremovable eyesores, she stuffed bunches of colorful plastic flowers, creating the ambiance of bathing in a lovely tropical garden—if you kept the lights turned off, and wore shoes in the bathtub.

It was at this point that I called Better Homes and Gardens--surely their readers would be interested in her pioneering work. The editor sadly informed me that I had them mixed up with Psychotic Homes and Gardens, a brief-lived but very colorful publication, that had only published a single, imaginary issue. However, I could try Better Homes and Hillbillies. In the end, my innovative spouse succeeded in popularizing a whole new genre of genteel home decor, now referred to by local law enforcement as the Hellzapoppin School of object placement.

Luckily her eyesight was so bad that she had never even seen the mites, cat dander, and particulate fecal matter surfing on the sunbeams that now poured through her west-exposed windows. She’d have been at a mental loss for how to cope with such a confluence of tiny, unbeautiul things. She couldn’t just pick up a general level of filth and throw it in the garage. She’d have had to burn the house down--which in retrospect seems another opportunity lost.

I sensed that something fundamental had shifted in our life together when I discovered that my bed was missing. Don't ask me why, but she’d muscled it out the bedroom window and then dragged it out to the alley, where she'd left it. Where had it gone? I asked. It's not in the alley anymore. She explained that a passing troupe of gypsies had taken it, damn glad to get it too. The floor was better for my back anyway, she said, and I'd better get used to it. That was that. I didn’t even say anything because to tell you the truth, life with Mommy had become so much fun that I'd given up trying to make sense of anything she did.

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Viktor Mistakes a Scouring Pad for an Item of Feminine Hygene

1969: Cabana Havana

by the Man-Maid

2013-01-13 Before there was Man-Maid, there were Mamacita and Boy-Maid Viktor, un hijo de pelo y pecho (a boy of hair and bone) born onto the white sands of the Cuban playa of 1961, part of an island paradise flush with the justice of Fidel Castro's nationalization of property and long-overdue equality for all citizens. To the new owners (the Cuban people) it would always be the Havana Hilton, but the new regime changed the posh hotel's name to the Cabana Havana.  It was like having Conrad Hilton as your uncle in the early sixties.  Tio Comrade Hilton. 

At the age of eight, the boy Viktor was unofficially apprenticed by his Mamacita, who was Head of Housekeeping at the Cabana Havana. Like his mother, prepubescent Boy-Maid cared little for money and more for social justice. His mother had a good position, one earned and given--not a dream deferred by capitalist corruption. Viktor would hurry from school to be at the Hilton--er, the Cabana Havana--by lunchtime. Boy-Maid loved their 60-hour work-weeks for the honor they brought to his country and to his family, and for the knowledge he would acquire. And for love of his fellow trainees.

Mama's housekeeping trainees were all pretty quinceanos girls, selected for their tourist-appeal. Their families knew they would get fair treatment from Mamacita, who worked hard, but also played hard too. The girls in Viktor's group might have been turned into whores whether they liked it or not, Mamacita said of the dislocated Batista regime. But now they were equal and they all had Tuesdays.

Fidel Castro, the bravest and most handsome young leader of the western hemisphere, had given workers at the hotel many tokens of recognition, including a day for them to enjoy the hotel's first-class facilities. Fair Play Tuesdays, Fidel called them, days when Viktor and Mamacita and the other housekeeping trainees could spend the long afternoon as guests, amidst the splendor of the Cabana Havana--let their hair down like the rich, and have a chance to practice their German too. On Fair Play Tuesdays, Mamacita allowed her pretty trainees to wear their skimpiest bathing suits if they wanted, just like the European tourists. For one afternoon a week, they lolled by the pool, sipping soft drinks on lounges in the sun--enjoying all the former-Hilton amenities, just like guests, like rich tourists.

The other six days of the week, Comrade Mamacita was the no-nonsense boss of all maids. Every day of her month-long training block, she warned her girls--and bambino Viktor, always within ear-shot--about floor fourteen. If Concierge Maximilian Sebastiano de Casa Ora ("Pudgy" to them) ordered a trainee to the fourteenth floor--"to tidy the long rose runner, dust the crystal sconces, and freshen the air with blossoming fragrance"--smart fifteen-year-old maids should stop, think, and put in a pad, just in case.

"Go first to the break-room after el Pudgy is out of sight, and slip a woman's pad into your clean cotton panties. Preserve your treasure. Before going up, just in case." Such was the science of maidenliness mama taught to her maids.

The first time Viktor heard about the pad, the eight-year-old nodded wisely with the rest--si Mama, I do too. He heard it many times, and once he located the pads, he began demonstrating for new girls where to find a pad, quick--although the ones he produced were the steel-wool bleach-pads used to removed rust. He would hold one and wink like Mamacita---these will protect us, sisters. Just in case . . . Nobody contradicted him.

Just in case what? Viktor never quite thought to ask, and most of the housekeepers already knew more than was proper for eight-year-olds. Pudgy's gentlemen were pescaderos (fishermen) of miserable sardines, given shore leave one night in 40. The front desk routed them thru the back, and put them all on fourteen--where in the past, men had lured an empty-headed maid into their fish-stinking room, and got her passion all fired up on sweet wine and money, until she gave in to men's desire--and for the few measly pesos they would give.

When los sardineros got going, they gave no wiggle-room. Sinverguenzos. But the pad, just in case, the pad, for it sobered fishermen up fast--especially when pulled out as a last resort, and thrown directly at them. Then the fools would scream like grandmothers and run down the rose colored runners back to their sardine nets. But enough about bad fishermen and good women.

At the umpteenth repetition of Mamacita's pad directive, eight-year-old Man-Maid Viktor demonstrated per usual, extracting and holding a scouring pad high. As usual, nobody blinked. But this day Victor embellished things by slipping the steel-wool biscuit into his own clean cotton panties. The young trainees gasped and giggled. Mama's eyes popped, but she said nothing until she had Viktor alone. Then she had him quickly remove it.

His off-target knowledge of pads was clarified for him, discreetly and not unkindly by Mamacita, who loved him as could only a mother, knowing that corrosive steel-wool tucked into his panties was full of strong chemicals, chlorine and lye. These would surely chafe and sting his young boy-part, still in a seedling state--burn and damage it, possibly for life. He might even lose it.. 

It was thus and so that Viktor learned how girls are different than boys--certainly the grossest stuff he had ever heard, but Mamacita didn't mince words. Also, Mama's hombrecito learned how scouring pads are different than sanitary napkins, and never mixed them up again.

Like all experienced maids, mothers, and devotees of the Madonna, the mamacita of Viktor preached also chastity and clean cotton panties. Even as an old woman, she feared that her own kidnapped, raped body would turn up on the coroner's cart in dirty panties. Death? That was nothing to her. Guns, knives, horrifying brutality--they didn't scare her. But dirty underthings? In front of others? The archangels surely would not permit such a maid to pass into heaven. Nonetheless, a scouring pad was still a very bad idea.

(c) DoubleThink Publications

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