Title Page (first)
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Title Page (second)
BALLS

(My Story by Mr. Lucky)

as told to

Illustrated by Jim Cim

An OmniMedia Electronic Book

© Copyright 1996 by Trumpet James

Revision 1.0:  20 April 1996


Table of Contents

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Title Page (first, with the illustration “Balls”)

Title Page (second)

About This Book and Revision History

About the Author

About the Illustrator

Begin reading “Balls (My Story by Mr. Lucky)”

Detailed Chapter Index of “Balls (My Story by Mr. Lucky)”


Detailed Chapter Index of “Balls (My Story by Mr. Lucky)”

Click on the blue text to move to the indicated chapter.

1.  This is How It All Started

2.  Morning Comes At the Crack of Noon

3.  So We Called the First Meeting...

4.  So We Go Down a Few Flights...

5.  Next, In Walks a Guy With a Bunch of Hamburgers

6.  We Land at Charles de Gaulle

7.  Whose First on the Agenda?

8.  This Next Gentleman Should Be Intriguing

9.  Robin and I Met in the Arboretum

10.  The Next Morning I Don't Feel Like Working

11.  Robin Meets Me For Dinner

12.  Debra Walks Into the Office

13.  What Do I Do Today For Excitement?

14.  Sir, We Have a Crisis On Our Hands

15.  I Need a Reality Check

16.  We Were Chatting Over Lunch

17.  I Wanted To Go To the Beach...

18.  Debra Shook Me Out of My Trance

19.  The Teleporter Man Was Next

20.  Yes, I Watched This Scene of Black Terror

21.  We Decided to Cruise the Galaxy a Little

22.  I Had to Get Back to My Office Suite

23.  That Afternoon the Teleporter Man Appears...

24.  We Need a New God

25.  I've Seen Enough

26.  It Was a Few Days Later


About the Author

Do you recall viewing Shirley MacLaine’s “Out on a Limb” mini-series a few years back?  Remember Shirley’s astonishment as her vehicle began driving itself, careening along mountain roads inches from disaster as her guide assured her it would drive itself?  Presumable it knew the way.

Well, who does know the way?  Perhaps a reclusive man who lived on an island who now lives on a mountain top.  The man who is Trumpet James has written many books.  He now prefers to remain anonymous so you and he can fantasize his reality.  Some hints or, if you would prefer, clues.  Trumpet James has made good by delivering reading extravaganzas to you.  He has even launched a new age of thought.  The books of Trumpet James, thought of as mind-adventures, made publishing history expanding brain capacity worldwide to brazen new horizons.

As we move toward the Orwellian world, wouldn’t you like to know what’s on the mind of Trumpet James these days?  Let this mysterious, secretive writer take you another step, deeper into his alias, Trumpet James, to streeeeetch your mind and senses to phenomenal new dimensions.  Let the doors open!

Ten years in it’s creation, the Trumpet James alias is now available to I-bahn travelers throughout the world.  Look for more electronic books in the near future!

Now, only from Trumpet James...come, look into the mind that rocked the publishing world just a decade ago...  “Come, be a guest...visit my mind.  Come see what’s here for you.”

TrumpetJim@aol.com


About the Illustrator

Jim Cim is a 44 year old artist/composer who is currently working as a house husband raising a Down Syndrome child with his wife of 24 years.  His full name is James Ciminera, but has always used Jim Cim as his artist signature.  He grew up on Long Island, New York, and has long been a fan of the “Dada” art movement, “Everything is art...........Nothing is art.”  The main influences on his art and music have been:  Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, James Joyce, Captain Beefheart and John Lennon.

More information about Jim Cim and his work (CaKim Design) can be found at his Web pages:

http://www.infobahnos.com/~jimcim/

E-mail address:  jimcim@infobahnos.com

Illustrations in this electronic book by Jim Cim:


Cover Illustration “Balls”


Trumpet James' Logo


About the This Electronic Book
About This Book and Revision History

About This Book

Mr. Lucky, a loser who’s down on his luck, decides to take a chance in Las Vegas.  Seduced by the glamour of the slot machines in the casinos, he gives in to temptation—the slots beckon him and he can’t resist.  He slips a silver dollar into the slot and…his life is forever changed!

Mr. Cigar Man, a casino owner cynical about Mr. Lucky’s talent, invites him to try his luck once more.  While all look on in awe, Mr. Cigar Man eventually hires Mr. Lucky, who is currently unemployed, to work for the Chamber of Commerce of Las Vegas as a Special Powers Vice President.  He will travel the world looking for people with special powers who can make the world a safer, more fun place for all.  Mr. Lucky is presented an American Express Gold Card, access to all the corporate jets, and a beautiful assistant, named Debra, who caters to his every need.

Once Mr. Lucky adjusts to his newfound life of leisure—able to go anywhere he desires at a moment’s notice, to do anything he desires—he calls Robin, an old friend, and tells her about his good fortune.  He insists she quit her new job as a legal secretary and become his partner.  What they do with all the money is the best part of the story.

Revision History

Version	Date	Comment
1.0	20 Apr 96	First electronic version


1.  This is How It All Started

This is how it all started.  I was driving through the desert from Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I had spent forty days and forty nights there, house-sitting for a friend.  I was coming home.

Driving west on I-40, I realized I could veer a little north and that evening I would be in Las Vegas.  I’m not a gambler.  The attraction for me was the championship fight for the heavyweight title of the world.  It was happening tonight at the Mirage.  Two fighters were battling for a prize—$76 million to be exact.  Maybe some of it would rub off on me.  Even the loser would walk away with a pile of cash, if he could walk.

I drove into town in my ‘72 Eldorado.  Like me, it had seen better days.  I felt like the loser I was…beat up, shopworn by the hundreds of thousands of miles of life.  I had nothing and I knew what it felt like to lose that.  Maybe I had graduated from Aimless Tech;  I musta used up all my bad luck by now.

The city was lit up like the sun rose and never set—if I had any money I would have bought stock in the power company.

Like everything I had done in life I was too late;  the fight was already over, a knockout in the seventh round.  King, the challenger, slammed Baal flat on his back.  After the count, Baal walked out of the ring grinning, collecting his check for $42 million.  I was in the wrong business.

I drove by the place where all the action was.  Throngs were still milling as if waiting for the next round.  I looked around for some stars;  they were already limoed away to the next party.  I decided to find a room and rest for my drive tomorrow.

I found a cheap room at the Aladdin and I wondered what my three wishes would be.  I hit the pillow like a brick and fell into dreamland.  A few hours later, the phone rang.  A woman’s voice asked where Haissam was?  I was groggy…so I told her I haven’t seen him in ages, but I’d like to.  I invited her up but she hung up.  She said the slots were hot.  I had been thinking about blowing fifty dollars.  I had my life savings with me, $800 in hundred-dollar bills.  Fifty dollars less wouldn’t make any difference.

I stuffed my sagging body into a pair of torn jeans, found a clean shirt and made my way to the casino.

The place was lively, anything you wanted here was available if you had the ante.  I cashed in one of my hundreds for fifty silver dollars and a fifty dollar bill, and began hunting for my one-arm bandit.  I walked up and down the rows of chattering machines, waiting for one to talk to me…

Well, I heard one say, “Play me.”  I laughed it off.  And then another one shouted, “Play me!”  This one was more serious than the first;  its lights were flashing at me like neon at a burlesque show.

“Okay, you’re serious,” I talked back to it, “I’ll play you.”

So I slipped in a shiny silver dollar, listening to it clink down the slot.  Then I yanked the arm and watched silently as those wheels began to spin.

The first one stopped on the bar;  the second one stopped on the bar…and the third one stopped on the bar!  And then all hell broke loose—there was this metallic crash and silver dollars started pouring out of the machine like a river of solder.  I was dumfounded…and they kept pouring out, and pouring!  And then the machine lit up like the fourth of July!  And bells and whistles started screaming and wailing like the invasion was here—I felt like I was under attack at Carnival.

“What the hell is happening?”  I whispered to myself.

All of a sudden I was surrounded by important looking people.  I wanted to hide—I’m shy around strangers;  I don’t like attention, and with all this money pouring out of the machine, I thought a territorial war was going to break out.

Then I was blinded by this light in my eyes, and somebody stuck a microphone in my face shouting, “How does it feel to be a hundred thousand dollar winner?”

I looked around behind me to see who he was talking to.  Nobody was there!?

And then I saw it, flashing at me…$100,000 Lucky Lady Jackpot…$100,000 Lucky Lady Jackpot.

“How does it feel to be a hundred thousand dollar winner?”  the voice asked again, this time very excited.

“Are you talking to m,me, sir?”  I shuddered.

“Yes I am.  What’s your name?”

“Ah…I’m…I’m,” I couldn’t think of my name!

“You’re lucky tonight, whoever you are,” and he turned away looking into the camera smiling, “This is Mr. Lucky, folks.  He just won the $100,000 Lucky Lady Jackpot.”

And then he turned to me and said, “How does it feel to be the big winner?”

“Feel?…Winner?”  I was stunned.

“How long have you been playing this slot, Mr. Lucky?”  he wanted to know.

I smelled this wonderful fragrance…and there was this beautiful, blond woman standing next to me gazing into my eyes, with her arm in my arm.

I tried to answer, “I just started playing it…it called me over.”

He interrupted me, “How many silver dollars did you invest for your big win, Mr. Lucky?”

“One…I just put in one.”

He turned to the camera saying, “And it all happened at the Aladdin—one silver dollar turned into one-hundred thousand silver dollars.  Thank you, Mr. Lucky.”

And then this well-dressed gentleman walked over to me with a check the size of a blackboard.  And it has my name on it.  And the amount payable to me is $100,000 and no cents!

I must be dreaming.  No, the blond pinches me on the butt telling me this is for real.  So I take this check and I nod slightly because I cain’t say anything, and I’m wonderin’ how I’m going to mail this check to the bank—can I fold it, will it still be good?

So the blond is whispering in my ear and some guy is slipping his card in my pocket;  he tells me he sells cars and he’ll give me the best deal on a new Mercedes.  I told him I have a car and please take your hand out of my pocket!

He says, “No offense, buddy,” and walks off as if I offended him.  The blond is tugging at me, whispering to me to come up to her suite;  she wants to give me a massage.  I asked her if we went to high school together.  She didn’t think so.  I told her I’m shy with strangers and maybe she could call me sometime.  She says, “No offense, buddy,” and walks off as if I offended her.

By now there’s this crowd around me, all shapes and sizes.  I’m the center of attention standing there with this blackboard check telling everybody I’ve got a hundred grand in my hand.  Do I feel vulnerable?  Nah;  I’m scared down to my little toe…I’m not gettin’ out of this town alive!

Three more well-dressed gents show up, and these guys look a little rough around the edges.  They want to know if I need an escort.  I wonder where I’m going.  We walk off the casino floor to the elevator.  We’re going to the Presidential Suite on the VIP floor, the floor you can’t stop on unless you have a key.  These guys have a key.

“Am I going to meet Elvis?”  I chuckled.

Nobody’s laughing.

These guys have me flanked and one’s leading me.  The door opens to the suite and I begin to feel like Mr. Unlucky.  There’s a party happening here—pretty strangers and well-dressed gentlemen.  Everyone wants to be my friend.  They hand me drinks;  I don’t drink.  Food is everywhere…I’m not hungry.  I want to go home to California.

They ask me questions…I don’t feel like talking.  Suddenly I’m a celebrity holding this blackboard check in my arms.  Everybody’s looking at me.

I thank everybody for the hospitality but I have to be going.  They say, “Oh, don’t go.  Why don’t you try your luck again?”

I say, “Oh, no, this is just fine.  I only was planning to lose fifty dollars, so that’s all I had to spend on gambling.  I don’t gamble anyhow.  I came here to see the fight, but I was late for that so I…”

“Oh, come on.  Try your luck again, Mr. Lucky.  You’ve got one hundred thousand dollars of our money now.  You can blow a few thousand.”

“A few thousand?  No, I would never do that.  I set my limit for fifty dollars;  that’s what my daddy taught me and he lived a good life and that’s all I want to do…live a good, clean, long life.”

I got the feeling these people were laughing at me.  So I made my way to the door and there was this big well-dressed gentleman standin’ there blockin’ the door.  He says in this raspy, deep voice, “Come on, Mr. Lucky.  Let’s go try your luck again,” and I say, “Yep, okay.  But only on one condition.”  I figured I could deal with these people if they all agreed with me.

“What’s the condition?”  someone roared in not very friendly tones.

“The condition is…when I lose one thousand dollars, you’ll let me go home.”

“Ten percent…you lose ten thousand and you go.  That’s fair, to share, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Lucky?”

I look around the room and everyone’s head is nodding up and down and so is mine.

We walk back down to the gamblin’ floor;  I’m under escort.  We walk past rows of slots and now they’re all talkin’ to me…”play me;  play me, Mr. Lucky;  I’m the one, play me!”

I’m thinkin’, “If I win another jackpot, I’m dead.  These machines are not my friend.”

I keep lookin’ for my friend…and there it is saying, “Don’t play me.  I’m the one not to play.  Don’t play me;  I’m a loser just like you.”  This one’s lights are flashing black and I almost see the Devil’s face laughing at me.  I had to play it.

My entourage sidled up next to me and Black Bart.  This one wants two silver dollars per pull.  What the hell, I had a hundred thousand of those little suckers.  I was bold, in one slot went a silver one;  and then another into the other.  I closed my eyes and yanked the arm.  The buzz and jingle of the wheels started.  I heard a click, thud.

The first one stopped on the bar;  the second one stopped on the bar…and the third one stopped on the bar!  I’m now in big trouble!

Here we go again—the metallic avalanche begins;  silver dollars pouring out the machine like nuns running from hell…and pouring and pouring.  Fireworks are shooting out of the machine;  sirens, flashing lights…they heard this ruckus on the tenth floor.  I wanted to dig a hole and bury myself.  Maybe they’ll do it for me.

Here’s the TV guy again.  Here comes the blond with two of her friends.  Here comes the crowd again, this time swelling to ten times larger.

“Mr. Lucky wins again!”  he’s screaming in my ears.  The girls are hysterical, tugging at me.

Here comes the guy with the blackboard check again.  And over there are my escorts;  they are not smiling.

“How many silver dollars did it take this time, Mr. Lucky?”

“Well, ah…this time, ah…I’ve been playing this machine for…months, months.  Yes, I’ve probably put in around twelve, thirteen thousand.”

My escorts are not smiling about this.

“Here’s your check, Mr. Lucky.  This time it’s a little larger.”

Larger, I gulp.

“This is the Silver Load Jackpot, Mr. Lucky.  This time you take home two-hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

Take home, I wish, I say to myself.

“That’s Mr. Lucky, folks.  The Aladdin’s wishes have been lucky for him.  He’s won $350,000 in two hours.  And you can too…come on down to the Aladdin,” and the TV lights went off and I was being escorted out of the crowd back to the Presidential Suite.

The door was opened to the suite and the party was over.  Nobody was smilin’—everything got real serious, real quick.  It was me and my escorts face to face with a Mr. Tell-Me-What’s-Going-On-Now type of person.

“Whatta ya doin’, Mr. Lucky?”

This man was definitely impressed with my style.

“Um…sir, I respect your position here and I hope you will accept my apologies for winning this money, but I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary.  I was just gambling, just like you want everybody to do.  Well, except for maybe one thing out of the ordinary.”

“And what’s that!”

“Well, I won.”

He’s not laughing, “Do you have any idea what the odds are of winning two consecutive jackpots with your extravagant investment of three silver dollars?”

“No, sir.  I have no idea.”

“Twenty-five billion to one.  There aren’t enough people in the world to even play that bet.  Whatta ya doin’, Mr. Lucky?”

How do I get out of this alive?  Just tell the truth.  These are sensible, understanding people.  They’ll appreciate your honesty.

“Sir, you might find this hard to believe, but your machines talk to me.”

“You’re right, Mr. Lucky, I find that very hard to believe.  Whatta ya doin’, Mr. Lucky?”

I was wrong.  I don’t think they’re going to understand.  Think of something else…

“I can prove it to you, sir!”  Why did I say that?

“You’re gonna stick to that story, kid, that our machines talk to you?  Why in hell would they want to talk to you?”

Well, maybe they were tired of taking in and wanted to pay out.  But why to me?

“I don’t know, sir.  But they did…and I think I can prove it to you.  Just set up a test for me.”

“Okay, kid,” the Cigar Man said, “We’ll set up a test right now.  Follow me.”

So everybody files out of the suite and we pile into this streeeetch limousine.  It’s a block long complete with anything you could think of.  There’s ten of us in there, including hot and cold running girls.  I haven’t bathed in a few hours and I’m sweating now.  We’re just going for a little ride, right?  These guys don’t just video tape you and then take you out to the desert and feed you to the rattlesnakes…do they?

We’re driving down the strip.  It’s four in the morning but the action looks like its Monday morning in New York;  people are everywhere.

The Cigar Man says, “Okay, kid, prove it to me.”

What is he talking about?  What do I do?

And then I start to listen…and I hear them, machines talking to me, “Play me, Mr. Lucky…stop here, I’ll pay out big…no, play me, I’m the biggest jackpot in town.  Little old ladies have filled me to bursting.  Stop here!”

This is turning into a nightmare for me.  I want to be back where I was a few hours ago, Mr. Nobody instead of Mr. Lucky.

“Kid,” Mr. Cigar Man says, “If you don’t prove it to me, we’ll have to prove somethin’ to you…namely, you don’t cheat Vegas!”

Now I know I’m really in trouble.

“Ah…yes, sir.  Just drive around a little more,” and all these machines are now screaming at me.  I’m startin’ to home in on one that sounds like water pouring over Niagara Falls;  it’s roaring at me, getting louder and louder as we pass by the Frontier Hotel.  Then it starts to get a little softer.

“Turn around,” I say, a little braver.  “Go back to the Frontier.”

The land yacht does a U turn in the middle of the strip, cars parting for us like the Red Sea.

I must be with some powerful people, I hear myself think.

We pull up and folks are rushing to the car, almost genuflecting, opening doors shouting, “Good morning, sir,” to all the sirs in the car.  My escorts escort me through the crowds.  Everybody thinks it’s Sinatra wantin’ to play some craps;  gettin’ ready for a big show, but shucks, its only Mr. Lucky.

The slot machine is now flashing at me.  I must be seeing into the future;  this must be a future slot.  I walk up to it;  it’s a double-dollar machine.  I stand there staring at it—it feels like it’s part of me, like I know its insides;  I’ve become it.  I hear another voice;  it’s coming from the crap table…roll me, I’ll roll boxcars, Mr. Lucky.  The crap table is joining in the banter;  it knows my name.  I ignore it;  I don’t know how to play craps.

I feel like I’m on stage, the curtain just ready to rise…all eyes are on me.  I pull out two silver dollars and stick them down the throat of this machine.  I can hear it gulp.

I grab its arm and yank it with respect.  In a few seconds I’ll be very rich or very dead.

Click, click…and click.  Three bars!

I let out a whoop and all the sound effects join in.  We could have been at a Pink Floyd concert the lightshow was so spectacular.  Everybody’s screaming along with the machine.  Silver is pouring out like the flood…I’m alive, at least for a few more hours.

Here comes the Frontier’s video team;  they play the same script, except with one modification, “Here’s your check, Mr. Lucky.  Where are you going to spend half-a-million dollars!”

Half a million dollars…I just won the lottery.

Mr. Cigar Man is chompin’ on it.  I think he’s grinnin’, probably because it’s not his casino.  Except here comes some more well-dressed gentlemen…it’s their casino.  Am I in double-trouble?

“Let’s go talk,” somebody says, and off we go to another suite.  This time its the Emperor’s Suite…It’s half the floor of the penthouse!

I’m introduced to the Chamber of Commerce of Las Vegas;  these guys are dripping with jewels.  Beautiful women are hanging on their arms;  I’m holding $850,000 in checks the size of beds in mine.

The owner of the Frontier asks, “What’s the story?”

Mr. Cigar Man informs him of my winnings in his casino— “The kid says the machines talk to him.  We asked him to prove it to us…he just did.”

“He had to prove it in my casino?”

“We just drove down the street;  he picked your house, had us turn around and drive back.  The kid has a special talent…he ain’t cheatin’, he couldn’t be.  Nobody could know which machine was gonna pay out, not even us.”

“How much has he won?”

He’s chompin’ on his cigar, “Eight-hundred fifty thousand…on three pulls.”

Everybody gives a great big sigh and nobody says anything.  It looks like they’re all thinkin’ real hard.

“Can we keep him out of Vegas?”  somebody asks.

“He’s broken no laws,” somebody else says, “he’s just been gamblin’ and winnin’.”

“How long have you had this…this power, kid?”

“Sir, it just started this morning.”

“How long is it gonna last, kid?”

“Well, I could go try a few more slots…”

Everybody screams, “No, kid.  That’s okay!  Here, have a drink;  relax, pick out a girl.  Rest your weary bones…”

I think the power is in my hands.  I ask for a diet Koala.  They’ve never heard of one.  I settle for grapefruit juice.  I don’t drink and don’t go with the girls that do.

A few minutes later more magnates of the city arrive.  They’re shepherded into the conference room.  I’m sipping my grapefruit through a straw playing solitaire, a very safe game.  The girls are wantin’ me for some private time.  I’m a shy boy, and who would watch my money while I was occupied?

An hour passes and they call me in.

“Sit, Mr. Lucky.”

I sit.

“We are very impressed with your special powers,” Mr. Cigar Man says.  “And bein’ that we are upstandin’ men of this here community, and the world for that matter, we want to see you develop those powers…expand them, to see what they could bring us…er, the world.

“On straight terms, Mr. Lucky, we want to employ you.  We want you to be our special powers Vice President.  We want you to travel all over the world lookin’ for people like you so we can put them out of our…so we can put them to work to help build a…a bright future for the planet.  You know, to use those powers so people are better off, have more leisure time, so they can have more time to gamble.  How does that sound, Mr. Lucky?”

“Travel all over the world…that’ll take some money, sir.”

“Don’t worry about money, Mr. Lucky.  Here’s your gold American Express card, embossed with Mr. Lucky.  And if they don’t take American Express, here’s your gold Visa and Mastercard.  And don’t worry about airlines schedules—you’ll have our corporate jets at your disposal.  Anywhere you want to go, anytime, just go.”

As I remember it, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life stepped up and handed me the credit cards.  Yep, in the name of Mr. Lucky.

“This is Debra,” Mr. Cigar Man says.  “She’s your private assistant.  She’ll travel with you at all times, be with you at all times, seeing that your wishes are carried out…all of them.  There’s just one condition, Mr. Lucky.”

I knew it was coming…

“The condition is, since you are now employed by The Association of Worldwide Casino Owners, you cannot gamble in any casinos or race tracks, bet on any sporting events, not even bingo, nor can you advise anyone to bet on your behalf.”

That’s it?  That’s all I have to do?

I was excited, “I’m an employee now, I have a job?”

“Yes, you can rekindle all of your self-esteem, Mr. Lucky.  You now have a career!”

I haven’t worked since I got laid off at the plant;  I was a drill press operator, drillin’ holes all day long.

I took a look at the blackboard checks that represented all my money…there it was, tons of power sittin’ there starin’ at me.  Boy, my girl would be real proud of me, if I had one.

“Mr. Lucky, from now on you’ll live in luxury hotels owned by the Association.  You’ll have a valet who will dress you for any occasion;  maids and butlers to cater to your every need.”

“You guys are gettin’ off pretty cheap,” I joked.

They didn’t think it was a joke, “Okay, you’re right.  All that stuff is just expense money, perks.  You’re right, you’ll need a salary.”

Mr. Cigar Man looks around at the other faces starin’ at him.  He says, “Mr. Lucky, we’ve voted to pay you half-a-million a week.”

“Half-a-million a week!  “ I exclaim.

“Alright…a million a week and not a penny more!”  He was gruff.

“A million a week!”  I shrieked.

“Two million…that’s it.  Done, it’s a done deal,” and all these gents leap out of their seats applauding, slapping me on the back, grinning.  Are these all my friends or what?

Debra is handing me a frosted glass of frothing grapefruit juice, and I see a tailor out of the corner of my eye with a measuring tape dangling from his arm.  It’s five in the morning and it’s been a hard day’s night.  I’m exhausted, and I hear these machines calling, “Play me…play me!”


2.  Morning Comes At the Crack of Noon

Morning comes at the crack of noon.  Debra is whispering in my ear, “Your coffee, sir.  Would you care for a massage?”

My eyes blink open and I’m laying on my back with my arms crossed over my chest like I’m dead.  Except I’m looking out over the world from this magnificent high-rise suite appointed with everything from anywhere exotic.  It wasn’t a dream…I really am Mr. Lucky.

“What would you care to do today, sir?”

That was a good question since I didn’t have to ever again do anything in my life I didn’t want to do.

“Let’s fly to Paris for lunch, Debra.  Can you arrange that?”  I’m still not sure how real this is.

“We can schedule dinner in Paris this evening, sir.  The Concorde would land in time…the limo could have us at Maxim’s by 9:30.”

“Ah…really.  Could we really do that, Debra?”

“Yes, sir.  Anything is possible.  All you have to do is think it up.”

“My, oh my.  This is power, isn’t it?”

“Have you ever had power, sir?”

“Power steering in my car, not in my life, Debra.  I think I’ll start the day in the hot tub, get the juices flowing.  Can I breakfast in the hot tub?”

“You can do anything you desire, sir.”

“Anything I desire.  What is it I desire?  I think I would like to hire someone to exercise for me.”

“Even that’s possible, sir.  The exercise therapists hook electrodes up to your muscles.  Electrical impulses activate contraction and relaxation;  much more efficient than a workout.”

“But that takes all the fun out of it, doesn’t it?  Let’s arrange a tennis game for me.  Somebody I can beat…”

“No problem, sir.”

“Okay, I’ll play tennis after breakfast.  And then we’ll lunch on the Concorde and dine in Paris.  Sound good?”

“I’ll arrange it, sir.”

That’s it, she’ll arrange it.  It’s done!  What do I do tomorrow?  “Ah, Debra…I’m not used to this.  I need some ideas—what is there to do in this world?  I mean, if you don’t have to work, what do you do!”

“You live a life of leisure, sir.”

“I just play, like a little kid?”

“That’s it, seeking pleasure and comfort in every moment.”

“That’s it?  What about guilt?  How do I deal with guilt?  Yesterday I was this poor, dumb slob with nothing going for me.  Today I have everything going for me but I’m still a dumb slob.  How do I handle the guilt for all the other poor, dumb slobs?”

“They don’t exist in your world, sir.  You live in a whole different universe.”

“They don’t exist in my world…but they’ve financed my world.  Aren’t I being hypocritical?”

“Only if you think you are.”

“So just don’t think about it, is that it, Debra?  Who cares about all the other suckers who live in cardboard shacks, I live in a suite.”

“Why do you think they call you Mr. Lucky?”

“But I just have this special power.  How come I was able to cash it in?”

“Because your power is more powerful than those in power.  That’s why they put you out of the power business, so to speak.”

“Ah, ha.  Of course, I’m a threat.”

“You knew that, didn’t you?  You’re not as dumb as you pretend to be.  Who are you really, Mr. Lucky?”

“Debra, I think I’ll exercise in the hot tub.  There’s a friend of mine I’d like to talk with.  Would you ring her up?  Could you also carry me to the bath?  Just kidding!”

Oh, that bubbling water felt so good, the heat soaking into my muscles, relaxing the tension from yesterday.  The view was splendid…looking out over Las Vegas, then into the desert winds.  Here it was, an improbable site for an oasis;  a watering hole that extracted wealth from millions and gave it to a few.  And I was one of the few.

“Miss Robin is on the phone, sir.”

“Robin, how have you been?”  I asked her.

“Great, I found a new job.  I’m a legal secretary.”

“Hey, that sounds good.  I got a new job, too.”

“What are you doing?”

“Well, I…I’m a special power locator.  Do you have any special powers you haven’t told me about?”

“I make a mean quiche.  Is that what you mean?”

“No…like supernatural powers.  Can you see into the future or talk to the dead?  You know, weird stuff kind of powers?”

“And you’re getting paid to do this?”

“Yeah.”

“Really, you’re serious.  How much?”

“Well…I make two million a week, plus expenses.”

The phone line was silent…then filled with her laughter, “Are you drinking this early in the morning?”

“I don’t drink, Robin.”

“You’re serious?”

“I’m serious.”

More silence…then she tried, “Two million what a week…yen?”

“No…dollars.”

“Listen, I’ve known you too long to believe this.  You have no skills, no talent, you couldn’t sell alcohol to the Indians, or wouldn’t.  You’re not good in sports;  you can’t act.  You’re not that good looking so you can’t sell your face or your body.  Your mind is warped and your sense of humor is lacking.  Did an Uncle die and leave you a fortune?  And if he did, let’s get married.”

I laughed, “Why get married…I can have anything I want.  I can even hire someone to argue with.”

She started giggling.

“So don’t believe me, Robin;  you never did anyhow.  But listen closely…read my lips;  I’m sending a limousine to pick you up.  You’re flying to Vegas in my private jet.  I need some company.”

More silence…”I can’t come to Vegas.  I have to work.  I realize that’s a dirty word in your vocabulary, but some of us Hoi Polloi have to do it.”

“Nope, not you…never again.  From now on, you’re my partner.”

“Your partner in what…did you rob a bank or something?”

“Nope, and everything I’ve told you is the truth.  If you don’t believe me, just wait for the limo.  Some of us were born with a silver spoon.  See you soon.”

“How poetic…sure, a limo.  Sure, when did you say?”

“Be ready in half an hour.  Don’t bother packing;  I’ll buy you a new wardrobe.  I need somebody to help me manage my estate and you’ve been elected.  Anybody who could have put up with me for all these years deserves to be my most trusted confidant.”

“Have you been doing drugs?”

“I don’t do drugs, Robin…I do life.  I’ll see you in a few hours.”

“…Okay.”

I hung up and rustled around in the hot tub.  Breakfast arrived and I snipped away at the Russian caviar, washing it down with non-alcoholic Dom Perignon.  Debra told me what I was eating and drinking so I could enjoy it more—it was the most expensive in the world, naturally.

It was time for tennis.  My little tennis outfit was laid out for me.  I walked out into the sunlight, whacked around a few balls.  Debra hired someone to chase my balls—watching them exercise exhausted me.  Time for a bit of refreshment…this is life in the slow lane.

I noticed people staring at me…it’s an eerie feeling.  You can feel them studying you, and when you look up they turn away as if you weren’t there.  Then you go back to what you were doing…and you can feel them staring again.  I was wondering if my fly was unzipped.

It was time for lunch.  Robin should be landing now in the Citation, or is it the Lear?

“Where would you like to lunch, sir?”

“Surprise me, Debra.”

The shower felt good.  I was looking around for a cigar to puff—this is the good life.

So we limoed over to the Mikado.  This restaurant looked out over the country club.  Beauty and opulence all around me.  It was good to be alive.  I looked up from my spinach omelet and in walks Robin with her escort.  Her mouth is agape;  her eyes bigger than tomatoes.

I’m cool, “Hey, Robin.  You made it.  Welcome to my restaurant…Debra is buying it for me.”

Robin hugs me and doesn’t know what to say.  Then she does, “It’s beautiful, but wouldn’t it be enough just to buy lunch?”

I think about that.  And then I wonder how we’re buying it.  After all, I only make two million a week.

I whisper over to Debra, “How are we buying this?”

She whispers back, “Citibank called early this morning.  You have a one hundred million credit line with them.”

“Oh,” I said.

So I turn to Robin and say, “Do you want to marry me?”

She says, “When?”

I say, “Right now.”

She says, “Sure, why not?”

I say, “Yeah, why not.”

I look over at Debra and she’s already punching the handheld setting it up.

So I ask Robin, “What do we do now that we’re married?”

“Umm…get a job, make a career, have a family;  look forward to two weeks’ vacation every year, retire, and then we die.”

“There must be another way;  can we avoid death?”  I pondered.

“I don’t think so, unless you’re Jesus Christ.”

I shook my head, “I’m not, Robin.”

“Me neither.”

We’re silent.

I asked her, “What do you want to eat, Robin?”

“I’m not hungry.  Let’s go for a walk.”

So the entourage follows us while we walk along the golf course dodging balls.

She says, “What happened?”

I tell her the story.  She doesn’t believe it.  I take her over to the bank in my limo.  I show her my bank balance—it’s now $2,865,000.00 and counting.  There’s some numbers on the bottom of the statement that say I have a $100 million credit line.

She says, “Lots of zeros…I understand the two point eight six million, but I don’t understand the hundred million credit line.”

I ask Debra about it.  She says my salary of two million a week is $96 million a year.

I said, “Oh,” and then I think about it— “It sounds like I’m already four million dollars in debt?”

Debra cautions, “We can’t invest all of your credit line.  We have to watch it.”

Man, I ruminate, no matter how much money you have, you end up owing somebody…

“Say, Debra,” I asked politely, “can Robin and I be alone for awhile?”

We walked off together ahead of the entourage.  I get the feeling they can hear everything we say.

“Robin, we need to talk.”

“About what, Mr. Lucky?”

“About this, my new life.”

“So talk.”

“Well…what should I do with it?”

She thinks for a few minutes, then says, “Play with toys, I suppose.”

“I can have everything I want, but what do I want?”

“The same thing everyone wants—love, joy, a family, sex, affection, money, respect, health, power, laugher…”

I think for a few minutes while we’re walking, “I have more money than I’ll ever need.  I think I love you and maybe you could love me some day, whatever love is.  I’d love to have a son with you, and a daughter, too.  I’d love to see the world in all of its beauty, but how do I justify my wealth when there are others who have nothing…who are even homeless?”

She thinks for awhile— “You’ll just have to give back.”

“How do I do that, Robin?”

“Set up a foundation of some sort, a foundation that gives life back.”

I wink at her, “Let’s go over and make love in those trees.”

I kiss her eyes and she sucks on my toes.

We walk back toward Debra and I ask her, “Debra, we want to set up a foundation that gives back life to people.  How do we do this?”

Debra knew what to do— “There are all kinds of foundations you can set up.  What do you want it to do, Mr. Lucky?”

“We want it to bring joy, laughter, and love to the world…to free the captives.  Can you set it up, Debra?”

“No problem, Mr. Lucky.  We can do it right now.”

“Great, let’s do it!”

And we walk back to the suite.  This is nice being omniscient.


3.  So We Called the First Meeting...

So we called the first meeting of the Mr. Lucky Foundation.  Me and Robin are the heads of it and Debra is the executive in charge of operations.  She sets up all the attorneys and accountants and we’re meeting with their representatives.  They say there are all sorts of tax incentives for foundations.

“What do you want this foundation to do, Mr. Lucky?”

“We want it to give back life.”

“You’ll need to define it a little tighter than that.”

“Okay, we want to give money to people who are inventors who want to invent things to make life more fun.  We want to give money to people who care about the environment and want to make it greener and cleaner.  We want to create wealth and power for people so they know they don’t have to war for it.  We don’t want any more sons or daughters going off to war.  We want criminals to know they don’t have to commit crimes because they can have everything they want.  We want a heaven on earth.  Do I have enough money to do that?”

An accountant says, “Even you, Mr. Lucky, are limited in your assets.  Over the twenty year term of your employment you will earn two billion, eighty million dollars.  The Federal Deficit this year is three trillion dollars.”

“How much is that?”

He says, matter-of-fact, “If we multiplied your earnings one thousand, five hundred times you would earn a little over three trillion dollars.  A trillion dollars is a stack of one thousand dollar bills, sixty miles high.”

My head is staggering with the calculations— “Our government is out of control,” I mumbled.

My advisor advises, “…and they are hard-pressed to bring about what you want to bring about through gifts.”

“Then we’ll have to do it differently,” I groped for the glimmer of an answer.

“How?”  Robin says.

How now, brown cow, I think.

“Put the word out that we have money to invest in projects that perpetuate life, not that we’re giving it away.  I want responsible people to know we have funds to invest, but we aren’t throwing money away either.”

“It can’t be a foundation in the true sense of the word then.”

“What can it be?”

Everyone thinks.

“It can be a corporate entity, like a holding company that holds assets in many operations.”

“Yeah, we can call it Mr. Lucky’s Holding.”

“Perhaps there’s another name,” Robin suggests.

Everyone thinks some more.

I mumbled, “How about LifeDream?”

Everyone looks at each other.  Nobody’s heard the name.  It’s okay.

“Okay, we’re in business.  Set it up.  Get the word out.  Done.”

I sounded like a mensch—This is great.  I get to talk to all the dreamers;  people who don’t know things can’t be done.

“Sir,” Debra says, “The word is already out.  There are two hundred people who want to see you.”

“Let’s go see them, Debra.”


4.  So We Go Down a Few Flights...

So we go down a few flights and enter the conference hall of LifeDream.

The first guy that walks in hands me a box.

I ask, “What is it?”

He says it’s purified air.

I said, “How do I know it’s pure?”

He says, “Smell it.”

It smells good.

He says he only needs ten million to develop the process.  He hands me a pile of papers that mean nothing to me.  He says they’re plans for an air purification plant to be located at the South Pole.  They’ll suck all the air down to Antarctica, purify it, and send it back through this gigantic blower.

“They’ll suck all the air down to Antarctica?  Won’t that create a hurricane everywhere?”

He says he hadn’t thought of that.

I said, “Maybe we ought to stop polluting the air.  After all, it’s a limited resource.”

He nods and says he’ll be back with a solution.

I nod.

Next it’s a pretty young lady with two men dressed in lab robes.  They could have been doctors.  She says she’s invented a pill.

“What does it do,” I wonder.

“I makes you feel like you’re having sex with anyone you want to, whenever you want to.”

“Wow!  How does it do that?”  I wondered with bug eyes.

“It activates the neurologic matrix of your mind and allows all your imaginations to become a reality to your body.  It gets you off whether or not you’re on.”

“What are the side effects?”  I wanted to know.

“None…except exhaustion.”

“Have you tested this?”

“Oh, yes,” she smiles, and I notice the guys in lab coats are smiling too—big grins.

Robin says, “If you can have imaginary sex with anyone you want to, you won’t want to have sex with who you can.”

I nod.

“But it’s safe sex,” I said in rebuttal.  “What do you do with the libido of the teenagers.  I mean, they want to have sex with everyone;  it’s part of nature’s plan.  Except they can’t.  With this pill they can get off on imagination.  And maybe that will satisfy their desire until they decide what quality sex is verses quantity sex.”

“Maybe we could legislate its use…only available to those under thirty,” Robin counters.

“The over-thirty-year-old’s would kill us.”

“We could make an instructional video.”

“That would be fun.  Does this thing really work?”

“Try it.”

Debra interrupts, “Sir, we should test it before you ingest it.”

“You’re right.  Give me the formula and some pills.  I want our scientists to break this down and give me a go ahead on it.”

“No way,” one of the lab guys says.

“What do you mean no way.  Do you think I need to steal your formula?”

The gal smiles at me, “We don’t trust anyone with this formula.”

“Well…then I don’t trust you.  Next,” I shouted real pompous.

They get up cursing at me.  I’m waiting for a compromise proposal ‘cause if I don’t hear one, I figure the product’s worthless.  I don’t hear one.  They leave grunting and swearing, the girl shaking her behind at me.

I look at Robin and shake my head.


5.  Next, In Walks a Guy With a Bunch of Hamburgers

Next, in walks a guy with a bunch of hamburgers.  He says to try one.  I tell him I’m not hungry.  I ask what’s special about ‘em.  He says he grew them on a tree.  I tell him he’s crazy.

“Next…”

He says, “No…wait, this is for real.”

“You’re tellin’ me you’ve bred a hamburger tree?”

“Yes.”

I look at Robin…she’s grinning.

He says, “McDonald’s tells the kids hamburgers grow on trees, so I grew one.”

“You mean, you’ve got meat dangling from branches?”

He says, “Yes, here are some photos.”

I look.  Sure enough, slabs of meat are hanging from trees.  I’m thinking, if cotton can grow on bushes, why not meat?  And then maybe people are next;  growing people on trees.

“Get atta here,” I laugh at this guy.

“No…I’m serious.”

“Sure you are.  Anybody can doctor up a photograph.”

“Taste the burger.”

“No way.  Never!”

“You’re missing out on a good thing.”

“I’m sure I am.  Look, if people don’t want to eat flesh burgers they can eat nut burgers.  And there are plenty of vegiburgers.  And I realize that if we used the grain we feed the cows to feed the world, nobody would be starving.  I know all of that.  But hamburgers don’t grow on trees.  Period.  Next!”

“What if he’s for real?”  Robin whispers.

“If he’s for real, we’ll hear about it soon enough.  It’s absolutely impossible, isn’t it?”

The next guy walks in with a team.  This team is into food, too.  And there is power in numbers.

“We’ve developed the prototype to the first, national franchised health food, fast-food chain.”

“Now that’s interesting,” I wowed.  “Are all the other fast-fooders serving unhealthy food?”

“That’s pretty much the case.  Here are reports from the Food and Drug Administration.  They conclude that bare minimum nutritional needs are being met by the national chains.  We desire to change that by offering food nutritionally beneficial, served fast to compete with the other choices.”

“You’ll even create drive-thru’s, yes?  Your customers can talk into a carrot instead of a box.”

“That’s the plan.  Instead of french fries you can choose breaded and baked avocados, one of the most delicious, nutritious foods you can eat.  Instead of coke you can have mocha rice drinks, naturally sweetened and low in calories.  Or fruit or vegetable smoothies and date shakes.  These are feel-good energy foods instead of hook-you-on-our-product foods.  You can even select protein powders, digestive aids, and metabolic stabilizers to even out your blood sugar fluctuations.  You won’t have high and low mood swings any more.  We need to turn our nation on to health!”

I laughed, “You’re really into this stuff!  What about depression;  have a cure for it?”

His answer surprised me, “Depression is a chemical imbalance based on the level of Serotonin produced by your pituitary gland.  Zoloft works for me.  Back to the health-food chain, here are my credentials and those of my team.  We’re ready to build the first prototype.”

“How much do you need?”

“Five hundred seventy-five thousand.”

“What’s LifeDream’s interest?”

“You can either loan the money to us or take a position in the project.”

“How much do you want to give us?”

“We’re prepared to offer you fifteen percent.”

“Nah…ten’s enough—just enough to know we’re there, but not too much to be a hang-up to you.  Go for it.”

“We’ll furnish project reports weekly.”

“Just bring it in within budget.  Go do it!  Done.”

We shook hands and my team walked them to the door, setting up meetings.  When I was growing up my buddies wouldn’t let me play Monopoly with them.  I can see how the big boys play the game—all you do is hand out money and take an interest.

“Let’s go, Robin.  We have to leave for Paris, remember?  Dinner, nightlife, all sorts of excitement awaits.  We have to catch the Concorde out of New York.  Let’s go.”

The chopper is waiting to zip us to the airport.  Debra says, “Sir, there were two hundred more people waiting to talk to you.  And tomorrow there will be four hundred.  How are we going to handle all those people?”

“We’ll have to set up a screening process.  Think about it while we’re in Paris, Debra.  Present a list of guidelines tomorrow and we’ll implement them.  I’m tired of thinking.  Let’s just relax ‘til we land in Paris.”

A few hours later the Concorde was whooshing us over the Atlantic towards France.  What a ride!


6.  We Land at Charles de Gaulle

We land at Charles de Gaulle.  The limo takes us to the Place du Châtelet and we visit its two theaters, Théâtre du Châtelet and the Théâtre de la Ville.  Corks are popping all around my diet Koalas and I’m learning French.  I can say oui, or is it wee!

We watched Les Miserables.  The performances were fantastic!  I’m moved into delirious ecstasy.  It’s amazing how artists can create such feelings for us mere mortals.

We drank non-alcoholic beer and munched a twelve-inch, French-bread sandwich at Cafe au Lait, a sidewalk cafe on the Champs Elysees.  We boarded the hovercraft to Calais…smooth sailing on rough seas, amazing!  We enjoyed the evening at La Sainte Chapelle, a chapel built in the 13th century.  The stained glass was gorgeous but no ghosts, a disappointment.

The next day we cruised the city.  You could spend your whole life here seeing the sights—the Garden des Tuileries, the Louvre, the Palace of Versailles, de Invalides, Napoleon’s tomb, Notre Dame, Malmaison, the Opera House on the Rue de Rivoli, the Eiffel Tower, and on and on.  History drips here.

And then up the hill, Montmartre, to visit the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.  This overlook is the highest point;  the city looks spectacular.  Maybe Robin and I will move here someday.  Montmartre means mountain of the martyr.  As the story goes, a saint who was beheaded tucked his head under his arm and climbed the hill where he eventually died.  Do you believe that?  Would you say he achieved that with faith, willpower, or with the power of positive thinking?  Or was it just a plumb miracle, a myth, or a falsehood?  I always have to understand everything, don’t you?

That evening we were cruising back home in the Concorde.  Debra presented the screening tools she had worked up for LifeDream.  Here they are:

In order for your project to be submitted to Mr. Lucky, it must contain the following elements:

1.  The project cannot hurt anyone, including its competitors.  Therefore, the project must create its own niche, thereby creating its own markets.  For example, instead of creating another hamburger chain, we’ve created a fast-food health food chain, something that was non-existent until we created it.  Therefore it has no competitors that can be hurt.

2.  The project must be environmentally conscious by either acting to eliminate pollution or by not creating it in the first place.  The areas of pollution we are concerned with are noise, water, air, food, and intelligence pollution.

3.  The project must perpetuate joy, contributing to both its customers, its employees, and the world at large.

4.  The project must be economically sound, while creating its own economy.

“This looks pretty good to me, Debra.  Hire some executives to implement the screening process.  When we land we’ll be meeting with the cream-of-the-crop projects.”

“Yes, sir,” she says.

I’m thinking I’m really gonna do something for the world.  Mr. Lucky is going to live in infamy.  Robin snuggles up next to me;  it’s good to be alive.  I hope its good for everyone.


7.  Whose First on the Agenda?

 “Whose first on the agenda, Debra?”

“There’s a fellow who’s developed a candy bar he’s named the Health Perfect Bar.  It’s chocolate covered and low in calories!”

“That is a winner if it doesn’t rot your teeth.  Has he defined perfect health?”

“Yes…it’s agelessness.”

“Oh.  I’ve just recently decided to sue them.”

“To sue who?”

“Youth…a class action suit.”

“What for?”

“Two reasons.  To make sure they value what they have, and to get mine back!  When I saw my first pimple, I knew life wasn’t just smooth skin all the way.  My second clue was when my parents restricted me for the rest of my life.  When I really woke up was when I looked in the mirror and saw myself wearing a Santa, I’ve been very good this year sweatshirt.”

“Life starts before that,” Debra giggled.

I wondered, “Does this candy bar also remove the painful memories of the heart, the ones that tug and pull, rip and tear;  the ones that bring on the tears—the ones that leave you hoping there is a God who will forgive you?”

“Let’s ask him.”

This youthful-looking man walks in.  “How old do you think I am?”  he asks me.

“You look around thirty-two.  How old are you?”

“I’m sixty-two.”

“You’re a liar,” I laughed at him.

“I’m not a liar.  I’ve been eating my candy bar for four years now.”

“Does it work?”

“It does on me,” so said Mr. Candybar.

“What’s it made out of, sir?”

“Wheatgrass juice, soy proteins, and other anti-aging substances.”

I started second-guessing him, “Is your testing completed?”

“That’s what I need the money for, Mr. Lucky.”

“How much, Mr. Candybar?”

“Two-hundred, fifty thousand.”

“A youth bar…that could really find a market.  LifeDream will invest one-hundred, twenty-five thousand;  that’ll give you a shove toward the finish line.  Report back to me in a month.  At that time I’ll reevaluate your portfolio.”

Mr. Candybar left the office.  I looked over at Debra, “If the world isn’t worth living in, why would anyone want to live longer?”

She says, “It’s worth living for you, Mr. Lucky.”

“Yeah, and every day I wake up and look in the mirror and see another wrinkle…and then I try to understand the mess of my hair, and then I spot another ounce of age growin’ on me.  I’m a man, Debra, so I cain’t put any makeup on to cover it.”

“Just be grateful you don’t see us before we do.”

I asked her, “Would I change my opinion of you, do you think?”

“Some great philosopher once said, if you put enough makeup on anything, It’ll look good.”

That got me to gigglin’.

“You know, Debra, no matter how much money I have, the Grim Reaper’s attack will creep over me day by day until one day, I just don’t wake up.  And then where will I be?”

Debra’s forehead furrowed, “Either in Heaven or Hell.”

“Is that a choice?”  I wondered.

“Only to God.”

I thought about that.

And then I asked her, “Having all this money makes me wonder, how can you have all this money and still have nothing to live for?”

I almost expected her answer, “Only God knows.”

“Do even sunny days get boring, Debra?”

“That’s why children are born, Mr. Lucky, to see our life in their joy.  That’s why there’s Christmas time, to relive our childhood through merry eyes.  That’s why there’s laughter, to cry with someone else’s tears.”

Debra had something else on the ball besides being always on the ball.


8.  This Next Gentleman Should Be Intriguing

 “This next gentleman should be intriguing, Mr. Lucky.  He claims he’s invented a machine that can look into the future.”

He walks in carrying something in a backpack.  He’s been searched so I know he’s okay.

“I’ve invented a machine that can glimpse into the future, Mr. Lucky.”

“How do you know it’s accurate?”  I wondered.

“I’ve been testing it over the last seven years.  I have videos of it’s predictions and verifications of its accuracy.”

“How far into the future can it see?”

“As far as ten years.”

“What’s out there, sir?”

“A future that is bitterly grim.”

“In what way?”

“Disparity, disunity, hatred, upheaval, riots, revolutions, famines, sinister enslavement, and hideous death.”

“Can it be changed, sir?”

“Possibly…but those in control must thread the eye of the needle.”

Debra didn’t know what he meant, either.

“Okay, turn on the machine.  Let me take a look.”

He straps me in and hooks me up and here I go, off into the future.

And this is what I see.  I see children holding weapons of war, marching toward an unknown enemy.  I see parents desperately crying for their lost children.  I see families destroyed by famine;  the only remains, photographs and video tapes.

I see hoards living in the streets, starving there and rotting.  I see people killing over an apple, gangs dismembering over grain.  I see entire economies collapsing over the weight of intolerable debt, trillions that could never be paid off.  I see countries foreclosed upon, bankrupted and traded like Monopoly cards.  I see populations herded like cattle, slaving for unseen kings.

I see babies being born into a world of sexual perversion, a world that can’t wait to show them the rules of the game.  I see the premise of God lost in a perversion of screaming ministers clamoring for money from those lost.  I see heart-wrenching death in a world that could be filled with shimmering life.

I see the earth shaking and people crushed in buildings collapsing on them.  I see fire from the heavens.  I see a stranger riding a lightning bolt.  I see him poised on a White Horse, a sword in hand, come to claim His Kingdom.

And then everything went black.

I wiped the tears from my eyes, “Can you change the channel, Mr. Future Man?”

He said, “There’s only one channel on this screen, Mr. Lucky.  The future can only be changed by example.”

“What can I do?”

Mr. Future Man said, “Live as the saved man you are,” and he gets up and walks out.

I shouted, “Wait!  Don’t you want any money?”

He smiles, “No…you’ll need every penny,” and he disappears.

I look over to Debra, my eyes on fire, “What was that about?”

She says, “I hope his machine is a hoax.”

“I don’t think it is…”

I started playing with the Mickey Mouse ears on my desk, “Let’s call it a day, Debra.  I want to walk with Robin.”


9.  Robin and I Met in the Arboretum

Robin and I met in the arboretum.  We walked around a little, stopping to stick our faces into roses of all colors and fragrances.  While we whiffed, we tasted each others lips.  Fun!

Then I told Robin about Mr. Future Man and his machine.  She said we can do one of two things;  ignore the future or do something about it.

I said, even though I have billions, I can’t affect the world.  The only one who can change the world is the one who owns the world.

“Whose that?”  Robin asked.

“Only he knows who he is…and a privileged few.  We all work for him, including me.”

“If we all work for him, why would he want to change anything?”

I pondered that one for a few minutes.  I had to ponder like a World King would ponder.  Assuming he had a plan for world dominion, the only reason he would alter his plan would be if he concluded it wouldn’t work.  Perhaps his new world would collapse, based upon revelation—everybody discovered what he was up to and refused to play his game.

I mumbled to Robin, “Slaves are only slaves until they’re set free.”

“We don’t have slaves today, Mr. Lucky.”

“Not the kind of slaves we used to have, Robin—we have a sophisticated batch of workers who slave to pay bills and taxes.  Yep, the Boss Man don’t whip them anymore…because he doesn’t have to;  they’ve been trained to whistle while they work.”

“So you’re saying there are billions of the less privileged supporting the few hundred thousand who are the so-called privileged?”

“Yes, and if they wake up to their slavery, they will eventually destroy civilization as we know it.  What good are tanks against an army counting a billion soldiers?”

“A scary thought.”

“Yep, and here’s the irony—if the tanks win, there won’t be any slaves left to slave for the Boss Man.”

That got her thinkin’…”It sounds like a dead-end street, Mr. Lucky.  What can we do to save the day?”

“You mean, like Superman would?”

I felt my muscles growing;  they were stone-hard.  I sucked in my stomach with supernatural breath;  my chest burst a few shirt buttons.  I was suddenly wearing a red, emblazoned undershirt.  Just for good measure, I began looking around for cans of spinach…then I heard these words in my own voice— “I’m calling for a reprieve in the war against the Hoi Polloi, the uncounted masses.  I, Mr. Lucky, hereby proclaim that each citizen must feel they’ve contributed to what we are as a world, not just as a nation.  We can’t allow national barriers anymore.  We must live in a world without boundaries fueled by the spirit of our forefathers.”

Robin was applauding, “Hear yay, hear yay…long live, Mr. Lucky.  But how, Mr. Lucky…how?”

So we walked off and slipped behind our favorite tree…and made love.  I kissed her fingers and she tickled my ears.  Exciting!


10.  The Next Morning I Don't Feel Like Working

The next morning I don’t feel like working;  I don’t even feel like living.  There’s just so much to do out there and it almost seems impossible.  If only there was a way to get everybody working together.  Or should it be playing together?

So I’m bathed and massaged and hot tubbed and tennised, and I’m ready to listen to the ideas of the day.

There’s a guy who comes in saying he’s worked up a process that recycles nuclear waste.

“What does it turn into?”  I ask.

He says, “Toothpaste…brighter teeth you’ve never seen.”

I laugh.

He says he’s kidding.

“Really?…So what does it turn into, Mr. Scientist?”

“It can be returned to its base isotope.”

“How?”

He lays out a blueprint of his machine.  I wonder how much this is going to cost me.

“Not that much, only $25 million,” he smiles.

“Only $25 million,” I choked on the number.  And that $25 million will turn into a hundred million, sending me to the poorhouse.

“Mr. Scientist, I don’t think this project’s for me.”

“I’ve created a preliminary budget for $10 million, Mr. Lucky.”

“When you can show me something for a hundred thousand, come back and visit.  What we really need is a machine that eliminates the need for nuclear power.  Invent that, then come see me.  Okay?”

He says okay and leaves.

The next guy in looks real serious, almost crazy in his intensity.  He’s lookin’ around to see who’s watching him.  He’s carrying a Gucci bag.  He’s either a mover and shaker, or a fast talker and a faster walker.

He starts out, “I’ve been given something that could change the world.”

Yeah, I know, I’m thinking.  It’s a vibratron condom.

“No, don’t second-guess me.  It’s a pollution free, free-energy machine that, if implemented, could eliminate the need for fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and even solar power.”

I sit up in my chair, “I’m interested, Mr.…”

“David is the name.”

“Tell me about it, David.”

“It’s so simple even a child can make it work.  In fact, I modified the idea from a child’s toy.  Balls speed down tracks pulled by gravity, almost like a roller coaster ride.  They spin propellers like water rushing through dams spin turbines.  The propellers are connected to generators that generate electricity.  In essence, it’s a gravity-based machine that generates electricity.”

He takes out a sketch and shows it to me.  It’s simple.  It makes sense.

My first question was, “What happens when the balls get to the bottom of the track?”

“Their momentum hurls them to a conveyor which powers them up to the top of the track.”

“How?”

“Ten percent of the energy produced is utilized to convey the balls back to the top.  Then, gravity pulls them down, again and again and again.”

“What do you call this machine, David?”

“Balls…David’s Balls.”

I nodded, “It’ll take steel ones to get it implemented.”

“Well, I think we’ve arrived at the time in our history where everyone can see if we continue burning fossil fuels and generating nuclear waste, we’ll poison our planet forever.”

“What’s fossil fuel?”  I needed to know.

“Fuels such as coal, crude oil, and natural gas, formed from remains of plants and animals.  These fuels are burned to generate steam which powers turbines that spin generators that generate electricity.  Vast supplies of natural resources are being burned to create electricity.  Scientists predict by the year 2010 we’ll run out of these fuels.”

“What do we do then?”  I was concerned.

“Switch to my Balls.  They don’t burn anything and they require no natural resources except gravity, which is not an endangered species.”

Could this really work, I’m wondering.

“Uranium is the other major fuel source.  It heats water by nuclear reaction which generates steam.  Occasionally, nuclear reactors blow up and melt down, to great consternation of everyone involved.  All tolled, coal, crude, natural gas, and uranium account for about ninety-six percent of the world’s energy production.  And all of these fuel sources generate poisonous venom, causing everything from acid rain to radiation waste.”

I looked him square in the eye, “Do you think the vested interests care if they poison the planet?”

David’s answer surprised me— “Yes…especially if we give my Balls to a consortium who are the vested interests.  In that way, they can share in the change-over.  I have an operative prototype.  Would you care to see it?”

David’s team walks in with this erector set and lays it on my desk.  His Balls look simple.  He puts some metallic balls on the top of the tracks and lets them go.  They start rolling down, gathering momentum.  They hit the propellers that start spinning.  The balls keep rolling down these tracks, zigzagging back and forth, faster and faster, spinning more propellers.  The propellers are connected to little generators.  I feel them…they’re warm with energy;  I can feel their current.  Light bulbs are connected to the generators.  They’re glowing with light!

“This thing really works,” I exclaim.

“Yes…it does, Mr. Lucky.”

The balls are making a humming sound as they whip to the bottom of the tracks.  They slide into a moving conveyor.  It powers the balls back to the top of the track.  They start rolling down again, gathering their own momentum…

I’m speechless.

“I told you it works.”

“Can it generate lots  of power, David?”

“As much as you want, Mr. Lucky.  It just depends on the length and slope-angle of the tracks, the weight and speed of the balls, and the gearing system that generates the power.”

He pulls out a blueprint for a plant;  I look over his Balls.  It’s a larger scale of what’s resting on my desk.

David was proud— “This plant can generate two-hundred megawatts of power without generating any pollution or nuclear waste, without decimating any natural resources for fuel.  Gravity fuels my Balls, and all they generate is electricity and the hum.”

I looked at the plans in amazement, “How much will it take to raise your Balls?”

His face is as straight as an I-beam, “Here’s the construction budget, Mr. Lucky.  Ten million will do it.”

“Where do you want to build the first one, David?”

“Right here.  We’ve already optioned the land.”

“Done!”  I clapped my hands and spun my executive chair around and around.


11.  Robin Meets Me For Dinner

Robin meets me for dinner.  We go off to a show and I’m telling her about David’s Balls.  She’s laughing.  I told her I saw them working.  She wonders how we’re going to get the establishment to accept it.  I wonder that, too.

The next day I’m back at my post.  The screening process is operating well;  not too many kooks are getting to me.  There was a guy who came in saying he could turn wine into water.  He said it was a joke, but he had this fascinating project…a desalinization plant.

I went over the system with him and it looked good.  One part of the system charged the particles.  The other part removed the charged particles with magnetism.  We drove over to a prototype plant nearby.  I watched the system.  Salt water went in one end and fresh water came out the other end.  I tasted it.  So simple.

I asked him if he could do that with liquid waste.  He thought he could.  All that would be needed was to ascertain the chemical composition of the waste, charge it, and then remove it with the magnetic filtering system.

“Go ahead.  Do it,” I said.

He left with a big grin on his face.

Now what do I do for fun, I wondered.  Maybe I need to talk to a kook.

“Send in a kook,” I told Debra.

She giggled and went to tell the screeners.

A few minutes later in walks a dude who’s wearing a tee-shirt that says, Budwiseup…this blood’s for you!

I knew I was in for it.

He said he wanted my power.

I said, “You already have it;  there’s power in Christ’s blood.  Don’t you believe it?”

“But you have all the money, Mr. Lucky.”

“And who do you think gave it to me, dude?”

“Jesus?”

“Read Job Two someday, that’ll explain it to ya.  And what if you had my money, dude, what would you do with it,?”

“Bring love to the planet,” he says.

“How would you do that?”

“By setting everyone free to the Lord.”

“Which Lord are you talking about?”

“The Lord…the one and only, Jesus.”

“Why is your Lord the one and only?”

“Because there’s power in the name.”

“That’s what I just told you, dude;  you already have the power.”

He starts screamin’ like a Baptist preacher— “Until you’ve felt the fire of Jesus, you’ll never know!”

I blow it, “Ah, come on, man.  Go to…”

“Heaven!”  He’s smilin’, his eyes piercing me.

I started laughing and he grabs me, hugging me.

“Get atta here…” and I push him out the door.

“Praise Jesus, Praise Jesus…” he’s hollerin’ down the hall.  “Praise the Lord!”


12.  Debra Walks Into the Office

Debra walks into the office, a giant grin plastered across her face;  the next guy is carrying a motel room with him!  It’s this two-foot by two cutaway model.

“Mr. Lucky, I’m here to present the solution to a world-wide problem.  A problem that’s caused sleepless nights every night!  We’ve calculated the production of the world could be raised at least twenty times if my invention was utilized.”

“What is it?”

“There are millions of people all over the world who won’t get a good night’s rest tonight.  These people are the victims of the worst calamity to visit contemporary man.”

“Homelessness or night-time soaps?”  I asked politely.

He ignored me, “This invention will lift the spirits of all ages…giving them new hope for tomorrow, and the next day.”

“What is it!”

“Okay…okay.  These sleepless nights are not caused by barking dogs or screeching cats;  not caused by economic crisis or rumors of war;  not caused by MTV or gamma rays.  They are caused by thin walls!”

“You’re going to save the world with thick walls?”

“Yes, Mr. Lucky…thick walls!  We’ve developed the first insulation system for cheap motel walls.  Isn’t that exciting!  You just tap in a hole, blow the insulation in, seal the hole, and blow the next wall, just like a terrorist.  The insulation hardens and, like magic, soundproof walls appear!  Presto, you sleep like a baby.”

I joked, “That would be a boon, except you couldn’t hear the couple in the next room making love.”

“If you’re alone, you don’t want to hear that.”

“You have a point.  How much is it per wall?”

“Two hundred dollars, Mr. Lucky.”

“So that’s about a thousand dollars per motel room, right?”

“There abouts.”

“So if you have a twenty-room motel, that’s $20,000.”

“…Yes.”

“How much more revenue can you charge for thick walls?”  I wanted to know.

He’s silent.

“You don’t know?”  I was amazed, “Well, you need to know that.  Cheap hotels are cheap because their customers can’t afford luxury;  they’re used to the sound effects.”

“I’ll be back…”

“I bet you will.”

Next, there’s this beautifully thin woman who walks in.  I mean, she was movie star quality.  What’s Debra doin’ to me, I wondered?

She introduces herself as Miss Lola Mitchell.  I think she’s going to do a striptease for me.  I’m wrong.  She moves over to my side of the desk and sticks her breasts under my eyes.  She says she’s invented a fat pill.

I say, “It makes people fat?”

“No…it burns fat off of people.”

“Well, you ought to call it a slim pill, shouldn’t you?”

“Good idea,” she says.

“How does it work?  What does it do?”

“Each tab raises the activity of the thyroid gland a little.  That raises your metabolism so you burn more energy;  you burn your food instead of storing it.”

“So to stay thin, you just chew as many tabs as you want?”

“That’s it, Mr. Lucky.”

“What are the side effects, Miss?”

“Only that you can eat all day and still stay as slim as you like.”

I wondered, “Won’t your jaws get tired with all that chewing?”

“Only if you talk all day while you eat all day.”

I was calculating, “So one human being could literally eat tons of food every week?”

“As much as you want, Mr. Lucky.  Every flavor of every variety;  every morsel of every sweet;  every sip of any drink.”

“Anything?”

“Anything, and never gain an ounce.  Look at me.”

I looked again.  She has this hourglass figure with a nineteen inch waist.  I look down at my belly.

I chuckled, “You’re just an ectomorph, don’t try to kid me;  you have a predominantly thin body-type.”

“I’m an endomorph, the mostly plump type…and I’m not kidding.”

“Okay, what’s the hitch?”

“No surprises, Mr. Lucky.”

“How does it work?”

“LIke I said, it gets the fire going in your body by raising your metabolic rate.  Everyone can be as slim and trim as they want to without dieting.”

“This is the biggest miracle to hit the free world outside of the resurrection.”

“I’m pretty excited about it,” she grins.

“Have you tested it?”

“Yes,” and in walk twelve more beautiful dolls, all slim as a rail.  They all testify they’ve used the pill, eaten anything they’ve wanted, and lost weight until they went off the pill.  I asked if any of them got pregnant?  They didn’t think I was too funny.

“Have you taken this to any of the drug companies?”  I inquisited.

“No…we came here first because we heard you were a fair man.”

“Who developed this?”

“I did,” she says.  “I’m a doctor of chemistry and nutrition.”

“Okay…listen.  I find this very interesting.  I want to try this myself and if it works on me we’re in business.  Give me a month’s supply of pills and I’ll get back to you.”

“I’m not that stupid,” she’s suddenly hostile.

“What do you mean?”

“You could break the pill down and run off with the formula.”

“Listen, we’ll sign a non-competition agreement with you, okay?  That just means that we won’t ever go into a competing fat-pill business against you.  Will that work?”

“I’ll have to talk to our attorneys.”

“Okay…let me know.  If it works, you’re funded.”

This is fun, and I thought she was a kook.  Debra’s keeping me on the ball.  Or on the pill.


13.  What Do I Do Today For Excitement?

What do I do today for excitement?  Golf, tennis, swim?  Travel, make love, entertain?  Walk, eat, ride, drive?  Read, write, talk?  I have all these options and I can do anything I desire.  Today could become complicated.

Let’s see what Debra has for me.

“What have you invented?”  I ask this man who’s wearing a bow tie.

“I’ve created a machine that alters your reality base.  It changes the perception of what you think you are into something you can be.  It’s a tool for changing the universe.”

“Simple enough…we just change the universe?”

“Yes…it alters peoples’ perceptions of what is real, breaking them out of their limitations.  For example, we live life in certain patterns, habit forms.  That’s the box we live in.  Yet, outside of that box are whole new realities to be discovered.  My brain/mind machine opens those realities.”

“How does it work, Mr. Inventor?”

“It uses light and sound to activate more brain power by synchronizing the hemispheres of the brain.”

“Isn’t that what faith does?”  I wondered.

“Precisely…this machine activates those same channels.  You’re aware we only use about a third of our brain power?  My machine lays an electrochemical matrix, like new roads on a map, that can be used for more creativity and skill development.  With that new receivership power, we can literally create and perceive anything.”

“But what do we need a machine for?  Why don’t we develop our faith and tap into the greatest power of the universe—God, the Father Almighty?”

“Because we don’t know how to, Mr. Lucky.”

My God, you mean we’ve been kickin’ around for two thousand years and nobody has figured out how to tap into God-power?

“Where, then, will the breakthroughs come, Mr. Inventor?”

“Only from people who are breaking out of the box.”

“Who is breaking out?”  I wondered.  “We’re all strapped to this survival mode;  we exist to survive.  We don’t exist to adventure beyond survival.  We don’t know how.”

“You did.”

“But I don’t even know how I did…I just, somehow, developed this special power.”

“Why did you develop it?”

“It wasn’t a conscious thought.  It just happened.”

“Why did it happen?”

“Because I wanted to contribute something to the planet and its peoples.”

“Is it God-given then?”

I had thought about that.  I had wondered, why me?  Yet, the reasoning behind the purpose was nebulous to me.  If I could be used as a vehicle for the perpetuation of the planet, then perhaps in some way I was also perpetuating myself.  And conversely, if I was used in the destruction of the planet, I was destroying myself.  Maybe that’s an axiom.

I wondered, “Perhaps when we die, we adventure off to these other realms.  Why else would they exist?”

“Maybe they are the heavens and hells the religions talk about.”

“Yes, perhaps they’re being designed by our thoughts this very moment.  And someday we’ll visit our selected heavens or hells according to our thoughts.  Perhaps that’s what the Judgment Day is.  Except it is we who do the judging, who send our souls off to wherever our next adventure awaits.”

“We can explore this inner sanctum with the brain/mind machines right now,” he interjected.

“Yes…for as we know more about what we are now, we can plan for the days of tomorrow, wherever they may be.  And perhaps if we knew glory days awaited based on the goodness or badness of our lives, perhaps we would change our todays.”

“The adventures of tomorrow all await in the mind,” he said.  “In the next century we’ll all become astronauts, exploring the inner space of our minds.  This is the beginning.”

The explorer in me said cautiously, “I would like to take a trip, with you along as guide.  Can you set it up?”

He said he would.

I needed a break;  my mind was flooded with new premises of existence.  My world was being shaked, rattled, and rolled.  I needed to talk to Robin and get grounded.  She usually has something relatively sane on her mind.

“You’re pregnant!”  I exclaim, “You’re going to give birth to a child?”  “I’m going to be a father!”

“Yes.  We’ll have to start saving now for his education.  In twenty years it will cost two million a semester.”

“What do you think he will be, Robin?

“It will either be a boy or a girl.”

“No, silly.  What do you think he will want to be, careerwise?”

“What will there be to be?”

“Let’s think about it.  David’s Balls should be fully operative by then.  He could be a Balls operator.  Or he could be a laser surgeon;  cutting surgery will be outlawed by then.  I wonder if laser surgeons can do liposuction?”

“Yes…with their lips.”

“You’re sick, you know it?”  I laughed.

“I know!”  Robin shouts.  “She could be a brain/mind travel director selling trips to the twenty-first dimension.”

“I wonder what goes on there?”

“Well, they have interstellar football games.  Can you imagine what the Superbowl would be like?  Players would be battling from all over the galaxy?  I wonder what the cheerleaders would look like?”

“By then everyone will be beautiful,” I said.  “Our bodies and faces will be molded into the most angelic creatures that could exist.  And everyone will be wearing designer haircuts with etched eyebrows.  Anything ugly will be done away with by the image molders.  We’ll all look alike!  There won’t be any individuality.  We’ll all be beautiful and thin, except we won’t know what beauty is anymore because we’ll have nothing to compare it to.”

“What’s the world coming to?”

“I know!  In twenty years we’ll have holographic in-house entertainment.  Three-dimensional actors and actresses will appear like magic in our living rooms, like they’re guests at a party, acting out their parts.  Police will be chasing hoodlums through our kitchen and hallways.  Lovers will be making love in our beds.  We’ll all become voyeurs.”

“Aren’t we already?

I had to think about that one.  Then I teased, “I’m sure holographic entertainment is on the drawing board in some corporation.  Complete with the fragrances of love.”

“Take me…I’m yours.”

“I would hope so.  After all, I have a few hundred million in the bank.”

“I love you for you.”

“That’s a switch,” I made a face.

“That’s why you married me, Mr. Lucky.  You knew if someone came along with two hundred million, it wouldn’t turn my head.”

“And if some gorgeous hunk came along, that wouldn’t turn your body?”

“Never…not in a million years, or even light-years.”

“And what if I didn’t have a nickel?”

“I’ll see ya…”

And she grabbed me, and hugged me, and touched me where I like it.  And we ran off behind our favorite tree.  And I was lost in another galaxy, a hundred, billion light-years away.


14.  Sir, We Have a Crisis On Our Hands

 “Sir, we have a crisis on our hands.”

“What’s that, Debra?”

“The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce wants you to locate more people with special powers.”

“They’re right.  That was part of my bargain.  Let’s do it…put the word out.”

“I did, sir.  They’re waiting.”

“Send them in.”

And in they come.

“What are your special powers?”

“I am a teleportation expert.  I can teleport myself to other locales in an instant.”

“I’ve heard of you.  Didn’t I just see you in Los Angeles,” I joked.

“I was there an instant ago, yes.  I was on the floor of the Lakers’ game.”

“Who was winning?”

“The Lakers, naturally.”

“Come on,” I said, “get real with me…” and he disappeared!

“Okay,” I shouted into the air, “I get the point.  You can come back now.”

And he reappeared!

“I’m impressed.  Can you take things with you?  You could be a courier and run Federal Express out of business.  You know, when it absolutely, positively has to be there the next second…”

“I haven’t figured that one out yet, Mr. Lucky.”

“Well, how can your special power be used to help the world?”

“I can teach people how to teleport.  Then we wouldn’t need the New York City subway system.  The workers can just teleport to the office.”

“But what would the NYPD do with all the extra time on their hands?  Eat more donuts?”

“We also wouldn’t need cars or trains or buses anymore.  The ultimate, environmentally-safe way to travel—teleportation!”

“That’s it!  Simple…no more pollution.  How do we sell the world on this?  It’s a bit out of the average citizen’s reality base.”

“We could give seminars?”

“And you could just appear on the podium, right?”

“Right.”

“And I suppose we could bring in a reincarnation expert from another dimension to tell us the way of the Diamond Light universe, where everyone lives in peace and harmony because they have everything they need by just thinking it?”

“Yep, we could do that.”

Suddenly I saw through all this illusion, “What good would it do anyway?”

“Probably none, Mr. Lucky,” and Mr. Teleporter Man thanked me for my pervasive insight…and then disappeared!

Debra gave me a, What was that?  look.

“That was a visitor from another dimension…some folks call ‘em demons.”

She looked startled— “Do you believe in demons, Mr. Lucky?”

“Don’t you, Debra?”

Debra doesn’t have the answer for me.  The next guy does…”You can transplant brains?”  I ask, dumfounded.

“Yes, I’ve developed the process by combining laser and microsurgery.  The brains are kept alive in a DNA solution drenched with royal jelly.”

“Why do you transplant brains?”

“The body dies but the brain wants to live on.  We locate brain-dead people and buy their bodies.”

“They shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

“There is a plethora.”

“Are they aware their brains are being transplanted?”

“It’s doubtful.”

“First there were kidney transplants;  then heart transplants.  Now hair transplants and brain transplants.  That really means if you’re fed up with your body and face, and you can’t do anything with your hair, you can just slap your slab into the body of your choice.”

“That’s the rub.”

“What rub?”

“The magnificent bodies and classic faces are in short supply.  It’s a seller’s market.  I need funding to provide the top of the line, so to speak, for my clients.”

“So even the brain business is a supply and demand business?”

“Quite correct…unless you deal on the black market.”

“Is that what’s happening with all the missing people?”

“Precisely…it’s dog eat dog out there.”

“What has life come to?”

“A horror.”

“Why?”

“We’ve forgotten what life is.  It simply doesn’t exist anymore.  What exists is illusion—the illusion of beauty, the illusion of love, the illusion of wealth.  And swirling around all these illusions is the great fear of the unknown…death.  We’ve lost how to live.  So I work in brains.  It’s a good living.”

“What do you tell your kids when they ask you what you do?”

“I tell them I’m a brain surgeon.  I am, you know.”

“It sounds like you’re a grave robber…or I should say, a pre-grave robber.”

“Somebody’s got to do it.  If it wasn’t me, it would be your neighbor.  Are you interested in funding my next creation?”

“What is it?”

“We’ve located a Madonna look-alike body and face.  The brain we’re transplanting belongs to a nuclear physicist.”

“It should have a bright future…do you call it an it or a her, or what?”

“The transplanted brain’s name remains the same.”

“Is that a jingle?”

“We could use it in our advertising…”

I’m looking over at Debra, trying to keep from laughing hysterically.  She’s ready to explode.

“Ah…” I smiled, “give me a week or so to think this one over.  Do you have any videos of any operations?”

He says, “No…”

I sigh in relief.

His parting words, “If you see a body you’d like to occupy, let me know.”


15.  I Need a Reality Check

I needed a reality check.

Next in to see me is a lady— “I take pictures and ghosts appear in the photographs.”

I’m wondering, Maybe we can trade consciousness with ghosts?

I call the Brain Transplant Man into the meeting.  They think about this.  Don’t you think it would be worthwhile?  After all, ghosts exist out there in this unlimited dimension.  Any world is their playground;  any thought is their reality.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to communicate with them?  Maybe they could share anti-gravity technology with us?  Or more efficient food preservation and cultivation methods?  Or they could teach us how to manifest our thoughts directly into this 3-D reality.  How would life be different if we allowed communication from other worlds;  if we allowed the exchange of consciousness?

“Let me ask you,” I asked her, “What have you learned from your photographs?”

She says, “I’ve learned there are only evil spirits if you believe there are.  I believe in benevolent spirits, so those are the spirits I contact.  These are the fairies, the gnomes, the tree spirits;  the nature apparitions who perpetuate growth, light, and life.  The musical spirits of dance and joy are the ones I party with.”

I questioned her, “What about the evil spirits?”

“Sure, you can lose yourself in evil spirits and demons, Mr. Lucky;  and if you’re afraid of them, you’ll bump into them.  But they really don’t exist unless you create a place in your mind for them to exist.  What’s really demonic is the hell committed on this earth in the name of peace, God, love, and progress.”

Before she left, she added something significant— “There’s a corporate grief that’s spread all over this planet, Mr. Lucky;  we haven’t begun to face it.  It’s hidden deeply in the psychosis that makes us all up.  We wonder why we’re not sane?  We’re running away from sanity into a place called progress.  One day we’ll wake up…we’ll see ourselves as the ghosts in these photographs.”

I stared at the photos, cringing under this eerie feeling.  If only there was a way to deliver the future in such vivid colors that it could be changed.  If only there was a way before we became ghosts.


16.  We Were Chatting Over Lunch

We were chatting over lunch— “Robin, I’ve been thinking about those consciousness transplants.  Maybe we can create consciousness that fits in molds, molds that know what the gift of giving back and sharing is.  Then maybe we can have a world of peace and bounty for all.  What do you think?”

“Not everyone fits the mold, Mr. Lucky.  And sometimes the vast differences of the world can’t be resolved in our simple minds.  But what we can become for the rest of the world is a better person than we were yesterday, a person who owns a greater understanding of life.”

“We’re so lucky, Robin;  we have all these beautiful homes to live in.  But what about the homeless?  Why don’t we put together an association of builders and tackle the homeless problem?  I could put up a few million to start the association.  Then we could ante ten million into the pot that would be joined by ten million from each major builder.  We would have a few hundred million to build something nice with, a prototype for other builders around the world…garden condos for the homeless.”

“Why would profit-motivated builders want to do that, besides the satisfaction derived from it?”  Robin’s always thinking on both sides of the coin.

“Because the builders can deduct whatever amount they put in, and the PR from the program would amass for them a hundred-fold return on their contribution.  America’s streets are supposed to be paved with gold;  that doesn’t mean people should be sleeping in them.”

“That sounds good to me, Mr. Lucky.  It’s a bright idea.”

I felt excitement stirring, “We should be able to get all the people off the streets and into shelters that provide adequate protection from the elements while also giving them some concept of what a home is.  With their newfound self-esteem and the Brain/Mind machines, we can begin a re-education program, giving them the skills they need to stay off the streets.  Pretty soon, they’ll be owning their own homes.

“We should be able to do this, Robin.  The ancient Greeks didn’t allow anyone to become homeless.  Every person was a valuable citizen who was taken care of and thereby contributed back to the nation.

“We must do this…

“Okay.  Okay, Mr. Lucky…we’ll do it!”


17.  I Wanted To Go To the Beach...

I wanted to go to the beach again, so the chopper lifted us off the Las Vegas high-rise and chopped us to Laguna Beach, landing on the beach near the surf.  Talk about people staring…you’d think we were famous.  I guess we were.

I bodysurfed for a while, then laid next to Robin’s tanned body.  I felt her warmth;  she felt good.  I resolved to remember that moment, just in case there would never be another one.  It’s hard to know about moments.

The chopper lifted us over to the Ritz-Carlton.  We landed on the bluff…again, everyone making a fuss about us.  You’d think we were rich or something.

We were escorted to our suite;  five rooms overlooking the incredible sanctity of the Pacific Ocean.  The salted air cushioned my senses, lifting my spirits on clouds of bliss.  Life had turned into a party for me, a never-ending party.  I had everything anyone could ask for—I couldn’t spend all the money;  I couldn’t devour all the beauty that Robin was to me;  there would be projects to fund until my dying days.  I was the toast of the world, truly Mr. Lucky.

And then it hit me like a load of bricks…is that it!  Is that all there is?  And then I knew I was really in trouble.

Robin came over and asked me what was wrong?

I said, “I don’t know what’s wrong.  I just feel like I have nothing to live for.”

“Are you serious?  You have everything to live for…look at all the projects you have in the fire.  The world is going to change because of you.”

“All I want to do is change the world inside of me.  I want to see everything in the perfection that it is.  After all, what is wealth?  What is health?”

She thought for awhile…and then said, “What we have.”

“No,” I said, “Wealth can only be peace of mind.  No matter how beautiful something is, if you can’t see it’s beauty, it’s worthless to you.  And the value that something is, is only value if your state of mind will accept it as value.  For instance, to an Aborigine, a blowgun is much more valuable than a Ferrari.”

She laughed.

“What are you laughing about?”  I wondered.

“The vision of a Ferrari in the Rainforest is just funny to me.  Okay?”

“Okay…but listen to me;  I’m serious about this.  I think I might have stumbled across the missing link.”

“Between apes and man?”

“Err, that’s Darwin.  No, the missing link between sanity and insanity.  All we can ever be is directly proportional to what we give back.  The IRS is really just showing us the way!”

“You are crazy.”

“Think about it.  Sooner or later, the body starts to sag, the mind begins to leave you.”

“Your transplant machines will be up and running by then;  anyone will be able to have a new body from the Body Breeder Factories.  They’ll be advertising bodies on TV like they advertise cars.  They’ll give cash back!  You can trade in last year’s model.  They’ll have year-end sales.  Or would it be rear-end sales?”

I started laughing hysterically.

Then I began to wonder what I had started with the Transplant Man…was my life turning into a science-fiction horror story?

I yelled to Robin, “It will be hard to remember which body we’re wearing.  We’ll have to keep track of everyone like they register cars.  We won’t know what we are, as if we knew now!  We won’t know who we’re making love to ‘cause we’ll be able to change bodies as easy as we change clothes.  God…what would the world be like if nobody knew who they were?”

“So how would that be different from the way it is today?”

I looked at her with bug eyes…she’s right!  We don’t  know who we are today.  We’re totally lost in the illusion of what we think we are.

“That does it.”

“That does what?”  she asked.

“I want a top level commission created to figure out who we are!”


18.  Debra Shook Me Out of My Trance

Debra shook me out of my trance— “A Mr. Christopher Prince is your next victim, Mr. Lucky.”

And in he walks.  He could have been Jesus Christ himself and I would have screamed bloody murder at him, just because he was unlucky enough to follow a Mr. Evil Demonface Scumbag the Vain who just left

“What can I do for you, Mr. Prince?”  I still felt singed by my close encounter with the perverted kind.  I don’t even want to tell you about it!

Mr. Prince answered, “I want you to help me dispense a medicine.  It’s a cure-all for the disease of war.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You have a medicine that cures our propensity to war?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I suppose you’re the Prince of Peace, right?”

“Right.”

“Mr. Prince, I’m not in the mood for Jesus jokes.  If you have a Polish, racist, sexist, attorney, real estate agent, cat, or dog joke you might get a laugh out of me.  You know, something like, how many attorneys does it take to unscrew a light bulb?  But no Jesus jokes, okay?”

“Okay…this is no joke.  Here’s the medicine.  Whenever two nations decide to battle one another, they risk staggering battle deaths, ruination of their economy, devastation of their social structure, destruction of their cities and towns, and the world risks nuclear annihilation.  Correct?”

“Correct.”

“These are not pleasant thoughts for anyone, even those buried in civil defense shelters.  After the megatons have exploded, the nuclear winter and radiation will continue the devastation for generations.  The green, precious thing called the Earth becomes a brown ball of poisoned wastelands.  Nothing living or growing;  everything dead, trashed out.  You won’t have to worry about recycling.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Christopher.”

“War needs to be made into a game, Mr. Lucky.  Here are the rules for Wargames.  The attacking country presents a declaration to the United Nations.  This declaration lists what the attacking country wants to acquire by its attack if it prevails.  This declaration also lists what the attacking country will give up if it doesn’t prevail.  The United Nations Wargaming Committee is given the power to balance the proposed gains against the proposed loses to ensure an equal balance.

“The country that is wargamed against goes through the same process.  Then the declarations are put to a vote.  If the vote is not passed by a majority of registered voters and validated by Congress, the declaration is resubmitted until it is passed.  At the time of passage, a Battledate is set.

“Five Battleteams from each side are selected and trained.  They are comprised of thirteen men each.  They can only battle with hand weapons in hand to hand combat.  Each team battles to the death.  Whoever wins three out of five battles is the victorious country.  Their declarations prevail.  Simple.”

“Isn’t it a little grisly, Chris, battle to the death with hand weapons?”

“Much less grisly than hundreds of thousands, or billions.”

“You have a point.”

“And also, in every country there are men ready to die so their nation may prevail—they will be martyred.  And those victorious will be heroes, until the next Wargames.”

“Should the Wargames be scheduled every four years, like the elections?”

“Sure, why not?  They could even be televised.  The networks can sell their spots for billions.  Can you imagine the ads?”

“This might work, Mr. Prince.  How much money do you need to get this amended to the U.N.  charter?”  I put on my Mickey Mouse ears, thinking, flapping my ears.

He starts giggling…

“Why are you giggling?”  I wanted to know, “What’s so funny?  This could work if everyone agrees to it.  Why risk global war because a few dirtbags want to go at it to prove how big their balls are?”

“That’s not why I’m laughing,” he screamed.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Because you’re wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse ears.”

“What’s so funny about that?  They help me think!”  and I flapped my ears some more, never to be daunted.

He was bending over, beside himself, howling.

I tried to stay focused, “Why do we have to live like this?  Why is a world of peace so difficult to attain?”

“Because nobody wants it,” he’s giggling.

“What do you mean?  Everybody wants it.”

“If everybody wanted it, you’d have it.”

“You mean we like to war?”

“Of course, every country practices war every day.  It’s a obsession.”

I stroked one of my ears, lost in the confusion of reality, “I think I would rather live in a fantasy world.”

“A lot of people do.  The real world is impossible for them to live in.  They have no hope, no faith, no reason to live, a fear of death.  Life is patently miserable.”

I pulled Mickey’s ears down over my eyes, “Just bury your head in the sand like an Ostrich, aye?”

“Bury it, dope it, stroke it, or blow it;  those are the options.”

“Life has turned into hell.  Where is the Messiah when we need him?”

“Ask and ye shall receive, isn’t that how it goes?”

“I’m asking…I’m asking.”


19.  The Teleporter Man Was Next

The Teleporter Man was next.  He’s been waiting for me.  He says he’s ready to take me on a trip.  I’m ready to go.

He straps himself in next to me and we take off, so to speak, off to a new galaxy.  It’s like the Star Tours ride in Tomorrowland at Disneyland that lifts you out of your body.

“Where are we heading, to a new universe?”

“Sort of.  I’ll take you galaxy hopping in a few minutes.  First, I’m going to take you on a little side-trip adventure, into the mind of a real baby.  You can watch the whole scene if you want to, or you can skip it.”

Baby, baby…baby needs friends.  Baby, baby…baby needs love.  Baby, baby…baby needs to mend, the rhyme split his mind.  Oh baby, come baby, play with me.  Baby, baby…baby needs friends to see…his mother’s face filled his mind, her voice repeating the nursery rhyme.

He walked in the shadows, in the early morning hours, looking.  Where could she be?  What would she look like this time?  Would she scream?  Would she cry?  Would she hit him?  Would he have to run home again?  Why?  He was just coming to play with them—why did they scream?  They always had baby powder all over them, and he was baby, so why couldn’t he touch them?

Baby, baby…baby needs friends.  Baby, baby…baby needs love.  Baby, baby…baby needs to mend—the rhyme hammered his brain, throbbing, pounding.  Oh baby, come baby, play with me.  Baby, baby…baby needs friends to see.  Where?…where is his mother’s face, filled with the smile that jingles his heart?  He could hear her voice singing in his head—tinkle, tinkle, tum;  it’s time to come.  Tinkle, tinkle, tum…

The shadows were cold this night.  Lonely.  He was looking for warmth.  His silhouette moved like a phantom, from shadow to shadow.  Where could she be?  Would she scream?…fright.  Would she cry tonight?  Would she hurt him?  Why did they always try to hurt me?  I am baby, so why do they try to hurt me?  I don’t want to run home again, crying.  Why do they scream?  I’m just coming to play with them…

All the girls on those nasty videos were always calling me.  Well, weren’t they…oh, baby;  come, baby.  Since I’m baby, isn’t it okay if I come to play?  Isn’t it okay to pull on their hair, to touch them, finger-paint in their baby powder, smearing it all over them?  Isn’t it okay to play with them, to chase them?  I’m baby…tinkle, tinkle, tickle tum.  It’s time to come, tickle tum.  It’s time.

Baby, baby, baby needs friends.  Baby, baby…baby needs love.  Baby, baby, baby needs to mend…the rhyme split him, devouring him in its frenzied playfulness.  Tinkle, tinkle, tum;  it’s time to…Tinkle, tinkle, tum;  it’s time.  There she is…

And Baby watched a woman, a woman he would stalk…peering at her through her window.  And she sat there, knowing she was being watched, hoping she was being watched because life for her was a gigantic bore.  She had joked to one of her girlfriends just this afternoon, “I need to be raped.  It would be more exciting than Walter could ever be.”

So there she sat, combing her hair, thinking alluringly about her words, not even reflecting they would come to pass…their vibrations emanating over the unseen wavelengths, attracting someone to perform the act she requested.  Baby felt the vibrations of her wishes, they communicated to him on some ephemeral band…and isn’t it okay to play with them, to rub my fingers in their baby powder, to pull their hair, to chase them?

There she sat in the window, the baby powder caressing her body, returning her to lost innocence.  There she sat, looking into her mirror, stroking her hair…running her fingers through it, twisting it around her fingers, feeling the cramps of her cycle tear into her tenderness, feeling her emotions being stormed away from her, sensing the ability to love herself and someone else a long, lost fantasy.

Her cramping tore into the guilt, forcing her to feel herself as an insensitive, non-loving bitchwoman.  She stared into the mirror, not even seeing the imageless beauty of what she was;  just seeing herself as moody, irritable, focusing into the abhorrent image of the mirror…focusing and focusing…and combing and stroking, hypnotically staring into the mirror, looking into herself, trying to love what she felt, even though she felt so unloving, burning the image into hate.  Was she still pretty, even pretty enough to attract a rapist?

And the horror in the black shadow, moving into the image of her mirror, was something she could never have imagined.


20.  Yes, I Watched This Scene of Black Terror

Yes, I watched this scene of black terror.  My mind, now implanted forever with its vileness, is flipping through legions of emotions—I don’t know whether to be angry or to relieve the pain with laugher, to be horrified or numbed!?  How could humanity be so inhumane?

Thankfully, Mr. Teleporter Man has us now traveling through space at the speed of light-years per second.  I feel the speed talking me away from my silent terror…this is better than diet Koala, salsa, and chips.

We see all these galaxies before us.

“Where do you want to stop, dude?”  my tour guide asks.

“Show me the one with all the light.  I’ve seen enough darkness.”

So we pull up to the Diamond Light Galaxy and drop in for a visit.  Everything is sparkling;  the beings here seem to be radiating the light.  They have bodies but their bodies are made of light…Lightbeings, I guess you call them.

“What do these…these entities do all day?”

“Let’s ask one,” so we stop an entity on his way to…ah, work.  I guess that’s where he’s…or maybe it’s a she, is going.”

“What do you do all day long?”

“Day?”  it wonders.  They don’t have night here so they don’t know what day is.

“What do you do?”  I ask.

“Do…I just am.”

“You am what?”

“I exist in the eternity that I am.”

“What do you create?  Do you work to earn a living?”

“Work?  Create?…Earn a living?  I am living.  I live forever.”

“You don’t work?”

“What is work?”

“To exchange labor or service for money.  The money purchases food to eat.”

“Money?…Eat?  My light body is sustained by the breath of the universe.  I perpetuate myself in forever.”

“You don’t die?”

“What is it to die?”

“Your life ebbs out of your body and your soul leaves for somewhere else.”

“No…I don’t do that.  I live forever.”

I look over to my guide, “How are we going to relate to this Lightbeing?  All our premises of existence are totally different?”

“Let’s ask him if he knows of planet Earth.”

So we ask.  And we talk about history and time and religion.  He says he’s heard of us.

“What have you heard?”

“That is the planet that lives in the Black Hole.”

I didn’t think we did but maybe we do.

“What do you mean, Black Hole?”

He says that’s the place where thought is limited.  He says there is not another place in the universe like it.  Everywhere else thought is taken to its ultimate conclusion.  Earth, he says, has grounded thoughts.  That’s why it was named Earth.

It made sense to me, “Why did we ground our thoughts?”

He says way back when, in the time of our history, we came up with the measurement of time.  Because of the measurement of time, endings were created.  Ever since then, we’ve been counting…we count our hours, our days, our years.  We even predict how long we’re going to live, trying to measure our life according to what we’ve achieved during the time we’ve given ourselves to live.

“But,” I said, “At the moment of birth it’s hard not to start counting.”

He said if we thought of it as a continuum, it wouldn’t be that hard.

“Oh, like thinking this is just another chapter instead of a totally new beginning?”

“Precisely.  If you allow your mind to exist in a place of forever, that’s where you will live.  In forever there is no counting.”

“So we can get out of the Black Hole by just changing our minds?”

“And you should soon, otherwise the experiment will be finished.”

“I thought there weren’t any endings?”

He says there are because we think there are.

He asks me if I know anyone who has broken out of the limitation of Earth’s thinking patterns.

“We know of one person…Jesus, the Son of God.”

“What is God?”

“That is the great creator of everything.  A lot of people on Earth believe Jesus is his one and only son.”

He looked at me quizzically.

I asked him about God’s creation, “Who do you think created all of this?”

“Why, we did, of course!”  he answered.

“We did?”  I quizzed.

“Yes, with our thoughts,” he said.  “If God is everything, it is also thought.  What you worship there on your planet is thought.  Thought is the ability to create a premise to build a reality around.  Thought is the blueprint.  That is God, the Father, in its purest concept and form.  If you continue believing there is something outside of you that creates your universe, you will continue living in the Black Hole.  That is the only difference between us—my thoughts are unlimited, yours are limited.”

“How do we unlimit our thoughts?  And how does God, the Father figure in?  And what about the Holy Spirit?  And the Son of God?  And what about the power of prayer?”

“Superstition,” was the response.

“Ah, I don’t believe so, Mr. Lightbeing.  In fact, they are the true powergiver.”

He apparently didn’t hear me, “You unlimit your thoughts by breaking out of everything that is superstition.  By knowing it is you that creates your reality every moment with your thoughts.  When you have the desire, you will be unlocked from your prisons.  A new reality will appear to you, and soon you can see it with your own eyes.  That is the sun rising in you.”

Perhaps the Son rising in me, I thought.  That’s how I became Mr. Lucky.

The Lightbeing flickered, “Once you live in Heaven, you’ll understand it.”

I looked over at my guide, wondering about that one.  By the time we put another question together, the Lightbeing was off to another adventure.


21.  We Decided to Cruise the Galaxy a Little

We decided to cruise the galaxy a little, see what we could see.

There was a place where a lot of laughter was leaking through.  We zoomed in…it was a playland filled with joyous children, running and jumping and playing every game there was.  We saw spectators watching, sharing in all the laughter.  I took a closer look—the spectators looked unusual;  I couldn’t make out their ages.  I thought some of them were grandfathers, but when I looked closer, they seemed like children.  Somehow they appeared to be wise yet to be children at the same time.

I wanted to talk with one of them.

I introduced myself as a visitor from the Earth.  They were aware of my home.

“How were you aware?”  I wondered.

“We can feel your energy when you come near to us.”

“How does it feel?”

“Very frantic, as if there is a great need for answers now.”

“Yes, we feel there is.  For we live as if there is no tomorrow.”

“Well, you’re right.  There isn’t a tomorrow, nor is there a yesterday.  There is just now.  But to live there requires that you relinquish your hold on yesterday and your expectations of tomorrow.  Live like the child lives, in unresolved joy for each moment it exists.  The child has no concept of tomorrow or yesterday.  It only knows now.  And the now that it knows is joy.”

“Is that why you don’t age?”

“That is how we live, therefore we are timeless.”

“I want to talk to your leader.  Do you have a leader?”

“Is a leader someone who controls others?”

“Yes.”

“No…we do not have a leader.”

“Do you have someone who helps organize a governing body that governs?”

“No.  We govern ourselves.”

“How do you do that?”

“Automatically, via instinct.”

“What is the instinct?”

“We know it as unending love.”


22.  I Had to Get Back to My Office Suite

I had to get back to my office suite.  I was due to meet with the Fat Pill inventor and David about his Balls.  Who was scheduled first, Fat or Balls?

The Fat Pill lady advised me, “We’ve encountered some problems in testing.”

“What’s that?”  I wondered.

“Once the metabolic rate is increased, it’s difficult to lower it back to normal—it just spins out of control.”

“People are getting too thin?”

“That’s what’s happening.”

“I thought you could never be too rich or too thin?”

“Well, they’re wrong…we’ve got one girl down to bare bones.”

I thought about that one for a minute.

“Okay…I said, “Here’s what you do.  Invent a pill that brings the metabolic rate back to normal.”

She thinks about that for a minute, then asks, “What is normal?”

I think about that for a minute, then state, “Normal is the place where you think you’re okay.  Everywhere else is abnormal.”

“Oh…so normal is different for everyone?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So I need to invent a pill that makes people feel they’re okay even if they’re not?”

“Yep…and then they will adjust themselves accordingly.”

“Gotcha.”  and off she went, busting through the door like a bull.

Speaking of bulls, David was next in with his Balls.

“How’s it coming, so to speak?”

“Balls is operative!  She’s generating free, pollution-free electricity.  We’ve brought her up to the two hundred megawatt level!”

“Good God…really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Now what do we do?”

“The vested power interests want to talk to us.”

“What do they want?”

“They want our Balls.”

“I expected this.  Is there anything on the table?”

“Yes…a butcher knife.”

“What’s the offer?”

“There is no offer…they just want our Balls.  We either shut it down voluntarily, or they will shut it down for us.”

“How?”

“Let me count the ways.  First they’ll try a friendly offer for a substantial percentage.  Then they’ll try a hostile buy-out.  Then they’ll lobby to legislate against us.  If that doesn’t work, they’ll offer us a buy-out for fifty times what it’s worth.  If we sell, they’ll just shut the plant down and lock up the patent until the fossil fuel runs dry and the air turns black.  If we don’t sell, they’ll just kill us, no questions asked.  Like I said, they want our Balls.”

“I believe we’ve struck a chord.  I guess our Balls really work.”  I wondered, “Is there some way to compromise with these people?”

“Yes.  Do it their way.”

“Ah…I see.”

I thought a little more, “Maybe we can offer them a percentage so we can be sure our Balls get up and on line?”

“To reasonable men who play by the rules, that would work.  These are unreasonable men who only play by their rules.  We’re tampering with billions of dollars of revenue to them.  They don’t give a gosh darn about what they’re doin’ to the environment.  If they cared, do you think we’d be in the crisis we’re in today?”

“Nope.”

“And the last thing they want available to the masses is free energy.  That would set everyone free and they don’t want that.  The world is imprisoned;  the warden is energy.  And the bars are so subtle, no one even has the notion to complain about it.  You just plug into it;  you don’t think about how it got there.”

“There must be a way,” I think out loud.

David thinks for a few minutes, too.

“I’ve got it!”  I scream.

“What is it?”  he screams back.

“I can’t tell you…I’m just going to do it.”

Ho ha, I laugh, popping out of my chair, skipping around the office.  Ho ha, Ho ha, it’s off to work I go…dum, dum, dum, dummmm;  dum dum dum dummmm;  to work I go.

I clapped my hands and shook his hands while he was shaking his head.  My Mickey Mouse ears were flapping wildly.

“Go take a vacation, David…go to the Bahamas, the Caribbean.  Go skiing in the Alps.  I’m off to see a wizard in Malibu.”


23.  That Afternoon the Teleporter Man Appears...

That afternoon the Teleporter Man appears in my office, out of thin air.  I asked him, “I want you to take some friends of mine on a trip, an adventure into another universe.”

“What are these people into?  What turns them on?”

“Power…power turns them on.”

“I know just the place…” and he’s thinkin’ with a razor thin smile.

“When?”  he asks

“Now…” I say, “Can I come along for the ride?”

“Of course.  Let’s go pick ‘em up,” so off we zip into the Teleportation Channel of 3-D reality.  It’s a little bit like cable TV, except you’re in the cable.

I’m very aware of where we’re heading…into solid rock.  I don’t know where it is but we’re going down deep.  And down, and down we go…until we come upon this control center, of sorts.  There are people here who are controlling happenings all over the world—controlling the stock market, the commodity markets, the bond markets, crude oil prices, the price of gold, interest rates, the movement of arms, the weather, radiation levels, X-rays and gamma rays.  These people are controlling the world!  I want to know who controls them.

I ask myself, “Where is the Mastermind?”  and off my thought takes me, right to the edge of forever.  The edge of forever turns out to be an island fortress in the South Pacific.  Are we really sure who won World War II?

This place is called Sovereign Island and it sure is.  It’s a fortress protected by the latest high-tech protection equipment.  I’ve never heard of this place but the Teleporter Man says, “X marks the spot.”

So we rematerialize and we’re in uniform, part of the royal guard on our way to the sovereign of Sovereign Island, and the world!

We march to his rooms and it’s like walking back through time…we’re walking back through the doors of history, hundreds of years, then thousands of years.  I see people, places, and things I’ve only read about…and then we enter into a pyramid that has a copper-plated apex.  We’re back in the times of the Pharaohs!

And there he is!  He did it!  This Pharaoh conquered death…he’s alive, sitting on his throne, the world serving him.

If he conquered death, why don’t we worship him like we do Christ?  Well…I guess we do in a way.  The whole world worships him, and we don’t even know his name.

What is he?  Or maybe he’s a woman, I can’t tell.

“Can you make it out…if it’s male or female,” I ask the Teleporter Man.

He says he’s not quite sure it’s human;  he thinks it could just be an icon we’ve erected with our imagination—an illusion we worship that doesn’t even exist;  a hologram fueled by our desires.  Maybe it’s time.

“If this is what we serve, why do we serve it?”

The Teleporter Man asks me to shut off my thinking for a second.  He’s trying to teleport into the mind of the…the…the necromancer.

And in he goes and I follow along;  we’re in the mind of this thing, trying to understand its intelligence so we can figure out why we worship it.  He’s reading a book;  it’s about changing the world.  He doesn’t want it changed—it’s his world and it works for him, or is it her?

I mindtalk to my Teleporter Man, “Let’s take it on a trip to another universe.  Do you know of a special place?”

His mind talks back to me, “Yes…it’s called the Ugly Universe.  Do you want to come along?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You might not have the stomach for it.”

“But will I have the kidneys for it?  That’s the real question.”

And off we go, hop, skipping, and zipping along with the Necromancer to the Ugly Universe.

And here we are…

“What is this place?”  the Necromancer rumbles.

“This is the Ugly Universe, where all the residue of thought ends up.  This is the place that shows you what your thoughts wrought.”

“What my thoughts wrought?”

“Wealth creates poverty, didn’t you know that?  Look out and see what wealth has created.”

Mr. Necromancer took a good, long look, for in the Ugly Universe everything is exaggerated thousands of times.  He saw the fruits of his labor and it wasn’t too sweet.  The cities were covered in feces…people shit.  Instead of shoveling snow in the winter to get to work, these people in the Ugly Universe had to shovel shit!

It was everywhere!  Waste, residue, shit—it clogged everything.  Nothing worked here.  Forty percent of the population were plumbers, with more in training.

Mr. Necromancer asked, “Where did all this shit come from?”

I couldn’t help laughing…

Mr. Teleporter Man said it comes from every product that was ever manufactured.  All these people care about in the Ugly Universe was the profits from the product.  No one worried about the shit.”

Mr. Necromancer asked us what time daybreak was?  Mr. Teleporter told him it was daytime.

“But you can’t see any light?  Where is all the light?  You can’t tell the shit from the air.”

Well, I could tell the shit from the air.  The air was black, the shit was brown—it was simple.  In the Ugly Universe the air you had to breath was black, and the streets were covered with shit instead of gold.  Simple.

Mr. Necromancer wondered where all the black air came from.  So we went to visit all the smoke stacks and exhaust pipes of all the factories, and cars, and buses, and trains, and power plants.  You could see this black shit billowing out, just like smoke out of a chimney.  And it seemed that no one even cared.

Mr. Necromancer wanted to know what the lifespan was in the Ugly Universe.

Mr. Teleporter Man told him, even though the people were pretty on the outside, they didn’t live very long.

“Why?”  he wanted to know.

“For one thing, the food they eat is so polluted…oh, a picture is worth a thousand words,” so off we went to a slaughterhouse.  The meat was hanging in slabs on hooks.  The flesh was being sprayed a red dye that made it look fresh.  But we could see it was really gray, rotted.  And it had cancers growing on it…and I felt my stomach starting to churn.  I got out of there fast.

I wanted to be near water, that always makes me feel better…but not here.  The water was filled with shit, too.  It looked like a sewer for every household or industrial item you could think of.  It seemed that everyone just threw it in, without ever thinking about what it would do to the water, or the people who had to drink it, or the fish who tried to live in it.

The fish?  I looked along the shore and there they were—schools wriggling out of the water trying to breath the air!  The water was slimed out, turned into a cesspool.  People were gathering the fish, taking them home for Sunday dinner, I presume.

I met back up with my two traveling companions.  Mr. Necromancer says, “All these people are beautiful.  But…” he paused, “their world has turned to shit.  What happened?”

“They lost sight of values,” I said.  “Everyone thought beauty gave life instead of life giving beauty.  Everyone lost sight of who they were inside for what they were outside.  And everything outside turned to shit right before their eyes.”

“Didn’t they have religion…didn’t that help?”

“Yes, they had religion.  The problem was, everything turned to shit while they were waiting to go to Heaven.  Now everyone is so covered with slime, it’s doubtful they’ll make it…too heavy a load.”

Next, we teleport over to this place of ultimate slimebag activity;  they call it Sleazy City.  Mr. Necromancer is all eyes because the woman are all naked and so are the men.  People are posing for sex, their phone numbers tattooed on their private parts…their formerly-private parts.

“Where has love gone?”  I speak up.

“Love…” Mr. Teleporter Man laughs.  “It’s gone nowhere because it was never here.”

Mr. Necromancer wants to know if prostitution is legal here?

“It’s not legal.  If it were, this place wouldn’t be called Sleazy City.  I’d be called Geisha Town.  The strawberries would be off the streets, growing fragrantly in the country again.”

“So sleaze is a result of the need for squeeze,” Mr. Necromancer quips.

I had to chuckle over that one.

Then Mr. Teleporter Man tantalizes us, “In some ports-of-call I’ve visited, if the real need is fulfilled, sleaze leaves.”

“What is the real need?”  we’re wondering.

“Fulfilled love, in all of its facets,” says Mr. Teleporter Man.  “The society that survives is the one who fills its people with unconditional love.  Love filled with conditions leads to sleaze…”

“And sleaze leads to squalor,” I guessed.

“Speaking of squalor, let’s go visit Squalorville,” and off we went.

“In a society where love is based on conditions, respect for self and others is lost.  Disparity is the only emotion that prospers.  And inequality brings on squalor…”

And we looked at it…and it was sickening.  For here were children being born into filth to families living in wretchedness without hope.  Here were children giving birth to children, while the hero of the street waited, the drug lord.  And here were children pounding children, trying to beat the pulse of life out of them for reasons known only to them.  And all of this horror was wrapped around the tease and innuendo of conditional love…do this for me and I’ll do this for you;  and this is what you have to do to be loved.

“What’s the answer,” I asked Mr. Teleporter Man.

“The answer is, each society needs to discover what love without condition is.  And once discovered, it needs to be fed to its citizens by the bushel basket.  Love must be what is lived for—not the love that things bring, but what love brings on its own.”

“Don’t religions teach this?”  I wondered.

“Are you kidding…” Mr. Teleporter Man said, “they teach total conditional love—if you are obedient, you will be rewarded in heaven.  If you give, you shall receive.  If you sin, you will be punished.  Life is not being taught—fear of life is being taught because God is not a personal thing.”

“You can’t teach a populace what morals are,” I said.  “You can instill in them the purpose of morality.  And I would say morality is a cobalt blue sky filled with billowing, white clouds speckled with eagles in flight.  To me, morality is a raging river frothing with spawning salmon.  To me, morality is radiantly healthy people who know their government is providing the best it can in the essentials of life.”

Mr. Teleporter Man finished my thought, “Morality is the offering to every citizen an equality that really exists;  an equality in the marketplace, in education, in industry, and health.”

Mr. Necromancer had seen enough.  It was almost as if he saw himself in the eyes of the children.  I knew he could do something about it if he wanted to.  And maybe his want would become a need;  and his need could become something to desperately fulfill.  And then again, maybe not.

We teleported back to our planet and took a look around.


24.  We Need a New God

 “We need a new God…”

“What are you talking about?”  Robin laughed.

“The world needs a new god to worship;  all these other gods are conditional.”

“What gods?”

“Money, sex, power, and drugs;  pride, youth, and vanity…the religious gods.  All these gods are conditional.  We need a god that doesn’t ask for anything.  We need a god that just gives us the feelings of love.”

“Wasn’t that Jesus?”

“Maybe he was, but his troops certainly haven’t followed in his footsteps.  All they clamor for is more money so they can have more power.  When was the last time you visited a church and they didn’t ask you for money?”

“I see what you mean.”

“The real test is, has the world changed over the two thousand years since Christ?  Do we love each other more?  Do we live in peace?  Are we secure in what we are?  Does everyone have enough to eat?  That’s the odd one.  The Church has been collecting money for two thousand years telling us they’ll feed the poor.  The poor are still starving!  Nothing changes.”

“Go easy on the Catholics.  My mum’s one.”

“Yeah, Robin…everybody’s mum’s one.  See if this works for you—how has the world changed since the time of Buddha or Abraham, or since the time of all of them?  Are we all blind or just a mass of propagandized innocents?

“We listen, we believe their rhetoric.  We want to believe we’ll be saved.  Most people have nothing to live for, except the paradise offered in Heaven.  And what can you take with you?  I’ve never seen a luggage rack on a hearse, so I figure these people must be given’ their money away to the tune of billions of dollars.  Religions have failed, creating a vacuum filled by the New Age.  The New Age has already failed.  Nothing works now except sleaze.”

“So what are you saying.  Mr. Lucky?”

“I’m saying, we need a new god to worship…not to worship, because that’s conditional.  We need a god that lives inside of us, who is equal to us, that lets us feel what unconditional love is.”

“What is unconditional love?”

I felt a sledge-hammer thud in my heart.  It is unfailing love, I listened to my tongue forming the sound vibrations.

I was excited, “Debra, we need to know that life is forever;  it needs to be a reality to us.  And we have to know that everything we see is ephemeral, the gossamer of fairy tales.  What is real is what awaits us in feelings.  And then we can truly give all we have to give—unfailing love to a world that’s desperately crying out for it.  You can see it in the tears of the children.”

“How?…How do you do that, Mr. Lucky?”

“We need a universal language that can tell everyone.  A language that can define unfailing love in emotion;  emotion heavy enough for everyone to feel…mercy felt by even the most hardened heart, grace felt by those chastised.  Then we can move into the 21st century with pride instead of arrogant pomposity.”

Robin almost sung the words— “Music is the universal language.  Everyone understands those heartthrobs.”

“Music,” I whispered.  “The music of praise and adoration…”


25.  I've Seen Enough

I’ve seen enough.  Now I’m going to act…

I called out, loud enough for the world to hear, “Debra, call a meeting with all the people with Balls!”

“Sir?”

“David and his Balls team, and those other people who want our Balls!  Call a meeting, Debra.  Hop to it.”

“Yes, sir.”

So just like that, within a matter or moments, everyone is gathered together to discuss the future of energy on planet Earth.

“I understand you gentlemen are not interested in implementing David’s Balls into the energy system.”

“That’s not it, Mr. Lucky.  His Balls don’t work.  The taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay to bring online a source that won’t work.”

“I beg to differ!  The plant is operating now, providing free, pollution-free energy.  You’ve visited the facility, you’ve inspected our Balls.  You’ve witnessed the electricity production firsthand.  You’ve accepted the fact that Balls is thirty-five percent efficient in its conversion of mechanical energy to electrical energy.  You’ve ascertained for yourself that the ball lifting system uses only ten percent of the energy produced, leaving a net electricity yield of twenty-five percent.  That yield is comparable to hydroelectric plants.  I sense there are other issues we should discuss.”

“The only issue that needs to be discussed is this one—fossil fuel and nuclear fuel provide a higher quality of electricity with less pollution at a lower cost to the taxpayers.  Even if your generation system had advantages over ours, it would cost billions to implement your…your Balls.”

“My Balls operate mechanically.  The plant is about as easy to construct as a roller coaster ride.  It requires no natural resources that it might deplete—my Balls are pulled down by gravity;  gravity is forever.  The plant requires no uranium isotopes nor any type of fail-safe sophisticated cooling system.  Nor do my Balls create any deadly waste.  To activate my Balls, all you do is push one and it rolls into action.  How much more simpler can you get?”

They looked at each other, grinning through their teeth.

“And with my Balls rolling, any country can generate limitless energy without the need for coal or oil to power their power plants.  In areas that depend on imported oil like Japan, South Asia, Israel, Western Europe, and the vast interiors of African and South America, David’s Balls will be their ticket to independence.”

More tongue-in-cheek attitudes.  How do I get these people involved in my appeal?

“And may I emphasize, my Balls produce no pollution, as compared with the megapollution and megadeath of fossil fuel and nuclear energy systems.”

“Megadeath?  Mr. Lucky, let’s be serious!”

Everybody’s awake now.

“Yes…megadeath,” David jumped up with a vengeance.  “Sit and listen, gentlemen.”

He’s hot, “For Americans in 1974, the oil price increases meant some inconvenience—higher gasoline prices and frustrating filling station waiting lines.  For those in the famine zones, the crude oil price hikes meant megadeath.”

“Come off it, David!”  they attacked him.

He doesn’t miss a beat, “Cheap crude oil is necessary to produce the bumper crops made possible by the so-called Green Revolution.  This revolution centered around new technology.  It produced super strains of grain which yielded more food.  The only problem, gentlemen?  This technology required cheap petroleum for fertilizers and insecticides, in addition to inexpensive gasoline and oil to power farm machinery.”

Somebody shouted viciously, “What does this history lesson have to do with power plants?”

“Everything…shut up and listen!”  David towered over them like a Goliath— “When the OPEC counties quadrupled the price of crude in 1973, they literally guaranteed that millions in overpopulated, underdeveloped nations would starve.  Besides making it impossible for these people to farm their own land, the rise in the price of oil increased the cost of imported grain.  Because of the scarcity of oil at affordable prices, the father of the Green Revolution, Dr. Norman Borlaug, declared that his revolution failed.  Millions starved painfully, drained of…”

“Such bunk!”  Mr. Boss Man loathed at the mouth— “Emotional appeals sicken me.”

David faced his enemies head-on, “Why do we need my Balls?  Would you rather starve, Mr. Boss Man?”

“I’ll never starve.”

The fallen idol rose, “If oil continues to be the world’s most valuable commodity, you’ll either starve or be incinerated!”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“There’s nothing funny about this, gentlemen.  This is a vivid, all consuming reality.  If demand for crude oil is reduced by my Balls, the price of crude will fall.  Petroleum will be available to the worldwide farming industry.  The Green Revolution can be born again!  People can eat.”

Mr. Boss Man stood, growling at me, “I’m leaving!”

“Sit and listen,” I growled back.  He sat.

I made a compassionate appeal, “Population experts expect our five billion population to double by the year 2000.  Can you envision twice as many people on the freeways in less than ten years!  How are we going to transport them without Balls?  How are we going to feed all these people without cheap fertilizers?  And if we can’t feed them, is the push going to be for war?  Of course it is.

“Your attitudes are plotting the destruction of our world, the butchering of billions of souls.  Anyone with half-a-brain knows the Middle East is the most strategic point on the planet.  Under that shifting sand and political structure is sixty to seventy percent of the world’s crude.  Whoever controls these oil reserves holds the world by the…”

“Ah, stacked high rubbish.  Mr. Lucky.”  The Boss Man’s lieutenant sneered at us, “we don’t buy any of this scenario.”

I shoved more facts into their faces, “Here’s another reason why we’d better get our Balls rolling.  Countries formerly dominated by Soviet rulers are located in strategic positions along tanker routes leading out of the Persian Gulf.  It’s conceivable that if they closed these sea lanes, our entire economy would collapse within a few days.  Without the flow of imported oil, our government would place an emergency ban on the sale of diesel fuel to reserve that fuel for possible military use.  Without diesel, commerce stops, period!  No toys and no food.  No food leads to panic.  Panic leads to anarchy.  Anarchy leads to resurrection.  Not a pleasant scenario.”

“They would never close those sea lanes…that would be an act of war.”

“Certainly we would negotiate diplomatically, then apply sanctions to cut off their supplies.  But what if both countries are pushed to the brink, their populations starved and battling in the streets?  Who would be more likely to order a first strike?  Certainly not us—we consider nuclear war unsurvivable.  They consider it survivable, mainly because they’ve created massive underground civil defense shelters that will protect most of their population.  Gentlemen, it would be best for the nation, and the world, to implement David’s Balls immediately!

“Ridiculous!  In any case, we can’t be assured that your…your Balls are the answer, Mr. Lucky.  And we would be heavily pressed to…”

I jumped in again for the close, “We can’t be assured that the sun will rise tomorrow, Mr. Boss Man.  But we can be assured of yesterday, and yesterday was filled with megadeath.  We know what a controlled nuclear reaction can do, witness Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And now, with Chernobyl, we know what an uncontrolled nuclear reaction can do.  Do we know the true realities of the fallout from operating nuclear plants?”

“I beg your pardon, sir…we’ve conducted countless tests measuring the radiation levels in and around operating plants.  The radiation is well within the save zone.”

“I don’t believe your tests.  And I don’t believe your concept of safe.  In fact, the test of any energy production system should be just one…common sense!  Balls produces nothing except energy.  It produces it free using gravity.  It pollutes nothing, requires no fuel sources, can be constructed anywhere almost as simply as a child’s erector set, and will last forever without depleting any natural resources.  What more perfect energy source could there be?”

I heard the same old song, “Fossil fuel is providing energy for hundreds of millions of people.  Nuclear fuel is providing energy for millions of people.  We are not going to allow…”

“Gentlemen,” I interrupted.  “I think an attitude adjustment is called for here.”

I put on my Mickey Mouse ears.  Nobody even cracked a smile.  I sensed a certain amount of animosity present, even after I flapped my ears a few times.  I whispered to Debra to locate Mr. Teleporter Man, quick.

“Gentlemen, since my advent as Mr. Lucky, I’ve had the opportunity to meet many people the world over.  I have in my hand a letter passed on to me fresh out of Russia.  It’s a letter of mercy, sent to the entire planet.  May I bore you?

Chernobyl.  In English it means wormwood, the biblical name of the great star that fell from the heavens in the Book of Revelation.  It poisoned a third of the earth’s waters and signaled the Day of Judgment.

Just a myth?  We also thought so.  Except it happened to us.  We call it the Day of the Shadow.  What we feared most in the first days was the rasplavlaniye, the meltdown.  That is when the reactor melts into an incandescent blob, burning itself down through the earth.  We learned the word from the Americans—Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1979.  Nobody was injured then, except in the place where fear is grown.

Almost a decade has passed since the Day of the Shadow, when the cloud blackened the lives of so many in my heartland.  The scope of the destruction and its long-term effects are only now coming to light.  Decontamination efforts have failed to eliminate the radiation.  America has hypothesized about a runaway reactor, but here is the reality.

The power in this thing is the uranium core.  It is a nuclear holocaust waiting to explode.  It’s purpose is to heat water to create steam which spins turbines to generate electricity.  The core is cooled by a sophisticated hydro system that attempts to be fail-safe.  The nuclear reaction within the core is contained by rods which are inserted or extracted from the core to slow or increase the reaction of the atomic particles as they heat the water.  Essentially, a nuclear powerplant is a very large pressure cooker.

Enrico Fermi’s first experimental nuclear assembly at Chicago had a single absorber rod to soak up excess neutrons if things went berserk.  It was suspended by a rope.  Fermi reputedly handed a colleague an axe before they began, advising, If it gets away on us, cut the rope and scram.  The emergency shutdown control has been called the scram button ever since.

It is difficult to describe what happened at 1:23:30 a.m., April 26, 1986.  A safety test was underway.  Through a series of human errors which overrode emergency systems, the pressure cooker exploded.  It is not known today if a total state-of-the-art computerized nuclear reactor could be controlled under these blow-out conditions.  The reason being, there are mechanical requirements necessary to contain a reaction if it breaks into a stampede.  And there may not be enough time to harness the bucking broncos.

As you drive into the Zone, you realize something is missing—people.  Reactor Number Four blew like a firecracker, sending a radioactive cloud in milliseconds three miles into the sky, launching it on a trip shadowing the world.  Is this stuff dangerous?  Battalions of the Red Army and 3,500 volunteers from all over the Soviet Union were hard-pressed just to clear the radioactive debris from the roof of the reactor.  Wearing protective gear made of lead, each person was allowed to work for one minute, then they left.  One minute.  Entire villages have been bulldozed, hosed down, and buried.  Entire towns have been evacuated.

What happened?  In three seconds steam production escalated from 268,000 horsepower to 710,000 horsepower.  Six seconds after the safety test began, a group of automatic control rods were driven out of the reactor.  Eleven seconds after that, two groups of automatic control rods began driving in to curb the fast-rising power.  Thirty-six seconds after the foreman began the safety test, he pressed the scram button.  It was 1:23:40 a.m.  Ten seconds had elapsed.  He was cooked in the next few.  In the following four seconds, the steam generated in the runaway reactor reached a hundred times its full power rating and the kettle exploded with a blast heard around the world.  It was as if 428 million horses were bursting from it.

The seduction of nuclear energy is cheap power.  There must be another power that is cheaper?  Nuclear energy requires a sophisticated society.  It requires almost impossible perfection from man and machine to manage it.  When will we accept reality?

As word of the catastrophe spread, so did the Shadow of Death.  Bellwether waves spread into Scandinavia within a day, through Poland in three days, across Europe in a week.  Spewed from the nuclear furnace, wafted high on a fiery updraft, carried far on strong winds in dry weather, the unseen, unfelt death was soon detected in a world watchful for weapon-test fallout or leakage from local nuclear power plants.

I’ve studied photographs of the remains of charred, charcoaled bodies from auto accidents, homes accidents, chemical fires.  I’ve seen pictures of those who were unlucky to be residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on those fateful days.  I’ve seen the Shadow of Death—the charcoaled silhouette of a mother carrying her child hammered into a rock by the force of a nuclear blast.  But these people died in the flash.  The fireball that consumed them screamed at one million degrees centigrade.  They may already be reborn or in a Heaven.  I don’t know.  It is the ones who feel the fire cooking in their veins.  Those are the ones I bitterly cry for.

Three of the four reactors at Chernobyl are still in operation;  in spite of pressure to shut them down, in spite of warnings from the scientific community that the basic design is unsafe.  Why?  To generate power.  We need the power in this country.

Reactor Four has been entombed in a cube of steel and cement.  It now weights 300,000 tons, six million pounds.  It’s starting to crack.  And when it cracks they’ll attempt to re-entomb it.  That will add more weight.  And then it will start to sink, a sarcophagus within a sarcophagus.  How prophetic was the film, China Syndrome?

The worst areas of contamination extend far beyond Chernobyl, far beyond the Ukraine, into the Byelorussian Republic, hundreds of miles from the reactor.  There are more than 700 towns and villages under rigid controls, and new hot spots are still being discovered to this day.  Six hundred thousand peoples are in sinister jeopardy.

Imagine your state of Iowa, a third of it contaminated, a fifth of its land unusable forever.  Poisoned corn and beef;  poisoned water.  This is Pirke, a village one hundred fifty years old.  Now dead.  The radiation levels here are about twenty times above normal.  People are dying insidious deaths.  It’s one of more than one hundred Byelorussian villages that have been abandoned.  Do you know what it feels like to abandon your home?  To leave because it is poisoned?

One hundred, thirty-five thousand people across the former Soviet Union have been relocated because of Chernobyl, this 20th century wormwood.  It’s estimated another 100,000 will have to be moved over the next five years.  The constant exposure to radiation levels in their villages would give them a lifetime dose above and beyond what is now considered the safe limit.

Acute radiation syndrome.  The words are scientific and they are ugly.  In terms you can understand, you start feeling weak and nauseated, like the flu is hitting you.  You can’t sit up.  You feel feverish.  A deep, insidious pain begins.  You can feel it in the depths of your bones.  Severe diarrhea strikes you as your hair begins to fall out.  You think you have AIDS.  Hemorrhages and ulcers appear on your once silken skin, appear inside your mucous membranes.  Your bone marrow is being destroyed.  All elements of your blood are being depleted by this invisible vampire.  You are dying in great pain and you can’t do anything about it.

And then there is the story of those who show no signs of poisoning.  Except it is hidden in their DNA makeup.  For the primary target of the Shadow of Death is the very nature of life.  Perhaps it was better to die fried, cooked in the first flash rather than to bleed to death internally.  Perhaps it was better to be blown apart by the blast;  incinerated before you could take your next breath.  Perhaps much better than to be born mutated by the nuclear age.

October, 1989.  Ten thousand people defied an official ban, taking to the streets of Minsk demanding more information and stronger measures to clean up the radiation.  In Byelorussia the entire food supply must be shipped in daily from other parts of the country.  Even crates of milk carry specially certified seals, marking their origin and date of processing.  The food grown locally is too radioactive for the people who live here to consume every day, and too valuable to throw away.  So it’s scattered to other parts of our country.  The theory is, if some people eat contaminated food occasionally it won’t hurt them.

At the Institute of Clinical Radiology in Kiev, authorities are preparing for long-term consequences.  An almost-impossible task faces them:  monitoring the health of 600,000 people exposed to Wormwood’s radiation.  No one knows what to expect.  Nothing like this has every happened before.  Skin cancers, blood cancers, breathing diseases, bone marrow diseases, lesions, genetic derangements, tumors everywhere and anywhere…fire in their veins.  And they are dying ugly, hideous deaths.

The next generation.  And generations yet unborn.  What is their fate?  The younger the organism, the greater the risk from radiation.  The longer the period of time of exposure, the greater risk of the cancers.  Kids who are born in such a place, who grow up in such a place, are going to be exposed for a longer period of time than someone who is fifty or sixty years at the time of the catastrophe.

Wormwood will not only affect how long these children live, it will affect the way they live, In a school in Byelorussia, my research team found a biology field trip being conducted in a hallway.  A manmade forest was being studied.  Children are not allowed in the woods under any circumstances.  This should remind you how important nature is, the teacher says, and your responsibility to it.  Many of these students will grow up without ever having picked a mushroom or climbed a tree, part of a grim reality that’s just now sinking in here.  I hope it never comes to your woods.

The people are beginning to ask, Are we ready for nuclear power?  Is it worth it?  We will be agonizing with this one mistake for perhaps as long as man is on the planet.  For somewhere, underneath all that steel and concrete, there’s still a mass of plutonium.  And it will be there, deadly, for the next twenty thousand years.

Mr. Boss Man didn’t hear a thing— “We deny categorically the validity of this letter!  It is meaningless hogwash unless it can be verified by competent…”

“Gentleman,” I interrupted, my voice cracking.  “I’m not a very emotional person, but when something like this happens, your emotions, your feelings are changed.  Don’t you feel yours being changed?”

“We categorically deny…”

“All of a sudden don’t you realize doomsday is somewhere near, maybe next door?  You just open the door and there it is.”

“Doomsday!  Hog wash.”

“Well, let’s go wash the hogs, shall we?”

Mr. Teleporter Man appeared in a flash.  He picked all of us up in his energy field, and off we went to the Ukraine.

“Here it is gentlemen.  We’ve brought you right to the meltdown site.  As you can see over there, Reactor Four has been sealed in a cement sarcophagus.  All sides, the top and bottom, are encased in steel and cement to keep it from boring its way through the earth to China.  What a marvelous energy source nuclear energy is, aye?

“From here we’re going to visit some families in the Ukraine and Byelorussia regions—the Khodemchuk family from Gomel, the Shashenok family from Bobruisk, the Telyatnikov family of Mogilev.  They deserve mention here because their families have been obliterated…”

“We have lived in Gomel for five generations.  It is a beautiful place with gardens and parks and waterways.  It was a good life.  When the Day came we knew we were all dead.  We prepared to suffer a slow, agonizing, humiliating death.  I watched my family die, one after the other.  There was nothing I could do to lessen their misery.  Have you watched your child die before your very eyes?  Have you held their feverish body?  Have you looked into their eyes feeling their wrenching suffering?  You don’t know if there is a Heaven.  You do know there is a Hell.  And now I have the poison in me because it burns like hell must.  And there’s nothing anyone can do to lessen my pain…”

“You didn’t know it was coming.  It was just in the air.  It looked like it was a healthy day, but it wasn’t.  It was deadly.  The sickness comes on slowly.  It starts to hurt when you breath.  And then the joints in your bones start to ache.  And then the pain comes to visit like a fever turning into a knife that cuts you unmercifully as you scream for forgiveness.  And then it is like someone biting your insides as they eat away at your muscles and flesh relentlessly.  It’s too bad a bomb wasn’t dropped.  Then we would have been dead very quickly instead of having to wait.  Is there a God?  I hope so…”

“I was looking toward the rest of my life.  I was just accepted at Moscow University to study International Relations.  I am twenty-one years old.  I will die in three months.  It was nothing I did to die;  I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I have accepted it.  What can I do about it so why not accept it?  It could have been good life.  I was engaged to be married and we wanted a large family to carry on our name.  My brother died last week.  The burial was simple.  And my sisters are dying now.  They are nine and thirteen.  My mother was the first to go.  My father is sick with it too.  My family is gone.  Wrong place, wrong time…”

I get everybody’s attention, tying in this tapestry of thought, “Now, gentlemen, you have a choice.  Which would you rather be?—a victim of one of these families or the consciousness of a gentle flower!”

“How ridiculous!”  they fumed.  “How dare you even suggest that you have power over us;  that you could direct our consciousness into the being of another.”

“It’s not I that has the power.  It’s him,” and in struts Mr. Transplant Man.

I watched him closely;  he’s carrying Ping-Pong paddles…not your secret service super-weapon, for sure.  Everyone starts laughing.  I’m holding my breath, hoping Mr. Transplant Man has ironed out the latest kinks.

“You have the power over me?”  the gentleman’s lieutenant ridiculed.

“I do, sir.”

“Show me,” he laughs.

So Mr. Transplant man walks over to Mr. Lieutenant.  He stands in front of him mumbling.  I couldn’t pick up what he was saying.  Suddenly, he slaps him over the ears with his Ping-Pong paddles, wham!  Then he shouts, “Whoa!”  just like a preacher unlockin’ the devil from some poor folk’s soul.

The lieutenant starts screaming, hollerin’!  Sores start to appear on his skin like the man just turned into a leper.  He screamin’ and yellin’ about the pain, like he’s burning up inside, and sure enough, his skin is startin’ to redden like there’s fire flowing through his veins.

He’s bein’ burned by a flameless fury.  He’s screamin’ about the pain, how it cuts into him, cooking the marrow in his bones.  He’s watching his family dying with the same pain.  He wanted to live in his homeland;  now he wants to die and go to hell because hell would be less painful.  And he starts to cry, and the tears have blood in them, and they leave these horrible red streaks down his face mussin’ up his real expensive business suit…

“What’s going on?”  Mr. Boss Man wants to know.

Mr. Transplant Man says, “We gave him a choice.  He choose power instead of the flower.”

Me, always being one to make a point, quipped, “If you live by the flower, you die by the flower.”


26.  It Was a Few Days Later

It was a few days later.  I was waitin’ for the decision from Mr. Boss Man about my Balls.

He said he would try to work out a compromise.  I said that would be nice, but let’s not wait until the Ugly Universe arrives here.  He said he thought he would have some answers in a few days, as if there was some higher power he had to consult.

Well, while all this was going on, Robin gave birth to our son!  For the first time in my life I could see the beauty of what I am.

You know, when you look into a mirror you can see your face, but you see it reflected back in all this illusion of glass and mirror…you never really see your own face.  All you can “see” is someone else’s face.

When you see your child for the first time, that changes.  You see yourself in his eyes, you see her body grow just like yours must have, you listen to the laughter that must have come out of you in some yesterday.  And somehow that laughter just all turns to tears as the sun rises and the sun sets.

When I look back over my life, I pretty much see me as Mr. Lucky.  Why?  Well, the old Boss Man decided he would rather die like a flower, so he let us have all the Balls power.  David’s Balls are now all over the world, humming with free, pollution-free energy for all.  And it didn’t take long for car manufacturers to develop high-tech electric cars and trucks, and for cities to lay in electric track systems.  All they had to do was dig a trench down the freeway and drop it in.  Simple!

And guess what?  Everybody liked electric powered vehicles much more that gasoline powered or diesel powered.  They were quiet, powerful, sleek and safe…I wish I could take you for a ride so you could feel the zip.  And think of all the time that was saved…you don’t have to pump electricity!

But best of all, everyone could breathe again.  There was no chance of Earth becoming part of the Ugly Universe.  Yes, sir…David’s Balls led the way!

And folks felt so good and healthy because they were eatin’ at our Fast Food Health Food Restaurants.  And when you feel good and healthy, you think real clearly.  New inventions started poppin’ up from everywhere.  LifeDream financed as many as we could.  Associations were created by people who wanted to give back instead of take out;  Clothing Associations and Food Associations like the Homeless Construction Company we started so many years ago.

All these new associations and inventions created more employment for the homeless and the disenfranchised.  And the Brain/Mind Machines educated them into the new technologies…they began to give back to a society that gave something to them besides heartache and drugs.

And then something really interesting happened.  All the Mr. Boss Man’s decided they would rather die like a flower, because as you know, a flower is born again in the Spring.

And since they all had sons and daughters, they began to consider the possibility that in some way their spirit would be reborn in them.  With that revelation they decided to leave a legacy for all, and for themselves—namely a world that lives in responsible love.  And so they did, everyone started to give back to the mother, the good old mother earth.

And then everybody began dancing in the streets.  Daniel Lovesong’s music flooded the world.  He was a songwriter we helped along.  And street musicians started creating wonderful songs about nature and God, love and peace, and all that.  We called ‘em praise and adoration songs.  And everyone was so happy, they didn’t need sorrow—for that’s what age is, sorrow.  Mr. Laughter Man kept everybody giggling.  Everyday, somewhere on planet earth, was Mardi Gras Day!

While all this was goin’ on, people were advisin’ me about the battle.  I would ask, “What battle?”

“The battle between the forces of good and evil,” someone would say, “the war in the heavenlies.”

I wondered, what does that have to do with me?  The only war I knew about was the war to bring joy here.  Dashing through the snow, in a one horse open sleigh, O’er the fields we go, laughing all the way…my anthem.

So they would tell me, “Out of the vastness past, throughout the history of mankind on this earth, and into the future, the battle rages on.  God versus Satan, light against darkness, truth against sin, life against death, heaven against hell!”

“Oh,” I’d say, “That battle, for the Heavyweight Championship of the World.  I already know who won,” and I’d go about my business, all is calm, all it bright.

Well, eventually my employment contract ran out with the Chamber of Commerce of Las Vegas, so Robin and I moved with our family to Aspen, to Santa Fe, to Newport, to St.  Croix, to Carmel, to London, to Paris, to Zurich, to Maui, to the Hamptons, to Sedona, and a few other places.  I had some savings.

And remember, LifeDream also had all those interests in all those projects that went to nurture the earth and the people.  Not only would I die with this wonderful feeling in my soul, enough money flowed through us to cover the earth like fertilizer.

Maybe that’s what we did—fertilized!

Everywhere Robin and I went, we looked for our favorite tree.  And guess what?  We found it…and Robin would suck on my earlobe and I would kiss her toes and it still feels good.

And then there were all the people we met…people selling anything you could think of.  And once we told them what we were interested in, namely products that give back instead of take out, they started inventing them.  It almost became a contest.  People were livin’ for something besides money.  They were livin’ for a purpose—to leave the legacy of a brighter tomorrow for their children’s children.  And do you know, they just might come back as a little child again.

Every once in a while Robin and I would visit places we’ve been to before.  I even went back to where I was raised.  I walked down the same streets I did thirty-five years ago.  I stopped in front of my childhood home;  the memories crashed over me like the raging surf.  I remembered the voices of my friends calling me to play ball.  I saw my father driving down the street in his ‘57 Ford, home from work, proud to be an American.  I saw him waving at me while mom watched from the front door.  I smelled the mashed potatoes and gravy…and I cried, and I really wondered what life was all about.

I wanted to stop people on the street and ask them what they felt.  Do you feel pain and anguish like I do?  Are you scared like me?  And most of all, I want to know if you feel love a little bit more because of the things I’ve done.

What’s business, I wondered?  It’s a big game of Monopoly, played by big kids.  What about life?  It’s a little bigger than that.  Love?  It’s all around in all shapes and forms;  you just have to look for it.  Joy…it’s everything there is and everywhere, and it’s free.  And the only rose without a thorn is a friend.  How good of a friend have I been?

Some of us have watched the Wizard of Oz at least twenty times.  We’ve studied the part of the Lion;  we’ve learned it well.  Some of us have played the Tinman.  Others, the Scarecrow or Toto, the dog.  Some have been the bad witch;  others, the good witch.  Which witch are you?

I often wonder is the reality I see real, or is there something hidden that’s whispering to me?  What was it that made me Mr. Lucky?  What was my special power?  And when I stare into the eyes of the children, what is it I see?

Well, one day Robin and I were driving through the desert and I said, “Let’s swing by Vegas and see a show.”

So we drove over to Caesar’s Palace and I start hearin’ these voices.  I’m thinking, Uh oh, I’m in trouble!  I never did learn how to play craps so I was just listening to the slots.  You know what they were sayin’…”play me, play me, play me, Mr. Lucky!”

I asked Robin if she had one silver dollar.  She did.

Well, I walked up to the one shoutin’ the loudest.  I slipped in the dollar and down it went, down the throat of that machine…gulp.  I yanked the arm and sure enough, here comes one bar, here comes the second, and here comes the…it’s a cherry!?

Well, isn’t that somethin’?  Somebody else must have the power.


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