Chapter Four

“Hello … Hello … Hello …?”

The daily news records time in such a way that gives detail to man’s existence, and thus, provides much of the material from which future generations will determine our historic definition. Without the news, how could one ascertain one’s own place in time? Therefore, my evening always begins with the newspaper. News stimulates the waking mind, puts one into the mix so to speak. Although my day begins with night, reading the paper is one of the few rituals I share with the waking world. Going outside directly afterwards, however, is another matter entirely.

DRUNK DRIVER DRAGS

TODDLER 20 BLOCKS

License Suspended 64 Times

The Igbo tribe of West Africa, most notably southern Nigeria, believed that the first person with whom you exchange greetings on any given day is the most important. If they are friendly and trustworthy, your day will go well. If they are hostile or indifferent, your day will go badly. Subsequently, it is especially important to ignore everyone until you can exchange greetings with the right person. I believe this to be a wise policy and have found it substantiated many times.

FAMILY OF FIVE

MUGGED AND SHOT ON SUBWAY

Trainload of Commuters Watch Silently

Unfortunately, the times we live in are especially foul and disagreeable. The newspaper awaits me each evening, perched recklessly behind the front door, waiting to fall into my foyer and release the ugly world into my safe haven. Although I faithfully read it, front to back, even if it takes all night, I find within it enough evil (nation upon nation, government upon citizen, parent upon child) to last indefinitely.

SERBIANS KILL MUSLIMS

MUSLIMS KILL CROATS

CROATS KILL SERBS

Just Another Day in Bosnia

Modern society has returned man to the primeval forest. Meaningless jobs reduce us to operating with our most base instincts. We’re like leopards hunting in concrete jungles overgrown with greed: survival of the fittest with money replacing food. Families separate as soon as possible. Parents can’t wait for their kids to grow up, get out and support themselves. Upon growing up, children can’t wait to commit their parents to nursing homes.

SNIPER KILLS MOM

Modern leadership has reduced itself to governing populations by statistics. The individual feels like a number on a list or a worker ant in an overgrown anthill. Neighborhoods have disintegrated into high-security skyscrapers where apartment dwellers know little of the people next door, or into ghettos where parents keep children indoors for fear of random gunfire.

Such isolation breeds anonymity, and anonymity breeds detachment from all obligation or decency. Words such as “good” and “bad” no longer have a clear definition beyond whether or not one gets caught. How can anyone get caught if everyone is too cynical, hardened, or plain scared to bother paying attention to anything but the most outrageous acts? Print a story about a 5 year old girl tortured to death by her parents and they line up for blocks to view the corpse, tears washing away the guilt of their own crimes against humanity. However, if they hear yelling, smacking, and crying next door, they bury their heads deeper into the pillow, roll over, and try to get some sleep.

NOTEBOOK, PAPER, PEN, AND A

9 MILLIMETER SEMI-AUTOMATIC

Junior Is Ready For Another Day At School

Anonymity breeds lawlessness. No one understands this better than children. Leave a group of children unsupervised in a room, come back in a few hours, and you’ll witness a pecking order independent of morality if not complete disorder. Children need parental supervision. Grown-ups either need a strong community consensus of those they know and respect or, if all else fails, the fear of God. Now that man has isolated himself from his fellows, and God for all practical purposes is dead, who will check man’s natural inclination towards selfishness in the name of survival of the fittest? In the ensuing chaos, man’s Darwinian instinct for self preservation will kick in. He’ll justify all kinds of law and order legislation based on “an eye for an eye” mentality of revenge.

Bring back the death penalty, the more painful the better.

It merely reinforces that might is right.

Why waste time, money and energy on rehabilitation,

when corporal punishment is quicker, cheaper and easier?

For every dollar we take away from education, ten is spent on institutionalization. For every new prison we build, another school deteriorates into a holding cell. The kid you toss out on to the street today without skills or self-esteem is the punk that will mug you tomorrow. It’s no wonder that youth crime is rising and will continue to rise in spite of all the feeble attempts by politicians, bureaucrats, and the other institutional icons of modern man to stem the tide. The young intuitively develop the very skills they need to survive. What models of behavior are left that offer them a practical alternative?

The Igbo had a simple saying for this, “It takes a village to raise a child.”

IS THE KING OF POP

A QUEEN OF PERVERSION?

Boy’s Family Charges Singer With Molestation

As the mind of man gets simple, society deteriorates and everyone becomes a potential threat. We’ve become a nation of falsehoods, a society of strangers, people hiding their true feelings in fear that it can and will be used against them. The modern forest is more sophisticated, the pecking order more complex, and the armaments more deadly. Without guile, a simple man like myself is unarmed against such weaponry and unprotected from the evils slyly hidden behind the smiling masks worn by others.

WACO WACKOS BURN

Botched Raid on Branch

Davidians Fueled by Fate

Consequently, during my first foray of the day, I’m unable to acknowledge the neighbors. In a co-op, this is not always the best policy. My monthly maintenance bill is automatically paid from my trust account each month. My apartment was paid for in full after the family tragedy. Regardless, the co-op board has been trying to rid the building of me since I came of age and has engaged in an endless running battle with my lawyers (praise the Gods I inherited them as well). I’m regarded as an unsuitable tenant, me, who humbly keeps to himself. Where they got this idea, I do not know, but I can hardly exchange greetings with such people. It would be opening the door to their evil without defense.

TEENS TOSS OBJECTS

OFF PARKWAY OVERPASS

Bowling Ball Bashes Baby’s Brains ¹⁷

Although I’ve lived here throughout childhood, I know few by name. How can I take a chance greeting strangers? Any Igbo worth his salt would have eagerly concurred. It was strongly recommended that if one is forced to exchange pleasantries with a hostile presence, one must return home at once and not go out until the next sunrise or risk imminent danger.

However, I can avoid the hostiles that surround me if I make it to the lobby, a bastion of safety. There, doormen patrol around the clock. Doormen are excellent people with whom to exchange first greetings. They always smile and say hello in an unthreatening and sincere manner.

Driven south, young Henry made his way into Mesilla, just 25 miles north of the border. It was the closest he’d ever been to Mexico, but he might as well have been south of the border for he had never seen so many Mexicans before in all his life. The men wore wide-brimmed hats and loose clothing that seemed very practical to a boy who had just ridden almost 150 miles through some of the roughest country in the southwest. The women made an even deeper impression on the young man. Long black hair, rich auburn skin, and deep dark eyes with an intriguing mixture of sadness and mystery beckoning him, as if the man who possessed the right key to their hearts could unlock the secret to life.

It was here that young Henry started picking up his first phrases of Spanish, a language he took to quite naturally.¹⁸

I’ve even learned salutations in the Spanish language as a sign of mutual respect. The doormen respond benevolently, tolerating questions on the subtle differences between hasta luego and hasta la vista with infinite patience.

It was also in Mesilla that Henry met another Irish youth his age, Tom O’Keefe, and together they decided to set off for the cattle-rich Pecos Valley in search of work. When asked for his name, Henry answered, “William Antrim, but you can call me Billy.”¹⁹

Such exchanges, always friendly, set a favorable tone, forming a protective armor of positively-charged ions shielding me from the ugly, unsterile world.

Tom had good news for Billy. If he would meet him just before the sun rose on the outskirts of town where the road forks off to the old Spanish graveyard, Tom would show up later with a pair of horses, one for Billy to ride. Billy was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth and readily accepted. He’d been walking so long he’d taken to plugging the holes in his shoes with newspaper.²⁰

Besides affording me the opportunity to go outside with the proper aura of protection required by the Igbo, my compadres do many other kind things for their amigo gringo. They also sign for the materials I’ve ordered concerning Billy the Kid and the Old Southwest. Such books and videos are usually delivered door to door by UPS men and the like, but I can’t trust interaction with such strangers. As a result, my packages arrive doubly blessed, as long as I can make it to the lobby.

There was a road, north, through the San Agustin Pass that would take them up through Tularosa and to the U.S. Indian Agency. There, they could get an escort through the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation and head through a small town called Lincoln, also the county seat for the Pecos Valley. Billy heard it was the best place to inquire about work, especially for men good with a gun. Tom, however, knew a better route east through the Guadalupe Mountains that would take them into the southern tip of Chisum country near the Texas border where there were lots of paying jobs either working for the New Mexican cattle king or against him. Unknown to Billy, the Guadalupe Mountains were located at the southwestern tip of the Indian Reservation and roving bands of renegade Apaches were known to supplement their meager reservation rations with frequent ambushes along the old Indian trails.²¹

A safe time to leave the apartment is shortly after 10 a.m. before I go to bed. By then all the ants have crawled out to work and I can safely leave my den. Maids and maintenance crews, often relatives of the doormen, patrol our dim hallways, but they are friendly. It’s best when one addresses them first—¡Buenos días! ¡Buenas tardes! ¿Una Noches Bonito, no?

After over a hundred miles of hard riding, out of food and water, they started climbing an old Indian trail over the Guadalupe Mountains. Spying a pool of water at the bottom of a canyon below them, Billy dismounted and took their only canteen down the cliff to fill it up. While at the bottom he heard gunshots echoing through the canyon. He scrambled up the cliff, but by the time he made it to the top, it was too late. There was no sign of O’Keefe, the horses, or anything, including his bedroll. On foot yet again, Billy stumbled down the mountains as the sun set coldly behind him.²²

The crucial consideration, however, is timing. One mustn’t go out during high risk periods of potentially negative encounters. Such times are during morning and evening rush hour. There are also pockets of danger zones during the day. For example: dinner-time delivery boys emanate especially evil ions.

He hid during the day and walked at night. With the mountains descending into arid foothills, the kid grew tired and hungry. Losing the strength to even carry an empty canteen, he threw it away. It was on the third day, no longer caring about the threat of Indians or the heat, that he lay down to rest without realizing he was only a few hundred feet from the Rocky Arroyo river. He lay there in a semi-conscious state unable to move as the sun reached its apex and temperatures soared to 110. Fortunately for the kid, however, a few of Ma’am Jones’ ten children had snuck away to play by the river. They overheard the kid moaning and ran to tell their mother.²³

Timing is everything.