Watching City Hall #196, JULY 7,2003

In memoriam:
Jimmy Dale Brown
4-18-32 to 7-6-03

Jimmy was my big brother. When I was 3 years old in 1947, he ran away and joined the Army. Like me, he was a little guy and they soon figured he was only 15. Didn’t stop him. Next year, he joined the new Air Force. He was out of boot camp before they figured out he wasn’t old as he claimed. Out the door! The next year, with mom & dad’s permission, he joined the Navy at 17. Jimmy wanted to be in the military.

I was 5 years old when he went into the Korean War, riding the U.S.S. Dixie (a destroyer). That was before warships looked like floating cargo containers and the Dixie was the cutest little destroyer. I guess it’s a male thing, but the symmetry of a classic warship has always elicited an admiring fascination from me. 13 years later, I was serving on one myself. Jimmy was always there. He got married at 19 and he and my sister-in-law, Frieda, made it past the 50-year mark. That’s a lot of years married to the same person. That’s a lot of years for anything.

The military and Frieda defined Jimmy for life along with one other factor that most people wouldn’t mention, but hey I’m nothing if not indiscrete. In 1963, my brother started having hallucinations. He was quickly diagnosed as a schizophrenic and was granted a medical discharge from his beloved Navy. From then on, when he didn’t take his medication, he suffered and those closest to him suffered.

Watch Billy Bob Thornton’s ‘Sling Blade’? He talks about the ‘Nervous Hospital’. It is a term I knew well before Billy Bob made it part of the lexicon. There are many types of schizophrenics. Those in Jimmy’s category are not dangerous. Trouble is, they never admit there is anything wrong with them. Keeping them on their ‘meds’ is a real life-long battle. I recall once, receiving a call that he’d gone off his pills, disappeared and turned up 2,000 miles away having given away his car & money and was wandering barefoot in the snow when they found him. His heart stopped 5 times that night and, yet he lived. He came back to us and for pretty much the last 10 or 15 years of his life, stayed with his prescription (although he’d always say: “there’s nothing the matter with me, you know”) he’s the reason I was a great ghetto coach and teacher of the severely disturbed. None of them had it as bad as my own brother.

Jimmy is the reason I can more closely empathize with the mentally disturbed people who fill the streets of San Francisco. I know that with a bit of medication, they can be ‘normal’. What they’re missing is the strong family structure my brother enjoyed. When he was ‘out there’, it was never for very long. Once he was reeled in and had his meds adjusted, he went back to being the dispenser of knowledge. He taught me to swim. He taught me to fire any number of weapons and to hunt. He taught me to dream of places beyond St. Louis and to know that I could reach them. He taught me to drive. He taught me that everyone who acts weird in the street is not a monster. Bon nuit, Jimmy. I’ll see you on the other side.

Life in the country

When you’re not techno-savvy and you travel (even a short distance) bad things can happen. After 2 days in Sonoma County, I could no longer send or receive e-mail. I couldn’t post my columns and, the FBI had surrounded the house and were yelling things about free speech only being two words. It was like being back home in Missouri. I finally got them to go away by walking out shirtless with my beer belly draping over the belt line of my ill-fitting shorts and throwing crumbled up Budweiser cans at their tank while screaming incoherently about states’ rights. They knew right away that I was one of them. Damn those guys can drink! We ran out of my booze halfway through the interrogation but they’d anticipated a long siege and were well prepared. We drank solidly for 48 hours and ended up dancing naked and smeared with ‘war paint’ made from a combination of used motor oil and fertilizer. Our music, of course, was an old Bee Gees tape. The rancher next door called in alarm when we slaughtered one of his cattle at 3 am for the bonfire but I assured him that these were ‘gov’ment’ people and that we were conducting ‘gov’ment’ business. People up here know not to mess with the govment. Just to punctuate the point, two ace snipers broke out a 50 caliber Sharp’s rifle and we took turns shooting at the ole boy’s porch light at a half mile’s distance. Took 3 boxes of cartridges to finally douse the damned thing and by then the house was on fire. Go figure. Don’t mess with the govment. They got us back good though. In the chill before dawn, the neighbors began to return fire and some of them were damned good shots. Still, we had two big advantages. First, the feds had come to raid me after first raiding a Norteno meth lab and when the shooting starting coming from the other direction, they started passing that shit up and down the line. I mean, we were like, stoked! Then, of course you couldn’t expect a bunch of Sonoma ranchers to even think about this, but hell, we had all the air cover you could ever want. By daybreak, every building in the valley was burning and the F-16’s were strafing everything that moved. We took many scalps that day and counted mucho coup.

OK, OK this is derivative of Hunter Thompson and meant to be. I’ve been told many times that my stuff is similar to his (bullshit, he’s a drunken genius, whereas I am only a genius at getting drunk) So, I’m like, out here in the sticks. I’m enjoying it, but, the only news I have from San Francisco comes from the copy of the Chronicle I drive into town to pick up each day. Well duhhh! Trying to get local news from the Chron is like , like you know? (Did I mention my friends have teenagers and the vocabulary is like contagious?) Anyway, the Chron prints nothing worthwhile, so I count upon a few phone calls from the City to find out what’s going on (most seem to be threatening in nature for some reason - can you believe your student loan officer can find you where you’re house-sitting?) I sort the calls and look at the rolling fields with the hills in the background and unwind by thinking perverted thoughts.

Who wants to be the mare?

Personally, as a journalist, I’d prefer the race for ‘mayor’ should be lots like an Oklahoma land rush kind of thing. You know, everyone rushing madly to stake out the best positions. Wagons turning over. Women and children screaming. Low candidate in the polls strung up each morning at sunrise (talk about ‘ranked’ choice). A classical Western election. But, do they listen to me? Ohhh, nooo!

End of time

Eileen is going into town and she’s gonna paste this up for me before she goes and so this is the end of this stuff for today. Give the first person you see in the mirror tomorrow a break all day.

Bye bro: