Friends of Liberty

''No one remembers Obama,'' says class of '83 Columbia University

by Dick Eastman
November 21, 2009

The point is that we do not have an executive branch of the Federal Government and no judicial appointee is valid because an imposter charlaton--and enemy infiltrator, not the President of the United States--appointed them. The only valid exeuctive authority in the US today is state and local government. Soldiers can come home now -- they are needed to reinstate the Constitution and save the republic and the people.

Looking for evidence of Obama's past, Fox News contacted 400 Columbia University students from the period when Obama claims to have been there, but none remembered him.

Wayne Allyn Root was, like Obama, a political science major at Columbia who also graduated in 1983. In 2008, Root says of Obama, "I don't know a single person at Columbia that knew him, and they all know me. I don't have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia Ever! Nobody recalls him. I'm not exaggerating, I'm not kidding."

Root adds that he was also, like Obama, "Class of '83 political science, pre-law" and says, "You don't get more exact or closer than that. Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him. At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack! And five years ago, nobody even knew who he was. The guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange? It's very strange."

Obama's photograph does not appear in the school's yearbook and Obama consistently declines requests to talk about his years at Columbia, provide school records, or provide the name of any former classmates or friends while at Columbia.

NOTE: Root graduated as Valedictorian from his high school, Thornton-Donovan School, then graduated from Columbia University in 1983 as a Political Science major (in the same class as President Barack Obama WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN IN).

How to send secure e-mail

Date: November 19, 2009
Reporting From: Pattaya, Thailand

Last week I sent out a few notes decrying the British government's choke hold on privacy. It's not just happening in the UK, though. All over the world, governments are monitoring emails, and I committed to writing up a piece about how to secure your email.

Sending an unsecured email is like shouting something across a crowded room... if you expect the information to be kept private that is probably one of the worst methods available. You might as well rent a billboard so everyone can see.

The problem with the internet is that there are so many touch points. Email traffic is routed across a hierarchy of networks, and between the sender, the receiver, the various email hosts, internet service providers, etc., there are a number of nodes that have access to our data. Consequently, network transmissions are anything but private and secure.

Governments figured this out a long time ago. In the United States, for example, the government set up a series of special encrypted networks that function just like the internet. The Department of State and Department of Defense (ok, offense) uses a network called JWICS.

JWICS, pronounced Jay Wicks, stands for Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System-- essentially; it is a secure version of the regular Internet. Special computers that sit in buildings with no windows communicate with each other through high level encryption algorithms.

Functionally, JWICS looks similar to the Internet that everyone else uses-- there's email, web pages, etc. From a technical perspective, though, JWICS is highly secure, and the government uses it to transmit classified information up to the Top Secret level.

While you can't plug in to the government's classified networks, you can use free software to create your own secure environment.

PGP, which stands innocuously for "Pretty Good Privacy," is the closest you could possibly get to NSA level encryption. The algorithm uses a unique 'public key / private key' model that has confounded government authorities around the world.

It works something like this:

Everyone who uses PGP has two 'keys', a public key and a private key. For a physical example, imagine you literally have two physical keys and a lock box. The public key is appropriately named because you give it out to everyone... you go down to the locksmith and make hundreds of keys to hand out to your friends and business associates.

Anyone who wants to send you a secure message can write it on a piece of paper and put it in the lock box. Using their public key, they can lock the box, but they cannot unlock it. The only person who can unlock the box to read the message is you, using your private key. Naturally, you keep your private key secret.

In the email world, it essentially works the same. The sender will encrypt a message using your public key. Once this happens, the email message will look like a bunch of gibberish. This gibberish is what is sent across the network, so anyone who intercepts the message will only be able to see the gibberish, not the actual message.

Once you receive the message, you decrypt the gibberish with your private key, and voila, the original message is displayed in plain text.

So how secure is PGP? In a word, very. Nothing is unbreakable, but it would take teams of analysts and supercomputers quite a number of years to crack the code, if they could do it at all. Bottom line, governments will have to REALLY want your data to invest the time and money into cracking the code.

I'll skip the math, but the PGP algorithm is based on matching together incredibly large prime numbers-- I'm talking millions of digits. Huge. Mathematicians occasionally 'discover' new prime numbers, and while most of the world laughs off these nerdy academics, each new prime number adds a whole new dimension to encryption technology.

So how do you implement this?

PGP caters to big businesses looking to secure their communications, though they do have some solutions available for individuals. Personally, I would recommend using the 'free' version of PGP under the GNU general public license.

It's called the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), available at GnuPG.org/download

All the documentation is available right there on the website; just read, and it will tell you exactly what to do.

Once you have GPG installed, I suggest installing FireGPG as well (getfiregpg.org) if you use Firefox as your web browser. FireGPG is an add-on for Firefox that can instantly encrypt/decrypt plain text right within your browser window; if you use a web-based email like Yahoo! or Gmail, FireGPG is a very easy solution.

Until Tomorrow,

Simon Black
Senior Editor, Sovereign Man

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Coming Soon: Dogshit Park & other atrocities

Do Not Accept the Swine Flu Vaccination

Bil Der Berg sent a message to the members of Fight New World Order.

--------------------
Subject: Swine flu vaccine, DONT take it!!!

Some of the new H1N1 (swine flu) vaccines are going to be made by Novartis. These shots will probably be made in PER.C6 cells (human retina cells) and contain MF59, a potentially debilitating adjuvant. MF-59 is an oil-based adjuvant primarily composed of squalene.

All rats injected with squalene (oil) adjuvants developed a disease that left them crippled, dragging their paralyzed hindquarters across their cages. Injected squalene can cause severe arthritis (3 on scale of 4) and severe immune responses, such as autoimmune arthritis and lupus.

Please people spread the word!!!

The Facts About Kim Jong-il's Private Train

englishnews@chosun.com / Nov. 09, 2009 09:48 KST

The private train North Korean leader Kim Jong-il uses on his trips either within the communist country or abroad consists of six around 90 carriages, and some 20 train stations have been built specifically for his own use. To defend Kim against attack, two separate trains precede and follow the main entourage, one handling reconnaissance and the other security.

South Korean and U.S. intelligence have been spying on Kim's private train with satellites, U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and other surveillance equipment, as well as testimonies of North Korean defectors. Among private stations for Kim's train are the Pyongyang Yongsong and Kangdaedong stations. Others are in Wonsan, Shineuiju and Hyesan, which are no more than 30 km away from his private retreats.

When Kim travels, three separate trains operate in conjunction. The advance train handles security checks to see whether the rail tracks are safe. Behind Kim's train is another carrying his bodyguards and other support personnel. Kim's train travels at an average speed of 60 km/h. Around 100 security agents are sent ahead of time to stations and sweep the area for bombs. Before Kim's train nears the station, the power on other tracks is shut off so that no other trains can move.

Kim's train is armored and also contains conference rooms, an audience chamber and bedrooms. Satellite phone connections and flat screen TVs have been installed so that the North Korean leader can be briefed and issue orders.

Sources say when Kim gets out of his train and moves to his private retreat, he is driven in a Mercedes or other car that has been brought along. When Kim travels within North Korea aboard his private train, IL-76 air force transport planes, MI-17 helicopters and other aircraft provide security support and haul necessary personnel and equipment to nearby airports. So far, Kim has taken 129 on-the-spot guidance trips around North Korea, matching the record he set in 2005 and probably exceeding it by the end of the year.

Fort Hood triggerman aided team on Homeland Security task force

November 06, 2009
9:21 am Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan

NEW YORK – Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday's massacre at Fort Hood, played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama's transition into the White House, according to a key university policy institute document.

The Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University published a document May 19, entitled "Thinking Anew – Security Priorities for the Next Administration: Proceedings Report of the HSPI Presidential Transition Task Force, April 2008 – January 2009," in which Hasan of the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine is listed on page 29 of the document as a Task Force Event Participant.

Hasan received his medical degree from the military's Uniformed Services University School in Bethesda, Md., in 2001.

Get "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America," autographed, from WND's Superstore.

Noting that the Obama administration transition was proceeding, the GWU Homeland Security Policy Institute report described on the first page the role of the Presidential Transition Task Force as including "representatives from past Administrations, State government, Fortune 500 companies, academia, research institutions and non-governmental organizations with global reach."

While the GWU task force participants included several members of government, including representatives of the Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, there is no indication in the document that the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition, other than to serve in a university-based advisory capacity.

Daniel Kaniewski, deputy director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, affirmed to WND in a telephone interview this morning that the Nidal Hasan listed as attending the meetings of the HSPI Presidential Transition Task Force was the same person as the alleged shooter in the Fort Hood massacre.

Video of Hasan at the event, carried originally by C-SPAN and reported by MSNBC, can be seen below:

Kaniewski said Hasan attended the meetings in his capacity as a member of the faculty of the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine, not as a member of the HSPI Presidential Task Force...

Daze of Whine and Neuroses (or, Why Can't We All Just Get Along?)

Ron Paul and Senate Candidate Rand Paul on the Republican/Libertarian Rift

Fear and Loathing in Amsterdam: the Smoke abortion

by Todd Brendan Fahey
(Commissioned by Smoke magazine, October 23, 1996; "killed" by Smoke owner Robert Lockwood, November 3, 1996)

A Self-Reflexive Fantasy/An Expressionist Argument...a trip down the Rabbit Hole:
Is this the new face of Gonzo?; The New Paradigm Shuffle?...or Just a Hot New Way of Getting By?

"I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it--a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures. A group photo of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness. It is not a trade that attracts a lot of 'slick' people; none of the Calvin Klein crowd or International jet set types. The sun will set in a blazing red sky to the east of Casablanca before a journalist appears on the cover of People magazine."

-- Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80s

[E-mail transmission from Fahey to R.U. Sirius]

Subject: 'Fear & Loathing Indeed'

--but fr this place. P.U. Gotta boogie out of Louisiana SOON. Amsterdam was a dream. Just a dream. Where do I begin? OK: Fast notation style: Finished the Smoke piece three days ago. It blisters. Bought 4 pieces of original art, blew my Smoke $$$, but worth it. Got fantastic head from a Peruvian slut. wOw. Got meself into a rave/house music mag in the Netherlands--Basic Groove: gonna be a meaty piece, & photos too! Am in this week's campus newspaper, back at the ranch. A good article; makes me look pretty paranoid, but I probably am. Got a good idea for a full length Fear and Loathing in Amsterdam novel. On which, more later. Smoked the kill hash; ate pure ecstacy (duzn't do much for me any more, but my friends tripped hard); a whammer LSD trip, rivaling anything I've ever been in touch w/; cubensis 3 times, 2 of them hardtrips. Peddled 35 copies of Wisdom's Maw: placed copies in: W.H.Smith (London-based); The Athenaeum Bookshop; The English Bookstore, & Conscious Dreams, a righteous head shop (took 15). Also got on TV. The broadcast was taped tonight (was on a plane home, but have a tape); came on after Philip Glass (the composer). Yup. Pretty neat. I TORE IT UP! Was pretty sure I was gonna lose my mind during days 2-6, but got it pretty well back together. I haven't used drugs like that in years. But FUN. The Red Light District is amazing. Too many sluts, too little money (actually, a 30 minute head job goes for 100 guilders, which is about $65...

"making it hot for them" T. Southern

--tbf

There is almost no way to explain myself here, in the 2500 words alotted me by Smoke. I'm thankful like hell to have the chance to fill up a couple of their expensive pages, but it is a loaded prospect I face herewith. The enormity of the situation came to me on the plane ride over--an uneventful 8 1/2 hrs through the sky--a straight shot from Houston, the highlight of which was the Michael Keaton flop, Multiplicity, a disturbing film about a slacker who can't advance his fortunes, no matter how many of himself he clones. I was thumbing through my hardback first-edition copy of The Great Shark Hunt (which I bought for a bargain $17 at some second-hand bookstore in Lafayette, and in which some sad-hearted fucker had written once: "To Nancy, the love of my life, 1979"...), culling what last-minute nuggets I could from my brutal Lord and Savior. It is an impossible act to follow, & I am too fundamentally honest to begin yammering about how the world really needsanother Gonzo journalist around. The truth is, Hunter S. Thompson is a terrible genius, whose star is about to rise again. Soon there will appear a scholarly look at the mad Doktor's Life-Rant, and we will have him to kick around for another twenty or so years of internecine egghead warfare...which could make a decent segue into this Amsterdam piece.

I have been tracking Hunter Thompson since 1983, since on one sunny Santa Barbra afternoon and helplessly stoned on Humboldt, I was allowed to be taken in by his heavy con approach to the literary marketplace. Much can (& will) be said about Thompson's stylistic innovations, his "participatory journalism," yadda yadda. The thing about Thompson, for me, now, a 31-year old unknown novelist, is his understanding that a week on assignment in an exotic foreign locale is virtually always A Ticket To Ride. Open-ended gigs like this come around about as often as the comet Kahoutek. & there is simply no way of anticipating the kinds of connections, for good or ill, or both, that are to be made in the process of earning a heavy nonfiction Sex-&-Drugs legend.

There will be things told in this story that will scotch my reputation permanently in Puritan America. But the shitty truth of it is, Puritan America has never been particularly good to me. & there is also the fact that Hunter Thompson stopped writing serious Gonzo around 1979. The world has seen about nine major music movements since 1979. So maybe there is a need for another Gonzo journalist on the scene. Or maybe I'm just ego-stuffed and deranged…

My relationship with Smoke magazine may be important to clarify here. Assistant editor Rich Hoxey "got the call," as it were, when my felonious "acid novel" passed across his desk some time this past September. Smoke was, at the time, devising a plan for a "Fear & Loathing" assignment, to be set in Amsterdam. They tell me I was third on the List: Chris Elliot had scheduling problems; Matthew Perry--or one of those ubiquitous face-names...the Friends guy (& I'll check character assassination at the door)...some publicist for one among the Friends troupe decided that a story he wrote on or about Amsterdam would have to stink like Sex & Drugs, and that anything he wrote would be the death of his career; and so, alas, the duties fall to me. It is now my purpose in the Food Chain to bend the minds of the American reading populace. So let me begin.

There exists a world in which high-living men (and probably a couple of womyn) pay humans to get in trouble, or become stained by, and to confess publicly in venues such as Smoke (& before that, we had Rolling Stone, which is now the void that is Jann Wenner's existence...), there is a world in which writers are paid to experience things that could very well involve the bringing upon themselves heavy penal sentences. & once in a rare moon, there is a writer who, for whatever reason--& they are all good and weighty--has essentially "had it" with mainstream America: that vapid land of sitcoms and commercials & infomercials & talk shows & visionless, primarily materialistic, subsistants, & whatnot--a writer who, again in the words of the great Hunter S., "has found out a way to live out there where the real winds blow."

So, I am the Acid Novelist. & I have been paid by Smoke to get The Story of Amsterdam. Let us proceed.

It is true, there exists a realm in which "happening minds" function more or less unfettered by meddling forces. That this place is called, geographically, Amsterdam, is also true. Many have found its gypsy soul/drunk of its wisdom. & maybe the real truth here is that America is not worthy of The Message. Maybe we've blown our shot. Maybe that is why Hunter has been so quiet for the past fifteen years. Indeed.

This is a strong line of inquiry, and it deserves to be plundered, & I am probably the fellow to do it; but there is also the issue of the Amsterdam piece, which may not be the most important this on this writer's mind.

Hmm. Commerce is a heavy reality. There are many realities.

That is my message from Amsterdam. There exists a place where happening minds can be brought to beautiful (& probably terrifying) truths; where the body can be brought to pleasure in untold ways... There is a story here. Aaron Sigmond is getting the first whiff, because he laid down good money, proved himself a visionary fellow (or at least got really lucky).

There are portals into which happening minds can peer--worlds into which, if one has balls enough, a man may find himself amongst splendidly amusing, and generally very fine, and even lucrative company. There is such a world. I call it Amsterdam.

Should this story be told to an American audience? The sadist in me sez, "Fuck 'em, they ain't worthy." But Smoke is paying. Commerce is a heavy reality. There are many realities. It is a solid paradox that is mine inhabitance.

Is America ready for me? Will it buy my acid novel? Can I make this gig pay? If so, I am the luckiest bastard alive. & Aaron Sigmond and his bosses above will prove themselves very good men--like the last scions of the Medici giving funds to Michelangelo.

These are good shrooms.

I feel like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry: "In all this excitement, I lost count of how many rounds I've fired. Did I fire six shots, or did I fire five? Do you feel lucky, punk? Do you?" So, America: are you gonna stand by like suckers for another four years, while Bill-who-didn't-inhale sends beautiful bright minds to penitentiaries for seeking wisdom through chemicals? Of so, you're no friend of mine.

The way I see it, it is time for many of us to make a deliberate, proactive choice: Revolt against the War on (some) Drugs...or move to Amsterdam, & if Amsterdam collapses as a place where happening minds can function fully and stay free...well, I will be in trouble. That would be a heavy day. I'll lay odds, though, now that I've been here and seen it for myself, that the Amsterdam intelligentsia would never let a thing like that happen.

So, I guess I'm an expatriate. Will any of my friends come over and play with me? & who will pay my bills? Bob Guccione? Hugh Hefner? Jann Wenner? Or Aaron Sigmond? My price is now $5,000 for a 5000 word installment of Fear & Loathing in Amsterdam, the novel. I think you're getting a bargain. Hunter won't get out of bed for less than $25,000; and from what I've heard, from an agent we used to share together, Uncle Duke is now biding his daze in the fine company of Lady White and will calcify that way, more or less--an exhilarating and disturbing fixture in the American psyche.

So, wire that $$$, dear editors, do it in Dutch guilders. Wire it to the Hotel Van Onna, 104 Bloemgracht. I stay in room 55. It is my lucky room. The proprietors know I'm trouble, but they take it with great humor. I have a twisted tale to share, bringing together a basement chemist named Heinrich, a smorgasboard of psychedelic shaman, a jazz player in exile since 1971, and an aging Gonzo journalist in need of spiritual redemption. It is a good story; I will put my soul into it. So, send the money. Allow me to finish this thing. Finance this pirate life of mine.

Do it now.

$ $ $

A "Fear & Loathing" place is a strange bird, journalistically. It lacks that which upon a true story depends: e.g., A Subject. And it is the lack of a subject that makes a "Fear & Loathing" piece as taxing as cleaning out the Augean stables. One lurches here and yon for an angle, casts about wildly for some goddamned Room with a View of Something interesting...and when one is finally worn ragged--because there is a God, and He is kind and has smiled upon his prodigal son on this day by granting him all three wishes in a single pop: an all-expense-paid trip to Amsterdam--the philosopher's stone is delivered unto wild Gonzo man, so that he may bring to the world his arcane vision.

The first thing a Gonzo journalist needs to know is his word-count--in my case 2,500, which is, as you might guess, not a lot of leg-room for the long-boned story-teller. But it gives me leverage. Since the story I have been privileged with is a black diamond, Aaron Sigmond will either have to splay this bugger over across the next half-dozen issues of Smoke, or I will have to publish another novel myself; & it is this win-win that brings me to the Mona Lisa Smile.

The other thing a Gonzo journalist needs to know, is how long his bills are being paid for. Aaron made it exquisitely clear that he was not paying for my Grand Tour, and I think I heard him toss off three days as a figure., which means I can stretch it to four--kind of like going sixty-one in the old fifty-five m.p.h. scheme, and knowing you won't be made to suffer for it. But the injured Hell of it is that I had not a whole lot interesting happen to me in the first four days. The piece nearly got hijacked by a low-budget, garden variety tale of a treacherous out-call girl and her pimply Iranian pimp/pusher boyfriend...but then the ecstasy started coming on, and revenge was no longer the best rush in town. And there was a night when I got involved in a savage fantasy featuring Courtney Cox and her body double, and I thought for a day or so that I might get some writing mileage out of that one.

It was around day seven when things began picking up the brilliant overtones unique to the Big Mystical Adventure. A quick mental survey told me it had been nearly a decade since my last significant sojourn in the weird world. Really good acid doesn't come around my neighborhood as often as it should.

The guarantors of Smoke will have a many vital and well-founded questions about my trip to Amsterdam. It is unusual for a 2,500-word piece (which now looks like it will top 3k) to take eight days to accomplish; probably it is more unusual that such a trip breaks five figures in expenses. Ah, let us burn yet another branch on the pyre of journalistic ethics.

Your money goes quickly in Amsterdam. Or, it has mine. I had been here 16 hours, and already I had spent $600: cab fare from the airport to the hotel @$45; a no-frills hotel in the museum district @$150/night; $200 for the hooker; $60 for two 3-gram baggies of hashish (not a lot, to the naked eye, but yr hash seems to stretch nice & far in Amsterdam...), another $60 for three baggies of freeze-dried psylocibin--which is over-the-counter material (or at least until this article comes out) at head-shops Amsterdam-wide, and about $40 at a Transylvanian fish-house, whose manager put me immediately on edge. Persons from or around the Mediterranean, I've concluded, are the most provincial on earth--a paranoiac, rigidly suspicious strain, which probably has something to do w/ guarding the hallowed secrets of the Son of the Real Jehova. I read a good paperback on the subject once, got it in an airport--but none of that matters now.

What I was after, after being forced by the autocratic young owner to clean my plate of the paella ("This is the best food," he kept repeating, "Best food in all Amsterdam. You don't like, we fix you something else. Come on, eat, this is best food..."), what I was after was the name of a good jazz club. I was in the mood to hear some young cat pluck off a stretch of guitar that would sound like Al DiMeola. It was a sophisticated mood, enhanced, no doubt, by the several pellets of 2cb I had eaten earlier in the evening.

"OK," I said, in a state of over-full exhaustion, and when he went to turn his well-oiled head to urge the Gen-X slacker waitress to earn her pay somehow, I managed to hide a couple boiled fish nuggets among or inside or underneath the mound of clam shells. "Is this good? Can I pay now?"

"Of course you can pay," he said, "You could have paid before. I just wanted you to eat best food."

I jogged across a cobbled walk to a smallish den called The Alto Club, on Liebenstraat, near the infamous Bulldog hash bar. I knew nothing of The Alto, except I had been warned that drink prices ran high for tourists. But at the door, I caught a vibe that was not real... accommodating to the traveling stranger: something about the way the clique of four pea-coated Dutchmen stared me down while I tried to ease my way through a clot of merrymakers. I actually thought about leaving, literally--just turning around; but the band was called Gator's Groove, and mebbe I was feeling nostalgic for my old place in de bayou. Who fucking knows. I walked in, paid for a club soda, and got ready to make an end-run around what looked to be four bad-asses from the Holland countryside.

One of them made a sucking sound in the teeth. I remember being concerned that my laptop--or the one I had borrowed from a friend--would be damaged in the fall. And the bartender shook loose of the strap on my wrist. But when I went, I went.

The floors are all hardwood in Holland, and though hardwood has some give, it is not a lot, and the bones, it seems, are not conditioned to take an uncushioned freefall. I remember reading a Reader's Digest article on the stunt-diver who once fell 3,000 feet without a parachute, and lived. He broke most of the bones in his body, but had remarkably few internal injuries, and none to the brain. His tip was to fall on the pressure points on one's side: the shoulder, the elbow, the hip, the knee, and the ankle. So that is what I did.

I took a long time to come to. When I finally did, it was midnight straight up, and I found myself sitting at a high table, next to a large black man who wore green shades and looked to be from out of the cast of the Mod Squad. Quite suddenly, the foggy qualities of concussion had receded and I was aware of being in the presence of brother Lucius, of the 12th Panther Brigade, of Oakland. I was massaging the socket near my scapula, where the shoulder had been put back in two sure motions by someone whom many in the crowd called "the Healer," and who had since departed with little in the way of forwarding information.

Lucius laid down his glass of wormwood nectar. "Man, that's nuthin'," he said. His teeth were like cinder-blocks, very uniform and with all the grace of an old U-Haul building. The pores on his nose were huge and deep, like so many abandoned water wells. "You want me to tell you a thing like that shouldn't happen in this town? See, I know. I saw you comin'. Shit, this town's gon' be as mean as you want to let it be. They's cats here gib me the crawlies--like findin' some old boy's head in yo' bed at night...no ketchup color on that picture, no Godfather hawse head, shit. But still, they's a spirit here save yo' soul. Save mine."

Lucius had seen better days, I knew. His eyes were clotted and rheumy, with real orange marmalade. They say absinthe is a harsh mistress, and he would make a good prohibition poster-child were it still a problem anywhere in the world.

He reached down into his lap and fumbled for something: I figured it was a cigar, but really I tried not to notice. Then, for the first time all night, I saw the glint of a tenor sax; the brass snake sat on the floor, its neck at rest against my companion's thigh, which was covered in a fine corduroy, of a rust complexion.

"Shit, most folks think of Amsterdam, and they see the steeple atop th' Temple of Gomorrah. But, they don't know. All I know is, a man can think straight over here. A man don't have to be scared all the time, 'bout gettin' his brains bashed in by some fool inbred thinks he's special 'cos he's Billy Joe's kissin' cousin, or some shit. I see what this place did for a lot o' sufferin' brothas. Saw Bud Powell go into a full bloom one May, right here, right in this club... If it wasn't this one, it was the one next door. And I don't have to tell some people what it's like to be 'round genius. Everything just kind'a gives," he said, pushing out deliberately with his fingertips. "Everything becomes possible. It's like, before everything was walled off--but you don't even know they's any walls there--and once the genius hits, there's no more opposition. Everything's clear, and orderly. Shit," he glimmered. "It's beautiful."

TO BE CONTINUED