The Official Rick Bell Blog

Off to the ER

To my non-family member readers. We've had a little health crisis in the family this week. I will start posting again shortly.

Unorthodox Pagan - Excerpt #5

(Note: This is a VERY rough draft from a section I happened to be working on this weekend. It does touch on a key plot point. My schedule gets much simpler in a week and I will be writing volumes...)

When you’re up on a murder charge with a hate crime chaser, it’s best to have a lawyer you can trust implicitly. For reasons I could not get a handle on, I had been having my doubts that I had selected the right person for the job.

Something just stuck me as being off when it came to Mark Recker—my attorney. As he sat across from me at his desk it finally hit me what that might be.

Let’s just say Mark would never be mistaken for a NBA power forward, not even for the hapless Atlanta Hawks. At best, he stood 5’7”. But today, as he spoke to me from behind his well-polished mahogany desk I realized what had been nagging at my subconscious mind all this time. This was not even a 5’ 7” man. When he sat, he appeared even shorter… maybe 5’4” and change.

What was going on here? Was he sporting ‘70’s era platform shoes? Was he pulling a My-name-is-Prince on me?

As he rambled on, I rolled my chair back to get a glimpse of his footwear. At first, I couldn’t get a bead on them, even after rolling back from his desk as far as I thought I could without raising his suspicion.

I had to improvise. Reaching down, I made the pretense of rifling through my leather satchel—or “man purse” as my ex-wife so frequently described it. Looking under the desk, I caught a glimpse: Dress boots, black, each with a silver buckle on the side. But the heels were no more than the stardard ¾ inch variety. I was stumped.

I pictured him standing. I eyed him sitting. Something still did not jibe.

Then it hit me. My lawyer must be sporting lifts inside those dress boots. No wonder he wore boots. Had he been wearing standard issue Bostonian wingtips, those lifts would have had the heels of his feet hanging out of the backs.

That’s what was nagging at me. He was short and trying to compensate for it. Not good if we were playing two-on-two down at the gym. But an over-compensating attorney might just be what I needed to get me out of this jam. Hopefully he saw the throat of the opposing prosecutor as the step up he needed in the courtroom.

I began to laugh to myself, then, like a cat caught burying her own feces in the backyard, I was made painfully aware that I was not alone in my thoughts.

“Benson!” my attorney barked, “are you even listening too me?”

I mumbled a response as I snapped out of my shoe-gazing trance. He had me. Rather than make excuses I leaned forward and locked in on his disapproving gaze.

“Shoot,’ I said, “I’m all here.”

“Well you better be,” he said somberly, “like I’ve been trying to tell you things are going from bad to worse.”

“Say again.”

“It’s Ramirez, the assistant DA who has got you case. His boss is stepping aside and won’t be running for reelection this term. He’s not naming his choice as successor, so three eager assistant DAs are jumping into the fray. Antonio Ramirez is one of them… the youngest of the lot and the one most desperate to grab some headlines and get in front of the voters. He's gunning for you because your case means headlines. You're his ticket to the big show.”

I tried to digest what I had just heard, but the words were going down like raw oysters with marshmallows.

Ramirez had come to me under the guise of compassion. I freely admitted to him the drinking, the dozing off and the ugly phrase I had uttered when I threw Jamal to the ground. He assured me that it would play out as self-defense… my daughter’s life was in danger after all. I told him everything… and the tape was rolling.

Next Post

All,

We are just about to go live with a 10-month, multimillions dollar project I am running. My weekdays are shot. I will write again this weekend. My life gets radically simpler after the 27th. Thanks

Unorthodox Pagan - Excerpt #4

(Note: Watch over the next couple of days how this post transforms into a true excerpt...)

Sure, the dude who started the Red Cross gets some kudos. (And I’m not being sexists, the founder was packing Kibbles and Bits—it wasn’t some skank in a hot little nurse’s uniform… man, I love women in uniform… a meter maid and a spanking—pure bliss… but I digress.) The Red Cross was founded by a Swiss business man named Henry Dunant. I’m not sure if he ever role played in a nurse’s costume, but he sported a fetching white beard and all in all was the kind of Swiss business man that I’d consider inviting over for an evening of mattress rodeo.)

And I’m sure Sir Alexander Flemming deserves a nod for the discovery of penicillin: he’s Scottish… I thought I was a Scot, which would be totally cool in a skirt wearing, bagpipe blowing and haggis ingesting kind of way… but my brother dug deeper into our genealogy and it turns out I’m a pasty Brit… now I hate myself and I swear my teeth are starting to go crooked and discolored.

And let’s not forget the guys that brought us Tivo—Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay—true heroes in my book. No longer am I forced to watch commercials like a rock-licking barbarian.

All these men made major contributions that ease humankind’s suffering (yes, being forced to sit through amusing-only-to-the-dweebs-in-marketing Gieko commercials is suffering.) They shall not be forgotten… at least for a day or two… I just looked them up on Wikipedia… odds are I will have forgotten their names by dinner time… I can’t even keep my kid’s names straight.

But I blog today to honor the man who has done more to ease human suffering than even that little Catholic schoolgirl vixen Mother Theresa. I’m speaking, of course, of the great Alexey Pajitnov--the inventor of Tetris.

You see, I work in white collar America… a meaningless blur of identical cubicles, inane meetings, gigabytes of emails and endless status reports. Long since faded is my childhood dream of working as a robot-fighting cowboy with balls of steel--metallic orbs that I hurled at the advancing robot hordes with a David-and-Goliath like sling. Life, as I know it, is slightly less enjoyable than getting a colonoscopy while a tap shoe wearing monkey gnaws at my groin.

The only thing that makes my life bearable is Toilette Tetris. Cell phone in hand, I retire to my stall—the handicapped one that is slightly less used and a tad cleaner—where I escape for twenty minutes into a world of blue and orange L’s, yellow boxes, purple double  circumcised E’s, red and green S’s (or are they Z’s), and baby blue phallic symbols.

For twenty minutes at a shot I escape the world of business casual Dockers, impotent middle managers and notes on refrigerators admonishing us to refrain from eating other people’s food. (If you're so low on the food chain that you’d consider polishing off someone else’s half finished country-fried steak from Chili’s I’m guessing your not going to be dissuaded by that 8 ½ by 11 missive.).

Of course if I get too engrossed in the falling geometric shapes my legs go numb and I wind up staggering back to my cube like an Irish-American Indian the day after the monthly casino stipend check comes through. But the brief respite from hell is more than worth a few minutes of pins and needles dancing up my calf. Like the meter maid spanking, pain is not always a bad thing.

Bless you Alexey—your crazed, mathematic brain has enriched my life like guarana, ginseng and caffeine enrich the vodka-laced Red Bull I call breakfast. You are my hope, my light, my freedom. May the Russian Mafia leave your royalty checks untouched. May 800 point, four line collapses fill the rest of your days. Until we meet in the Great Tetris Game In The Sky, bless you.

Unorthodox Pagan - Excerpt #3

“Victor, I’m not saying there is no God, I am just saying there is no evidence that God exists… take a look at this screwed up world, I’m thinking there is plenty of evidence that a no one planned this mess.

“Why do you say that?” my soft-spoken Navajo friend asked.

“Well look at all the struggles all around the world,” I said.  “I’m thinking a loving god would have designed things a bit better.”

“Struggles? You doubt God because of struggles?”

Victor sat back in his smooth black leather recliner. He eyed me, then closed his eyes thoughtfully.

“I think its time you heard the story of a young, foolish Navajo boy named M’ii," he began.

"Back when my people were free of the confines of a reservation, M'ii was exploring the wilderness that surrounded his village. As he ventured about, he happened upon a cocoon just as a butterfly was struggling to emerge. For a long time the butterfly fought to squeeze through a tiny hole at the top of the cocoon. But the progress was painfully slow. M’ii took pity on the butterfly and used his knife to open the hole wider.”

“The butterfly quickly emerged, but it was horribly misshapen. Its body was three times the normal size and the wings were shriveled and useless.”

“The boy naively thought it was only a matter of time until the butterfly’s wings filled out so it could take flight. Gently, he picked the butterfly up on a leaf and took it back to his village. For three days he waited, but the butterfly still had a bloated body and emaciated wings.”

“Wanting answers and assistance he took the butterfly to his uncle, a medicine man, and asked for help. His uncle took one look at the butterfly and asked whether the boy had helped release it from its cocoon.”

“The boy was puzzled by how his uncle knew he had cut the cocoon open, but admitted that he had. The medicine man scolded him for his action. And then he taught the boy a valuable lesson.”

“Haashch'ééti'í, the Talking God, created the cocoon for a purpose, the uncle explained. As a butterfly struggles to free itself, the strain forces fluid from the body into wings. Only then can a butterfly's wings achieve their majestic shape. Only by passing through this trial is a butterfly able to to take flight.”

Victor paused and looked directly at me with a deep, probing stare.

Neither of us spoke. His story had made a small indent on my hardened soul, but like fry bread with lime Jello and carrots, something wasn’t quiet right. Then it hit me….

“Wait a minute,” I said, “I think I heard that story in Sunday School years ago. But it wasn’t M’ii with a knife, it was a city kid with a pair of scissors.”

Victor’s eyes shifted downward. Then a grin trickled up his face, stopping just below his high cheekbones.

“You caught me,” he admitted, “I picked that one up from the missionaries who frequented our reservation… always kind of like the story though.”

“Dude, you can’t be repackaging my people’s stories as Navajo wisdom… it’s not right.”

“Made you think didn’t it,” Victor asked. “All I’ve been trying to do these past few days is clear out the bottles and debris that have your mind so cluttered. You’re broken Val. All bitter and angry about the God thing… bitter at the murder charge looming over your head... bitter and angry about everything.”

“Forget about believing in some brandname God. That’s not what I’ve been saying. I just want you to consider accepting things the way they are. You need to accept where your life is at. Accept how the world is. Accept that you're an alcoholic. Not accepting things doesn’t change the fact that they are. It just keeps you sick.”

“Once you start accepting, you can start tapping into that long forgotten inner resource that maybe, just maybe, can be attributed to a power greater than your own pathetic thinking.”

“A power? Now you are sounding like a twelve stepper Victor,” I snapped, “Don’t hit me with that Higher Power crap.”

“We're not travelling that route,” Victor said softly. Then his eye filled with an earnest plea for attention. “But you better start opening yourself up to something greater than your own conscious mind. If you don’t, you’ll be drinking again. And to drink, my friend, for you means death.”