One  great thing about having George, my downstairs neighbor,

  as a friend, is that I can talk to him about my prison experience.  Three times. Total time “inside”: 10 months. Twice for drunk driving, four months each time, and two months for “impairing the morals of a child” until my parents bailed me out.

  “Recognize this?” he said, handing me a tiny Walkman bedecked in duct tape. We were watching  CNN.

  I shall not reveal his opinions about mz Bachmann nor mz Palin. I don’t share them. I don’t see myself or them cuddling afterwards.

  “Prison issue tunes, “ I said.

  “Yeah, still works.” He put his paw out. I gave him 6 cigarettes.  “thanks, buddy.”

  “What the hell did you listen to, inside?” These words like “inside” and “joint” and “p.o.” (probation or parole officer ) or many others, are power words. I use them with the minority people  I often run into.

  “whattaya think, Frank.”

  “Sinatra? “

  “No, Frank Fuckwad.” He said. Laughed. Another power word.

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  My brother taught me the nuances of elegant vulgarity. Self-proclaimed “sewer mouth”, he used to take me out in his truck and threaten to run over people on the sidewalk.

  “Her? Nah, too f-ing stacked. Which one?”

  “That one, Paul.” I pointed to a black girl.

  “Nah, I don’t run over n…ers. “

  “Why?”

  “Got nothin’ against em. Work with em. Get along good. Spics, too”

  “Well, that one, then,” I said, pointing to a chubby nerd with glasses who looked like me.

  “Him? Next time, poindexter. Go home to mommy & eat yr fudge.”

  Paul would then change the subject. He could change subjects faster than Eastwood could shoot outlaws. He was an outlaw.  From so-called bourgeois values.  He was my second dad.  The first one, old stick in the mud high school principal George, was, “the only dad we got, I guess,” to paul, but we loved tearing him down.

  “to live outside the law, you must be honest,” Dylan sang to me later. From “Where are you tonight, sweet marie?”, blonde on blonde, 1966. Paul introduced me to the Stones and Seger and Little Feat and the Allmans, etc. Also the Dead.

  “I’ll be dead before I’m thirty,” my 15 yr-senior-poppa would say.

  He turns 59 next month.  God bless him.  Haven’t seen him in 6 years.

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  “The son is the father of the man,” is my favorite Freudianism.  I dig Freud immensely.  This Oedipal thing keeps popping up for me.  Also I notice the Electra thing is alive and well. “The family romance,” he called it. Yes indeed.

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  I have a deep deep voice like my dad.  I can get all fatherly on anyone. Including a 67 year old ex-alcoholic whom I love to trash talk with. George. The new one.

  “Afghanistan hotel bombed, George.”

  “Ah, the Taliban.” George knows his stuff. He can even quote Robert Frost.

  He shrugged them away, like my dad used to do, and I do, but paul never learned to, I don’t think.

  “Bad gang of kids, ja?”

  “yeah. You know some of these suicide bombers are women?”

  “Yep.”

  “Christ.”

  “They don’t worship him.”

  “Hah?”

  “They don’t worship Mr. ‘do unto others’ “ I elaborated in my scholarly way.

  “who?”

  “Christ.”

  “huh.”

  “Hey, did you know the Pope tweeted today?” I was going to fuck up his head with computer talk.  He eschews computers. I have to program his damn land line phone for him.

  “Nah, what happened?”

  I explained tweeting to him as if he were my father. The other George.