...it's strange to then be out on the highway and realize that all those people you're whizzing by/being whizzed by by, '...are just as much a bunch of loose cannons as you are...', I say to The Fool In The Mirror - I can speak for no one else but I have my suspicions.
To the girl in the red Camry: Where have you been and what have you been doing? WHAT!? For shame - but fun, so hence maybe your smile as you fly by in the fast lane, and you up there in that Big Pete, why the frown? O I see...she did that huh? Well, maybe you should pull off give it a rest...
A State Cop...oooh...adrenalin pumping all down the line...
Hands on the wheel, I say, eyes forward, 58 mph, no dope, no booze, all legal, me and the car. He keeps going. Everbody on the road is sweating his
approach, cleaning up coke spills, eating roaches, slowing down, sweating bullets 'cuz they don't got no license...worry, worry, worry - even if you're totally legal and The Man pulls up behind you you get nervous, can't be helped...it's the nature of your scurrilous existence, I again address the mirror and the fellow in it, and comes with the territory.
He pulls off the exit, we are all safe for awhile, a collective sigh of relief heaved as the mass of traffic accelerates and cruises away down the smoggy highway, me among them, coming from and going to nowhere.
SPYING, I'VE ALWAYS THOUGHT...
...was a good way to make big fast bucks in a hurry if you didn't get caught, had no scruples and assuming you had something for sale your enemy wanted, but selling one's country down the river for the money is bad form, not to mention tacky, whereas if you've done it - sold the old state secrets - for philosophical-idealogical reasons, then there was a little weight to your arguments, although the penalties are much the same, i. e. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg being fried in Sing Sing, or Aldrich Ames being shipped off to Maximum Marion where he no doubt will soon be joined by this fellow Nicholson, if he's guilty, and there they will have plenty of opportunity to review where they fucked up. My guess is that in prison spies do not get most-favored inmate status but rather are shunned and/or beaten.
In the 50s when the Rosenbergs were front page news for a long time, I was just a boy and only knew what I read in the papers and so thought they were guilty but as I grew older and delved into the case I thought they'd been framed and of course reading Louis Nizer's 'Implosion Conspiracy' cinched it for me: a frame-up.
Lo and behold when the Soviet Union crumbles there stored away in KGB vaults are transcripts of exchanges with the KGB handlers/agents & The Rosenbergs. They were guilty after all it seems! And so was Alger Hiss who I also thought was railroaded. In fact they were in league with their Fellow Travelers all along...
Nicholson & Ames beat the death penalty but unless they escape they're not going anywhere again until they pass out of those walls in a hearse and then only to Pauper's Field.
Erase s-p-y from your wish list of careers, better you should try being a clerk at 7-11 - it's dangerous too if danger is what you seek in life.
IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE THAT 43 YEARS HAVE PASSED...
...since I stood bollicky bareass behind Bobbsy at Camp Nimitz having our physicals at the Naval Training Center just as the news flashed on the radio and around the world that President Kennedy had been killed in Dallas. In a trice the harbor at San Diego was alive with activity, suddenly ships which had tied up at the piers quickly set sail and guns reverberated through the day as big ships saluted the death of our young leader, much of the world was plunged into sorrow and fear crept across the land.
After the initial report we'd heard on the radio all was quiet, no one told us any more until Sunday when we were allowed to read the papers.
Suddenly we 19-20 year-old recruits were no longer leaving to see the world
with the Navy, but instead, for all we knew, were being readied to plunge into
war. What had promised to be a six-year vacation had taken an ominous turn.
Four decades ago. How could it be? Where did the time go? All of Camelot is dead now, the men of my Company 545 have scattered around the globe, those bygone days now but fading troubled memories.
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