The Neon Cowboy Liberation Front— Now It Can Be Told

In my experience, being a terrorist has a whole lot to do with falling asleep in front of the TV on the couch of your former girlfriend's parents' house on Friday night on the border of Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Maybe it works out differently for other terrorists on other terrorist missions, but really, I wonder. I think there are certain similarities, somewhat.

Still, now the story can be told. The statute of limitations has expired, and everything sensible has been tossed into the dustbin of history. (That means you're stuck with me telling the tale.) And plus, that historical dumpster seems to have not been dumped out for a couple of decades or so, raising a small bit of a stink at first, and then dying down and drying up, and turning to dusty dust, and from there, at long last,  to lint. And since all my fellow Neon Cowboy Liberation Front comrades are so effectively on the lam, so successfully fugitives from the law one and all, so deeply underground that nobody gives half a good gotdamn . . . well, I guess I'd better cough up. And our ringleader, our Fidel, our Tania, our Ayatollah, has done so successful a job of losing her mind's marbles — and with it her scrupulously-kept scrapbook of our mass-media exploits — that it's left for me, clinging to this here handy floating coffin, to tell the tale. Call me . . . aw, hell, call me whatever you want to call me.

Same as ever, really.

Okay, so it's Friday night and I'm crashed out at my former girlfriend Mary's parents — Mister Excitement to the rescue. Where Mary was, I don't know, but let's all hope she was out horsing around with someone who wasn't snoozing away on her parents olive-green vinyl couch, who hadn't fallen asleep watching old movies on what was in those days considered a pretty dang big screen TV.

I'd let myself in, naturally. Here's the kind of household it was: If you knocked on the door, they knew you didn't belong there. Everybody just came over to Carol and Phil Wagner's house there on the border, on la frontera of Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona — "Super-rich Scottsdale," Carol invariably called it, barking her smoke-ringed laughter — parked the car, walked in the door, grabbed a beer or an ice tea out of the refrigerator, maybe lit a cigarette, and then sat down and started arguing about politics or sports or something. Carol was invariably always there, unless she'd gone off to the grocery store for more beer and cigarettes, and when Phil got home from the factory, he had to sort of work his way in through the crowd. It was pretty much agreed that he got the good couch, not the olive-green plaid Scotchgard one, but the fake-leather one, up close and personal to the TV, and that he was allowed to switch the TV over to the All-Sports Network — unless there was something pretty dang major going on with the hostages at the US embassy in Iran or something, in which case he and Carol would work it out. She'd win, if she wanted to, and Phil would win if it was Monday Night Football, because she wanted to watch too. Either way, everybody's conversation roared on.

Well, so there I am, crashed out on the couch, Saturday night, probably some old movie on TV, Mary's out horsing around, Phil and Carol are rather amazingly nowhere to be seen, the whole place is a ghost town. I walk in the door, grab a beer or two, turn to some dumb movie, and fall right asleep. Next thing I know, Carol's going "Bart, get your butt up!" She and Phil had been off at a party somewhere. I probably grabbed for the remote control and tossed it to Phil, just so he could put it back on sports, where it belonged, instead of some effete-ass black-and-white movie I'd probably been snoring it up over. It was the least I could do.

(more to follow, obviously...)