“Take a drink," he said.
Avellanos opened the container and drank part of its contents.
"It's milk. I don't get it."
"You just broke the law by drinking unpasteurized milk transported to the Winterborn County from the state of California."
Avellanos laughed.
"How can that be illegal?"
"Look it up."
"Milk is illegal?"
"Look it up on the Internet when you get home.”
"So you're saying you got fired from your last job for transporting unpasteurized milk on company time?"
"I didn't say that," Kozlowski said. "I said you just broke the law for or drinking unpasteurized milk transported to the Winterborn County from the state of California."
"It seems like a waste of time to me," Avellanos said, finishing the milk. "I can't tell the difference."
"That's because the New World Order has trained you not to be able to notice the difference. You see this?"
Kozlowski pulled a twenty dollar bill out of his wallet and held it up.
"This bill is pasteurized milk," he said. "It's fake milk the New World Order forces us to accept as real milk."
"I can buy a lot of milk with that twenty dollar bill," Avellanos said.
"Wrong. You can buy a small amount of fiat milk with this fiat money."
Kozlowski reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin, a 20-dollar-gold coin. He gave it to Avellanos, who looked at the engraving by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, then over at Carlos, who was staring at them both with contempt. He gave the coin back to Kozlowski.
"That's beautiful," he said, "but don't flash a 20 dollar gold piece around here."
Kozlowski took the 20 dollar bill back of out his wallet. He put it up to Avellanos's face and snapped it. Avellanos winced. He over at Carlos.
"What's a fresa like that doing in Poison Springs," he heard. "White faggot, his college boy Spanish and his redneck friend, just my luck. Piss on his grave."
"I'll give you a second chance," Kozlowski said. "How much is this 20 dollar bill worth?"
"You just told me. It's a 20 dollar bill."
Kozlowski held up the 20 dollar gold Double Eagle.
"How much is this worth?"
"A thousand dollars? I don't know, but don't flash that around."
"Why weren't you worried about me flashing 20 dollars’ worth of fiat money around?"
"Because it was only 20 dollars."
Kozlowski smiled, his blue eyes glinting out of their narrow slits.
"But they both say 20 dollars? Why are you worried about me flashing around 20 dollars in gold and not 20 dollars in fiat money?"
"I will admit that was a better than your pamphlet," Avellanos said.
"You see?" Kozlowski said. "You learned something today."
“OK. Let's get to work."
"You're the boss."
"No I'm not," Avellanos said, looking back out at West Hill, now completely shrouded in darkness. "I'm just an outcast and an outsider like I've always been, everywhere I go."
Chapter 7 - The United Coalition against Xenophobia
According to the architect's proposal, the Grand Plaza at Poison Springs was not to have had any trees. The north south traverse and the east west traverse were, if viewed from the air, to have formed a cross, clean, without obstruction, minimalist, the negation of the urban chaos surrounding it. In the early 1950s, however, the city council bowed to public pressure, and hired a landscape architect to seed the eastern two thirds of the park with American elm trees. The money ran out before they could reforest the area directly in front of City Hall, but it turned out to have been a happy accident, the western third of the park now a dramatic front yard for the ornate old municipal building.
As it was built up in the 1960s and the 1970s, the Great Lawn of what was then Roosevelt Plaza had become a sort of mirror. If it happened anywhere in the United States, it probably had an idiosyncratic reflection near the Franklin B. Gowen Memorial Fountain Circle. The night after the Kennedy Assassination, then Mayor Danny O'Neil was so taken by a candlelight vigil on the steps of City Hall that he decided to make it permanent.
In 1964 he commissioned a local sculptor to build a statue of John F. Kennedy across the walkway from the small stone pump house that controlled the fountain and the park's sophisticated irrigation system. A year later, the city council added statues of Franklin Roosevelt, John Mitchell, and John L. Lewis. The Great Lawn of Roosevelt Plaza had become a genuine civic center.
In April of 1968, an anti-war demonstration took over the streets around City Hall, and snarled traffic in downtown Poison Springs for the better part of two days. By that time, the Franklin B. Gowen Memorial Fountain Circle, as popular as it was, had become a source of concern, a notorious gathering place for hippies and runaway teenagers, a well-known spot to buy marijuana or hard drugs, and, if you were new in town, to get mugged. It crystallized a right-wing backlash that had been brewing for several years.
"Did our forefathers discover America only to reinvent Amsterdam's red-light district in downtown Poison Springs?" an editorial in the Winterborn County Post declared. "Pass a curfew. Hire more cops, or, if you have to, just bulldoze the whole place."
In 1970, however, Mayor O'Neil, loath to see his beloved fountain circle under attack, hired a local company to build the Poison Springs War Memorial, a move he corrected assumed would give the city's conservatives a stake in maintaining Roosevelt Plaza. As with the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, the right-wing soon forget they had ever hated it The Great Lawn and the Franklin B. Gowen Memorial Fountain Circle.
The Poison Springs War Memorial consisted of a semi-circle of stone slabs across from the pump house. There was one slab for every war from the American Revolution to Korea, each one with a list of every soldier from Poison Springs who had "paid the ultimate price for freedom." The exceptions were the Civil War, and the Vietnam War, both of which had two.
Soon a biker gang called The Winterborn County Patriots, an early forerunner of America's Guard, volunteered to maintain a 24 hour watch around the war memorial and the fountain circle. The marijuana dealers, the runaway teenage kids and hippies, were pushed out of Roosevelt Plaza altogether, or so the local media reported. In reality, The Winterborn County Patriots simply took over the drug trade for themselves. They kicked back some of the money to the editors at the Winterborn Daily Post, and to the Poison Springs Metro Police, and so the problem was solved.
When Michael Catalinelli signed the Comprehensive Citizens Identification Act (CCIA) into law in 2010, he believed that it would cement his legacy as "the greatest mayor in the history of Poison Springs." He soon realized that the CCIA is not something you actually want to sign into law. As with the repeal of Roe vs. Wade or the privatization of Social Security, the CCIA is the kind of bill you perpetually dangle in front of your most rabid supporters, then blame your political opponents every time you pull it back.
Lawsuits were filed almost immediately, but Catalinelli had counted on the CCIA eventually being struck down in court. What he hadn't planned on were the boycotts. His short lived national celebrity proved to be a double edged sword. It guaranteed his reelection as mayor, but it also carried the debate about the CCIA outside of Poison Springs. Catalinelli could bully the local media in Poison Springs. He couldn't bully the New York Times. Almost overnight, he went from being a hero to a laughing stock. Since a big part of the economy of Poison Springs came from tourism, the CCIA alienated the Winterborn County's economic elite. The bonanza of jobs for "real Americans" never came. The unemployment rate, which was a little over 10% at the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008, was close to 13% after four years of the CCIA.
Nicholas Cecil Felton, the city's best-known defense attorney in the 1970s and 1980s, was a descendant of one of the original 16 families who settled the Winterborn County. Rumor had it that he was also descended from John Felton, the Puritan martyr who assassinated George Villiers, 1st Duke
of Buckingham, in the run up to the English Civil War. According to the legend, Felton had not been hanged in 1628, drawn and quartered, but, instead, had escaped to the fledging colony of Massachusetts Bay. He married, raised a family, and sent his grandchildren out to the Scahentoarrhonon River. Whether or not the family legend was true, the Feltons quickly established themselves in what would eventually become the Winterborn County. Farming, beaver pelts, the early anthracite coal mines, railroads, the steel industry, the construction and demolition industry, the Feltons seemed to prosper with every development in the economy of Poison Springs. In the words of a local guide book, their great Victorian Mansion, which went up in 1850, and which could be seen for miles, "dominated the commanding heights of the East Poison Springs, "a symbol of our heritage as an industrial powerhouse."
Michael Catalinelli never tired of pointing out how the Feltons had always been liberals, even leftists. What he wanted to forget was that he and Nicholas Felton had at one time been political allies, even friends. In 1994, the 32 year old Catalinelli, then a moderate Republican in a northeastern swing state, went up to the East Poison Springs mansion to ask Nicholas Felton for advice. Should he run for the open Senate seat?
"You can win as a Republican," Felton said, "if you have the guts to come out in favor of the assault weapons ban."
Catalinelli, who had been Mayor of Poison Springs ever since he turned 26, was one of the state's most promising young politicians. He had switched parties in 1992 after he realized the Democrats were a gerontocracy who would never give him a nomination to run for state wide office. Catalinelli had no illusions that coming out for an assault weapons ban would cost him votes in Poison Springs, but he thought it worth the risk to win votes in the state's "blue" districts in the big cities. He had no idea that Felton was using him as a stalking horse. After Catalinelli lost ground in the polls, that it was clear that gun control was a losing issue, Felton declared his own candidacy as a "Second Amendment Democrat."
I'm a progressive Democrat in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and our own long time Mayor Danny O'Neil," he said, "but never let it be said that I don't support the Constitution of the United States."
After the tall, handsome Felton was photographed on a deer hunt with a bolt action .30-06 it was all over. Felton looked like Gregory Peck. Catalinelli looked like a callow young opportunist with no moral center of gravity. Catalinelli, who would never again allow anybody to outflank him on the right, got his revenge 15 years later. Felton, who had swung hard left after he won the election in 1994, coming out in favor of amnesty for illegal immigrants and single payer health insurance was suddenly vulnerable in the face of an onslaught by the Tea Party. He lost by less than a percentage point to a candidate put up by Michael Catalinelli himself, who had since become a stalwart of the Republican right, and who campaigned nonstop against Felton in the state's rural districts. When Felton was diagnosed with cancer a year later, Catalinelli could barely contain his glee.
"I got you," he said, "then God got you."
The celebration was premature. Nicholas Felton's cancer made him an untouchable, almost sainted figure in Poison Springs. It also brought him back to life after his humiliating defeat in 2009. When Nicholas Felton called for an ongoing protest against the CCIA, he also called upon an extensive rolodex, and body of contacts in the national press. Poison Springs was soon flooded with upper-middle-class progressives from all over the east coast, who had left their "papers" back home, determined to spend the night in jail. The sight of 65-year-old retirees being led off in handcuffs was bad enough, but when Felton, who had once been a starting defensive end for a Big 10 University, decided, in a fit of pique, to forget about his non-violence training, and "resist arrest," things got even worse. After a Reuters photographer snapped a soon to be iconic photo of the old man throwing one of their officers over a park bench inside Reagan Plaza with one arm as easily as he could have thrown a small child, the Poison Springs Metro Police became known as not only brutal, corrupt and incompetent, but as bullies and weaklings who had been put in their place by one testy old man. The publicity got so bad that Catalinelli instructed the police not to press charges, lest they give that testy old man a day in court before a sympathetic judge and a room full of newspaper reporters.
Instead of having Nicholas Felton arrested, Michael Catalinelli called on his friends in the local media. Nicholas Felton had, in his youth, and even well into middle age, been something of a womanizer, fathering one, and perhaps several more children out of wedlock. But nothing the mayor fed to Winterborn Daily Post, however, seemed to work. A few years before, a seemingly never-ending string of pedophile priests had been in the news for months. That the tall, handsome, aristocratic old man with his dark eyes, white hair, and broad shoulders seemed to prefer dumpy, working class, middle-aged women only made him a hero in an aging city where most of the women were, in fact, dumpy, working-class, and middle-aged. When Nicholas Felton finally passed on, Catalinelli was diplomatic enough to attend, and even to speak at the funeral, but you could almost hear the audible sigh of relief in each of his gracious words.
“Farewell Nicholas Felton, my old political nemesis. We will never see your like again."
That audible sigh of relief turned into an audible groan of frustration when a student reporter at a local college dug up proof that Oscar Hernandez, who had confessed to Bethany Peterson's murder back in 2010, had also, over the course of the previous two years, confessed to three other murders, none of which he was within 500 miles of while they were being committed. Even though the Winterborn County Police, not the Poison Springs Metro Police, officially maintained the county jail at City Hall, popularly known as The Dungeon, Bethany Peterson's murder had stretched both departments to their breaking point.
When an investigation by the state attorney general revealed that on the night Oscar Hernandez was murdered, the jail was staffed only by a small detachment of city police officers, none of whom were familiar with its normal procedures, but still concluded "there had been negligence but no malfeasance," it raised as many suspicions as it dispelled. It began to look as if Michael Catalinelli had used a poor, mentally disturbed immigrant, who had been brutally murdered while in the custody of his government, for his own cynical, political gain.
Catalinelli, decided to make the best of a bad situation. He "reformed" the Poison Springs Metro Police -- broke the local police union -- by dismissing three quarters of their officers and replacing them with police cadets at half the salary. But a move that he considered an inspired use of a crisis as an opportunity, but which turned out to have been his biggest mistake of all. It's one thing in a conservative city like Poison Springs to dismiss teachers, but quite another to dismiss police officers. From that moment on there was a dark cloud hovering over his administration. People now began to take Elizabeth Felton's campaign for mayor, something which she had originally begun as a one issue campaign to continue her father's protest against the CCIA, seriously. She secured a large donation from the city's tourist industry. She recruited volunteers from all over the northeast, turning the old Felton Mansion in East Poison Springs into a political and cultural nerve center. Then she got her most valuable ally of all, a man plucked right from the staff of Michael Catalinelli himself.
David Sherrod, one of the few African Americans to graduate from the Winterborn Regional High School, had been a star athlete, and a gifted speaker. A self-proclaimed conservative and born again Christian, he became a local hero after he turned down a Rhodes scholarship to enlist in the Marine Corps. When Sherrod started to appear on stage with the mayor shortly after his discharge, he was widely criticized, criticism he initially dismissed, having been in Afghanistan during the most grotesque excesses of the Bethany Peterson affair. He was flattered by the attention of a man who had long been an institution in his hometown. Michael Catalinelli, in turn, while having no qualms about using Sherrod as "proof" that he wasn't a racist, valued the young man enough to
put him on the payroll as his official press secretary.
Once Sherrod found himself an employee, however, and not merely a supporter, he had second thoughts. He seemed to take his Christian religion seriously. Often he would mutter "20 pieces of silver" every time he noticed just how unsavory some of Michael Catalinelli's "friends" really were.
"It's 30 pieces of silver David," Catalinelli would say. "If you want a raise just ask for one."
David Sherrod had, in fact, often appeared so uncomfortable on stage with Michael Catalinelli that, when his Damascus Road moment finally came, the only thing some people were surprised about was that it had not come sooner. The first sign of trouble came after Michael Catalinelli had spoken at Nicholas Felton's wake, where he had assigned Sherrod to sound out Elizabeth Felton about her father's death. The mayor seemed to believe that without her father pushing her along, she would simply drop out of the race. The next morning, however, during a staff meeting, all David Sherrod wanted to talk about was her proposal to study the number of homeless veterans in the Winterborn County. When Catalinelli seemed dismissive of the whole idea of there even being homeless veterans in the Winterborn County, Sherrod slammed his notepad down on the table.
"20 pieces of silver," he said, and stormed out of the room.
The bolt of lightning that finally knocked David Sherrod off his horse, however, came from the newly constituted Poison Springs Metro Police. One Friday night, Sherrod, who liked to ride his bicycle through downtown Poison Springs, had uncharacteristically forgotten his identification. It was also the Friday night that he got stopped by two newly hired police officers unaware that it was legal to ride a bike across the north south traverse of Reagan Plaza after 6PM. Sherrod was thrown to the ground, shoved into the back of a police cruiser after having his head smacked up against the side of the door, taken down to The Dungeon, fingerprinted, and locked up for three days without being allowed a phone call. Only a lucky encounter with an older officer who recognized him prevented him from being held for the full 168 hours that the city of Poison Springs was allowed to hold an arrestee before bringing him in front of a judge. Michael Catalinelli's apologies were as profuse as they were ultimately useless.
NOT AN AMERICAN Page 7
