Finding Steve
From Sokushinbutsu
Flattered, Brian took it. He took the job the memo in the manilla envelope described. It was a war on drugs job, and it was real world work. Taking leads from local law enforcement The Bureau, Brian, was to infiltrate the drug culture from within, to poison it, to speed its demise.
It was part of an ongoing program that had simmered under The Bureau’s stainless flatfoot image since the early sixties. There had always been a peck of go getters with off budget support up the food chain brainwashing uptight Canadian housewives and getting young prostitutes to sneak their johns acid and there was funding for movies and TV shows.
When every household in America first had a TV in it and there were only three channels. You bet your sweet ass the Federalés via The Bureau or the CIA had their messaging as part of the broadcast.
Broadcast being the literally operative word. It means to throw seeds in a wide arch onto the ground where they might grow.
Now I suppose they are planted in rows.
The Colonel who ran the program Brian signed on to was Micheal Eck. In developing the strategies for his assignment Brian and this ex-Viet Nam Colonel who’d recruited him would have two to three after office hours Bourbons and scheme in all seriousness.
Who should be selected?
What should they be tasked with?
The Colonel was a man of the world, a man who’d gone to war and Brian was some rural South field agent who’d just been put out to pasture. Brian was in awe of the Colonel and the Colonel saw in Brian the makings of a great secret soldier in this new war- someone he could mold.
The Colonel studied the occult, his wife was a high priestess in the church of the devil. They practiced sex magic, he told Brian. She ran a daycare for the army base in Biloxi. He consistently called his wife different stripper-sounding names: Bambi, Trixie, Tanya, Honey, Sweet Tit’s if he meant it.
Brian didn’t care much for the Colonel’s wife. She wore a lot of jewelry and black clothes and it always seemed like she was trying to get him in the sack. Brian didn’t care for that, and what’s more the Colonel responded pretty positively to Brian shrinking from his wife’s advances.
All of this served to bolster their professional bond.
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Figures who drew a lot of focus in the counter culture tended to be in a certain age range- mid late twenties. They tended to be attractive and white and male but not always. They tended to be well adjusted, emotionally stable, self assured, well spoken, single, sexually active drug dabblers who were less attached to people than people were attached to them. They tended to have a remove, a distance, like a pretty girl who’s had a bunch of unsolicited attention.
They’re easy to see and they don’t mind the gaze of their peers. They’re friendly. They do well, but they are not desperate for the change and influence they can’t manifest, because they can.
In the hot war that was Viet Nam, lower middle class men like this were singled out and shot by their direct superiors because they were trusted and believed. Grunts would go to them instead of the C.O. and then everything was fucked.
Out here in the real world they’re the wait staff lead or the head of the sales department, the only straight guy in the community theater, the player that everybody’s mom likes.
Brian’s job would be to find these men, help them to see the light and then place them, fund them, guide them into the right moves for the right reasons, but also to be uninvolved.
The kind of work that needed to be done wouldn’t survive the scrutiny of plebes. Yankees weren’t that bright or community minded, but they were suspicious and righteous. Great care would need to be taken.
“The Bureau can be used to shield a man from prosecution, but it shouldn’t be one’s reputation that his organization put him above the law.” Eck told Brian.
“You want the local cops to respect you as a man who does honorable work and deserves grace. If he thinks you’re a spook who is getting away with murder, we’re all in trouble.
“You’re gonna want to make the kind of marks that’ll wash out.” The Colonel had said this to Brian one evening while putting a third bourbon on rocks that had seen their day come and go.
His wife poked her head around the corner in a black apron that was longer than her skirt and winked and giggled.
She was making the two gentlemen thick cheeseburgers in a cast iron skillet and tater tots in a Fry Daddy.
Brian felt strong on his drinks and was fixing to get stronger with that burger down him.
Brian had always had a big ass. He liked the wide leather chairs in the Colonel’s Study. When the Colonel left the room to piss or grope his wife out of sight Brian would wander the little space and look at the Colonels medals and finger his books and stare up at the framed photos above the bookshelves: platoon posing in the jungle, helicopter gunship, navy carrier deck in dress blues, some fiery circle and what he assumed was the Colonel’s naked wife, some black and white of a farm taken from a plane.
“That’s the house I was born in.” the Colonel would say, pointing to it.
They’d sit back down and continue talking about the future of American society and what there is to be done about it. Brian barely believed his good luck. He put his nose in his glass and reveled, seriously.
When the Colonel first put Brian in the field he was in Chicago. Everyone knew he was a cop. He couldn’t get anything done. All the good looking Italian and Irish kids worked for their dads or were on the make or wanted to be cops. He didn’t even go into the black neighborhoods.
One night he was in a bar in a Loyola Neighborhood and a guy came and put his arm around Brian, told him he was in the wrong place. Brian stood up as if to move to a different stool and the guy walked him right out the door with a drink in his hand.
Once he was outside, the bar let out a cheer.
He was in the wrong place.
He was moved to California.
The oblivion there served his aim. Oakland and San Francisco offered him pockets of educated drug culture to poison and good looking young men that he unironically mentored as young patriots serving in the war on drugs.
It worked. He was making a change for the good in his world. The drudgery of his career lifted. He was inspired. Meaningful work was his.
The first time Brian saw Steve, Steve was making the top of his cigarette box into a ring and talking to a girl who was trying not to seem delighted that he was gonna slip it on her finger and hold her hand.
Dudes at the table across the aisle were shaking their heads and rolling their eyes. When he put it on her finger she audibly gushed and they finished their drinks and left. Brian knew, this was his guy.