10-07-2026, 12:54 PM
FROM VOLUME ONE: THE LONG FALL--BIRD OF PREY
Sometimes you see death and destruction headed straight for you. Sometime it catches you from your blind side. And sometimes, sometimes, like a hawk on a cloudless day gliding on thermals far above you, it’s always been there, waiting….
Maybe I knew it from the time I was a little boy. From the time my father walked out the door. From the moment we heard the rumbling like a small earthquake. Far away. As far away as the mine shaft that had already collapsed once that day.
Maybe I knew it from the moment my mother stood in our small kitchen washing the last of the dishes from what would be our Last Supper….the last supper she and my father and I ever sat down to.
She stared up at the ceiling as she let the plate she was drying fall to the tiled floor. Its shattering sounded louder than the far away rumble that ended our world. I knew what it was, although I wouldn’t let myself know. I was only eight….but I knew.
I was sitting at the living room table watching some program on television too old for me to really understand. Probably a cop show…maybe Adam-12.
When I heard the rumble and then the shattering of the plate, I looked into the kitchen and saw my mother drop to her knees as though her legs had given out on her. Then, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, she fell forward hitting her face on the tiles.
I don’t remember getting up but I was kneeling beside her and trying to lift her face from the floor. She put one hand down and pushed herself up and was looking at me, but I don’t think she saw me.
Neither one of us said anything. She pulled her to me and began to weep, clutching my face to her chest. She cried ceaselessly and never let me go until some neighboring women came in and pulled me away from her. They took me to a neighboring house and the last I saw of her was their laying her down on a bed in my parent’s bedroom. As she saw one of the women leading me to our front door she screamed and tried to get up, but they held her down, stroking her soft blonde hair.
Maybe that was when it started. Because I knew then although I couldn’t put the thought into words, that what had happened was WRONG.
I don’t think I ever really, truly, believed in God from that day forward. And if I were to look back, that was probably the moment that made me decide that I wanted to make things RIGHT.
I forgot a lot of that over the years, but when I wanted to, I could put myself back in that kitchen, watch my mother collapse to the floor and hear her scream
as I was led out of our house.
That was probably what led me to the University of Florida college of law, although by that time I had much more rational reasons for becoming a lawyer.
And that dark bird of prey watching from above…It probably observed my future wife grunting in pain as three Frat fucks, including her boyfriend, bangd her one night at a party and I cleared the room out with a fireplace poker.
It watched as I lay tangled in tubes and dreamless in a coma while the young and inhumanly beautiful Debbie Bascomb was drawn to the bedside of a short, poor, average slob she would never in any other reality have looked at twice.
It hovered high in the Gainesville skies as Debbie Bascomb bulldozed her way into my ordered life and shredded it. It watched as I fought not to fall in love with her, but I never had a chance. Not from the first moment I saw her in that storeroom being bangd, to the first moment she walked into my off campus apartment.
It was undoubtedly there the first time she broke my heart after a summer that changed my life forever. And it watched the first time we made love, when I knew that no matter what, I had to try to win her.
It was hovering over the campus many months later when the reality that I would never be good enough for her sank in, when I knew in my heart that she had been screwing around behind my back, that she just hadn’t been able to resist slipping back into her old wild and wanton ways.
And it watched and probably smiled as I learned I was the one who hadn’t trusted enough, that the stories I’d heard were stories and that I’d thrown away the love of the best thing I was ever going to have in my life, no matter how long I lived.
It was probably there when I begged her in the bedroom of her Jacksonville home for a second chance. Even if I’d known what lay down the road nearly 20 years later, I would still have rejoiced when we somehow made it back.
And that was how I wound up in April of 2005 a long married, relatively happy husband – as long as I didn’t look closely at my life - and father of two teenagers, the functioning head of the State Attorney’s Office of the Third Circuit in Northeast Florida.
That was how I wound up married to a woman I wasn’t satisfying in bed, wasn’t satisfying in our marriage; an unhappy woman who WAS made happy by the attentions of a tall, handsome, young Assistant Professor to her Associate Professor at the University of North Florida.
Debbie’s mother called it a fling, but whatever name you called it, it was the end of our marriage.
We fought for five months while I worked myself to exhaustion every day getting into the best shape of my life running away from the truth of my life, that
she was with a younger, better man in the bedroom that we had made love in for nearly ten years.
I threw myself into my work because it seemed my marriage had evaporated and my kids had no place in their lives anymore for me…but then again, they hadn’t had that much of a place in mine before.
So I ran the State Attorney’s Office for my boss and mentor, who was running for Governor of Florida, prosecuting murderers and drug lords and men who killed their dying wives. And wound up going a little crazy. Only a little crazy. But it was enough.
My boss forced me to take a sea cruise to try to get my head back on straight. I met Aline des-Jardins on the Bonne Chance sailing temporarily out of Jacksonville, and for the second time in 20 years fell in love.
Of course, with that damned black bird of prey hovering over my life, Aline turned out to be married to Philippe Archambault, a French federal prosecutor I’d worked with four years before on a trip to Paris.
Aline and I had a week of glorious sex and when I walked off the Bonne Chance I knew that I was still a man and that I was still the unluckiest damned man on the face of the earth. But I walked away from her and told her I wouldn’t be coming back. And now Debbie and I are divorced and she’s thrown out the stud she left me for, even though she swears that’s not the way it happened. But I’m not worried about her. Men have always swarmed around her and they always will.
As for myself, I’ve had Aline, which counted, and casual sex with two hot women, which didn’t count, and fulfilled fantasies I didn’t even know I had. So I’ll be alright. Miserable, but alright.
Which almost brings us up to date.
Sometimes you see death and destruction headed straight for you. Sometime it catches you from your blind side. And sometimes, sometimes, like a hawk on a cloudless day gliding on thermals far above you, it’s always been there, waiting….
Maybe I knew it from the time I was a little boy. From the time my father walked out the door. From the moment we heard the rumbling like a small earthquake. Far away. As far away as the mine shaft that had already collapsed once that day.
Maybe I knew it from the moment my mother stood in our small kitchen washing the last of the dishes from what would be our Last Supper….the last supper she and my father and I ever sat down to.
She stared up at the ceiling as she let the plate she was drying fall to the tiled floor. Its shattering sounded louder than the far away rumble that ended our world. I knew what it was, although I wouldn’t let myself know. I was only eight….but I knew.
I was sitting at the living room table watching some program on television too old for me to really understand. Probably a cop show…maybe Adam-12.
When I heard the rumble and then the shattering of the plate, I looked into the kitchen and saw my mother drop to her knees as though her legs had given out on her. Then, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, she fell forward hitting her face on the tiles.
I don’t remember getting up but I was kneeling beside her and trying to lift her face from the floor. She put one hand down and pushed herself up and was looking at me, but I don’t think she saw me.
Neither one of us said anything. She pulled her to me and began to weep, clutching my face to her chest. She cried ceaselessly and never let me go until some neighboring women came in and pulled me away from her. They took me to a neighboring house and the last I saw of her was their laying her down on a bed in my parent’s bedroom. As she saw one of the women leading me to our front door she screamed and tried to get up, but they held her down, stroking her soft blonde hair.
Maybe that was when it started. Because I knew then although I couldn’t put the thought into words, that what had happened was WRONG.
I don’t think I ever really, truly, believed in God from that day forward. And if I were to look back, that was probably the moment that made me decide that I wanted to make things RIGHT.
I forgot a lot of that over the years, but when I wanted to, I could put myself back in that kitchen, watch my mother collapse to the floor and hear her scream
as I was led out of our house.
That was probably what led me to the University of Florida college of law, although by that time I had much more rational reasons for becoming a lawyer.
And that dark bird of prey watching from above…It probably observed my future wife grunting in pain as three Frat fucks, including her boyfriend, bangd her one night at a party and I cleared the room out with a fireplace poker.
It watched as I lay tangled in tubes and dreamless in a coma while the young and inhumanly beautiful Debbie Bascomb was drawn to the bedside of a short, poor, average slob she would never in any other reality have looked at twice.
It hovered high in the Gainesville skies as Debbie Bascomb bulldozed her way into my ordered life and shredded it. It watched as I fought not to fall in love with her, but I never had a chance. Not from the first moment I saw her in that storeroom being bangd, to the first moment she walked into my off campus apartment.
It was undoubtedly there the first time she broke my heart after a summer that changed my life forever. And it watched the first time we made love, when I knew that no matter what, I had to try to win her.
It was hovering over the campus many months later when the reality that I would never be good enough for her sank in, when I knew in my heart that she had been screwing around behind my back, that she just hadn’t been able to resist slipping back into her old wild and wanton ways.
And it watched and probably smiled as I learned I was the one who hadn’t trusted enough, that the stories I’d heard were stories and that I’d thrown away the love of the best thing I was ever going to have in my life, no matter how long I lived.
It was probably there when I begged her in the bedroom of her Jacksonville home for a second chance. Even if I’d known what lay down the road nearly 20 years later, I would still have rejoiced when we somehow made it back.
And that was how I wound up in April of 2005 a long married, relatively happy husband – as long as I didn’t look closely at my life - and father of two teenagers, the functioning head of the State Attorney’s Office of the Third Circuit in Northeast Florida.
That was how I wound up married to a woman I wasn’t satisfying in bed, wasn’t satisfying in our marriage; an unhappy woman who WAS made happy by the attentions of a tall, handsome, young Assistant Professor to her Associate Professor at the University of North Florida.
Debbie’s mother called it a fling, but whatever name you called it, it was the end of our marriage.
We fought for five months while I worked myself to exhaustion every day getting into the best shape of my life running away from the truth of my life, that
she was with a younger, better man in the bedroom that we had made love in for nearly ten years.
I threw myself into my work because it seemed my marriage had evaporated and my kids had no place in their lives anymore for me…but then again, they hadn’t had that much of a place in mine before.
So I ran the State Attorney’s Office for my boss and mentor, who was running for Governor of Florida, prosecuting murderers and drug lords and men who killed their dying wives. And wound up going a little crazy. Only a little crazy. But it was enough.
My boss forced me to take a sea cruise to try to get my head back on straight. I met Aline des-Jardins on the Bonne Chance sailing temporarily out of Jacksonville, and for the second time in 20 years fell in love.
Of course, with that damned black bird of prey hovering over my life, Aline turned out to be married to Philippe Archambault, a French federal prosecutor I’d worked with four years before on a trip to Paris.
Aline and I had a week of glorious sex and when I walked off the Bonne Chance I knew that I was still a man and that I was still the unluckiest damned man on the face of the earth. But I walked away from her and told her I wouldn’t be coming back. And now Debbie and I are divorced and she’s thrown out the stud she left me for, even though she swears that’s not the way it happened. But I’m not worried about her. Men have always swarmed around her and they always will.
As for myself, I’ve had Aline, which counted, and casual sex with two hot women, which didn’t count, and fulfilled fantasies I didn’t even know I had. So I’ll be alright. Miserable, but alright.
Which almost brings us up to date.
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