See no Evil -- a short-short story

1744seenoevil/695  words

8/18.17

See no Evil

A short story

Harley L. Sachs

As a final debriefing I had taken Harry up to the Tower for a farewell look at New York City at night. I was told his name was Harry, which is an inside joke in the company, a reference to Harry Lime of the Third Man. I this case I actually knew his real name, for we had met briefly between beers at a super bowl party. He had been there with his young wife and I didn’t linger for a conversation.

Taking agents up in the Tower on their last night has become a routine ritual for me. We don’t  want anyone to spend the last evening in a bar where they might drink too much and talk, like say where they are going the next day. Instead I take them out for a swell filet mignon dinner with red wine. I don’t claim reimbursement for the wine because our bookkeeper is a teetotaler, so I claim the dessert part of the menu and always pay cash. It’s my chance for a hundred dollar dinner before I go home to my wife who’s into chemo therapy for her breast. She’s too sick to cook and I’m no chef.

We call it simply the Tower. Used to be the Trump Tower before the assassination. Nobody lives in the penthouse any more. The building was foreclosed and bought by a shell company financed with laundered Russian money. I borrow a key to the private elevator from the building manager and take the occasional special guest up top so they can see the bathrooms. Everybody always wants to see the bathrooms and sometimes pee in the gilded commode.

So Harry and I were on the top floor balcony, looking down over the city. He said he’s leaving for Hong Kong in the morning but I know he’s flying to Moscow via Warsaw. It’s not etiquette to ask much.

The agent called Harry is in his thirties. I know his history and have to write a contact report on his last evening in the States. I make those reports as brief and innocuous as possible, just enough to justify the cost of the meal. You never know who reads those.

We were standing at the parapet looking down at the city. On a floor two stories down there was some sort of party and on that balcony there were two men who had separated themselves from the crowd. Just two men, talking.

Harry said, “Isn’t that, er, Cannon?”

“Bannon,”  I said. “Steve Bannon.”

“Oh.”

“Been in the news again.”

“Yes.”

“Not good.”

“No.”

One second there were two men down there on that balcony. Then in a blink of an eye, there was only one.

“Did you see that?” Harry asked, shocked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Shouldn’t we report it?”

“What? You report it? You’d miss your plane to Hong Kong.”

“What about you?” Harry asked.

I tapped the American flag pin on my lapel and gave him a knowing look. “Got it.”

“That your Go-pro?”

I just gave him a thin smile like don’t ask. Everyone thinks we’re equipped with button cameras and other James Bond shit.

“Oh,” Harry said.

There was a faint sound of a siren on the street down below. “We’d better go out the service exit,” I said, not wanting to encounter uniforms in the lobby.

When we reached the street I hailed a yellow cab to get him back to his hotel. As Harry got into the cab he turned and asked, “You’ll report it, right?”

I nodded.

He was off.

Before the assassination the president used to fire people. Pence just kills them.

Not my problem. I’m up for retirement soon. We have a rule: see no evil. Works for me.

A year later I learned that Harry had been killed in a car crash in Moscow. I thought it probably was a car crash. The Russians can’t afford to spend a car and driver when it’s cheaper to toss someone out a fourth story hotel window. I wondered what had gone wrong, if the man called Harry had made a mistake, or someone like Cheney had blown his cover. 

The Toilet Police

1741toilet/ 650 words

4/8/2017

The Toilet Police

 by

Harley L. Sachs

I’ve always been a guy. Even when I was only three, people used to call me the little guy. Now with all this bathroom brouhaha my guyness is in question. It’s all because of that Carolina law about who gets to use what toilet. The transgender folks, those who can’t make up their minds if they are a guy or a gal or whatever, have been persecuted. I can see that if I dressed up as a drag queen for the Moose Halloween party, it might look a bit peculiar, but even in a wig and lipstick, there’s no doubt that I would be seen as a guy. Stupid looking, comical, but still a guy. Now all that’s changed.

Now to use a toilet in some big stores you have to prove your birth gender. In Saudi Arabia they have the religious police, in case a woman shows her ankles, bare wrists, or doesn’t cover her eyes. Here it’s the toilet cops.

I was standing in line by the men’s room for my turn when I was stopped by toilet security. This was a tough looking person in a badge and uniform but of. to my mind, uncertain gender. “You have to show proof of gender,” the toilet cop said, very stern.

My gender was never questioned before. I thought it was a joke. “You want to see my circumcision scar?”

I thought it was a joke. Apparently it wasn’t. People who have undergone a sex change might have operation scars I don’t want to see under any circumstances. I have trouble enough with people who pierce their lips and noses. “

“You have to show proof of gender when you were born.”

“How do I do that?”

“Birth certificate.”

I didn’t have my birth certificate on me. Who does? If I were an immigrant of questionable legality I’d have to carry a green card or a proof of citizenship, but not a birth certificate.

Fortunately, that time my visit to the toilet wasn’t urgent. I went home and searched the file of documents, my high school diploma, my confirmation diploma from Sunday School, my military discharge DD214, and found a birth certificate issued by a Chicago clerk. I decided I’d better carry it with me at all times, just in case I’d have to pee.

Sure though, I did. This time I was in a different big box store and approached the public toilet. Again there was a toilet cop guarding the facility. This time I was ready.

“:Proof of birth gender,” I said, hoping not to be kept waiting. This time I really had to go. I showed my birth certificate. There is was: male baby complete with baby footprint.

The toilet cop was skeptical. “This is a photo copy. We only accept original documents.”

“What are you?  Ex IRS?” I once had to re-file my income tax because I sent a photocopy of the return, not one with the original signature.

The toilet cop wasn’t amused. “Got to be the original document. How do I know if you aren’t transgender?”

If I waited any longer it would be too late. I had to go, now. I gave up and hurried out the door. Round the corner, at the back of the building where there are no windows, I peed against the wall. I was in Italy once. Almost everybody pees against a wall in Italy.

Not here.

I was arrested for public indecency.

Funny thing was, they put me in a cell with several violators, some of them transgender. They’d been caught by the toilet cops without the proper birth certificates.

Nobody seemed to care in the jail. They have unisex cells.

I didn’t have cash for bail money, so I have to stay in the joint to  await my court date.  You know what they have for toilet facilities in the jail? A stainless steel commode and no privacy. Everybody uses the same one, with or without a birth certificate.

Faux Hnting

1740faux/450 words

January 16, 2017

Faux Hunting

A column by

Harley L. Sachs

When our family was in the fur business my father sold coats made from many animals. Mom had an ocelot jacket and a mink stole. I had once had a cut down raccoon coat. But we also sold Labrador seal, sheered beaver, Coney, an occasional squirrel coat, mouton lamb, almost any animal whose hide leant it to making into a coat for humans. Lions were too shaggy, but leopards were fine for coats. Mink was raised on farms just for the hides. Sable was trapped in Siberia. I suspect zebra would be too difficult to match up, what with all those stripes. Arctic fox was often sold as a scarf with a fake animal head clasp complete with glass eyes. You could even get moleskin, though it would take an awful lot of dead moles to make a ladies jacket.

Animal rights fanatics are full of beans, total hypocrites.. A cowboy wouldn’t want a plastic saddle. Saddles need to be leather.  As for the cruelty of killing an animal for its skin, in the Argentine cattle were initially raised only for their hides until they figured out that the meat could be turned into corned beef. Leather or pigskin shoes are just an animal skin with the hair removed. Shaving and pastry brushes are made of pig bristles..

Coming from that fur business background, I was stymied by the label on my new, lined boots. The label says “faux fur.” So what animal is a faux? Not a fox, too shaggy for a boot liner, and not mink, too expensive. We used to sell seal dyed Coney, a Coney being a sort of rabbit and dyed to look like seal. It was still basically rabbit.

But a faux? What animal was that?

It couldn‘t be very large, and being a mammal had to be something with four legs.

I’d heard about fox hunting, but not faux hunting.

I’d never seen a faux in the zoo, either.

Maybe the faux is something like the nauga whose hide is made into furniture. I haven’t seen naugas at the zoo, either but plenty of recliners using naugahide..

Maybe, like the Coney, those animal  skins are processed to suit the technological world we live in.  Seal dyed Coney was just a fake. Maybe the faux is, too. Maybe faux fur is really guinea pig, those cute cuddly creatures that are not actually pigs. A Coney is not a seal even if dyed that color, and a guinea pig isn’t a pig. Nobody would want to kill a guinea pig for boot liner, so they give it another name, faux. So maybe a faux is something else. Go figure.

Crony Capitalism

1739crony /220  words
Dec. 4. 2016

Crony Capitalism
A letter by
Harley L. Sachs

Donald Trump’s “saving” about 800  jobs at the Indianapolis Carrier plant from being exported to Mexico was a publicity stunt. He campaigned on a plan to stop exporting American jobs abroad, but in fact there were 2000 jobs in play at Carrier, not the 800. What about the rest? Bye-bye. Then, to sweeten the deal he got Carrier a seven million dollar tax break. The money “saved” for Carrier in fact will not go into the Indiana general fund.
Vice president elect Spense should be ashamed. As governor of Indiana, his deal with Carrier will deprive the state of needed tax income. What will it come out of? Schools? Infrastructure?
This is a typical Trump tactic: pay a bill with other people’s money and then take the credit. He did the same with casinos: borrowing money, then going bankrupt, selling at the loss of his creditors and making himself richer in the process. You can’t run a government that way. In one Southern state a Republican governor cut taxes and left office with the state bankrupt.
In the Carrier case the creditors who get stiffed will be Indiana taxpayers. Try floating a seven million bond issue for schools or roads to replace the Carrier giveaway. Lots of luck.

Here we Go Again

1737history/        

Here we go Again

A letter by

Harley L. Sachs

www.HarleySachs.com

Merkel’s government is going under to a right wing nationalist party. Why?

The new German political Party is anti-immigrant, why?

The immigrants are flooding Germany from Iraq and Syria. Why?

The Iraqis are fleeing a religious civil war; the Syrians are fleeing Assad’s regime. Why?

Iraq fell into a religious civil war because Bush and Cheney caused an invasion. Why?

The Iraq war was started because Shell and Cheney’s Haliburton lost their oil leases and contracts to Saddam.

The Syrian war started because Assad would not give his people a voice in government and declared them to be terrorists. So he destroyed his own country out of spite.

Merkel’s German government is about to go under. Italy will follow and maybe France. Britain is pulling out of the EU and Russia is threatening the Baltic States.

All because of oil rights.

Last time it was the assassination of a minor royal in Sarajevo which precipitated World War I, many millions of dead, and the redrawing of the map of Europe.

WW I ended with the treaty of Versailles which crippled the German economy, making way for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist (NAZI) party. Then it was the Jews who were the scapegoats.

The new right wing German party will go after the Moslem immigrants.

Why don’t we ever learn?

Submission to New York Times magazine

LIVES

From Tent to Castle

Harley L. Sachs

www.HarleySachs.com

     She was a shop assistant with a German passport, working for a cooperative grocery in Stockholm and spoke no English. I was an American spy at the tail end of the GI Bill teaching English as a foreign language, two three months terms a year. In three years I had learned Swedish. When my number came up to be served I recognized the clerk’s accent. In the then formal Swedish way of addressing strangers in the third person, I asked, “Is the young lady Danish?”

She blushed. I was surprised. This was Sweden, after all, the land of unabashed free love. That this pretty shop assistant could blush was intriguing. I had to know more about her.

It was my job to size people up, judge their character, know them, if possible, inside and out. I immediately saw this girl, who turned out to be from North Germany but an ethnic Dane from South Schleswig, as someone special. She was, to my mind, like a bud of a rose. I saw potential. It would be exciting to see how she would blossom. I was determined to find out.

I set about to doggedly pursue her in my broke grad student fashion. The GI bill had run out. I was paid for my language classes only twice a year. I was not someone who wooed with a bunch of flowers, a bottle of wine and a dinner invitation. Instead, every day I stopped at the Konsum store, took a number, waited until she would be the next clerk to serve. I then bought a nickel chocolate bar. Every day.

 I learned her name was Ulla. 

The store crew figured it out, of course, and teased her. Ulla refused all invitations to a movie. It looked pretty hopeless, but I was determined.

While a company clerk in the US Army in Heidelberg I had learned from our cooks the secret of making pie crust. Swedish pastry selections did not include American apple pie.  I decided to bake a couple of pies and, since Ulla refused my invitations to a movie, to invite the whole Konsum crew upstairs for some real American apple pie, a pie party.

I baked the pies and waited. The agreed time came and went. I cut a pie and had my piece, alone.  Half an hour late Ulla showed up with one of the co-workers.

After that delayed success she decided I wasn’t such a dangerous person after all. We did go to the movies with her always insisting on paying her own way, a plus for a guy who lived on two pay checks a year. That was the beginning.

We did a shakedown trip, hitchhiking to Norway and sleeping rough in a small tent, cooking over a Loma gasoline stove and getting to know each other. This was no American girl who could not live without a hot shower every day, stay in hotels and eat in nice restaurants. This was a girl who had lived through World War II in North Germany on a diet of boiled milk and potatoes in a house with no running water or plumbing. Ulla had pumped water and boiled laundry in a cauldron over a brown coal fire. She could rough it without complaint.

We were married the next year. My American and Swedish friends thought us an odd couple: a Jewish American with a graduate degree whose Polish family had been murdered and a German girl with a Lutheran background who spoke no English and whose brother had died at Stalingrad. We had a lot of points against us and we knew it.

On our honeymoon we left Stockholm on rebuilt one speed bicycles, calendar and itinerary open. Ulla had no money and I had my stash of the three thousand dollars I had put away during my three years as a contract agent. It wasn’t as crazy as it looked, for if we did go broke and get stranded I knew (but Ulla didn’t) the government would pay our fares to the United States. That failing, I had hopes of an assignment in Denmark.

We still had the language problem. We had fallen in love in Swedish and for Ulla’s father’s sake, married in German at the Stockholm synagogue after her conversion. Snubbed my my English relatives who saw Ulla as a despicable German even though she saw herself as Danish, she swore not to leave England until she learned the language.

After fifty-two days of rain in the tent in England and Scotland, we advertised for a winter layover and, because I’m an author, were offered the gatehouse of Borthwick Castle for the winter. While I wrote a bad novel in the dungeon Ulla was upstairs teaching herself English, her fifth language.

This is no Pygmalian story, for I am not her Professor Higgins or Svengali. I am her loving, devoted observer, still enchanted by that remarkable girl who once blushed in the Konsum grocery. store. We have been married fifty-six years.   

Our story, “From Tent to Castle: Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon” is available through Amazon.com.

Write Your Story

1734tell-your-story/494 words

2545 SW Terwilliger Apt. 328

Portland, OR 97201

Tell Your Story

Harley L. Sachs

www.HardleySachs.com

“Everybody has a story.” That’s the word from Harley L Sachs, long time resident at Terwilliger Plaza in Portland. “If you don’t tell yours, nobody else will be able to.” Sachs has written his own biography in three hefty volumes and is in the process of incorporating old photographs into volume one. He used to teach memoir writing for Oasis at Meier and Frank, now Macy’s, and now is a co-leader of the Author’s Circle at the Terwilliger Plaza retirement center.

“It helps if you keep a diary or a journal,” Sachs says. He began his when he was fourteen years old and writes in it every day. “Memory is unreliable,” he says. “For instance, my bride and I set off on old bicycles from Sweden in 1960. Looking back I thought we had a kitty of $5000. When I went back to the old diary, I found that we’d had only $3000, yet we had a year long honeymoon in a Scottish castle outside Edinburgh.

“From Tent to Castle, Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon” is just one of the adventures Sachs has written about. In the thirty years since his retirement from Michigan Technological University he has published more than one book a year.

“My rhythm is to write a novel in 90 days, writing every morning. I realize that, like Charles Dickens, some of my books are based on current social issues. Dickens wrote “Bleak House” about lawyers. I wrote “Stoprape,com” about rape in the military, “White Slave” about slaves aboard Pacific fishing boats, “”The Accidental Courier” about rare earths mined by slaves in Africa, “Dead Men Don’t Bleed” about the difficulties of being transgender in Portland, and most recently “The Seventh Paradigm” about the abuse of metadata, your loss of privacy to computer marketing systems.” His next project? Something about sex trafficking in a Portland shopping mall.

Sachs reveals that writing, for him, is therapy and escape, for Ulla, his wife of 56 years, is paralyzed by a stroke and in expensive 24 hour care. “Writing a book takes up your mind and blots out the troubles around you,” he says. “When you retire, you have to have something to do. For me, that’s writing books. At least I have something to show for it besides some old golf scores.”

Sachs was a freelance writer from 1957, writing trade magazine articles while living in Europe. When he and Ulla settled down to raising their three daughters, he shifted to newspaper columns. He did not publish a book until after he took early retirement. He now has 43 titles available at Amazon. He now reads his published short stories at Portland retirement centers.

“When you die, your memory dies with you,” Sachs, now 85 and in poor health,  says. “For the sake of your grandchildren and history, write your story before it’s too  late.”