The Lo Zone

Like this:

The afflicted find themselves waking up in the middle of sexual activity. In benign forms the activity is harmless, such as masturbation when alone or in some sexual act with a bed partner. In extreme cases the behavior can be embarrassing or dangerous, such as the protracted shouting of sexual noises, engaging in violent masturbation (more common in men, who can awake with bruises), or in the worst cases sexual assault of a bed partner. Subjects are often more dominant in their behaviors than they are when doing the same things when awake. Subjects report complete amnesia of the events.

"I noticed your site on the internet off of a link from MSN.COM , me and my fiancee is experiencing a problem with sleep sex. Most nights that she falls asleep for a few hours she starts moaning and soon is masturbating and acting out sexual acts in her sleep. She has spoke to her dr and he doesnt seem to think anything serious about it she was put on an anti psychotic pill that only seemed to change the pattern for a couple weeks and then went back to her usual sleep sex. She discontinued the pill at this point. If you can offer any suggestions or help it would be greatly appreciated."

"Me and my wife have been having a very difficult time since our marriage began four years ago. At night I become a very aggressive person in bed only to awake to a horrified wife that knows all to well what I have on my mind. It is only when she awakes that I do realize what is going on. I do have a very difficult time a night sleeping getting up every night. She has been so patient with me until recently the unwanted ness has become more aggressive. Our marriage is on the brink of divorce because of this obsession. She brought in an article that explains sleep sex! I read this and to my surprise I am astonished at what I was reading. I am looking a mirror image of what is happening to me. Is this just a stipulation or a convenience excuse with men with a sex obsession? If there is more information about sleep sex I would really like to know. I am in desperate need of answers to the question of what is going on."

Really Good or Really Shitty!!!

...addressed the following passage:

“See, I told you dum-dum. That frog ain’t turn to no dust,” the little girl taunted in a heavy southern accent. She had her hand on her hip, just the way Aunt Sister always stood. Her head rolled on her slender neck with an expertise far beyond her seven years. She stared at her brother waiting for his response, which would probably be a swift smack upside her head. Instead, he brushed past his sister fuming at his fallacy. She giggled at his defeat and skipped toward the creek to look for another activity.

Approaching the creek, the girl settled on dangling her legs over the dilapidated bridge that straddled the small stretch of water. She tiptoed to the middle of the bridge, careful to avoid the missing spaces where planks of wood once lay. Finding a secure spot, she carefully sat and began to further roll up the legs of her faded over-alls. They were two sizes too big, an obvious hand-me-down from her brother. Coupled with his oversized white t-shirt, she was lost in her ensemble. Her pants legs rolled to her satisfaction, the girl gingerly lowered her body and slid her legs under the railing of the bridge. Her legs were just long enough now that her feet skimmed the top of the creek water. Leaning back on her hands with her face turned upward at the sun, she remembered the days when Mama was alive and yearned for them with a hunger too deep for her own understanding.

[click image to enlarge]

...and what doesn't.

Sir Shakey

Lady T.

Mary and her husband Gareth

“See, I told you dum-dum. That frog ain’t turn to no dust,” the little girl taunted in a heavy southern accent. She had her hand on her hip, just the way Aunt Sister always stood. Her head rolled on her slender neck with an expertise far beyond her seven years. She stared at her brother waiting for his response, which would probably be a swift smack upside her head. Instead, he brushed past his sister fuming at his fallacy. She giggled at his defeat and skipped toward the creek to look for another activity.

Approaching the creek, the girl settled on dangling her legs over the dilapidated bridge that straddled the small stretch of water. She tiptoed to the middle of the bridge, careful to avoid the missing spaces where planks of wood once lay. Finding a secure spot, she carefully sat and began to further roll up the legs of her faded over-alls. They were two sizes too big, an obvious hand-me-down from her brother. Coupled with his oversized white t-shirt, she was lost in her ensemble. Her pants legs rolled to her satisfaction, the girl gingerly lowered her body and slid her legs under the railing of the bridge. Her legs were just long enough now that her feet skimmed the top of the creek water. Leaning back on her hands with her face turned upward at the sun, she remembered the days when Mama was alive and yearned for them with a hunger too deep for her own understanding.

...dared to explore the tricky world of writing in dialect:

Sand…I ‘memba I used to hate when niggahs called me dat. My moma name me Vincent. Dat’s probably why scary shit always happen to me, name me after that ol’ crazy assed Vincent Van Gogh, dat artis’ dude who cut off his ear fo’ a dame. Mu’fuckahs say I do some wil’ shit, but dat niggah was off da chain to do some shit like dat. Come to think of it, Ma named all us after some wil’ cats whose names started with Vs. Big bro’ Vee was named after some writer dude, Voltaire. Dat niggah got teased all through school – which is probably one reason he quit after da sixth grade. Anybody call him Voltaire now, better be ready to defend hisse’f. So, you know a niggah like me uses his name sometime to rile him. Vasco, come after me. Dat pretty mu’fuckah always tellin’ chicks he was named after a explorer so he can take dem ‘roun’ da worl’. I think Baby boy got da smoovest name, fo’ real. He da only one named after somebody black, too; dat photographer dude Van der Zee. I seen some o’ his pictures and black folks was smoove back den.

I ‘on’t think Daddy liked all dem big time names Ma gave us. He used to always grab my curls, tease me ‘bout my light brown hair and light brown eyes, said I look like da grainy color of sand. Started callin’ me Sand and now it feel funny when anybody call me Vincent. I tried to be cool once and make people call me Vinny, but dat didn’t last too long. Sand just stuck to me like dat gritty shit do from da beach.

Here's what you thought after a robust 302 votes:

I have to personally say that I thought this piece was OUTSTANDING, and was executed with great skill. Not everyone can write well in dialect,and readers either love it or hate it.
I LOVED IT.

CONGRATULATIONS are therefore in order for Bronx-based Lo Zone frequenter, author/artist/educator/explorer...CapCity...

...who also runs a wonderful blog called The Intimate Side of CapCity.

Kudos, lady. You ROCKED!!!

Previously: The Lo Zone: Really Good Or Really Shitty, Excerpt #5!!!
Previously: The Lo Zone: Really Good Or Really Shitty, Excerpt #4: The Results!!!
Previously: The Lo Zone: Really Good Or Really Shitty, Excerpt #4!!!
Previously: The Lo Zone: Really Good Or Really Shitty, Excerpt #3: The Results!!!
Previously: The Lo Zone: Really Good Or Really Shitty, Excerpt #3!!!
Previously: The Lo Zone: Really Good Or Really Shitty, Excerpt #2: The Results!!!
Previously: The Lo Zone: Really Good Or Really Shitty, Excerpt #2!!!
Previously: The Lo Zone: Really Good Or Really Shitty, Excerpt #1: The Results!!!
Previously: The Lo Zone: Really Good Or Really Shitty!!! Part 1 (Or, WWM3MS...What Would My 3 Muses Say?)

An accounting firm employee who was fired last week shot and killed a woman and wounded two men Monday at the suburban Detroit building where he worked, then led officers on a high-speed chase, police said.

Hours after the shooting, a motorist 50 miles north of Detroit spotted a vehicle described on radio reports and notified authorities, touching off a 30-mile pursuit that passed through a construction zone and reached speeds of 120 mph, officials said.

Anthony LaCalamita III, 38, said nothing after officers surrounded him, Genesee County Sheriff Robert J. Pickell said. Officers found a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and three live shells in the vehicle, but LaCalamita [w]as "subdued. Very, very, very subdued," the sheriff said.

...or not.

The Shakeman

The Great Ms. Morrison

Mary and her husband Gareth

Sand…I 'memba I used to hate when niggahs called me dat. My moma name me Vincent. Dat's probably why scary shit always happen to me, name me after that ol' crazy assed Vincent Van Gogh, dat artis' dude who cut off his ear fo' a dame. Mu'fuckahs say I do some wil' shit, but dat niggah was off da chain to do some shit like dat. Come to think of it, Ma named all us after some wil' cats whose names started with Vs. Big bro' Vee was named after some writer dude, Voltaire. Dat niggah got teased all through school---which is probably one reason he quit after da sixth grade. Anybody call him Voltaire now, better be ready to defend hisse'f. So, you know a niggah like me uses his name sometime to rile him. Vasco, come after me. Dat pretty mu'fuckah always tellin' chicks he was named after a explorer so he can take dem 'roun' da worl'. I think Baby boy got da smoovest name, fo' real. He da only one named after somebody black, too; dat photographer dude Van der Zee. I seen some o' his pictures and black folks was smoove back den.

I 'on't think Daddy liked all dem big time names Ma gave us. He used to always grab my curls, tease me 'bout my light brown hair and light brown eyes, said I look like da grainy color of sand. Started callin' me Sand and now it feel funny when anybody call me Vincent. I tried to be cool once and make people call me Vinny, but dat didn’t last too long. Sand just stuck to me like dat gritty shit do from da beach.

Don Imus will appear on the Rev. Al Sharpton's radio show Monday, five days after Imus made racially charged comments on his own show about the Rutgers women's basketball team, Sharpton and MSNBC announced Sunday.

Despite Imus' scheduled appearance, Sharpton said his position was unchanged: He wants Imus fired and intends to write the Federal Communications Commission about the matter.

"Somewhere we must draw the line in what is tolerable in mainstream media," Sharpton said Sunday. "We cannot keep going through offending us and then apologizing and then acting like it never happened. Somewhere we've got to stop this."

Nothing says "reformed racist" like a good old-fashioned ass-beating.

David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.

"I have never seen anything like it," Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. "Box after box after box are just empty. There’s nobody home."

My boyfriend, "Leighton," has been pressuring me to do things that I'm uncomfortable with. Shortly after we began dating, he told me that he likes to frequent strip clubs. Many of my male friends do as well. However, their attendance is limited to bachelor parties and post-breakup cheering-up sessions. It turns out that Leighton likes to go more often than that. Going to a strip club is one of his favorite activities, and he will even go alone if he can't find an available friend. This makes me uncomfortable, but I am willing to accept it. I'm not interested in making anyone change. People aren't made of clay to be sculpted in accordance with my preferences.

Unfortunately, Leighton doesn't feel the same. He wants me to go with him. I have told him that that is something that I would never do. I don't wish to see flesh-and-blood women turned into sexual objects. I don't wish to see a naked woman writhing on someone's lap a few feet away. I don't want to witness my boyfriend lusting after someone else. Ick! I live in Canada and apparently our strip clubs are very raunchy, more so than in the United States. Leighton keeps insisting that I go. He says that he wants to share his favorite activity with his significant other.

This next part is why I'm asking advice from a stranger. I can't bring myself to mention this to my friends -- it's too embarrassing. Here it goes, down to brass tacks:

He also keeps insisting that I have anal sex with him. I'm not ready to do that yet, maybe in a few years. Once when we were in bed together, he told me to close my eyes while he excused himself for a moment. When he returned, he put handcuffs on me (without asking) and told me that he could do anything that he wanted to. Even have anal sex with me. He didn't. I was furious and scared. I felt completely helpless, and not in an exciting or enjoyable way. After, he said that his restraint demonstrated that he could be trusted. He says that if I really trusted him, I would satisfy his desires. He compares me to his other girlfriends, who all apparently accompanied him to strip clubs and let him in the back door. He says that I am uptight and that I should get over my inhibitions. He says that if I loved him, I would do what he wanted. He says that there is something wrong with me.

I've only had one other sexual relationship. "Steve" and I started dating when I was 19 and we shared eight happy years together. Over the years I went from being a girl who might like to be a mother to a woman who definitely did. Steve went from a boy who wasn't sure if he wanted to be a father to a man who definitely did not. Now we are great friends. We had wonderful, exciting, inventive sex. We didn't experience the boredom that many couples complain of. I still wanted to rip off his clothes even after eight years.

Being with someone new is different. I'm not sure what's right. Am I obliged to do something I find distasteful just to satisfy my boyfriend? Do I sound uptight? Do other people routinely compare their new lovers to the old ones? Why am I expected to behave like them? How will doing something I find demeaning or undesirable prove my love? I don't think it's a fair thing to ask. I'm confused. Are Leighton's demands typical? They feel controlling and manipulative. Am I overreacting? I've never been asked to do anything sexually that I wasn't willing to try. I don't know how to respond.

Is some K-Y looming in her future?

The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.

Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other "fight or flight" stress hormones.

No one blames the whole feud on this, but doctors say it could help explain some of the clan's notorious behavior.

...was based on this excerpt:

It was deathly quiet, except for the occasional chirping by the crickets, and splashing of water, it was in fact the perfect place to commit a murder. They called him a punk. For as long as he could remember he always had to prove himself. Prove that he was better, tougher, stronger than the rest. Tests, challenges, were second nature to him. They should know that by now, but they knew nothing. They demanded a life with ill regard to the repercussions. He was smarter than the twelve of them put together, punk wannabees, leading each other by their own minute dicks, and they had the nerve to call him a punk. The thought of twelve of them strung together like sausages made him laugh. He struggled to pull her out of the water. Dead weight, weighed considerably more than the living, a fact that always puzzled him. She was little, tiny even, no more than a hundred pounds, and yet she felt like she had doubled in weight. His shoulders hurt and his wrists twisted in pain as he pulled her to the edge of the marsh, and dumped her near a pile of dead timber. She resembled a Black Raggedy Ann. Her clothes were in shreds, and her once beautiful hair, lay matted and tangled with bark and all sorts of things. He pulled a piece out of her hair and his heart jumped, even in death she still had the same eyes, still looked at him the same. It was a fearful stare of disbelief, of something gone wrong, a friend betrayed. He covered her face with a plastic grocery sack, no longer wanting to be reminded of her tearful pleas or the beauty that remained even in the face of death. She was beautiful, by far one of the prettiest girls on campus. He had thought so the very first time he saw her. She was nice too, a good girl, smart, kind and always smiling. He lingered over her, remembering her warmth, just hours ago. It was so easy, and perfect, yet he felt a tinge of regret because he would no longer be able to savor her sweet lips and that pissed him off more than anything. All is fair in love and war and right now he was at war. Every action, every plan had been put in place, to be executed and for sake of the one and only, Blood.

That means congratulations are in order for Diane Dorce'...

When Helen Barahal was deciding whether to sell an East Harlem apartment she was renting to tenants, she asked her son, Marcus, for advice.

"I knew that the neighborhood wasn’t that good at the time, but it was going to change,” Marcus said. “I told her to hold on to it because I knew we would make more from the rent instead of selling it."

Ms. Barahal heeded his advice and has kept the apartment (worth about $100,000 when she bought it in 2000), which is now being bought for four times as much.

It was a "Marcus-approved sale," Ms. Barahal said. Marcus is 11.

But age, as they say, is just a number. Ms. Barahal’s broker, Jeffrey Gardere of the Corcoran Group (who happens to have a doctorate in psychology), said that Ms. Barahal, like many parents nowadays, does not simply listen to her child. “She relies on what he has to say,” Mr. Gardere said.

Parents have long depended on their children to be in-house experts on fashion, technology and pop culture, to introduce them to fresh music, purge their closets of ghastly apparel (“mom jeans”) and troubleshoot household electronics. And generations of parents have encouraged their children to weigh in on family decisions like choosing a winter vacation spot or a replacement for the belly-up goldfish.

But the nature and pervasiveness of child-to-parent advice has reached new proportions for a variety of reasons. Many parents — who have shed their status as old fogy untouchables and become pals with their progeny — are treating their offspring as worldly equals. They think of their computer-savvy, plugged-in children as confidants, and so they look to them for advice on life decisions, as well as major purchases: cars, computers, vacation packages, real estate, home décor.

An article in the Journal of Business Research for April says today’s children “encounter decision-making at an earlier age,” are “taking on greater roles and responsibilities in family purchases” and are influencing their parents’ buying decisions far beyond areas where children are the “primary product users.”

Sandi Mendelson, a chief executive at Hilsinger-Mendelson, a literary public relations firm, said she seeks advice from her daughter, Karah Preiss, 17, because, “I just respect how she looks at the world.”

“There’s a lot of trust,” said Ms. Mendelson, who lives in Manhattan.

Karah — who figured out which television the family should buy and turned her mother onto the band Coldplay — also obliges her mother’s publishing-executive friends when they want to pick her brain about what’s in and what’s out. She said she enjoys weighing in, as well as hanging out with her mother and her mother’s friends.

Big Willie

Lady T.

Mary and her husband Gareth

It was deathly quiet, except for the occasional chirping by the crickets, and splashing of water, it was in fact the perfect place to commit a murder. They called him a punk. For as long as he could remember he always had to prove himself. Prove that he was better, tougher, stronger than the rest. Tests, challenges, were second nature to him. They should know that by now, but they knew nothing. They demanded a life with ill regard to the repercussions. He was smarter than the twelve of them put together, punk wannabees, leading each other by their own minute dicks, and they had the nerve to call him a punk. The thought of twelve of them strung together like sausages made him laugh. He struggled to pull her out of the water. Dead weight, weighed considerably more than the living, a fact that always puzzled him. She was little, tiny even, no more than a hundred pounds, and yet she felt like she had doubled in weight. His shoulders hurt and his wrists twisted in pain as he pulled her to the edge of the marsh, and dumped her near a pile of dead timber. She resembled a Black Raggedy Ann. Her clothes were in shreds, and her once beautiful hair, lay matted and tangled with bark and all sorts of things. He pulled a piece out of her hair and his heart jumped, even in death she still had the same eyes, still looked at him the same. It was a fearful stare of disbelief, of something gone wrong, a friend betrayed. He covered her face with a plastic grocery sack, no longer wanting to be reminded of her tearful pleas or the beauty that remained even in the face of death. She was beautiful, by far one of the prettiest girls on campus. He had thought so the very first time he saw her. She was nice too, a good girl, smart, kind and always smiling. He lingered over her, remembering her warmth, just hours ago. It was so easy, and perfect, yet he felt a tinge of regret because he would no longer be able to savor her sweet lips and that pissed him off more than anything. All is fair in love and war and right now he was at war. Every action, every plan had been put in place, to be executed and for sake of the one and only, Blood.

A German woman's plan to turn her dead father's ashes into a diamond was thwarted Tuesday by her grandmother.

A district court in Wiesbaden ruled the 19-year-old could not take the cremated remains to Switzerland where a company creates synthetic diamonds from ashes.

"The daughter of the deceased could not provide sufficient proof that it was his final wish to be pressed into a diamond," the court in western Germany said, ruling in favor of his 86-year-old mother.

...guess who they're emulating???

Even in a three ring circus, I’m sure you haven’t seen a man handle three women with such great mastery. These three women, combined with the few I had long distance made me the ultimate juggler. If this were a circus, the ringmaster would be working extra hard to keep up with the details of this performance. Be that as it may, that’s exactly the way I was living. At the time all of this was going down, the required skills were second nature to me. However, I must admit they took some time to develop, because being a player takes talent. You have to know how to appeal to different women at the same time, learn how to handle various female nuances, make sure you keep the stories from crossing, and above all else, you can never, and I do mean never, fall in love, ‘cause that sort of thing can bring your act to a screeching halt.

[click image to enlarge]

...aka our much-loved Lo Zoner Rich in the STL of The Rich House.

Lil' Pools

Summer at Tiffany.

Do you remember the best summer of your life?

New York City, 1945. Marjorie Jacobson and her best friend, Marty Garrett, arrive fresh from the Kappa house at the University of Iowa hoping to find summer positions as shopgirls. Turned away from the top department stores, they miraculously find jobs as pages at Tiffany & Co., becoming the first women to ever work on the sales floor—a diamond-filled day job replete with Tiffany blue shirtwaist dresses from Bonwit Teller's—and the envy of all their friends.

Hart takes us back to the magical time when she and Marty rubbed elbows with the rich and famous; pinched pennies to eat at the Automat; experienced nightlife at La Martinique; and danced away their weekends with dashing midshipmen. Between being dazzled by Judy Garland's honeymoon visit to Tiffany, celebrating VJ Day in Times Square, and mingling with Café society, she fell in love, learned unforgettable lessons, made important decisions that would change her future, and created the remarkable memories she now shares with all of us.

The author, Marjorie Hart, in her Tiffany's wonder years.

Marjorie and her best friend Marty at the beach in the 40's.

A woman working the sales counter at Tiffany's, circa 1945.

Marjorie, present day, in front of Tiffany & Co.

Marjorie Hart and her/my editor, Jennifer Pooley (Lil' Pools)

“Every once in a while a book comes along that is everything one wants it to be; such is the case with Marjorie Hart's Summer at Tiffany. Hart’s infectious telling of her wide-eyed introduction to New York City during the summer of 1945 is charming and fun…Hart offers a rare behind-the-scenes peek at the iconic store, where Marlene Dietrich, newlyweds Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, a steady stream of the 400, and “Old Man Tiffany” himself come through the doors…reminiscent of Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany's. Equally compelling is that Hart was able to recreate the essence of that summer decades later, developing the book at the urging of her grandchildren and then having it discovered at a writers conference.

—BookPage

...or Shinola!!!

Big Willie

Lady T.

Mary and her husband Gareth

Even in a three ring circus, I'm sure you haven't seen a man handle three women with such great mastery. These three women, combined with the few I had long distance made me the ultimate juggler. If this were a circus, the ringmaster would be working extra hard to keep up with the details of this performance. Be that as it may, that's exactly the way I was living. At the time all of this was going down, the required skills were second nature to me. However, I must admit they took some time to develop, because being a player takes talent. You have to know how to appeal to different women at the same time, learn how to handle various female nuances, make sure you keep the stories from crossing, and above all else, you can never, and I do mean never, fall in love, 'cause that sort of thing can bring your act to a screeching halt.

We were living in Irvine, Calif., where he had a small carpet-cleaning business. My older cousin happened to be visiting from Florida, and my mother told her to keep me in my bedroom as the agents arrested my father. It was a harrowing ordeal; distraught, I rushed my bedroom door time and again, trying to get to my father as my cousin restrained me.

WHAT had he done? My mother first told me they had mistaken him for someone with the same name. (And there is, in fact, an organized crime figure with his name.) After his arrest led to his detention, however, my mother conceded that he'd done something wrong, but she wouldn't tell me what.

[...] our lives were turned upside down. The F.B.I. took my father to New York, and my mother followed to arrange for his defense, while I was sent to live with my aunt in North Miami Beach. A parade of character witnesses testifying to my father's honest work as a carpet cleaner finally led to his release a year later.

I didn't learn of his release until my parents showed up in Florida on my aunt's doorstep, which was the best surprise I have ever received and remains my fondest memory of my parents. I was 6 years old.

We stayed in Florida for a few months until my father, who had gotten a job as a line cook, could save enough money to take us back to California. When we returned, we kept on the move, living over the years in Garden Grove, El Toro, Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, Laguna Hills, Aliso Viejo and Laguna Niguel. The nature of our cocoonlike existence led me to trust only my parents, to look only to them to tell me who I was and to feel fearful and disloyal for seeking outside comfort. My parents' mantra, drilled into me, was, "Never tell our business to strangers." And I didn't.

Until I was 5, I knew our last name to be Cassese, but then my parents told me our real last name was Mascia. Cassese was the surname of a prison buddy of my father's. I knew my father both as John, his real name, and Frank, his father's. During our brief time in Houston, he had apparently gone by Nicholas.

The day after I graduated from high school, we packed our belongings into a U-Haul and moved to New York, where my father had friends who could get him work. He joined a painting crew, earning $100 a day, leaving my mother and me with nothing to do for the summer but drive around Long Island in a car that was soon to be repossessed, talking. After one of these drives, I broke down in tears, recalling the anguish of the day my father was arrested. "I deserve to know what happened," I told her.

At my insistence, she finally opened up. She began by telling me the real story of how she and my father met, which was not "through friends," as had been their story, but at the Fishkill Correctional Facility in New York, where my father had been incarcerated for "racketeering." My mother was a high school English teacher with a humanitarian bent, who visited prisons, hoping to write a book about the prison reform movement. My father was among the inmates she interviewed.

Their interviews gave way to animal attraction, and when my father was paroled a few months later, they started dating. Within a year they married and moved from New York to Miami, so he could escape his previous life of crime. But after I was born, he went back to his old partners and their sources of income: bulk marijuana and cocaine sales in the Port of Miami.

When I was a year old, my father was arrested on cocaine possession charges. The authorities didn't yet know he had violated his parole and mistakenly let him out on bail. And the second my parents stepped outside, my father said to my mother, "If we stay here, I'm going to end up dead or in jail. I'm running. You coming?"

"Of course," she answered. It would prove to be the defining moment of her life, and mine.

And so, as she explained, it was that act---skipping out on bail and then crossing state lines---that led to my father's being arrested by the F.B.I. in California five years later.

Which was the truth, but not, as it turned out, the whole truth.

A year after my mother and I had this conversation, when I was in college, I read a newspaper article about a woman who had searched an online database for criminals who had been shuffled through the New York State Corrections Department. One afternoon I found the site and typed my father's last name into the search field. His record appeared, and I was able to verify that it was the right John Mascia. The birth date matched. I scrolled down the page past his identification number to a table listing "crimes of conviction." And there it was, the real act that had bound the three of us together.

Murder.

I sat silently as my center seemed to drop through the floor.

[...] last winter, [...] my mother had a stroke [ed., the father had died at this point] and was close to dying herself. When she emerged from her haze, she somehow felt compelled to tell me the rest. "Your father did some bad things after he got out of jail, Jenny."

No. Was it possible he had repeated the crime that put him away in the 1960s and '70s? "Tell me," I said. "Was it...?"

She nodded.

"How many?"

"Four, maybe five," she said sheepishly.

I was reeling.

"It was after you were born," she continued. "It was a part of that life. He was doing a job, and one of the byproducts of that job was to do what he did." She went on to explain that his victims were fellow drug dealers, as if that made it more palatable.

...and his daughter, Meadow...

...cold efficiency that screams "I'm-my-father's-daughter."

...presented the following excerpt for your reading (dis?)pleasure:

On television are three or four people in chairs sitting on a low stage in front of a television audience. This is on television like an infomercial, but as the camera zooms in on each person for a close-up, a little caption appears across the person's chest. Each caption on each close-up is a first name followed by three or four words like a last name, the sort of literal who-they-really-are last names that Indians give to each other, but instead of Heather Runs With Bison...Trisha Hunts By Moonlight, these names are:

Cristy Drank Human Blood
Roger Lived With Dead Mother
Brenda Ate Her Baby

I change channels.
I change channels.
I change channels and here are another three people.

Gwen Works As A Hooker
Neville Was Raped In Prison
Brent Slept With His Father

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.

[click image to enlarge]

The excerpt I presented was taken from his 1999 novel, Invisible Monsters...

Darrell Roberson came home from a card game late one night to find his wife rolling around with another man in a pickup truck in the driveway.

Caught in the act with her lover, Tracy Denise Roberson - thinking quickly, if not clearly - cried rape, authorities say. Her husband pulled a gun and killed the other man with a shot to the head.

On Thursday, a grand jury handed up a manslaughter indictment - against the wife, not the husband.

...

The December night before the shooting, Tracy Roberson sent LaSalle a text message that read in part, "Hi friend, come see me please! I need to feel your warm embrace!" according to court papers. LaSalle apparently agreed.

Darrell Roberson, a 38-year-old employee of a real estate firm, discovered the two, his wife clad in a robe and underwear.

When Tracy Roberson cried that she was being raped, LaSalle tried to drive away and her husband drew the gun he happened to be carrying and fired several shots at the truck, authorities said.

Of course, no situation involving a white woman back then ever ended well for a black man.