The Dictator's Slut Chapter III

Before we go any further I need to explain that I really was a very pretty girl. I'm not being vain, any vanity I had was scoured from me that year.


I was tiny, small-boned like my mestizo mother, and with her dark eyes and feathery brows, but with a tumble of silver-blond curls.


My father always said I got my blond curls from my grandmother and as a child, I believed she'd died so I could have her hair. Isn't it strange, the things we believe as children, almost as fantastical as what we believe as adults?


He was touching my hair and smiling, and there was something like greed in his eyes. I could sense my mother's distress.


She said: "Generalissimo, can I offer you something to eat?"


He turned and smiled charmingly at her if you could imagine his heavy-jawed face lightened by charm. "What is that I smell, my dear?" he asked. "Chupe?"


My mother nodded and pressed her hands together. "Yes," she smiled nervously. "Chupe de camarones. It's Friday..."


The Generalissimo sighed. "I haven't eaten a bowl of honest chupe in years. They insist on French cooks at the Presidential Palace, and they can't make chupe...Not like my mother's..."


"I'll get you a bowl, Generalissimo," my mother said immediately, but he held up a hand. I noticed it was even bigger than the meaty-handed man's.


"No, no!" he cried. "I will dine with your family, we will wait for your husband. He was one of my warriors. I want to see him, talk about old times."


His smile widened and he added: "But I don't want to add to a good housewife's troubles!"


"No," my mother said. "It will be no trouble and a great honor!" I saw her cast me a nervous glance and wipe her palms on her dress. "If you will excuse Dita, she will set the table."


I hurried to obey, but he caught my hand as I was passing. "No, no!" he cried. "Please, Mrs. Hernandez, allow Dita to remain here with me. If you'll excuse her from her chores of course. It's not often I have a chance to speak to the young ones, to hear their views. After all, they are the citizens of the future!"


"Of course, Generalissimo," my mother said, but I could see that it wasn't alright, and that made me even more uneasy.


"Please don't call me Generalissimo, Mrs. Hernandez," he said. "My friends, my family call me Papa Juan."


"Papa Juan," mama said, and looked horrified. The bloodiest dictator in South American's bloody history wanted my mother to call him Papa Juan.


He laughed delightedly and raised my hand which he was still holding to his lips. "You too, precious angel!" he cried.


Obediently I chimed in like a little parrot: "Papa Juan." He kissed my hand again. He didn't let it go and I didn't dare pull it away even though it was getting sticky with sweat.


My mother stood in the doorway to the kitchen looking uncertain, and he waved her away. "Don't worry, Mrs. Hernandez, Dita will entertain me."


He pulled me to our thread-bare sofa and sat me beside him, so close I could feel the heat of his body. He was still holding my hand.


"Tell me, Dita," he said in a quiet, gentle voice. "Tell me your dreams."

You said you loved loved
Loved the taste
Of the salt on my skin

So you drowned me in oceans of pain

You said you loved loved

Loved my tender heart

So you tore out a bite

Chewed me up and spat me out

Don't love me, don't love me no more

Set me free, let me be like before

I beg you don't love, don't love me no more

You said you loved loved
Loved the sound
Of my sweet voice

So you sang me a song of disdain

You said you loved loved

Loved my eyes

So you made me blind

So I couldn't see what was true

Don't love me, don't love me no more

Set me free, let me be like before

I beg you don't love, don't love me no more

Couldn't you love without pain,

Depression, anyone?

I forgot to refill my anti-depressant meds two weeks ago. So much to do etc, etc, I'm sure you all know what it's like. I'll do it tomorrow... Anyway, the point is I made a fascinating discovery. I'm not depressed -- I'm FUCKING FURIOUS. I, and I suspect millions and millions of women in their fifties worldwide are prescribed meds and told they are depressed when in fact they are FUCKING FURIOUS -- and they have every right to be. But since telling these women that they are FUCKING FURIOUS is going to spark off a worldwide socio-economic-political crisis without precedent in modern history they tell us we are DEPRESSED. When you are DEPRESSED it's all about YOU. There's something wrong with the way you are seeing/adapting/handling life. It's all your fault, really. The world is perfect, and you are the miserable cloud raining on their parade. When you're FUCKING FURIOUS you KNOW it's not your fucking fault, and you are ready, willing, and able to point fingers, quote statistics and get on with making sure things change for the fucking better. So don't drink the cool-aid, girls, have a Margarita, and get FUCKING FURIOUS! MC

IF DEATH COMES KNOCKING

If Death comes knocking at my door 

I won't scream 

and bite and claw 

I won't beg for a stay 

Of just one more day 

If Death comes knocking at my door 

I think I'll smile 

And peek over 

her shoulders 

At all the beloved faces,

Run into loving embraces 

When Death comes knocking at my door 

 MC

Waking up today I realized I've been more than asleep, I've been drifting through my own life, the prisoner of an endless grief. The hole in my heart won't heal. I can't feel anything but the pain in me, and all my joys are fleeting, for others and never for myself.

We all need a little death in our lives.

Visited by ghosts

SOAP 

Drek Kline is a German Jew - a bit of a scum bag - who lives from scams and small-time crime in Berlin, screws german women, drinks too much, sells cocaine. 

He is a thin and quick shyster in a sharp suit, brill cream on his dark hair, Clark Gable mustache, pale bulging blue eyes, long face, and big nose. 

He tugs at his earlobe when he lies, which is all the time. He is half Jewish - his mother was Jewish, his father German, but his mother died in childbirth, and his Grandmother brought him up much against her will, seeing him as a symbol of her daughter's falling away from her people. 

She calls him "drek" - human garbage - and this is how she treats him. When he is 13, after his Bar Mitzvah he runs away. 

Drek has forgotten what he is, denied his past. He is a made-man sharp and sly like a rat, a small-time hustler getting fat on war. He deals a little, steals a little, pimps a little, and buys jewels cheap from Jews and other desperate people wanting to flee the Nazi regime. 

Then one day he is sleeping in his bed with this big-tit german girl, sleeping bare-ass but in his vest and he hears screams from downstairs. He gets up, lights a cigarette, goes to the window, and sees downstairs the vans and the soldiers and it means nothing to him. 

Then they break down his door, screaming his name. He is naked in his vest with just his socks and his suspenders, his cigarette forgotten sticking to his lip. 

They drag him downstairs, and the German girl comes to the window in a flowered wrap, her thick breasts hanging like udders, her yellow hair sticking up, and screams: "Schweine, let him go!" 

And the officer says, "Would you like to go too?" and she shrinks back, mouth open wide, her startled tongue lapping at the icy air. 

They take him "JUDEN," and he doesn't understand WHY and they stick him in that van with scared and desperate people crying and sobbing, and he sits there with his shrinking penis dangling and the children staring, and some kind man takes off his long coat so he can cover his nakedness. 

He gets processed, shoved into a train, and taken to a camp in Poland. He is outraged; he does NOT consider himself a Jew - he complains, tries to talk to "someone in charge," and gets beaten for his troubles. 

He is deloused, given a uniform, and he gets a bunk next to a Rabbi who gets up every morning and whispers, "Next year, Jerusalem." 

The Rabbi is a small man with long sidelocks who chants each morning: "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither" and "Next year, Jerusalem, next year..." and it drives Drek mad. 

His daily response is, "FUCK OFF!" They kept each other alive As the days and weeks progress, this old man becomes the symbol of the difference that is killing him, the inheritance he rejected and left behind and is now destroying him. 

Hating the Rabbi keeps him alive. The Rabbi has these very thin white feet, I don't know why. Drek would see them sticking out, these white feet, when everywhere there was dirt and mud, and they wore paper slippers - and he hated him even more - because he loved him, you see. 

One day they wake up, and the Germans are gone, but the Rabbi does not get up. So Drek screams at him, "Don't you die now, you fucker! Not now! Next year Jerusalem, remember? Next year Jerusalem!" 

The Rabbi holds his hand and tries to speak, and he dies. So Drek takes the Rabbi's star of David - the yellow rag of shame- and he hacks off his sidelocks with a shard of glass. The Americans come the next day, but Drek tells them to fuck off, drags himself through the open gates, and starts to walk from Poland to Jerusalem.

It takes him over a year, and he gets there, and he goes to the foot of the wall and gouges a hole in the dead ground and buries the Rabbi in the temple of Soloman. 

Then he goes and asks to fight. They tell him no. he can barely stand. He doesn't eat, you see, he can't. Everything he eats he throws up. So he does a scam. like he used to in Berlin. He steals a shipment of cigarettes, American chocolates, and nylon stockings and bribes a ranking officer in the new Israeli Army. He gets assigned to a battalion under the authority of Joseph Levi. This is Leila's Joseph (you will see him in the script) and he dislikes Drek, despises him, and calls him "soap". 

On the day of the battle for Jerusalem, the street and the house they are holding is bombarded, and Joseph is wounded, his legs crushed. Drek takes him out of the rubble and drags him to the nursing station and he keeps screaming, "You can't die now! Not now! Not now!" "You can't die this is Jerusalem, and it is ours." 

He takes Joseph to Leila, and he is dead already. No breath, no final words are said - but Drek lies. He tells Leila Joseph died with her name in his lips, struggling to live. Drek takes Joseph's gun, and goes back to fight, walking into the clouds of dust. He survives and stays.

He calls himself Joseph Soap; he stays and makes a life.

MC