Dead friends and Mad Coffee.

Top of the morning gents,

I'm so old. I still listen to my ancient analog (not digital) multi-band radio that picks up short-wave, UHF, VHF, CB, AM and FM along with a hunnert other bands like weather and airplane frequencies. I don’t dial in any fire or police band radio; those give me a fucking headache and weird panic attacks. To increase reception, I clip dozens of wires to my antennae draping them across my living room horizontally and vertically. Some wires I run out and clip on the TV antennae up on the roof, but the best addition to all these plethora antennae is the wire I've clipped to the ground wire of the electrical outlet under my computing station. Hence using the entire building as a radio wave receiver.

I intentionally avoid any of the hot-wires, that'd blow fuses, fuck up my hairstyle, burn my fingers and stop my heart. Household 120-volt current kills more people than all the other voltages combined. Household voltage is a good defibrillator whereas 220 and 440 currents simply cook, burn or detonate yer shit out yer ass and all over yer apartment like an exploding shredded pillow. Late at night when bun's asleep I take my coffee by the living room window at my senior center apartment and dial in radio stations from Russia and Northern Europe. Occasionally I dial in stations from foreign countries like Alaska.

I gotta unclip them before grandma wakes up or she gets mad stumbling into my copper wiring like a fucking Eskimo trapped like a fly on sticky candy spider's web. On clear nights I get some seriously weird shit on the radio. Sometimes I hear women crying, gun battles or footsteps running and Eskimo dancing. A while back I heard yelling and little boys and girls crying from domestic cases and search and rescue investigating crashed airplanes between Kiana and Selawik over 50 years past. Some days are unexplainable, cuz I hear vaguely familiar voices as I dial in my old-fashioned radio and eavesdrop the nightmares of my nursing home cellmates. Yours too.

You’re all too young to appreciate this, but when you get to be my age you’ll find that old men don’t sleep. Plus, the smell of good coffee draws soldiers to my living room, coffee bar and old-fashioned radio like flies to your wives’ diapers and maggots to your mudflaps. After I lay out a shit load of guns and put on coffee, it’s just a matter of time for all the old men to wander down the hallway, knock on my door and let ‘em in. We’ll all die unloved and alone so I set up a replica squad room for old men in my building to drink coffee, listen to my scary radio contraption and talk about their stories you and I have already discussed. Sometimes I tell them some real awful stories from where y’all rut: Brown Rural Pygmy AK.

Since our banishment to the villages, old men and cops have long ago stopped being right in the fucking head. If my old pals here at the senior center have exhausted their Vietnam tales and are feeling brave, they listen my tall tales and far-fetched stories from Kotzebue and Barrow. Tales I’ve kyped from y’all. Every evening I make pots of high-grade mad coffee (occasionally coffee and medicinal whiskey), set the chairs in a masculine grouping and hand out boxes of rifles and pistols to disassemble, cleaning rods, oil and brushes to fiddle with while sharing and listening. Masculine chair and table settings are far different than vaginal sewing circles cuz most men are terrified of having doors and windows to their backs. Google the phrase, “Aces and eights.”

The long and short firearms aren't to shoot each other, they're just stage props to occupy their hands. Maybe even cover egress and exits and keep phantom wives and stinky old women far away. As women age, they transform into Grimm’s Fairy Tale bitches, get meaner and enjoy hurting old men and disfiguring and eating children. Even so far as laughing at men reminiscing their own personal heartbreaks, guilt-ridden career mistakes and regrets for putting their dicks in the women they married. Ya see, old men won't share their feelings, memories and tears if old bitches and soggy diapered wives are anywhere nearby. Just think of my late-night elders’ anonymous meetings as an Eskimo Bleeding Hut for old men. Minus that smell.

What you’ll find surprising is that the only woman allowed in our murderous chat circle is the old native woman I’m married to. Like the squad room or dispatch, she’ll wander all over the place topping coffees, whiskeys, serving pie, bread or cinnamon rolls. These old geezer soldiers, cabin psychos and grandpas chat away and don't even take notice of bun tending to the drinks and snacks. The perfect woman, she’s invisible and silent. Let’s just say serving my elderly male company is her penance for the simple sins of being female, native and old.

I wrote the book on the care and feeding of elderly native women, but I tore out the chapters that detailed the last living representatives of Alaska female twat born after 1950. Not interesting nor relevant in God’s plan fer ye. The soul of woman was created below: mother earth, father sky. She’s not responsible for the sins visited upon her husbands and children. It’s the nature of the beast. And smell. Some women live their life through love, nurture their families and radiate kindness to humanity in every action and word. Doesn’t sound like a soul kitchen we’ve ever parked wood. In a sense, purgatory is here in Alaska, yet not on Earth. Bad people and worse women don’t go to a lake of fire when we pull their plug, they come here and wander all over Alaska refusing and incapable of forgiving those they’ve hurt the most.

Before you die, simply listen to other old men’s stories, then blow ‘em out of the water with the cases stuck in yer craw and up yer ass. Let ‘em know Hell is so close you can see it from here, and they’ll be fine in the great hereafter. You, on the other hand will no longer be married 907. By yourselves yet not alone, the gates of heaven will close immediately behind you. Alaska women (fat white and mean dark) will forever haunt misery upon this state, ensnaring droves of white Christian soldiers for eternity. And stupid cops. When you dream of Heaven, you’ll already know how to navigate your way through endless European saloons, tobacconists, theaters and cafes. We will be washed of familial and spousal obligations and on familiar territory, free of memories of this frozen tundra swamp prison. Heaven is a complete universe away from godless aboriginal stubborn cruelty.

That’s my mission. I send off elderly gentlemen with cleansing and alleviating purges with storytelling and focused man-companionship. No churches needed. Churches are inside us all and my job is to warm the benches on their last days here on their Earth not unloved and not alone. That also includes you boys. I tell your police stories incomprehensible in format dispatch and case report parable: sensible, yet terrestrially nonsense. My words but a whisper, your deafness a shout. Now pay attention.

Old men love sharing hunting and fishing tales, old cars and wrecked planes and pretty girls that flirt with them. During Group, and if it’s my turn to share, I’ll start with suicide reports of cutting down hangers with Mashburn, Ramoth and Moto, finding frozen native children and shooting dogs at the dump with Byrd and Garroutte, hopefully encouraging questions and clarifications from my geezer team. Most of these tales I stole from all ye and are simple literary theft and psychological facilitation to encourage these old farts to open, allay shame and most times, elicit a really good laugh. Occasionally a good weeping.

These old boys miss their pals and buddies from work just like we do. You guys understand this, now it’s our job to help the mankind in our circles to let go of their family shackles and offspring chains, ditch the crutches, grab their go-bags, shake hands and head into the bright lights of their next stage. Dying grandpas are a blessing to the deceased, not the living. On many voyages in a long life, we weary travelers occasionally must abandon our burdensome luggage. Our arrival solitary and upon two feet and when we die, we will die young; at whatever age this experience occurs. I aren’t dumb, I’m a smart ABE GED grad from Upchuck U.

When I got company, my wife stays quiet as a church mouse. She prefers the company of men and loves hearing lower register chit-chat. On rare occasions, when she’s asked to share, her stories are of subsistence, starvation and lawlessness long before statehood. Ancient Eskimos like bun add details retrieved from her encyclopedic memory of territorial Alaska history, village names, dates, and rural ancestries dating back centuries. No shit, she’s memorized family trees of Alaska’s natives back to Siberian migration. If asked, she’ll expound upon Eskimo culinary techniques to enhance raw meat flavors, serving fresh, frozen and aged whale, seal, and caribou. Richard and Steve always compete on their knowledge of windage, bullet drop, accuracy, and bullet weights and muzzle velocities (serious yawn). After guns, refreshments and munchies are handed out, I tune in my radio and let my “Over The Hill Gang” listen to KOTZ, KBRW, KICY and KNOM radio stations broadcasted from cursed foreign cultures, like rural Alaska.

Sometimes the shit gets just plain fucking weird. We’ll hear old interviews with dead people and bun books out of her sewing room to let us know that these folks are from Kotzebue like Rachel Craig or Paul and Beula Mason. Us old men lean in, cup our ears for better reception and listen to Paul and Beula and Rachel Craig talk about church, subsistence and bootleggers like they were sitting right beside us, drinking coffee yacking all sorts of Eskimo gospel gibberish terminally terrestrial.

There’s something disturbing about hearing cranky old salmon crunchers enter in our coffee and gun oil cocktails. Shortly after I dial in scratchy recordings on my beater radio, bun started explaining to us that Beula was known for holding her old bible to her chest with her eyes closed reciting blessings to all the elders of the NANA region. Fuck me, it’s like Beula Mason was speaking directly to each of us old farts. Richard, Steve and Ron start looking at me like they’re fucking terrified, they’ve never accepted their age nor lived near Inuit geezer lovers like us. They sure got interested when Bun explained that Rachel Craig and Beula were recorded for a show at KOTZ 720 shortly after Karl busted the Capone Boys.

"Nalign! He was supposed to kill every single one of those monsters!" "We sure prayed for him to come and take these white devils up to cemetery hill and kill them." "They are an abomination upon God's green Earth." Spooky, it sounded like old Rachel, Paul and Beula Mason were in my rest home apartment to join for coffee and talk. I doubt they’d contribute to the topics of guns, cars and boobs.

My roommates at the senior center were startled to hear this religious shit about our work busting drug dealers and bootleggers. Old crusty Eskimos refused to cast eyes upon or speak to white trash druggies nor dirty their own Eskimo hands disrupting alcohol and drug sales in the NANA region. "Those cops were supposed to do it!” “They were supposed to kill them and bury them!” I know. Beula is SO old school on the sins of drugs and alcohol. She twice has ragged my shit at the post office and Paul Mason confided to me that she thought he should run me over. That is, prior to revealing my role in Nolton and Nay’s complicated plans as encore following Trooper Carl Schramm’s search and seizure warrants and arrest roundups.

I felt like a pussy because that cranky old native woman gave me a ration of crap scolding me, "Our church don't want them breathing God's air in jail." My vet buddies looked at me like I was a gutless homo. Steve quipped, “Shit Karl, I wouldn’t wait for some old lady to rag my shit. I woulda shot ‘em just fer fun.”

Some of our meetings went deathly quiet when bun shushed us to listen to old Kotzebue shows. One interview that was rebroadcast on 90.3 KNBA: a recording of Rachel Craig on KOTZ, “The Elder Speaks” by Ed Alexander. I’d heard it already, and I knew she was going to talk about subsistence hunting and berry picking. She even talked about digging up “mussu” and food caches hidden by mice. “My mother and I used to eat those and they sure tasted real good.” Bun explained to my Vietnam Vet coffee mates that mussu roots were from edible flowering tundra plants and mouse nests under the tundra were filled with seeds, nuts, roots and animal bits: crunchy and cured with vermin secretions.

The boys blanched and swallowed muke. I’m not sure any of my gunslingers anonymous talking circle would munch on urine cured granola clusters buried underground by rodents. I simply nodded my head that Rachel and Bun’s old Eskimo stories were true. Years back, when all my coffee club vets were still alive, bun told them about how I saved a native girl’s life.

I took Sara and Bun to Pizza House and on the way out a wheeler sped by, and Mary Ann Russell fell off the back, tumbled and rolled flat on her back, right at my feet. She looked like she broke all the bones in her body, and I heard her head clunk three times with each roll. Her neck was in an unnatural position but with a delicate touch I detected no sharp edges in her upper spine. I did the basic poolside lifeguard ABC’s and checked her pulse and breathing. Good pulse, but Mary Ann wasn’t fucking breathing.

If it was her brother Andrew “Thumbs” Wilson, I would’ve just stepped on his neck and croaked his nigger ass like George Floyd. I scooped out Mary Ann Russell’s gullet, checked her throat and started CPR, plugging her nose and breathing into her, but skipped the chest compressions. Three good swimmer dude lungs full of air and she erupted. She barfed Lysol and pumpkin seeds right into my throat and fucking mouth. Miss Russell coughed and spit, then started breathing and crying. At that point I wanted heave up and take my own ass to the fucking hospital. I’ve never tasted an Eskimo cocktail before. It was worse than getting gasoline in my mouth from syphoning. No tongue, just lots of nutty seeds, fuel and cleaning products like anilingus with my half-sister Thelma Ewing: yummy.

I feared my coffee dudes would never fucking visit again. Rural AK stories ain’t fit for regular people. Remembering that shit still makes me puke. Miss Russell’s stupid friend, the wheeler operator finally returned and brought her home. After me and Bun lectured them for racing Team Lysol and doing pavement gymnastics under the influence of cleaning products. “Jus junk.” Meaning “just drunk” in big lip Fort Yuk no-teefer dialect.

Many years later, Mary Ann Russell met with Bun and told her that when she flipped off the speeding wheeler and bashed her ass at my feet, she was falling into Hell. When she puked in my mouth, she thought I was Jesus saving her and that’s why she was crying so hard. That’s me: Doc Sibbuk. Of Nazareth.

Way back, decades before pavement, when Kotzebue was all mud, bugs and drugs, I habitually walked Dopey the Doberman down front street toward the airport. I’d loop past Dan Yenni’s shop, steal coffee from Cape Smythe, say hello to Arlene Zagars and imagine heaving those giant boobs down to house #321 Second Ave. I was single at the time and hadn’t had an opportunity to roll huge Inuit breasts in my arms. Yet.

On an early Tuesday morning on my day off from fish guts or tossing freight at Ryan Air, I washed down a few bowls of Seattle’s finest green bud with a pot of coffee, yelled for Dopey to get out of the old trooper building and booked down the wet rainy shitty 2nd avenue with a dog in tow. At the southern end of front street, I saw a drunken native woman beating a bundle of blankets in the middle of a big puddle, with a stick.

Yup, I was a cherry. When I discovered what GG McLuke was up to, I shit my pants. Only a little turd, but I gulped it back up. Glenda McLuke was angry at a pile of linens that swaddled a tiny native boy, half submerged in a soupy brown puddle and whooping on it with a stick, crying drunk and likely flogging a drowned river rat.

I yelled at her and asked her what the fuck she was up to. She continued crying and swinging that stick, so I did what any dumbass white guy would do. I took the stick in one hand and picked up the soggy kid in the other hand, simultaneously yelling at a stupefied neighbor to call the cops.

Miss McLuke kept yelling at me trying to take the stick back but not the baby boy and I was getting pissed off, wet and waiting for a goddamned cop to show the fuck up. It was Wallace. He was responding to a 911 call reporting that a tall white guy was fighting over a baby with Glenda McLuke: in the middle of an aromatic lake of muddy water and suspicious smells. I handed the baby over to Wallace and told him I didn’t know who the drunk ass bitch was, who the baby was, nor the lady I yelled at to call the cops. Where I’m from, we call everybody “asshole”, even police.

Wallace grinned, then asked me my name and where I was from, upon which I told him that I lived with Higbitch at house 321 on second avenue for the last 3 weeks, recently arriving from Seattle. He took the baby with Glenda fighting him for possession and went to interview the stupefied neighbor who called 911. She stated the basics of what happened, so Larry took the baby over to an arriving ambulance driven by Munson, cuffed Miss McLuke and told me to drop by the cop-shop after I get rid of the barking dog. Unlike the citizen that phoned 911, Wallace didn’t take offense to the “asshole” quip.

That was my first of many visits to the old jail. I went upstairs, was greeted by Daphne and waited for Larry to emerge from the restroom. I was betting his turds were bigger than 907 newborns. He stepped out with a cigarette and asked me for some ID. I gave him my Washington driver’s license, had Daphne run the WA DL #EWINGKF390LT, and then proceeded to interview me what occurred that morning. So, I repeated exactly what happened, and then asked him how the muddy baby was. He said it was in the emergency room with bruises and cuts, wet, muddy and cold: but in general, good health. Wallace took a phone call, then told me a charter flight was taking the baby to Anchorage because that mud puddle was full of tipped over thawing buckets. Wallace told me that Miss McLuke was downstairs but omitted what thawing buckets meant. Y’all are laughing at me, but that illustrates the fuckheads you’ve become. Assholes: all of ye.

Had I known I would be such a magnet for neglected children, drunken women and fucking cops, I would’ve packed my shit and fled that day. I’m such a dumb shit, swimming in poop and drinking muddy water was my life for the next 40 fucking years. Tim Rayburn was temp foster care for this poopy mud bather baby, and he stated that he wanted badly to adopt him. GG McLuke eventually got custody again. Go native. Fuck ICWA.

My wife likes to brag about her brain-dead fuck-ass husband. She continued telling my rest home coffee mates an old tale of a little baby crying in the 29-unit apartment rear parking lot. I’d just gotten off graveyard shift mopping puke at the Kotzebue Jail and Sara and Bun just left for school and work. I’d knocked back a couple Jim Beams and was circling the drain, heading to sleep. I kept hearing that fucking baby crying in the building.

I grabbed a bathrobe, walked the hallway listening for that damn crying baby: fucking nothing. So, I went back to the apartment and climbed into bed. I dozed off and was descending into my regular nightmares of rolling large breasts from the bank towards home when I was awoken by that goddamned crying baby. FUCK!

I stomped all over the apartment in my underwear listening for that the damn noisy infant. Nothing. So, I went back to my bedroom pissed off that the sun was already coming up and I had to be back at work that afternoon for an overtime shift.

I got back to bed, dozed, then I heard that baby crying again, but much quieter, less crying, more like whimpering. Weird. So, I opened my window and saw a baby carriage upside down in the snow. This is not good. I’m in my underwear and I gotta go out and play “Stupid fucking white man saves the day. Again.”

I got dressed: boots, jacket, hat and gloves and booked down three flights of stairs and pulled that baby stroller upright and inside was a little blue Eskimo girl: frosty and quiet. Sleeping: maybe.

This a job for Super Man. I ran up three flights of stairs and called KPD and told Kathy Elam about this fucking kid smothered in snow in an upside-down baby stroller. She panicked, yelled for my location and slammed the phone down on me. I ran back downstairs and stood by the recently righted stroller containing a frozen blue little Eskimo girl with cute snow beard and frosty eyebrows.

Capt. Wallace and Kathy Elam came flying out the cop shop and Trox came running full speed hauling balls from the Fire Hall. I did a retarded semaphore signal waving Troxell and a speeding patrol car to my location. Wallace asked me if I’d done any hypothermia exam or any inspection for any assaults. Like a dummy, I just shook my head, pointed at my window again in retarded semaphore, then back down to the Eskimo popsicle in the stroller.

Her mom, Margaret Brown (Amelia Byrd’s sister) was freaking out looking for her little girl and didn’t know she was almost dead, frost bitten on the face and refrigerator cold in her jacket. Trox and Kathy flew like motherfuckers to the MMC Emergency Room. Larry stayed around to record a parking lot interview regarding my finding the kid.

It seems the child was missing for 3 hours, in temps of 28 below, Margaret Brown shitting bricks, cops, troopers and rescue in a tizzy with a fear of possible abduction. This little girl, all by herself climbed in the stroller expecting to take a walk. She rolled across the parking lot and tipping forward, face down in the snow. That’d give me a fucking ulcer, if I wasn’t buzzed on glassfuls of Beam and trying to sleep. I recited this tale to Capt. Wallace, word for word, exactly for the report. Then felt sick.

The ER had to do the emergency warming deal on Margaret Brown’s daughter and then I got a knock on the door from Trooper Hecker and an old drunk white woman from DFYS, asking for a repeat of my stupid tale of trying to get some fucking sleep for an overtime shift that afternoon. I was asked if I touched the child in any way. Nup, I just tipped that goddamned stroller upright and saw a frozen face of a little native girl, ran back upstairs and called Kathy to report a frosty toddler.

When I got to work at KPD that night, I was advised by Roy Fields that the child was flown by Life Flight to ANMC for further evaluation due to frostbite and cold ass organs.

Here’s the deal. I almost went to sleep out in the living room to escape the irritating crying baby. Roy looked at me and told me that “you did good Karl.” “That little girl was almost dead.” “You won’t hear it from all the cops, but you saved that little girl’s life.”

After hearing this frozen child story, my rest home neighbor, old man Richard told me, “Shit Karl, I feel like I’m gonna cry now. Or puke.” “That’s some fucked-up stories.”

“I came to play with your guns, drink your coffee and listen to the radio. Then your wife tells us stories about old native women encouraging you to murder defendants in stupid drug cases, munching on rat shit granola turd balls, eating Lysol puke, poopy puddle babies, and then a frozen little girl.”

As he headed for the door with his buddies following, Richard scolded me, “I think I need a break from yer shitty stories. I still don’t believe that kid put a rifle round through his head and lived.” (Michael Mills, Alice Schaeffer’s brother).

Bun was just getting warmed up. The next week, she sickened my elderly veteran guests with the Japanese explorer that popped by to purchased cans of pepper mace but declined a shotgun or a 44-caliber pistol. He was torn up and killed by the bears he planned to photograph on the Noatak River. The story of the German hunters sitting frozen solid on a riverbank in their underwear upset Richard, Steve and Ron.

They ain’t like you fuckers, they don’t cotton to hearing AST dispatch logs. Nor Troxell’s explanation how end-stage frostbite feels like yer on fire and the impulse to strip and cool off. Join me for a cold one: minus 40, our assholes, butt cheeks and ball sacks frozen to an ice shelf bench seat.

They got over it. They returned on schedule every week. Old men can’t resist. They’ll gladly listen to Rural AK stories like Gil Hall, Dallas Hannah and Ethan Cooley: regardless of the nausea or heartbreak.

It’s been years now and we continued our coffee, gun, and radio bullshit sessions without missing a single date. That is, until all my pals passed away.

Don’t you fuckers go and die on me. You’ve got a job to do. Mankind in your midst needs your tales of suffering, companionship and bench warming. You can keep the crutches and family burdens and bullshit; they’ve got their go-bags in hand. Just hand them sunglasses, shake their hands, smile and wave.

As old men pass, they will hear you as the last voice, the intervening generation they’ll ignore.


Karl.