Disney Buys Lucas Episode 7

   My grandfather on the Italian side, Benedetto, "summoned" me when I was 6 to come see him on the North Side of Boston. My mother, who hated Italians - hated everyone who was not Irish actually - knew enough not to antagonize the Italian side of the family, at least not to their faces. They didnt care what you said behind their backs if it did not affect business. Business was all that mattered. Anything else was stuff that didn't matter. Badmouthing, gossip and lying didnt matter unless it affected business. Then it mattered.

   Benedetto was in the "importing" business. The "shore story" as L Ron Hubbard would call his version of things for his shipboard zombies to tell the people and authorities their reason for coming ashore, and an expression I have adopted (I have adopted many Scientology terms because they are more exact as far as I am concerned) - the shore story is that he imported silken bolts to be used as lining for suits. This he actually did. My father would always say when and if Adolph Menjou's name was mentioned "He's wearing our silks." I think I heard this two hundred million times. So he did actually import silk. I believe silk comes from China. Or the Golden Triangle. Or someplace Asian.

   Unlike the Irish side of my family, the Italians were all rich. Except for my father. He was a gambler on horses. And he could not keep a secret. He was kept at a distance from the rest of the Italians. My father basically "didn't get it." He was not a loose cannon so much as a loose beanbag chair; not too dangerous and if you have to you can stop the beanbag chair with your bare hands.

   Benedetto lived in an actual house. That housed only one family. Him and his wife. My father's step mother. All the sons and the one daughter lived in those things you see in English movies, long connected buildings that are red brick industrial age apartments with stairs and strangers going up and down them, or the New England version of duplexes that are big houses with more than one family living in them. Benedetto lived in his own house with a yard and a decorative metal fence that was higher than the sidewalk because the house was built on stacked dirt, a make-believe hill. Benedetto was a bit of an imperious fellow. Unlike my other grandfather Thomas Byrne. He was a reader and the quiet, ever-ready type. If Benedetto read at all it was the at-the-time version of Global Conquest Magazine.

   I was sent up the front walkway alone. My father did not like Benedetto. More likely it was the other way around.

   I had heard that I was the first "irishman" to approach the door without being shot at. which was even more remarkable since I was worse than an irishman I was a halfbreed Irish wop.

   I was greeted by his maid. She was hot. But was pretending not to be. Even at six I was convinced that the attractive, sexually distinctive and physically blessed human female was the most desirable object on the planet and judging from this radiant reserved beauty I had gotten this trait from Benedetto. Who apparently had gotten it from me. Whoever got it from who first it was obvious at that moment that me and him were related.

   Benedetto was sitting in a large pre-halogen room that smelled like a Bavarian kitchen. Benedetto ate like a German, not like an Italian. 

   I stood there and he said, also standing there, "So you're the one with talent." I didn't say anything. I wasn't aware that I was the one with talent. Talent to me was Mozart composing symphonies at 6. so I didn't say anything.

   "I had been hoping that your mother would abort you, I didn't want her having children after your brother was born." 

   I didn't know what abort meant but I knew instinctively it was one of those things that was so bad that you never asked an adult what it was you asked via the "kid worldwide network" of instant communication that exists among children on this planet.

   "They tell me you are very alert, I don't see much evidence of it." 

  "Why don't you go fuck yourself," I said, because he was really pissing me off at a very deep level, like he was not even a human but a contortion of one. If Star Trek had existed then I would have thought he had come through the transporter wrong or that a moray eel had come through with him and they exchanged some atoms with each other. It was out of me even before I knew I said it, it was, like, pushed out.

   He smiled a sort of slow sinister smile and gestured to a chair near his desk for me to sit. "I apologize for my rude behavior. I have a brain disease that causes me to act like an animal. It won't happen again because I forgot to take my pill. I will take it now." He then took something out of a drawer and put it in his mouth. It was very likely nothing because he did not have a brain disease. He was just a prick. But I had inadvertantly convinced him that "the people that sent me there" knew what they were doing. 

   I had thought my father had sent me there, but Bennie used the words "the people that sent you here." When you are six, no matter how alert and bright you are, you are still new to the planet and things that would cause an adult to get all nervous...a kid doesn't know if its unusual or not because everything is unusual to a child.

   Excuse me, that's the door.

  

   That was a voracial. Voracials come in many different forms. There are object voracials and there are "life form" voracials. This was a life form voracial that looked like a Jehovas Witness. The fact that it was not a Jehovas Witness was easy to see to anyone in that I let it in the house. If you are me an inquisitive, trouble-making voracial is a whole lot easier to deal with than a Jehovas Witness and nowhere near as infuriating.

   There are I would estimate 10,000 people who know voracials even exist. The voracials job is to monitor what the Scientologists would call PTS's or Potential Trouble Sources. Potential trouble sources are not disciplined. They are merely slowly excluded from the loop. What are they going to do about it. Who would believe them.

   Voracials are also capable of instantaneously separating all of your atoms from their neighbor atoms so that you - basically - and quite accurately - disappear. You dont "go somewhere else." You are just gone. You once again become that wonderful star material amateur astronomers like referring to from which we are all made. The circle of life. Or as the voracials would put it, if they put things in ways, the circle of death.

   The voracials have the memory capabilities of an aardvark with Down Syndrome. They operate on a "what is occurring right this moment" level. So they have been coming here a lot since I started this autobiography. Hey, it's time for me to start my autobiography, voracials, deal with it, it's in the cards, go away, go fuck with someone who gives a shit. The fact that I am an oracle makes them a whopping lot easier to get rid of.

   How many voracials there are I have never been told. The verascients won't answer and I would not waste my time asking one of the people the voracials keep track of, and if a verascient won't tell you no one will. No one that I know of.

   As for oracles, I have been told that there are 392 living oracles and that they are in grades that are numbered 1 to 377 and that I have my own grade which is a "resolute." I am apparently the only resolute. I have heard of an "arranger," and I have heard of a "disarranger" and I have heard of a "decider," and I have heard of a "persuader" and I have heard of a "coordinator" and I have heard of an "arbitrator." I don't know what any of it means and I have no curiosity about it. The people - assuming they all actually are people - the people who have grade designations instead of numbers don't know who they are and don't in fact know any of the oracles with numbers. However the numbers do not represent a degree of quality, it's just an identification system. As are the grades. All oracles are Valueds but not all Valueds are oracles. I frankly don't think oracles are very high up on the Valueds scale but that is just a suspicion. Based on what the verascients have told me about some of the bonehead moves some of the oracles have made. Apparently being an oracle is the default setting for the overall scheme and I do mean scheme of things. 

   Benedetto having taken his invisible non existant pill to cure his insanity he had me sit down on a chair that did not allow my feet to reach the floor. It was like something out of a book illustration from 1890. He said, sitting in a similar chair opposite of me, "I am going to teach you about my world. And the world in general. Do you know what a half breed is?" Ben never tiptoed up to topics. "I said no. He said "You are one. You are half Italian and half Irish. I hear you can Irish step dance better than St Patrick. you don't have to say anything. I also hear you are the only Byrne with any musical ability at all. I know that your mother's mother, Agnes, has a piano and plays it and that when you were 2 you were picking out tunes. Can you still do that?" I said no. He said "The music has gone into you. You apparently respond to it physically, not with an instrument. You are the instrument." I had no idea what he was talking about. He said, continuing on calmly, "Do you know what cops are?" "They are the police." "You are going to hear all your life that cops are your friends. Cops are your mortal enemies. Cops are lazyass bums who can't get jobs as mailmen. You have to pay them and they reward you by taking you out of your house, putting you in jail, and stealing all your stuff, including your house and your car and, now, thanks to that asshole Roosevelt, a fucking Jew, Federal cops can make you join the fucking army. Let's assume I am not lying to you, what do you think of that." "I don't think it's right." "Ok. What you need to do now is discover on your own if I am lying to you or not. Cause I could be lying. I take insanity pills remember."

   That was the end of my first meeting with Benedetto Solari. The hot maid showed me out of the house and I walked back to my father sitting in a car at the street. I remember thinking to myself, "This is the first time an adult has ever said anything interesting to me."