[Gummo] ...hold that mouse steady Capn Rob...I've got some more stuff coming on Lil's interlude in New York State...it will place her in very close proximity to Mother Teresa for the apocalyptic ending this saga so rightly deserves...

As the car sped up the river road to the Falls Bill had time to check out the driver in the faint glow of the dashboard lights. Lil was dressed in some strange layered outfit with amulets hanging around her neck and a gris-gris bag on a woven belt at her hip.

She checked them into a classy motel down river from the Falls. Bill had some definite expectations about how they were going to spend the night. What he got was a long night of story telling. Lil told one anecdote after another about mucking through the Louisiana bayou poking into dark holes and observing the husbanding practices of various reptilian life forms. Bill found some of the stories upsetting. Lil seemed to take them in stride. The night of endless talk helped Bill understand why for so many people for such a long time the Falls has been such a disappointment.

As the sun rose Lil took him across the street and stood him to breakfast at Denny’s. He had the usual, a tall stack of pancakes with the double order of sausage, the same breakfast choice that had done in Deputy Chief O’Gready. As he was wiping his plate clean of the last drops of table syrup with his last mouthful of pancake Lil announced that she was going to relocate. To a small town south of Buffalo. She’d heard that free thinkers used to live there. She was going to hang out a shingle and help people any way she could. From the long pause that followed Bill figured out that he was not included in the plan.

Out in the parking lot Bill uttered the truth that some day the rainbow would disappear from over the Falls. “No Way!”, shouted Lil, as she blew him a kiss and laid two strips of black rubber across the parking lot and into the street. Bill stood considering his options. He thought of walking to the Falls to let the rush of water flush Lil from his mind. Instead he turned and headed for the bus terminal. He bought a one way ticket out of town.

Later on Lil would think of her years in Upper New York State helping others as good years. She traveled a bit, mostly exploring micro-breweries in the Finger Lakes, once going as far as Syracuse. It was a lovely evening in August. She bought a ticket at the ball park, and a bag of peanuts and a cold one, and settled into a seat three rows above the dug-out along the third base line. In the third inning the moon rose over the right field fence.

The trick in the Syracuse ball park isn’t just to hit a home run. There’s a train track that runs along the left field fence just outside the park. The trick at Syracuse is to hit a home run into the open door of a passing box car. It happens once in a blue moon. That night a young Puerto Rican, playing his first season of Triple A, hit two home runs into passing box cars. He dedicated one to his mother, and the other to Lil. She was touched.

The job at the honeymoon retreat in the Poconos was a natural extension of Lil’s life, and of her occupation as a relationship coach at home. The only difference was she ended up spending so much time in pink heart-shaped hot tubs that her skin could barely stand it. Through it all she managed to keep her head above water. Until she met Rick. Rick was a baggage handler from Patterson, New Jersey, and the president of his union local. He said he had a labour relations degree from some school he called The Real University in some duckburg at the eastern end of Lake Ontario that Lil had never heard of. She’d never met a working class hero before either. She liked his blue jeans and plaid shirts, and Rockport shoes that Rick said were for “pounding the bricks”. He was the biggest hearted man she’d ever met. She admired his obstreperous militancy, and his ability to find a subversive strategy to deal with any obstacle placed in his way by society’s dead-wood institutions. She liked his considered disrespect for people who are supposed to be important and smart – like business leaders and university presidents – but generally fail to meet the mark.

Lil was so infatuated and so caught up in this new perspective on life that she wrote a letter to her Congressman complaining about Reagan’s treatment of the air traffic controllers. But she was smart enough not to take it any farther. As an illegal alien she knew she ran the risk of being deported to some banana republic where her bones would be dug up and sorted through decades later by a team of forensic experts from the UN.

When one of the gardening staff ratted her out Lil was not surprised by the reaction from Rick’s young spouse. But she was taken aback by the unusually strong negative reaction from her employer. After all, he and his wife were in and out of the guests’ hot tubs as often as she was. She was going to miss Rick, but it was time to move on.