The Devil & Me, a syndicated column by Cliff Harrison
Wounded Knee & Wounded Heart
I lost my brother, Kenny, two years ago New Year’s Day. While other people spent yesterday ringing in the New Years I couldn’t help but think of Kenny. I grew up with Kenny being an important part of my life. He was my older brother. Older brothers are supposed to protect you, educate you; teach you things about life you missed elsewhere, or that somebody else tried to teach you but you didn’t hear them correctly enough to learn. Older brothers are suppose to teach you how to tie a tie, how to act in public, how to… be a man. Older brothers are supposed to spend the time with you when your parents are busy doing other things needed to raise their family.
Older brothers are supposed to teach you how to play and win at sports. How to win at everything you do.
Older brothers are supposed to teach you proper conduct, etiquette, behavior, morals and how to fight back when someone threatens you. Good brothers teach you how to lift weights and how to keep yourself in good physical shape. Great brothers teach you how to dream and how to use your imagination. They groom you to become an upstanding citizen, a patriot, an achiever; a hard worker and self-starter. They teach you how to be independent and how to respect and love others. They teach you how to devote yourself to God.
Kenny did all of those things and more….
The last time I saw Kenny he was on his way to Midnight Mass. I was in New York burying my stepfather, Paul—a 26-year front line war veteran—who had died during Christmas of 2005. I was the executor of the estate. Back in Vegas I was a supervisor managing five different departments at once on a busy car lot. I had all I could handle and needed to get the New York affairs wrapped up and back home to work in Vegas. Kenny was helping me with getting things in order with the estate.
The last day I meet with Kenny, we met at the house we grew up in. It was also the last day I had ever been inside that home either. Our old home, our father and mother built, had since been foreclosed and then sold. A new young family is raising memories where Mom and Dad once raised theirs.
The next day I was on my way to the airport; Southwest had gotten me an emergency flight to New York from Vegas. I never made it to the intensive care unit where the U.S. Army Staff Sergeant, who had served America’s First Team, the 1st Cavalry Division, had died before I could reach him. But Southwest got me back home to Vegas on that day, 25 December 2005.
Christmas Eve, 2005, was the last time I ever saw Kenny alive. That was while I was leaving New York after burying someone else I would never see alive again—a combat soldier who had helped keep America and the world free.
Tomorrow I’m going back to Sally’s thrift shop and pick up a ten dollar guitar I saw there the other day. Sally’s is what the homeless people call the Salvation Army. I’m going to re-write some of those songs I threw away when I dumped New York for Nevada almost 15 years ago.
I won’t remember a lot of them. Many of them perished to eternity. There were over a thousand song lyrics and musical chords I had written. Along with the songs, hundreds of short stories, novels and articles and essays—a life’s work—wound up in the trash of my brother Jerry’s burning barrel. I’d be a billionaire today had I published some of that work that ended up floating in the air as embers, and paper ashes, burnt offerings for the literary demons.
From ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
With a ten-dollar guitar and sometime to spend in a rundown motel room, I’ll hammer out the songs I left being swallowed by flames and the devil’s desires; songs lost in a country burning barrel back in New York so many years ago…where everything else that ever mattered to me died.
From homelessness to total independence is a long, long road. Where that road will lead me and where it will all come to an end, I do not know.
Had computers, with the kind of word processors that are available today, with internet connections, spell checkers and grammar checks, Google and other search engines, Wikipedia, and free blogs and social networking and all the modern writing tools existed back then like there are today the writing wouldn’t have perished. All that writing that was lost when a troubled young man left his past and a depressed economic era behind and moved on to a new life, wouldn’t have been lost.
It would have been preserved in the eternal cyberspace of free blogs like Google’s Blogger and WordPress or self-hosting websites like this one. The writing would have been left in the universe of the blogosphere for someone else to discover one day. Except the greedy literary demons grinned and stirred the ancient flames of the burning manuscripts with their red-hot fireplace poker.
Demons do what demons do.
Rather for the price of personal satisfaction or real and genuine financial opportunity, the lost pieces, be they creative art or literary composition or essays and opinion pages would not have been lost.
The blogosphere would have preserved my work not much different than a book after being sent to the printing press and published would preserve the works like the preserved works of William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Rod Serling (perhaps one of the most talented and least recognized writer of all time. ) and music by such greats as Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash, John Denver, Ritchie Valens, The Beetles, Elvis Presley, and thousands of others and of course… the Bible, the Word of God.
Cyberspace and blogosphere preserve that stuff like libraries do and collectors do—‘till the end of time.
Kenny was the instrument of my creativity and imagination. I’m not going to spoil future stories I‘ve already written, by telling you or explaining why he was, I’ll save those good stories for publication day. Just take my word and the ball and run with it, because it is so.
I know a lot of that stuff that was thrown away in New York was good because Kenny said so. If you knew Little Kenny, he was critical. Being critical was a Harrison trademark. If Little Kenny said it was good. It was good. The Harrison’s don’t criticize to hurt or insult, we criticize to make the world a better place, like the 4-H motto we grew up with: To make the best better.
If my work, my writing or my music, wasn’t any good, Kenny would have rejected it and told me so. Period. You had to get through Kenny in order to accomplish anything.
Kenny was my inspiration. He used to take me with him when he played semi-pro football for the Schenectady Stormers. I remember the electric lightning bolt on the sides of the helmet. He drove us in his black ’66 Ford Fairlane. He didn’t mind my ‘tagging along’, in fact he never called it that. He always asked me if I wanted to go with him. And I always did. During the 20-30 minute ride to and from the games and practice, he’d coach me with his “talks”. He was always a teacher.
And like that writing of the past, the Masterpiece That Will Never Be, Kenny is lost to a world of yesteryears—but not in my mind or in the minds of the people who loves him. Notice I use present tense. Because Kenny, just like Mom and Dad and dozens of other love ones continue to live on in our wounded hearts.
Speaking of wounded, that brings me to Wounded Knee. On 29 December 1890, the United States Government massacred hundreds of innocent men, women and children Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. My Website, Indian Nation
This wasn’t a real battle like so many others. The Indians had already surrendered. Their guns were handed over to Army troops. Women and children and old people never had guns. But they died with their blood seeming into the snow of Wounded Knee just the same.
It was a massacre, not a battle. Wounded Knee was a massacre.
We’ve apologized to others we’ve warred with, like the Japanese. It’s time we apologize to our own people, the American Native Indians. People, who still mourn for the lost of their love ones. Just like I continue to mourn for my family, for Kenny, Mom and Dad, Pa and Ma, Paul and many many more, the Native Americans deserve closure and respect.
The drive to give them that, what they deserve, the exposure of their unspeakable poverty on Pine Ridge, the respect and closure of Wounded Knee, will be an inherent part of my writing future.
I’ve got a lot of sites I started and never completed the way I wanted them in the network. The brain damage I suffered after my second stroke and has prevented me from ever accomplishing what I wanted to accomplished. It destroyed any ability to produce like I had in the past. I have a lot of work to get done. Somehow, I’ll get it done. God willing, I will get it done.
I’ve got a lot of unfinished stuff I want to get finished. Only Jesus can help me with that.
The Devil doesn’t want me to produce. He never did. He gets in my way to stop me from producing or accomplishing anything productive—at least anything long standing. Jesus on the other hand pushes me to produce. He knows I can help make the best in the world better. He knows I can and will expose the suffering and wrongs against those living in poverty and who are slaves to the evil slave masters.
It’s a battle and a struggle that will continue until I die. It’s a battle between good and evil. A battle between Jesus and the Lucifer. This reminds me, you’ll soon meet Little Lucifer, my imaginary friend—or rather Demon. Yes, demonic stories will be told.
I might as well profit from it by telling you about them.
The question is who is going to win that battle? The one between Lucifer and Jesus? Who will win the battle on my own personal battlefield? The one involving my life? I know Jesus will win the ultimate battle. But who will win this battle? The one involving my life?
The Devil and Me will include up-to-the-minute events of my current affairs and life in Las Vegas like right now, and it will include events from my early childhood. It’ll include the first time I ever remember running smack into the real Devil and coming face to face to him, when my brother David, raced me from the family car lot up the road to the family house and I entered alone—to meet the Devil. David gave me my first lesson about the Devil. That memory still lingers in the subconscious mind.
Sometimes I have to correct the spell checker and grammar check, I accomplished that feat by being strict, critical, demanding and a perfectionist, like Little Kenny taught me to be. Compared to many of the writers of the new media my writing is actually now superior.
Finally, the pen has been said to be the most powerful weapon in the world. And that truth you’ll soon see. I hold nothing back. My bottled-up anger and frustration is often vented through my writing. So, I’ll hold nothing back. I’ll write. When you’ve lost everything there is to lose, you have nothing left to lose.
In closing, in the old days, it would have taken weeks, months or even years to publish this manuscript. Instead, I wrote it and published it in minutes and it traveled all the way to Russia with Love.
By the way, that’s what a thousand words look like. Word counters are another plus to the modern technology the Lord has given us, although the Devil tries to interfere with our technology.
In correct English one would say, ‘The Devil and I’, that I am aware. I chose to name of the column, The Devil & Me as a deliberate pun. Not only that, I believe that is how most people would say it if it were them saying it.
A lot of sorrow drips from Wounded Knee and my wounded heart, but in order to move on one must persevere. And that’s what I’m going to do. And if the Devil follows me, then so be it, The Devil Follows Me.
Well, this manuscript wasn’t a thousand words; it winds up more than twice that, (2,200 words). The devil made me do it.
[I missed the 9:11 publishing time-stamp deadline by two minutes on purpose.]
Well, so I visited and the demons seemed to have some mercy on me this morning. Yesterday was such a trying day I found myself screaming into the phone as I had to deal with the last A-hole from AAA Auto Insurance.
