New Mexico Mercury

Everybody in Burqueville is talking about Bustin St. Germane who wrote a recent op. ed. piece in the lofty New York Times. Bayor Merry wants to shoot Bustin in the lips for saying what a violent place is our dear Albacore. In his piece, Bustin recited the whole litany about the police who kill the homeless and the teens who also kill the homeless.

Listen, I know Bustin Germane like the back of my hand. Bustin had a little teacher cubicle office right across the hall in the UNM English Dept. from my own cube, so we shared a lot, believe me. I got to know all of Bustin’s innumerable and intimate secrets. Many were the times when Bustin opened up his heart to me on those two or three fleeting occasions when he passed by in the hall during the three years he was at UNM.

“Hi, Bustin,” I would say. “Hi…what’s your name again,” he responded in his warm way. He’s a tall guy. I do know that. He also always thought that Burque was the set for a contemporary shoot-em-up western. Sam Elliot would play Bustin. Gabby Hays would play Bayor Merry.

I had absolutely no idea Bustin Germane would skedaddle, flee town, and end up betraying our beloved Burque by blabbing the truth about us all over hell and creation from a safe distance holed up in a dank motel room somewhere in mid-America thousands of miles from here where he can safely flip us off by saying we Burqenos are a damn mean and nasty lot of viboras and that Albuquerque kids like the baby rattlers they are see the cops here blow away homeless people with abandon, so why not get in on the fun?

How incredibly jawdroppingly inappropriate! If we learn one thing from this horrible disaster it’s this: Kids do not have the same rights and privileges as adults have. Adults like Bayor Merry have the right to shoot the lips off anyone they damn well choose. That’s one of the compelling reasons we should educate and test our children more frequently and less effectively or whatever, just get the job done.

(Photo by Bradley Gordon)