A Football Story

Then suddenly, the TMU star African American fullback, Wylie Sams gives a TV interview accusing the school of continuing to pay its players despite their probation restrictions. Infractions officer Brotherman is quickly forced off the case by money in the bank Arthur Godine, TMU’s wealthy, ex-senator board of governor’s chairman, and leaves Matt in charge of the NCAA investigation.

Despite an attractive job offer from Godine and harassment from Godine’s two in-house flunkies, Flipper Smalls, the ugliest man alive, and Evelyn Rouse, the biggest bitch on the planet, Matt, with the help of Morgan Caulder, the TMU president’s daughter, an African American hooker, Gerry Johnson, and Wylie Sams’ mother, Celia, and his sister, Prissy, gets the evidence he needs to make his case, just when his chief witness, the drug-addicted fullback, Sams, is resupplied with narcotics by Godine’s crew, overdoses, crashes, and dies.

Eventually with the help of TMU’s All American running back, Taylor Dobie, Matt proves his case, wins Morgan’s love, and the respect of the people who count in his life.

As a light snow falls on Christmas Eve, Flipper and Evelyn are hauled off to jail by the Dallas police, while William, Godine’s jack of all trades manservant, heads their long black Cadillac toward hearth and home, as Gene Autry sings “Hop in bed and cover up your head, because Santa Claus comes tonight.”

The rich and powerful board chairman drives safely away, as the snow comes to a halt. No white Christmas again this year, it appears. But, after all, this is Dallas.

Paradise Divide

PARADISE DIVIDE is a Die Hard like action story. Its world is the small Colorado community of Paradise, below the continental divide.

A ranger recon sergeant, Danny McCarty, returns home following the apparent suicide death of his father. Five years ago, feeling that he had to get away, Danny joined the army, leaving behind his dad, Sam, his older brother, Mike, his dad’s old maid English teacher, Aunt Ona, (who has flunked half the valley), and his strong willed girlfriend, Sara, (who has no plans to forgive him).

What Danny doesn’t know is that he has been recruited by his aunt’s Forty Two Domino club (the aunt, the town sheriff, his deputy, and the local high school chemistry teacher) for his military (recon abilities) and his outdoorsman skills (bow hunter, tracker) to root out his dad’s real killer and bring them to justice.

The chief suspect of the domino club is the owner, Richard Clayhouse, of the reopened Molybdenum mine above the town that now employs Mike and Sara. At the family ranch, purchased by Clayhouse, Danny finds a water quality report suggesting that the mine is poisoning the town’s aquifer, but he is set upon by Clayhouse’s thugs, an oddly matched threesome. They try first to kill him and then end up burning down the old McCarty house and barn and blaming it on Danny.

A series of encounters follows wherein Danny goes into jail, breaks out, goes back in, and breaks out again. In between escapes, he quarterbacks a winning football game, blows up the mine with a homemade bomb, and has several confrontations with Mike and Sara, and the three Clayhouse thugs – in the process he solves the crime, wins back Mike’s loyalty, and Sara’s love – and ends up in a running bow and arrow battle with Clayhouse and discovers that when you’re lost – the best place to find yourself is at home.

Christmas Angel

Christmas Angel is a collection of memories of three events in the life of a retired surgeon, a man who is self-admittedly not perfect and who has not always been religious. A grumpy sort of a fellow who blames his personality defects on his genetics, as do most of us who are well-educated enough to appreciate the value using DNA as an alibi. The time course of the works begins in his senior year in high school and ends just after this retirement from the practice of medicine. He chronicles three separate meetings with his Christmas Angel, occurrences that led to positive outcomes, to his choice of a career as a doctor, to his improved relationship with his family and the world around him, and to his response to a potentially fatal disease. In addition to the short stories, he does include three of his unpublished poems but on the up side, he does show a proper reverence for Bob Dylan’s work. They offset. And that is only fair.

Restoration of Wood

Wood and BR live separate lives. Instead of children, they have sailboats, Wood’s ISSA, an ancient wooden affair, and BR’s LEGAL EAGLE, a modern, up to date fiberglass sloop. The Eagle is the faster boat, but Wood is the better sailor and has won numerous yacht club Governor’s Cups racing on Lake Travis. BR wants a trophy of her own more than she wants Wood and is in the process of divorcing him.

While dodging a dinghy sailed by a young Latina girl, Perla Perez, Wood wrecks the ISSA by running into his own dock and effectively locks himself out of his life.

Perla turns out to be the daughter of Issa Perez, the Hispanic woman for whom Wood’s boat is named. It was built over thirty years ago by Wood’s governor grandfather and Issa’s migrant father, Javier Perez, working together. In their late teens, Wood and Issa fell in love and had a liaison aboard the sailboat which resulted in Perla, the child Wood never knew he had.

Javier takes Wood and the ISSA to his salvage yard across the lake, where he works on getting Wood and his disillusioned daughter reunited. Javier and his cadre of unusual confederates restore not only Wood’s boat but his ability to love, and, although Wood gets the chance to return to BR and his old life by letting her win the upcoming race for the Governor’s Cup, he follows a different wind, waves goodbye to BR, and sails toward happiness, his life restored by newly found family and friends.

Davids Valley

Set in the racially turbulent sixties, Davids Valley is a drama overlain with magical realism. A self-isolated, disaffected young resident surgeon, Dr. John David III, is pushed by Esther Freeman, an African American ghost, to visit his stroke-crippled and dying mother, Alice David, in Davids Valley, Oklahoma, John’s hometown, which was founded by his grandfather. After a prolonged absence, at home John discovers he has a son, Sonny, by the strong-willed, independent Native American woman, Betsy Guy, whom he has left behind. Burned by the loss of both of his parents at a young age, John has purposefully rejected any commitment that would risk a further loss of love.

John is besieged by Earl Hatch, the town’s mayor and the man responsible for the deaths of John’s father, Jack David, and Esther Freeman twenty years before. Scarred by hate and bent upon the destruction of the entire David Family, Mayor Hatch executes an elaborate plan to kill John, John’s five-year old son, Sonny, and Sonny’s mother, Betsy Guy.

The story is multi-colored. Beginning and ending on Bloody Sunday on the steel-gray Edmund Pettus Bridge above the muddy brown Alabama River, it has a dispossessed white sandhill crane, an ancient yellow school bus with a hand-painted message on its side, “BACK TO THE VALLEY,” a black Labrador dog wearing the red bandana of Sonny’s deceased Native American Chickasaw grandfather, Chick Guy, and an inclusive rainbow message from the Nobel Peace Prize winning Martin Luther King.

Ultimately, John reconciles with Betsy, stops Earl, and saves their family from a man-made thunderbolt, a purposefully set hay barn fire, and a pair of predatory tornadoes. And he learns from Esther that while there are a lot of reasons to hate, there is only one reason to love.

Fortnight

That day, David’s mother discusses David’s emotional alienation with his history teacher (an African American woman with special abilities and a magical cat, Halloween) and wishes that he would go back to being the loving, giving boy he once was. She makes that wish come true using a wooden button ring (a wishing ring) and Halloween. That afternoon during the ball game, David gets knocked out. He wakes up in the powder magazine at Fort Sumter and learns the year is now 1861. He’s been wished back in time. Thus begins his two week (a fort night) odyssey where he meets Abner Doubleday, pitches a winning baseball game, and enlists the help of a young black man (the new black ballplayer whom he threw at) to help him find the person whom he has been told can help him get home, a scary local conjuring woman, Mother Mary (David’s history teacher). While in Charlestown David adds a young woman (his estranged girlfriend from home) to his band of recruits, which now includes a savvy slave named Jefferson (the young black man’s grandfather). In the process, he falls back in love with his girlfriend and Jefferson and the two young men locate Mother Mary who tells David what he needs to know to get home – to be in the powder room right at sunset, two weeks to the day from when he arrived. Meanwhile, the civil war begins. David is captured by a slave trader (his baseball coach) but, with the help of his young black friend, escapes in time to return to Fort Sumter. With the battle still raging, the young black man saves David’s life and David gives his ring (his ticket home) to his new black friend, so that he, his girlfriend, and Jefferson can fulfill their own wish – to make it to freedom. Resigned to his fate, David returns to the powder magazine, where he’s attacked by the resilient slave trader (thought to be dead) but is saved at the last second by an appearance by Mother Mary.

And boom – David finds himself back on the pitcher’s mound and decides to finish the game, by allowing a third time senior tryout (his history class friend) to hit the game winning home run. After the game, he asks his history teacher (Mother Mary) how he was able to get back, since he had lost the ring. She explains he hadn’t lost it but rather had given it away –and thereby he had fulfilled his mother’s wish – to once again be the loving, giving boy he once was. David reconciles with his family and walks toward home plate where his old girlfriend waits for him. As the field lights go out, they kiss the kiss that has taken them two lifetimes to accomplish. The four seniors, David, his girlfriend, the black ballplayer, and his girlfriend drive home together with the boys in back arguing with the girls in front. Things are as they should be.

Hampton’s Annie

HAMPTON’S ANNIE is a western set in late 1880 Colorado, and the arena is the coming of the railroad.

In the opening flashback, an imaginary African American actor named Albert (Bert) Brown, dressed as a railroad porter, sets up the story. The twin protagonists are a famous New York actress, Anna Carroll (prefers Annie), who is dedicated to seeking revenge for the civil war death of her father, and the man who caused that death, a railroad construction engineer from Georgia named Wade Clay.

With Bert’s help, Annie tracks Clay to Colorado where he is in the middle of a railroad building race that involves Annie’s brother. The plot thickens during a vaudeville show at the Alkazar Theater in Denver, followed by a disaster-filled train ride through the mountains which ends in Aspen, where Annie, despite her best efforts not to, falls in love with Clay — the man she has sworn to kill.

The array of idiosyncratic characters includes the richest man in America who wears a red wig from the Irish sailor’s skit, an unintentionally earthy auburn-headed ingénue who ends badly, a mute deputy who has a well thought out game plan, a tobacco spitting sheriff who prefers to urinate out windows, and a monkey with an attitude named Monkey who comes from Milan, Italy.

There are period songs, comedic skits, a rigged prize fight, an arson set trestle fire, a pair of nasty stabbings, and a life and death locomotive chase that ends in the fast flowing, frigid river below a blown up railroad bridge.

In the end, the villains get their just deserts. On the stage, Bert, dressed as himself, sings Stephen Foster’s song “Beautiful Dreamer,” while, at the train station, boy gets girl (and vice versa). And, in melodramatic fashion, all is well that ends well, for the most part.