The two old men were inmates at Seaside Manor, the geriatric gulag to which their families had consigned them when they’d become difficult. 

George ‘Fonzie’ Fredericks  made lewd telephone calls to the women he’d left in his considerable wake, insofar as the dear old things were still among the living.  Recently, he’d called Charlene Fredericks, his ex-wife, and, having established contact, inquired ‘Are you wearing any panties, Charli,’ as his opening salvo. 

The former Mrs F., now gently demented, didn’t seem to object to Fonzi’s salacious patter, however her adult granddaughter, who monitored Charlene’s calls, was speechless with indignation. She made a police complaint.  The police knew the anonymous caller without investigation.  The opening line was Fonzi’s signature ice breaker.  He was a well-known phone boner.

Harry, ‘ET,’ Johnson, when left to his own devices, dipped a little too profoundly into Early Times whiskey and, thus inspired, verbally assaulted schoolchildren  and others who passed his front garden.  Using a megaphone, ET ambushed passers-by, shouting ‘Wake up,  nigga zombies!  Whitey’s filling the jails with your black asses.  It’s riotin’ time again!’  This to the considerable consternation of the highly motivated and carefully selected black children attending the local, high resource, magnet secondary school.  Whoever was going to fill the prisons, they already knew it wouldn’t be them.

Both families, exhausted by police interventions and other chaos created by their venerable ancestors, deposited them in Seaside Manor where telephone calls were centrally monitored, liquor was vigorously discouraged, and megaphones were not permitted.  In Fonzi’s case, without that disposition, the City Attorney intended to press forward on the pending criminal complaint.  Enough is enough, the dirty old pervert.

After first attempting to use their given names, the staff at the Manor soon became discouraged and addressed both old men by the only names to which they responded, Fonzi and ET. 

Critically negligent in their ignorance, the Seaside Manor’s staff was unaware of the professional literature regarding malignant synergy between paired offenders: Leopold & Loeb, Bonnie & Clyde, Donny & Marie, Bill & Hillary, and the like.  They should never have warehoused the two old scalawags in the same wing, let alone as neighbors, at Seaside Manor. 

In good weather the old men accessed the nearby shopping center for cigars and liquor, thereafter, adjourning to  a secluded table in the public gardens across the street from the Manor.  They managed this pilgrimage with relative ease, making use of the electric ‘scooters’ their thoughtful children had purchased in hopes of providing more wholesome outlet for their considerable energies. 

Fonzie’s scooter was candy apple red, the hair color favored by Clarice of Blessed Memory, his most recent Las Vegas wife.  ET’s was shiny raven black with silver flecks. It was lettered with the name ‘Malcolm,’ in honor of Malcolm X, the assassinated black political icon and ET’s inspiration.

*  *  *

ET set up the chessboard they took ‘for political cover’ while Fonzie lit his cigar.  ‘Did you get your grandson to soup up that scooter of yours yet?’  ET asked.

‘Oh yeah, and she shits and gits when you punch the boost switch he put on the floor.  It zaps an extra six volts to the motor and jumps up her speed by about thirty percent.  He did mine for $100 in parts and a bottle of Jack Daniels. The boy’s only seventeen, crazy as hell for anything with wheels, and desperate for whiskey to loosen the knickers on this little girl he’s dating.’

‘How fast you recon she’ll move?’ ET asked.

‘Fast enough to outrun Jenkins, that fat-fuck orderly, if I have to.  He caught me with a cell phone on the back patio this morning, but I got away. 

‘He’ll never find the phone because my grandson made a latch for it beneath my seat here, a charger for it too. That little shit is clever.’

‘What’s that boy’s name, Micky, ain’t it?’ said ET. ‘You tell him to put me down for that right away. He can take Malcolm away on Friday because my family’s coming by on the weekend. And tell that Micky to try Southern Comfort. It goes down smoother.   Don’t rush the girl.  She’ll come along.  Lord knows, they all do.  I’ll fetch him a bottle next time we out.’

‘Did you ever dream something or see something in that space just before you go to sleep?’  asked Fonzie.

‘Yeah, like I’m falling down a ladder and then I wake up and realize I forgot to take a leak.  Then I have to drag my sorry ass to the can.’

‘No, no, I mean there’s a millisecond between being awake and asleep, a zone, just before you start dreaming.’

‘That’s when I remember I got to take a piss,’ ET said.

‘Well, anyhow, last night just as I hit that spot, I had a vision of the most beautiful breasts I have ever seen.  Although I didn’t see anything else, I knew immediately who they belonged to.  It was Hannah, a girl I haven’t seen in fifty years. 

‘She had brown eyes and light brown hair piled on top of her head.  Her skin was summer tan, tawny like, and the hair on her forearms and nape of her neck was sun bleached blond.  She was athletic, the kind of girl who was a borderline tomboy; she walked in strides and carried herself tall and strong. 

‘That first night Hanna was wearing a strapless, tube-top cotton dress.  It went to her ankles and was in a red bandanna pattern.   Her bare feet were just visible beneath the hem. She’d painted her toenails red to match.  Hanna was like that. When she decided she’d have me, she just stepped out of that dress.

‘And there were those wonderful breasts!  When she slipped off that dress, I was stunned by Hanna’s gorgeous breasts.  They weren’t huge, but high, full, and just off firm.  She had large, darkened aureoles, unlike any I’d ever seen. The rest of her, which I finally managed to take in was muscular like I’d thought, but by my God it was those lovely breasts I couldn’t get enough of.’

‘You saw all that in just one little, bitty flash before you went to sleep?’  ET asked.

‘Yep, I could even smell her.  She had a cinnamon smell about her that night.’

‘She was a black girl, right?’ said ET.

‘Who said anything about her being black, for Christ’s sake, ET?  No she wasn’t or, if she was, maybe by a great-grandmother.  She looked white to me.’

‘White girls don’t have titties like that,’ said ET.

Both men glared at each other as they each took a pull from the brown paper bags tucked beside them in their scooters.  Then Fonzie spoke again, ‘Dammit, ET, I don’t want to have no race argument with you about this.  I’m trying to tell you a story about my dream and what I did about it.’

‘If I had a dream that good, I’d fall down on my knees and thank Lord Jesus for His precious gift, that’s what I’d do about it,’ said ET. ‘Why I’ve practically forgotten how good titties can look, particularly black girl’s titties.’

‘Well, anyhow, that’s what I was trying to tell you.  This morning as soon as I got up, I tracked Hanna down on the Internet and got a telephone number for her.  Damn, I love the Internet! 

‘That’s who I was calling when that cocksucker Jenkins came running out after me.  I’d already gotten through though, but I didn’t get to talk to Hanna.  I spoke to somebody who must have been her housekeeper or something.  She had a pretty thick accent, but when I asked to speak with Hanna, she said ‘You too late, meester. Miss Hanna, she died yesterday afternoon.’  I was trying to find out what happened when Jenkins came busting out the back door shouting at me.

‘The only good thing about it was I got to outrun Jenkins with my scooter.  He got so red in the face, I thought the fat prick might have a heart attack, but he just gave up, gasping for breath.  He won’t write me up though. He’ll try to get even, the schmuck.’

ET took a meditative pull on his whiskey.  ‘So, you probably reckon she came back just to show off her titties to you?’

‘No, ET, don’t be thick.  That was Hanna come to say Aloha.  I loved that girl and she loved me too, a long time ago.’

‘She’s a black girl,’ said ET,  ‘Only a black girl have the nerve to come back just to show off her titties like that.’

Looking down, Fonzie said, ‘Before that fucker Jenkins came running after me, the maid told me Hanna died of breast cancer, ET.  That ain’t right, not for my Hanna.’

‘I agree,’ said ET. ‘That’s Satan’s unholy work for sure.  But she showed Old Scratch.  That’s why she came back after she was made whole by the Lord.  She returned just to spite the Devil.  Now I know she was a black girl.’

*  *  *

‘What do you want to do when we finish our cigars?’ asked Fonzie.

‘There’s a demonstration down in front of the Courthouse on account of there being not enough black people on the juries.  I thought I’d motor on down there.  You want to join me?  They don’t allow no tittie crazy old white motherfuckers on the jury neither.’

‘Why not,’ said Fonzie ‘I haven’t got any calls to make this afternoon.’