1

The Wong Wedding and Other Tribulations

by Guy Duperreault

Chapter 1 The Smile

Alfred Wong woke one bright and cheerful spring morning. The morning was bright because
the sun was already high in the clear blue sky when he opened his rich brown eyes and it was
cheerful because the house finches which had begun setting up their nest in one of his hanging
baskets were singing like, well, a pair of wildly cheerful birds.
Alfred Wong yawned a delightful, glad-to-be-alive kind of yawn, one which anticipates the
day properly begun with a steaming hot shower and clean towel, followed by the wonderful
aroma and taste of his uniquely blended coffee, properly ground and prepared. His thoughts
continued down their familiar path, and his senses anticipated how the morning's overture of
sight, scent and savour would be brought to a simple but powerful completion with the hearth
tones of a thick bagel's toasted grains singing a gospel praise to the butter melting richly into it
and cascading gracefully onto the white plate in pools of liquid sunshine.
Alfred Wong, snug under his down comforter, stretched a delightful glad-to-be-alive kind of
stretch, a stretch which compels the toes to wiggle involuntarily and ends with an electrifying
tingle, near orgasmic, pulsing through the spine and out the extremities.
Alfred Wong smiled. Life was indeed delightful. And all this wonder and pleasure before he
had even remembered that this was to be one of his most memorable days. The memory of
what this day was to bring eased into his consciousness like a rose scented breeze on a warm
summer day. And as the beauty of his long and arduously sought for wife-to-be filled his mind
he threw off his covers and jumped out of bed "YES!" The joy at the thought of meeting her for
the first time opened his face and transformed his brightest and most cheerful glad-to-be-alive
smile into something transcendental.
Rarely has such a smile been seen by anyone on earth, either living or dead. Its energy
reflected off his vanity mirror and sped out the bedroom window. It danced off the mirrored
sunglasses of the neighbour two doors down who was driving her Mercedes convertible to
her Wednesday lover before work. That smile picked-up, serendipitously, the energies of
random photons, pheromones, hormones and the atoms of Passion going their way, and sped
through the atrium window of the house next door. It happened to strike, with the energy of
an epiphany, their neighbour Jennifer March, who had paused to curse the dust she was in the
process of busting.
Jennifer March's neural networks and synaptic bridges instantaneously underwent a global,
vertigo inducing, paradigm shift. With her house spinning around her head she fell backwards
onto the small coffee table with its carefully chosen and appointed books. It shattered under
her head and shoulders, and the only thought, no not thought but overwhelming feeling, was of
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the distressing need to want to thank the Universe, God, dust mites, something, anything and/
or everything – except her husband! – without knowing why or for what. And a moment later
not even the sense of being distressed about needing to be thankful for being alive remained.
Instead, as she lay atop the shattered wood, she watched with rapt attention and inexplicable
joy the motes of dust dancing the tango to hidden air currents shifting in time to the pre-
mating song of the birds outside. She would never know that Alfred's smile had effortless
expunged from her being the detritus of choices good and bad, made or deferred, that had
been cluttering her heart and pinching her soul. Nor would she care. From that day forward
this once bitter house bound woman lived each moment of life with a light heart, a light touch
and a light duster. She ceased rebuking her slutty neighbour for her ill-gotten lucre and found
herself admiring the ease with which her neighbour's graceful delight in physical sensuality
fed and clothed her and seemed to delight her and her many lovers. And while Jennifer did
not feel compelled to join her running with the bulls, they became friends for life and each felt
somewhat awed by what they saw in the other.
Jennifer ceased shaking her fist and damning the finches nesting in her other neighbour's
basket and the robins nesting in the laurel hedge. Instead she began to emulate their song
with whistling and chirps of her own. A smile was never far from her lips and she would
spontaneously burst into enchanting song whenever she did housework, the very same
housework which until her dusting epiphany had evoked from her an endless stream of dreary
epithets, trite curses and melodramatic tirades. And with that change of heart she found, to her
surprise, that the time needed to keep the house clean was significantly lessened and the time
she could invest in reading was significantly expanded. To her further surprise the romances
she had till then found riveting were now vacuous, and by the end of her life she had read
everything from Homer and Beowulf to Joyce and Marquez, from Behn and Wollstonecraft to
Dickinson and Dinesen and more.
Bob, her husband, would miss those curses more and more as he grew old without her. He
remembered how it was that he had found the naïvety of her cursing in turn charming, then
amusing and ultimately alluring when he first sat next to the buxom Jennifer in high school
science class. He would forget how, in the twelve years following his signing their marriage
licence, he learned that what her curses had lacked in maturity they more than made up for
with energy enough to drive him into the smoky calm of the nearest pool hall and the self-
pitying feelings of loss and regret and loneliness.
About seven years into his marriage his pool hall was upgraded into a smoke-free coffee
bar and billiards room with attached clean air smoking room. He seized this change as an
opportunity to transform his life, and tried to transmute his loneliness by becoming passionate
about lattés, cappuccinos, espressos and the thick and pungent blue smoke of the fine Cuban
cigars which he learned to lovingly caress with fingers, lips and tongue. This worked, more or
less, for about four years. After that, in what would be the last year of his marriage to Jennifer,
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his passion for fluffy coffees and dense tobacco expanded to include the electrifying Tess
Everhard. She was the latest of the office's young and exuberant mail clerks, but her bright
smile, bobbed hair and perky tits had unfailingly fired his blood and lifted his spirit like none
before her, much to his consternation and embarrassment.
With an irony only some of the Greek gods and the Buddha would appreciate, it was the
beauty of the evening of the day before his wife's epiphany that sparked Bob to really change
his life. There was something about the rich burgundy on the clouds edging towards a pastel
violet, exquisitely complimented and completed by his neighbour's haute couture, Mercedes
Benz and vibrant flush of sex and expensive wine, that had mocked the bleakness in his heart
and dared him to seize life and not just his pocket cue one time too many in a bathroom stall
at work. After two years and five months of particularly bitter self-recriminations, muffled
profanities and broken personal vows, that night's beauty helped Bob to eke out just enough
courage to escape his marriage.
The morning after his fateful, decision-filled night, he thought that he had finally taken
control of his life as he crept out the back door while his wife restlessly slept, wrestling, he
assumed, the rabbits with over-sized incisors who frequented her dreams. Once clear of the
house he jumped for joy at the thought of embracing Tess and rubbing his face into her short
brown hair. The thought of gently, guiltlessly, kneading her firm little breasts after work gave
him a hard-on, the first that had not made him feel ashamed in a long time. He shouted out the
window as he drove out of his cul-de-sac "Yes!" while adjusting the fit of his pants. He smiled in
anticipation of the beginning of the first day of the rest of his life.
Over time Bob convinced himself that it was his leaving on that fateful morning which had
transfigured his wife. He could not be dissuaded from believing in God as the agent divine
which had pointedly acted through Tess's perfect breasts. "Why else would God have made
such perfection in one so unworthy, unless it was to give me the needed incentive to leave
my wife?" he would rail against anyone who dared suggest that he had been, like many men,
albeit somewhat prematurely, a victim of his own foolish and sex- crazed mid-life crisis. "Bless
her soul," he'd say. "Bless both of them, and in particular Tess, for although she was for that
short time God's agent, she is doomed now to burn in Hell-Fire for being an abomination
to God. But," he would add sententiously, his finger pointing at whomever had had the oral
impertinence to impugn his life, "whenever you are quick to dismiss the wicked, remember the
story of Tess Everhard and her crucial role in my Wife's inevitable sanctification! The Lord works
in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. Amen."
These and other paganistic distortions of the New Testament resulted in his being
excommunicated from his church. But he didn't care. Bob March saw his having left Jennifer
as an act of such generosity to the world that he fell asleep each night happy in his aloneness.
And when he woke many years later for the last bodily time it was with the happy thought
of how his generosity had transformed his ex-wife and its inevitable inclusion in the future
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hagiographies into which his wife's name was bound. He visualized the high praise he would be
given as the husband who had had the wisdom and courage to set St. Jennifer free to discover
her saintliness.
As it would actually turn out, however, he became the footnoted fool who forsook a saint for
a four month fling with a young lesbian flapper who's perky breasts had flummoxed him.
Once Bob had moved in with her, his appeal to Tess in being supposedly older, hence wiser,
waned in direct proportion to her hands-on discovery that he was neither old nor wise, either
mentally or emotionally. The only thing agèd seemed to be what lay limp night after night
between his legs. Even more surprising to Tess than his petered pecker was how quickly she
found tiresome his breast-fixated and sentimental ardour. His original passion for Antonia
and Jane, as he called her breasts, had helped her to enjoy life in a way she had not 'til then
experienced because, at first, his adulation of Antonia and Jane gave Tess a sense of ease with
the body which had until Bob mostly disappointed her and her son-obsessed parents. But she
thanked procrastination everyday of her life that Bob had kept putting off having Antonia and
Jane tattooed in a circle around the appellated nipples. Paradoxically, his puerile obsession with
her tiny tits eventually made her feel even more self-conscious than before she'd met him, and
even more self- conscious and inadequate than when she'd bought a brassiere in a department
store instead of via catalogue.
As for his frequent impotence, she found it at first amusing and challenging, but ultimately
just arduous.
So it was that within four months of Bob having moved in with her, Tess bobbed her losses
and tossed him out in order to make room for what would become a life long relationship with
Alexis White, one of the company's regular bicycle couriers. It was a relationship Tess and Alexis
launched as platonic roommates, sharing with joy the vicissitudes of single life. But with gentle
hesitancy and surprising ardour, it metamorphosed into an intimacy both enlightening and
sensual. It was even eventually given a begrudged half-blessing from Tess's father, who was
heard to mutter under his breath one Thanksgiving day "Well, if God wouldn't grant my wish for
a son, I hope, at least, that she's the one on top."
Alexis White, who cared not one fig newton about the state of Tess's breasts, perky or
otherwise – except for the pleasure she could give to Tess through them – would eventually
have several books written about her and her significant contributions to women's billiards.
One of them actually included Bob as a footnoted ex-lover of Tess with a catty denigration of
maleness, virility and heterosexual foolishness. These books amounted to several more than
the one and only one which would eventually be written about St. Jennifer March.
After a long and mostly tranquil life Jennifer March died quietly amidst the expansive and
cacophonous song bird sanctuary which she had started to build shortly after her husband's
departure and continuously added to throughout her life. It was, to a large extent, because
of this sanctuary that she came to be both vili- and sancti- fied. Those who fought for her
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sanctification did not do so because she had fallen in love with birds who seemed keen on her
too, but because of the peculiar circumstances surrounding her death and because of the effect
that attending her birds had had on the thousands of lost souls who found in cleaning up after
them a grounding to which they could anchor to life spiritual transformations and, in the case
of more than a few individuals, even spiritual meaningfulness.
Those who sought her vilification were primarily, albeit not solely, the corporate owned
news-media and their groupies. They averred her to be an elaborate con-artist/cult leader.
They pointed out that at the time of her death the sanctuary had subsumed into itself
seventeen of the eighteen city blocks which comprised her extended neighbourhood, and
that from the many scores of thousands of visitors a significant percentage would stay on
for extended periods of time and/or others would give her generous sums of money. That
she seemed to have dispersed all her wealth to those around her, and died estate-less, was
reported by the press as an example of how cunning a schemer she was. "No one," they
said, "but a fool would give away all their wealth. And if there is one thing everyone can agree
on, it's that Jennifer March was no fool."
And while this would seem to be inadequate grounds upon which to undertake a vilification,
by the time of Jennifer's death the depth and breadth of thought in reporters had been
significantly delimited since the failure of the state to finance college education. The corporate
owners of the universities and colleges had, with the self-sanctioned ideals of managerial
efficiency, streamlined the various faculties to achieve a uniformity of ideology and thought
the envy of dictators the world over. The net result of this promulgation of corporate ideals in
the universities was that all students, regardless of faculty or department, learned that the only
reasonable motivation ascribable to human action was that of pelf and that the only meaning of
being immoral was getting caught breaking a law – a law which in all likelihood shouldn't have
ever existed in the first place given that laws are inherently impediments to business acumen
and free-market integrity. This development in the production of journalists, combined with
the media having become a fully fatted public estate, ensured that no-one within the news
entertainment business heard the journalist's idealistic, and rarely embodied credo of the early
20th century which was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Instead journalists
learned to dis-empower government agencies and inculcate the widespread belief that
governments are the natural enemy of the people who can only trust the news and the white
knight MBA's of the supra-national corporations and their invisible gloves to fairly distribute
society's wealth.
The news-media bias against Jennifer and her bird sanctuary got its start several decades
before her death, when Jennifer was in her fifties. A local home owner, whom Jennifer knew
of but did not know, had become incensed at the noise and filth of the tens of thousands of
birds, as well as that of the thousands of penniless and unwashed gadabouts who destructively
meandered with moon-faced arrogance all about the sanctuary and through other peoples'
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flower beds. "How," Susan Philmore would rant to Avis, her husband, "can these human vermin
expect some kind of bird-brained enlightenment or batty epiphany if they don't even know
enough to respect others and their property, let alone wipe their asses or wash their faces?"
Avis had long since ceased responding to Susan's long-winded, mostly rhetorical, cants.
Avis Philmore had wanted to sell years before when he could see, long before most others
in the area, the bird shit that was going to be hitting their fans. But at the time his wife had,
as usual, belittled him as a worrisome and silly old fool. "That March woman is nothing
but a typical feminist idiot having gone slightly batty from being alone," she had laughed
derisively. "She should be taking hormone therapy or have an hysterectomy – or have kept
her husband! As you well know, Avis Percival Philmore, or would know if you'd properly study
The Bible! God does not condone divorce let alone unnatural acts, and so no good can come
to her. So stop your fretting and worrying! God provides to the just and unjust alike their mete
justice." Having a complete disbelief in a white bearded God let alone his wife's asinine notions
of Godly "justice", and not being above cutting off his nose to spite his wife's face, Avis did not
insist on their moving.
But that was many years ago, and now, despite her ostentatious faith in God, the sight
and smell of bird shit and unwashed masses was making Susan feel desperate. As was usual
whenever Avis noticed Susan's unspoken but physically expressed anxiousness, he could only
think that her agitation was less for the shitty state of their castle than it was a fear that God
had meted out justice justly, and that Susan had been found wanting some unknown, yet to
be discovered, or even completely missing, state of personal Christian mien. When he took
the time to look at her hiding behind the omnipresent and well thumbed New Testament, Avis
thought he could see the tracks of fear pinching into cracks her eyes and mouth.
For some reasons her facial creases would bring forward in his mind poor Job and the
so-called friend who advised him that it was the wise who did not utter vain knowledge or
reason with unprofitable talk. And he kept silent, unsure if he was being wise or was simply in
denial about having lost the soul-war of attrition to his wife. He viewed each possibility with
equanimity, realizing that regardless of the truth, both would be irrelevant when the worms
were frolicking in his and Susan's guano covered ashes.
Anyway, on this particular summer's day Susan Philmore had watched, one time too many, a
dirty little bat-faced female bare the hair between her buttocks before squatting like an albino
ape to water her already root rotted and acidified Japanese maples. That neither her husband
nor the local police would do anything to stop them was seen by Susan as the conspiracy
of men against all the decency that she stood for as a morally upstanding God- frightening
woman. "And you wonder why we are going to Hell in a hand- basket!" she barked, despite the
reality that that was not something Avis ever did. "It's because you and your ilk are standing by
doing nothing! Nothing, I tell you, but abetting the Devil through torpid silence!"
Avis did not tell her that he had not in fact done nothing. Years before, shortly after his
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wife had blasted him with a particularly nasty turn as an idiot for wanting to move, he had
dragged the reluctant police captain with him to invest in or establish most of the various
stores and shops, including the local birdseed plant, which were being demanded by the influx
of curious birds and their followers who were comprised of a wide variety of gawking birders,
animated tourists, fanatical environmentalists, wan vegetarians and all the other guided and/
or misguided seekers of life's meaning in the lives of others. Needless to say, Avis and Captain
Armbruster found butts, hirsute or bald, male or female, the highly attractive basis for the easy
accumulation of wealth and the seats upon which they established a highly profitable toilet
paper factory.
As Avis ruminated about how wealthy he was, while drinking tea from their chipped and
tired china, he heard faintly one of his wife's pat phrases. "I've had it! I've absolutely had
enough of your indolence and laziness!" This time, however, she took the unusual step of
following through on her promise to call someone who would listen to her. She phoned the
television news station who's corporate image ads had successfully convinced her that it
was sincere and community minded. She complained for not more than twenty minutes that
Jennifer March was evil incarnate and that her birds were ruining not just the neighbourhood
but also the minds of lost and misguided youths.
Sam Wanamaker, the ambitious assistant news director of HBRS-News1 who was filling in
for his boss who was recovering from a breast reduction operation, listened with his usual
inattention while working on other more important stories that were jostling for position
inside his head. He quickly became confused by the fast-paced and long-winded diatribe he
wasn't listening to and, as usual, dismissed the obviously disturbed woman as one of the area's
finest. He had noticed in his calender before coming to work that morning that a full moon
was immanent, and so had been fully prepared for the fruit-cake callers and their bird-brained
stories.
From the little he had understood of the bird story Wanamaker concluded, with a smile, that
there was some kind of traumatic neighbourhood dispute involving another bird's oversized
bird bath. However, as soon as he'd hung-up the phone his usual fear of missing the big story,
while working on another story, once again overwhelmed his reason. With his imagination
racing he concluded that, however unlikely, her rant could be something big – or, at the very
least that it could be made into something big. His fear of losing out on a story fought against
his fear that he would be caught wasting valuable resources on some king of wild goose chase.
The net result of his ulcer producing sparring resulted in him sending Kat Wong, their newest
and youngest, hence least expensive, reporter. He figured he could justify sending her with
the reasonable argument that at the very least it would be good experience for this still wet
behind the ears grad, as well as a gentle introduction to the fact that the world was populated
by "idiots who think that buying guides for dummies is a mark of intelligence." This was a pet
phrase he had inherited from a pre-business reform professor of English, and while he wasn't
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quite sure what it meant, whomever he said it to invariably nodded solemnly and said, "How
profound!" or "How true."
When Kat, the second eldest daughter of Alfred Wong, failed to return from her assignment
the next day, Wanamaker had visions of another Jonestown. "Or maybe even, with God's
blessing," he thought, "another Waco Texas! I could be onto a ratings gold mine!" He liked
to think in exclamatory and inappropriate metaphors and, when electrified, babbled his
thoughts. "But wait!" his voice and finger stabbed the air. "This time it would be even better
because the cult leader is a woman! Or at least a female. Now what's her name? Philemon?
Damn it, that's not right! Philauty? Damn! Why did I give all my notes to Kat?! You'd think I'd
have learnt by now that that's why photocopiers were invented!" He paced about for a few
minutes, muttering to himself "What to do? What to do?" before ejaculating "Got it! I'll just
have to send our best team out to get it. And her, of course." He danced with excitement as he
pulled this person from that story and that person from this story. "Thank God I sent Kat!" he
crowed. "I can see it now! Her pretty smile blazoned across millions of television and computer
screens, not to mention the front pages of papers and magazines. Including Time and, perhaps,
even People! All I need is to get a picture of that evil mesmerizing bitch! I hope she is either
horrifically ugly or mind-blowingly beautiful! Ahhhhhhhhh! Life is sweet!" He deferred calling
the police or the FBI until his crew and their camera were in place. "That way I'll get the jump
on all the other stations when the cops come rushing in, guns a blazing!" He danced around his
office, playing shadow guitar and thrusting his pelvis with glee.
Sam Wanamaker went to bed that night with a smile on his face as thoughts of accolades,
promotions and dollars danced through his head. He marvelled at the grace of "life with a
capital 'l'" to have a story like this fall into his lap at the exact time his boss was unable to keep
abreast. He felt genuinely blessed, secure in the knowledge that the strength of his character
and the honour of his profession had put him solidly amongst God's chosen. His dink grew hard
with the thought of his future. Involuntarily his right hand moved, oh so slowly, down over his
furry chest, pausing briefly over his tingling nipples, before moving down to his belly and below.
His thoughts quickly turned to his boss, the boss he imagined he knew before her surgery. Not
once did he think of the young and pretty Kat Wong who's life he had earlier imagined was in
peril.
The next morning the crew, in unmarked vehicles and equipment, arrived in the area
under Wanamaker's strict caution to avoid all contact with anyone. "Get pictures first, before
anything, before talking to anyone, especially that Filbert woman!" Unsure of what it was they
were expecting to see, the crew was nevertheless amazed at what they saw. Everywhere they
looked they saw birds and birders, tourists and gawkers, hippies and hawkers, moving freely
over the landscape in an unchoreographed bird-dance that was both beautiful and frightening.
And, as per orders, this is what they began to stuff into their camera as if they were just one of
the many scores of others who were pointing their lenses short and long, fat and fixed. As the
 9
hundreds of designated picture takers scoped out the best shots, they smilingly jostled around
each other in a kind of crane-your-neck dance within the great ornitella, all hoping with feigned
patience for the other to get out of their way.
Wanamaker, who was viewing the images from the safety of the studio, was getting
annoyed. "I didn't send you on a sight seeing tour of birds and their nutty watchers! Dig out
the dirt!" he yelled into the ear pieces of his crew. And so they tried. But despite the thousands
and thousands of birds, all the homes and yards were well maintained, with fresh looking
paint, clean roofs and clipped and green grasses, hedges and shrubberies. And everything was
elegantly accented with a range of beautiful flowers, big and small, bright and dull, sweet and
rank, with beauty enough to bring a tear to the most hardened gardener's eye.
Once the crew got past gawping at the homes and gardens, they were able to discern why
the near pristine state of the neighbourhood. There were a large number of people either
washing, cleaning or painting the houses, with an equally large group maintaining the lawns
and gardens.
Wanamaker was not amused. "My source said that private property was being destroyed!
Stop showing me pictures of those goofy looking, perspicacious, obsessive compulsive
gardeners, carpenters and painters! When I said dirt I didn't mean for you to film idiots
collecting guano from suburbia's vinyl siding, green grass and picket fences! And no, I don't
want their fertilizer factories either! Find the ringleader who has brainwashed your co-worker
before she or her groupies brainwash you! Find me the queen-bee about which all these
doorknobs turn! Find me that beautiful, evil, destroyer of souls!"
Wanamaker had decided in his mind that it would be most fitting if the bird-cult leader was
almost as beautiful as Kat because it would boost ratings with an easy tie-in to Snow White and
the whole mirror on the wall business. He rubbed his sweaty hands with excitement. But as he
became aware of his clammy palms he also became aware that what he was seeing had begun
to knot his stomach with the fear that this story was a washout. He tried to mask his doubts
with bluster, so rather belatedly squawked "Go on! Get going! Give me the dirt!"
"But you told us not to talk to anyone," Jason, the crew director, pointed out, without even
the hint of a whine.
"Take the initiative, you moron! That's why you're getting paid the big bucks. But since you
obviously can't, let me think for you: It has become obvious that you need to find that Pistachio
woman! Right? Well, then, do it! Now!" Wanamaker also liked to talk with exclamation points.
So Jason and the crew began looking for the home of the woman who had made the
original call to Wanamaker. From experience Jason knew to dismiss as irrelevant the names
Wanamaker ascribed to his sources, so he went in one direction and sent his crew in another in
order to search through the suburb one block at a time. Jason kept himself and his crew from
asking for directions with the hope that they could remain as inconspicuous as possible and
that their source would be obvious once seen, although exactly in what way "obvious" he had
 10
no idea.
As he walked Jason began to notice that all the homes in the area, as well as being
surprisingly clean, seemed open to everyone. People came and went freely without knocking
or ringing door bells. He found it very disorienting to see the cherished principle of private
property being debased so casually. And he realized that a part of the garbled version of
the source's story Wanamaker related to him now made some sense. He could understand
someone feeling dismay and fear at such an anti-social way of life and any leader who could get
people to behave that way.
It was while he was sympathizing with the unknown to him source known to others as Susan
Philmore, that he felt a tremendous sense of relief when he stumbled across what could only
be her house. Its fence was not friendly and the banks of bars and signs which threatened
dogs, prosecutions and security companies brought to Jason's heart a reassuring sense of
the familiar. The only jarring notes were the thick layer of putrefying bird shit which covered
everything and the prominently displayed warnings which proclaimed the presence of a score
of cats trained in the extermination of birds. He also noticed that the Japanese maples in the
easement, which must have been at one time magnificent, were now looking near death.
As he was reaching for his cell phone to rush the crew to him, it vibrated against his hip.
Before he could even say "Hello," Perry, the sound man, yelled "Jason, get here quick! We've
found the cult leader. Her name's Jennifer March and you'd never believe our luck – she's right
in the middle of a some kind of turf war! Hurry! Lisa's setting up the camera now!" Jason didn't
have the chance to squeeze in a "But" before Perry threw him the address and directions,
which he jotted down. Then he noted the address of the guano-japed house in front of him
before rushing to join his crew.
When he arrived at the fight he was very disappointed with what he saw. "You call this a
fight?" he snapped at Perry.
"Quiet!" Perry hissed back at him. "Watch! And listen."
What Jason saw was a tall young man, thin, with long dreadlocked blond hair, speaking with
a comfortably roundish, nondescript middle-aged woman who's greying hair framed a peaceful
and calming face. But the young man, by his vehemence and strong body language, was
obviously agitated with this seemingly quiet woman. Jason picked-up the heated conversation
while the woman, confirmed later to be Jennifer March, was speaking.
"... don't care. How many times, in how many different ways do you want me to say 'No'? I
will not, under any circumstances, give you or the group you claim to represent my blessings let
alone the money I don't have."
"But you don't understand! If you'd just take the time to listen, you'd see how important our
society is. Without it the animals on the earth are doomed!" He was clasping and loosing his
hands as he pleaded.
"Since we're all to be worm bait anyway, that is of no import. But while I'm alive I assure you
 11
that there will be birds, if nowhere else on this earth than here."
"You stupid old bag! Can't you see that you are throwing away all the good you could do with
the money your bird sanctuary is earning? Right now it is a gold mine. But why not turn it into
a platinum mine!" He softened his tone. "Why not use it for a good greater than just common
song birds?"
"This home and these birds are not tools placed here for your aggrandizement! This world
which man – which is short for manipulator by the way – is killing, is being killed because we
manipulators are too stupid not to use everything around us as a tool to derive some perceived
ulterior, often otherworldly or prelapsarian, but always munificent benefit."
"But – "
"Don't interrupt! You had your say, based as it was on the limited thinking and experience of
all idealists, especially ones still wet behind the ears and in their pants. Now I'll say my piece –
which no doubt you'll ignore, having, I am sure, misunderstood Lao-Tzu's aphorism about those
who know and those who speak.
"The benefits we exult in, in being human beings, have been the result of our superior, and
some would say God-given, intellect. But those benefits have always come at a cost, either
directly or indirectly, to that part of Life which is being used by that intellect. Women, Animals
and Nature have all felt this keenly since the Renaissance not only made their debasement
and defilement acceptable but seemingly necessary too. And while our intellect is big enough
to comprehend a golden goose, even when it comes in the shape of a bird sanctuary like
this suburb, it seems infinitely too small to keep us from killing it (and us) at the same time.
History has amply demonstrated that we humans are too stupid to learn that past a certain
stage of well-being, any additional benefit is derived at exponentially increasing costs to the
environment from which we derive that so-called benefit. The examples are legion in all areas
of life, and even you must be able to think of at least one. We are also too stupid even to ask
ourselves at what point a benefit is nothing more than gluttony, gluttony being, I think, one
of the cornerstones of our society's spiritual impoverishment and the associated anti- social
behaviours, especially greed. I am incensed at economists who out of one side of their mouths
mumble like priests giving benediction to their university students the law of diminishing
returns, and out of the media- megaphone shrilly advocate infinite growth within Gaia's finite
resource as a justification for impoverishing and destroying most of the planet and every social
structure not founded in the Chicago School of Economics’ world view!"
"But you – "
"Quiet! This is, of course, where your concern lies – in the cost to the environment of excess
consumption. But you're plan is the plan of all idealists, who invariably sacrifice their integrity
and individuality, as well as the physical well-being and even the lives of others, for the sake
of their ideals. You want to use these birds, just like any other unfeeling capitalist manipulator
of the environment, to give to your group a benefit which you think will outweigh the costs of
 12
deriving that benefit.
"But your argument is no different than all the capitalists that you will have blamed for the
state of life as you understand it. You are, if I can use the phrase, a capitalistic environmentalist
– a parasite in denial of its parasitic behaviour and without even the decency to be a symbiont.
So, since you don't want to help with, or even just simply help, the birds, please leave."
And Jennifer March turned away and disappeared into the crowd before anyone in the news
crew had the wherewithal to jump in front of her with a camera and a microphone. Like the
rest of the small crowd which had encircled them, and without having understood much of
what Jennifer March had said, they had become enrapt and transfixed by the elegance and
power of her voice. Once he became aware that she had gone, Jason snapped at Lisa to focus
her camera on the young man who's face had gone from bleached white to rose red. A vein
near his temple was visibly pulsing and his mouth was moving like he was a beached fish. Jason
told one of the reporters to go after Jennifer and then he walked up to the sanguine, muted
man.
"Excuse me, I'm with HBRS-News1. Would you answer a few questions please?"
"Huh?" was all the red-faced man half grunted.
Jason's persistent questioning got a few more of the grunt-like utterances from the
flabbergasted activist and that was it. Nor was Jason able to get anything from Jennifer March,
who refused his entreaties to be interviewed.
Before they left, but after somehow managing to forget all about Kat Wong, Wanamaker
insisted they talk with the original source, which they did after getting her name from the city's
property records. No one even thought of interviewing Philmore's husband who, because of
long practice, had been able to remain so unassuming that his existence did not even register
in the minds of the crew. Thus HBRS-News1 missed the golden opportunity to exploit the man
who had turned March's sanctuary into a platinum mine. But if they missed a platinum chance
with Mr. Philmore, they almost made-up for it with his wife who became an HBRS-News1
goldmine.
With the news of a news-crew on site having spread throughout the sanctuary like wildfire,
Kat Wong was able to get to the Philmore residence before Jason had finished his interview
with Susan. She was disappointed with what she saw. It seemed to her that Jason had
somehow gotten so caught up in Susan's obvious eccentricities that he missed the bits of
genuine information and history that she let slip amidst the digressions of disjointed and often
contradictory words and ideas. But she said nothing to him.
Back at the station the next day she assured everyone that she was okay. No, she hadn't
been brainwashed, but had instead become fascinated with the dynamics that existed between
Jennifer March, the birds and the seekers. She did not tell them that her eldest sister had, for a
while, become obsessed with a defrocked rock n' roll Buddhist monk and his groupies when she
was a girl, which is one of the reasons why she had become fascinated with Jennifer March and
 13
her groupies. Instead she eloquently argued that a quick Q&A would have been a meaningless
waste of time, and so had, unilaterally, decided to stay overnight and blend in as one of the
hundreds who help with the birds in order to get a better sense of what was happening. At
first Wanamaker was, with poorly disguised self-interest, sceptical. But once Kat was able to
convince Wanamaker that he could not convince her that she had been brainwashed, she
broached her desire to go undercover within the sanctuary for a long term investigative story.
"Mr. Wanamaker," Kat argued, "there is definitely something mysterious going on. I'd like
to get to the bottom of it, and the only way is to see it from the inside." He hesitated. He was
concerned that he had already spent too much money on the story, and was at that time still
unaware of how much money the station would in the near future be making from it. But with
her persuasive smile and bright arguments he agreed to it – "But only for a short term long
term investigation," he stated, firmly. She was ecstatic and got her things together and left that
day.
As for the verbally out gunned environmentalist, Jason's digging determined his name to be
Alfred Unwin King III, an heir to an huge logging and mining fortune. He had rebelled against his
family three years earlier by co-founding, with a dozen other distressed rich kids, the Animal
Sympathizers and Social Education Society. Over the few weeks following his encounter with
March the other ASSES' members vilified Jennifer for being an exploiter of animals no different
than any other insensitive capitalist pig – with due apologies to the noble pig, of course.
And from this was grown HBRS-Nes1's money shot.
Their slanderous campaign was seized and ostentatiously promoted by Wanamaker who saw
in Susan Philmore and the ASSES the opportunity to recoup the reputation he felt he had lost in
the bird story. At first glance Susan Philmore's interview had been seen as completely useless.
She turned out to be several dimes short of a dollar and her plight was seen by the news
crew as the manifestation of unconscious masochistic tendencies clouded by fundamentalist
Christian fervour. However, when combined with the irrational rants of the ASSES, Wanamaker
was able to spin the image of overflowing guano, Susan Philmore's incoherence and the young
environmentalist's blather as a consequence of Jennifer March's manipulative irresponsibilty
and greed motivated selfishness which was destroying not only the sanctity of house and home,
but of people's sanity as well.
Unforeseen by him, or anyone else at HBRS-News1, "March's Birds vs. the ASSES" became a
news-wire hit for several weeks as a humorous story about the serious issue of too many rights
being granted animals at the expense of man's God given rights to exploit the environment and
sub-urbanize nature. Wanamaker was able to leverage it and Susan Philmore to huge financial
rewards for HBRS-News1. The executive managers, in their typically MBA bureaucratic way,
mistook a lucky break for true skill and promoted Wanamaker to head of news. At no point was
veracity and integrity a consideration. And typical of MBA bungling, the promotion was deemed
a good one, for despite their ostensible error in judgement they had managed to promote to
 14
head of local news a perfect bureaucrat with no real creativity but in his sycophantic abilities
and proclivities.
It was during the story's first week, when "March's Birds vs the ASSES" was still climbing the
news-wire hit chart, that Wanamaker quickly changed Kat's assignment to a long term one. He
thought that this would help him prolong its staying power, despite the fact that he had to nix
broadcasting Kat's copy because it invariably had some sort of positive, feel good or complex
social aspect about March and/or the birds, which contradicted the tone of the news he was
having broadcast.
Jason, who refused to participate in such an obviously exploitative abuse of journalistic
sincerity, was fired. In the months it took him to recover from the shock of being canned for
what he thought was journalistic integrity, he took a look at himself and his experiences as a
journalist. As a consequence of that self examination he became conscious of the schism that
he had allowed – and had even encouraged – to grow between his beliefs and hopes versus
that of his actions. After his meditative seclusion he perceived that the inherent bias of the
news was not "just" the necessary consequence of editorial gate-keeping, but was largely a
conscious, hence malevolent, manipulation of information by the corporate owners who in
their patterns of hiring and firing of university deans and media editors were able to promote
their agendas while keeping the masses both ignorant and off balance with regards to how
society was distributing and redistributing its wealth and social values. With this enlightenment
Jason chose to expiate whatever falsehoods he had contributed to his society by developing a
web site devoted to exposing the inherent bias and self-censorship of the corporate ownership
of universities and news media.
Soon after Jason went on-line with this intent he discovered that there were hundreds
of other web sites which had been established by some of the many other officially
disenfranchised former journalists doing pretty much the same thing as him for pretty much
the same reasons. In one way or another they too had become aware that while working
for the corporate media they were bound by invisible cords which kept them from freely
investigating, let alone reporting, anything but corporately sanctioned truths and half truths.
Jason mused on how it was that in his seventeen years as a "good" journalist he had never
given these web sites anything but the contempt his cadres had enjoined him to express. He
found, as did these extremely dedicated journalists, a deep satisfaction in having shed the
invisible hand of the corporatist self-serving ideology. It was with glee that he joined the "real"
journalists in their efforts to afflict the comfort of their former employers, and give comfort to
the society and its members which had been afflicted by the pooling and stagnation of worker-
less, supra-national, corporate wealth.
Jason was pleasantly surprised several years after going on-line when Kat Wong joined
his web-site. During her undercover work she quickly realized that the truths and other
information she was uncovering were not only not going to be aired, but were in fact
 15
antithetical to the financial purposes which drove was being aired. With this realization she
spent her five undercover years quietly but thoroughly investigating not just the bird sanctuary
and Jennifer March, but also Sam Wanamaker, HBRS-News1 and the ASSES and their symbiotic
relationship. Her investigation came to a stop shortly after Wanamaker was promoted from
head of local news to the director of national news. Wanamaker's replacement felt that her
investigation had long since stopped bearing fruit, if it had ever done so, and so pulled her out
of it. She quit the next day, taking with her her record of HBRS-News1, Jennifer March and the
ASSES.
The MPEG-documentary she made of her experiences generally praised Jennifer March, but
its focus was on HBRS-News1, in particular Sam Wanamaker. She cited them for the deliberate
proliferation of distorted "facts" and even lies about Jennifer with the sole purpose of
maximizing corporate profits. Kat's MPEG also demonstrated how the ASSES was an unfocused
and largely unintelligent collection of pathetic little rich kids with too much time on hands filled
with unfocused anger and poorly educated minds.
With Jason's assistance Kat transcribed her MPEG-documentary into an e-book about the
incident, both of which e-sold very well despite being ignored or scoffed at by most of the
critics of the corporate papers and television news stations. Of course her documentary was
never aired on a network television station. Eventually what was left of the moral conscience
of the public broadcasters nudged them into giving a few unheralded airings during low
viewership days and times as a kind of palliative for their having largely subscribed to corporate
sponsorship and the concomitant obligations that such a mutually gratifying relationship
entailed and engendered.
As for Alfred Unwin King III, he never recovered from his brief encounter with Jennifer. After
his exchange with her he stumbled back to the ASSES in a daze and was unable to light the fire
he once had. He very quickly fell out of favour with his co-founders and within two years had
committed suicide in a bungee jumping "accident" he staged during a leap for leopards fund
raiser on property his father was exploiting in South America.
On the late spring day of Jennifer's death, the sky was unusually dark and rain filled. The
witnesses to it claimed that the great spirit of her Greater Self, which she had so joyously
invested into Life and in being alive, ignited and lifted her body high into the air, where it
disappeared in a violet flash of light which transformed the rain of the black clouds into a
golden ambrosia. At least this was how the witnesses described it to the authorities when they
were asked about both her disappearance and the magical transformation of that dark rain. Of
course everyone who was not there thought everyone who was there was deluded – probably
nice and good-intentioned, but in serious mental trouble. The kinder-hearted people ascribed
their irrationality to grief, while most others wrote them off as having lived too long with birds
and cranks.
What was irrefutable, because it was recorded by meteorologists, was that the rain,
 16
ambrosial or not, continued to fall for a beyond Biblical double fortnight. Those fortunate few
who happened to be in the rain on the day of Jennifer's death said that it did not feel wet. They
also said that they were healed of all physical, emotional and psychological infirmities which
their doctors confirmed afterwards. What they did not say, because it was a wordless feeling,
was that a spiritual thirst within themselves – of which they had been ignorant until then – had
been slaked by this dry rain.
What was also incontrovertible was that the ground which had received what came to be
called March's rain, grew the garden which paled Babylon's, both in reality and imagination.
The sceptics cited many other reasons for the incredible garden, of course, although the one
most of them agreed to agree upon, regardless the complete lack of evidence scientific or
otherwise, was that the garden was the result of having been fertilized for many years with
the multi-variegated guano, enhanced as it had been by the peculiar dietary supplements that
Jennifer was reported to have fed the birds. They suggested that forty days and nights of rain
had somehow kick-started the fertilizer.
Jennifer's life and death, especially the events surrounding the latter, marked the beginning
of the prolonged and pugilistic process of sanctification. Her lapsed, even paganistic religious
practices, had, in the beginning of the match, given the naysayers the nod from the Vegas odds-
makers. But the unswerving witness testimonial, both anecdotal and experienced, as well as
March's Eden, which the sanctuary and garden had by then come to be known, were all the
punch needed for the naysayers to throw in, with heavy hearts, the towel during the twelfth
year of the process.
Of course there were those who with vociferous self-righteousness opposed the rights of
an onerous and misogynist church to claim the right to sanctify anyone, but especially Jennifer
March, because such an acknowledgement would sully the beauty of her life and death. To
their delight this concern was fully validated, albeit not in the way they had anticipated. It
turned out that no one within the church, except the committee members arguing her case,
paid too much attention to March because at that time the church was struggling with an e-
cash flow problem which threatened insolvency.
However, her sanctification inspired and fired the ire of a frustrated and irritable Women's
Study graduate student, Erin Jacobs, who besmirched the purity of Jennifer's memory with an
odious and rather unsavoury and critically reviled biography which, because of official Catholic
censure, came off and on bestseller lists for the better part of seven years. The book was
imposingly titled False Sanctuaries: Sanctified Church Delusions, March Misogynies and Other
Feminist Setbacks. Besides her colourful and witty rebuke of the church sanctification process
– which everyone readily acknowledged was an easy target – Jacobs vilified Jennifer for failing
to honour her marriage and for abandoning her rage against being enslaved by a misogynist,
patriarchal society. And while these two arguments would seem antithetical, Jacobs argued
that while marriage, as structured, was detrimental to the individuality of women, it was
 17
idealistically and in potentia the basic unit of any social organization, especially societies.
Jacobs linked the perceived moral and social decay of the late 20th and first half of the
21st century to the fall, in the first two thirds of the 20th century, of marriage from its rightful
place as the primary social organizing principle to that used as an agent of acquiring alimony
payments and in rearing improperly parented, hence socialized, children. She condemned
the church for sanctifying someone who was an unfit woman. Being a good scholar – she
graduated in the top one percentile of her prestigious university – Jacobs did not allow
subjectivity to colour her analysis, so in writing her bestseller she was careful to avoid visiting
the garden or interviewing any of the "Marchists", as she called those who had been sullied
by the so-called sanctuary and garden. Instead she relied upon the solid and reliable evidence
of the documented interviews of the Marchists by the investigative authorities of the time.
She dismissed as self-serving fluff both HBRS-News1's coverage and Kat Wong's MPEG-
documentary, but found the unedited MPEGs of the Philmore interview to be particularly
insightful. She also relied on the uneven and often self-centred journals of the Marchists.
As a typically well indoctrinated university student, Erin Jacobs failed to recognize that she
had effectively wedded herself to university scholarship at the expense of her individuality. Nor
did she recognize that her book was an unconscious effort to intellectually bootstrap herself
up out of that marriage to university as mater and pater. Being a very intelligent person, Jacobs
was completely and passionately ignorant that it was her intellect and its power to mistake the
name of things with the things themselves which had bound her to that marriage no less than
the sacred vows and social censure she ascribed to the bonds of marriage between male and
female, and those between nuns and priest and their church.
Surprisingly, her somewhat distasteful argument was not the specific assertion which caused
Sanctified to be written-off far more expeditiously than it had been written. That was reserved
for the preposterous and completely unsupported theories Jacobs felt the need to posit in
order to explain the about-face in Jennifer March's psychological, spiritual and emotional life
when she was in her late twenties. The first was that Jennifer's husband, Bob, had botched
a murder attempt using an overdose of prescription pills and that the chemical concoction
completely changed Jennifer's character, killing the consuming ire which had until then put fire
in her uterus. Jacobs suggests that it was this death, the death of her anger, which deluded the
hagiographers and other groupies into seeing as a saint this doormat, albeit a nice doormat.
But even Jacobs dismissed this as unlikely, given the obvious intellectual, creative and spinal
turpitude and ineptitude of husband Bob, not to mention the lack of both pharmaceutical
evidence and hospitalization records which would be expected from such an action. After
discounting several other equally implausible notions, Jacobs expresses her preference for
her last theory, which was that Jennifer had had a nasty, but unrecorded blow to the head the
day her husband left – probably from stumbling, tired, out of bed – which had addled her far
beyond mere befuddlement into the perceived, if not actual, sainthood. Her cited evidence
 18
was a brief reference Jennifer made in the margins of book of the need to replace a broken
coffee table. But this was soundly laughed at by scholars. Privately Jacobs did not believe this
theory either and never expressed her true opinion to anyone. She was, of course, ignorant of
the fact that this false theory had in fact, some elements of truth in it. "In either case," Jacobs
wrote, "even if it were an act of God, God forbid!, Jennifer's sense of Self had been crushed into
falsely believing that womanhood in a patriarchal society did not preclude feeling good and
happy."
In an appendix Jacobs further argued that the actual process of Jennifer's sanctification was
an affirmation of the Church's continuing intent to promulgate perpetual delusion and false
salvation in the face of religions' many failures and impending bankruptcies.

End of Chapter 1