Instant Karma

Flynn Gets His



I missed most of the Springfield mayoral election of 2007 because I was in drug rehab for all of October and November of that year. When I mysteriously stopped posting to this blog, after a week or so my readers started checking the papers and even calling the police, thinking that something terrible must have happened to make me stop. Fortunately something wonderful was happening - I was being reborn - but I'll always be grateful and touched by the number of people who cared when I went missing.

But even in the heavily sedated realm of my institutional setting, cut off from most of my usual sources, I could tell that Charlie Ryan was in trouble. The first sense of it I got from the TV screen, when I saw those ads with Dom Sarno and the trash cans. At first I was pleased to note that Sarno had a bright red Commerce sweatshirt on, but by the time the ad was over I was mad.

I was mad because Sarno was promising in that ad something I knew he couldn't deliver - the repeal of the trash fee. I had never supported the fee - whatever was wrong with Springfield, it wasn't that the citizens were under-taxed. After all that Springfield had been put through by the Albano's and the Keoughs and the Phillips and the sleazes and incompetents of every stripe, they didn't deserve a tax hike on top of it. I thought it was mean of the Control Board to insist on such a thing.

But the point was that the Control Board, not the elected officials like Ryan or Sarno, were the only one's with the authority to repeal the fee. They had already firmly stated that they had no intention of doing so. So Ryan had no power to repeal the fee, and Sarno knew that, yet he was blaming Ryan for not doing so. Sarno also knew that if he himself were elected mayor, the Control Board would still be in control and he would be helpless to repeal the fee. And that is exactly what happened.

So even by political standards - hell, even by Springfield standards - Sarno's ad was about as bold-faced an act of outright lying and conscious deception as you could imagine. I knew Charlie would be at a great disadvantage against those ads, because Ryan is too much of a gentleman to stoop to the level needed to match that kind of dirty fight.

And there were other disadvantages Ryan brought to the race. Bringing Springfield back from the brink of fiscal disaster had required making some very difficult decisions. It meant firing some popular people who were none the less doing a lousy job. People like Springfield Police Chief Paula Meara, who everybody liked but who no one thought was getting a handle on Springfield's rising crime rate. The fear of crime, both real and imagined, is a major barrier to Springfield's recovery, since no one wants to live where they don't feel safe. The middle-class is not returning to Springfield until crime is under control. Crime fighting in Springfield needed a fresh face.

The problem was Meara didn't want to go. She rallied her friends, made angry statements and called in her lawyers. In the end Charlie had to expend a tremendous amount of political capital and taxpayer's money to ease Meara off the stage. You might say he staked his entire second term on relieving Springfield's crime problem through shaking up the upper ranks of the police department, beginning with the Chief. The man chosen to replace Meara was a state official named Edward Flynn.

I met Flynn only once, at some political shindig held at the artspace the Keith Sikes Gang used to run out of the old Valley Bank Space in Tower Square (to some of us forever Baystate West). Here is a video I shot that day.



So after all Charlie had gambled on Edward Flynn, when the news reached me in rehab that Flynn had suddenly quit to take a job in the Midwest, I knew Charlie was finished. Flynn's departure, after having been in town such a short time, killed any chance that Ryan could run on the crime issue. Since battling crime had been the centerpiece of Ryan's second term, and now he couldn't run on it without bringing up the embarrassment of having lost the man he bought out Meara for, and with Sarno's dishonest ads all over TV, I knew Charlie was finished. There was nothing for me to do than to ring the nurse for more medication.

Of course what's causing me to recall all these things is the big scandal that has erupted out west over an illicit romance Flynn has gotten caught up in. It's the sort of sordid affair that ruins a man's career and ultimately overshadows all his other accomplishments. Whether he manages to hold onto his job or not is irrelevant, Flynn's day is done.

I'm sure Flynn is preoccupied now with the firestorm of media surrounding him, and coping with the personal fall-out of having betrayed his wife. But I hope, in the course of it all, he pauses perhaps for a moment to consider another person he let down, a man who staked his mayoralty on his character, and who he also betrayed. I hope Flynn thinks a little bit about karma. About how when you do something wrong to someone, something bad has a tendency to happen to you a little further down the road.

Karma - What goes around comes around. Looks like its coming round to you, Chief Flynn.

Odd Life and Death of J. Wesley Miller



Here's another oldie transferred from Geocities:

So I see in the paper that J. Wesley Miller is dead. Actually the obituary says he died back in September, but his death is only being publicly announced exactly four months to the day later. That strikes me as weird and mysterious, but then everything in the life of J. Wesley Miller was very weird and often mysterious, so why should his death be any different?

People close to the circumstances surrounding the death of Attorney Miller have been contacting me with details about the infamous activist's untimely death. First of all, although the newspaper obituary listed the date of Miller's death as September 13, 2005, the actual date of his death is not known. He was last seen alive in early September but then vanished from view, missing several appointments until concerned acquaintances felt compelled to call the Springfield police. Officers went to Miller's home and forced their way inside, where they found Miller lying on a cot dead of what was later determined to be a massive stroke. How many days he had been lying there dead could not be determined.

At first not everyone believed he had actually died. It would be just like Wesley to fake his own death, but the passage of time has convinced most people that Wesley is in fact deceased. No one has told me that they have actually seen his body however, which for some reason was for a long time held in Boston. In any case many said that they were not surprised by his sudden demise.

Miller was a harsh critic of all healthful activities such as exercising and dieting, insisting that only intellectual activities mattered and that all else was vanity. Miller often complained that colleges and public schools focused too much on physical fitness and should devote the money they spent on sports, gyms and athletic fields to academics and research. With these attitudes it was not surprising that he was considerably overweight, inactive and considered eating "a waste of time." Therefore he ate whatever was cheap and convenient, which often meant junk food. With all of his glorifying of the mind over the body, it seems the good attorney forgot that the mind cannot function when the body is dead from neglect and bad food.

The last time I saw Wesley was at a public meeting held in downtown Springfield to gather citizen input into possible economic development projects. Such public hearings are usually meaningless formalities designed to allow the Economic Development Poohbahs to claim that they listened to public suggestions before going ahead and doing precisely what they wanted to do in the first place. But this was exactly the kind of phony affair that Wesley always attended with great seriousness.

He didn't look very serious. He was wearing an electric orange jumpsuit (God knows where he found such a thing) over which he wore a bright purple bikini over a codpiece that created a huge bulge between his legs. His hair was cut and greased in a big mohawk. The dignitaries could only sit with their mouths gaping as Miller insisted that an excellent idea for an economic development project would be to build a public shrine to LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary (a proud graduate of Springfield's Classical High School) and then market it as a tourist attraction for hippies.

Many people didn't believe that Wesley was a real attorney, but he was a graduate of Western New England College School of Law and he died a full member of the Massachusetts bar in good standing. Upon graduating he immediately turned around and sued the school for what he called "educational malpractice." The case was settled out of court, and one of the stipulations of the settlement was that he was forever unwelcome on the college campus and was stripped of all alumnae privileges. Wesley couldn't understand their hard feelings, he thought they should be proud of the fact that their student had won his first lawsuit!

Of course Wesley never actually practiced law. He would have, except he never had any customers. Perhaps they were afraid he might show up for court in an orange jumpsuit. In fact I don't think he ever had what could actually be called a real job. His obituary mentions teaching positions, but those were from when he was in graduate school. His parents had been fairly well-to-do, his father was a prominent executive at the former Monarch Life Insurance Company and had accumulated a large amount of stock in the company. His family was definitely considered one of Springfield's upper crust, in fact one of his ancestors was Miles Morgan, to whom a statue was erected on Court Square which stands to this day. But the family lost everything in the collapse of Monarch in the 1980's, turning what should have been a life of gentlemanly leisure for Wesley into one of near poverty. He was too eccentric to get a normal job, so he survived by living with his mother on her small social security check and pension.

I doubt Wesley was ever what you would call normal, but the loss of the family fortune seemed to really unhinge him and started him drifting towards his orange jumpsuit phase. I only knew him after the financial catastrophe, but people who knew him before then told me he used to be more grounded. I considered him a complete lunatic from the moment I met him, but an interesting one. For one thing, in his odd way he was a serious scholar. He had really advanced research skills and was very clever in obtaining information no one else could get. Part of the reason why was because he seemed to know everyone, in fact I was amazed by the number of high ranking people he was in regular contact with. He once bragged to me that he had either written or spoken to every single politician and business owner in Springfield over the last forty years, and I believe he did.

Wesley won my friendship by being useful to me. I would tell him what I was working on for the Baystate Objectivist and he would come by in a day or two with all kinds of documents, news clippings and photos on that subject that would have taken me hours or even days to track down on my own. He seemed to know something about nearly everyone; he was a walking encyclopedia of facts, figures and gossip about Springfield politics. I would eventually come to hate Wesley, but I'll always owe him this much, knowing him was like getting a doctorate degree in the political history of Springfield.

Unfortunately, the better I got to know Wesley the weirder things seemed to get. For one thing, I noticed that he sometimes referred to people as "my research projects." When he wanted to know something about someone he was absolutely relentless in his pursuit of knowledge about them. I began hearing rumors that he had been in trouble over complaints of "stalking behavior." Once Wesley designated you as one of his research projects, you might catch him peering at you from behind a tree. A few research subjects reported him to the police, but no one ever pressed charges.

It got stranger still when Wesley began taking me into his confidence about his "games." The first inkling I had of Wesley's games came from the activist Eamon O'Sullivan. Eamon told me that Wesley had invited him to his house to sample some homemade jam his mother had made. During the course of the visit, Wesley asked Eamon if he could take his picture. Eamon was glad to pose, asking only that Wesley give him a copy when it was developed. At the time Eamon was in a feud with Larry McDermott of the Springfield Newspapers. From what I could tell the feud was sort of one-sided, with Eamon leaving critical and insulting messages on McDermott's answering machine and McDermott pretty much ignoring them. Eamon and Wesley interpreted McDermott's silence as a sign of insufferable arrogance, although I tried to suggest to them that maybe McDermott might be more likely to respond if they were not harassing him on his home phone.

Anyway, Eamon later told me that one day he got a letter in the mail and inside there was a copy of the photograph from the jam tasting visit. Eamon said that on the back was written in Wesley's handwriting, "Larry, here's the picture of Eamon." What could that mean? Eamon told me he had to wonder whether Larry McDermott had gotten the same picture with something like "Hope you liked the jam!" written on the back. In other words Eamon wondered whether Wesley had also sent that picture to McDermott, but had mixed them up and put the one with the message for Larry in Eamon's envelope instead. I told him it couldn't be, it was inconceivable that Wesley might be in a speaking relationship with McDermott and not say anything about it.

But that was before I knew about Wesley's games. Little by little I realized that it was common for Wesley to be actively engaged in communication with people who were either arguing, or in competion with each other or running for office, and befriend them without either one knowing that he knew them both. With both sides thinking he was their friend, he would manipulate them into having confrontations or making embarrassing mistakes, and he seemed to do this for no reason other than his own amusement. He was an intellectual version of the guy in the bar who keeps running back and forth between people trying to set up a fight just to have the fun of watching the excitement of it all when things come to blows. So he would have long phone calls with Tom Vannah of the Valley Advocate, then tell everything Vannah said to their competitor David Starr of the Springfield Newspapers. When Starr gave Wesley his unlisted home phone number, Wesley passed it out to all of Starr's harshest critics. Always he manipulated one person against the other, with each one thinking Wesley was their friend, when actually he was playing a big joke on both of them. At any one time he had dozens of such games underway.

Why did so many powerful and successful people become involved with J. Wesley Miller, a man who pranced around public meetings in an orange jumpsuit? For one thing, they didn't take him seriously. In other words, they humored him. That's part of what his crazy costume was designed to do, make people dismiss him as just a clown. Clowns are safe. But while they were not taking him seriously, they were also not noticing the very serious things Miller was up to.

At first I thought Wesley's games were mean and a little sick but I couldn't see where they did any great harm, not until Wesley got Johnson's Bookstore to close. From what Wesley told me, the owner of Johnson's was undergoing some kind of psychological crisis, and Wesley, an atheist, was advising him to give up his store and find inner peace by becoming a religious missionary overseas. When Wesley told me he had successfully done this I was furious. "Don't you realize what a blow it is to the city to have Johnson's close?"

"I do." he replied in a self-satisfied tone.

"Well then why the hell did you do it?"

He replied, "Because I can."

I believe that on a fundamental level Wesley hated the world. I suspected from things he told me that he had a tough childhood, being very smart and sort of weird he had been taunted and ridiculed by the other kids. He considered his tormentors to be inferior to him, and as an adult he got a kind of unhealthy thrill out of playing power games with prominent people that involved manipulating and making fools of them in elaborate deceptions that only he knew of and about which he could snicker over in private. Sometimes he couldn't keep all his nasty triumphs to himself, and he would tell me about them. It began to dawn on me that Wesley's games were inflicting real damage on people and even on the city of Springfield. When one of Wesley's games almost resulted in some one's suicide, I concluded that no matter how valuable a researcher he was I had to start distancing myself from this weirdo.

Unfortunately, that was when Wesley informed me that he had fallen in love with me. Wesley was a homosexual with a leather fetish, and began leaving off at my house the most vile forms of gay S&M pornography in the insane hope that somehow this would entice me into having a relationship with him. I told him to keep that crap away from me but he wouldn't listen. I had become his latest research project.

I couldn't reject him as sternly as he deserved. Inside he was already a deeply hurt person and very lonely, so I didn't want to crush him. Big mistake - almost as big a mistake as sending him a picture of me in the nude. It was a very PG rated nude picture, you could've run it in a family newspaper, but it was none the less obvious that I was naked. I did this insane thing as a means of softening my refusal to attend Wesley's lecture series entitled, "The History of Art in Springfield." Wesley loved the sound of his own voice and I couldn't imagine sitting there for God knows how long as he droned on and on. Also the invitation said that guests were required to take notes, and I knew that Wesley would be checking to see if the guests did. In short it seemed like the perfect chance to start cutting off contact with Wesley. The invitation had various attempts at humor on it including the phrase "clothes optional" under the dress code. I sent Wesley my PG nude with my rejection of his invitation, writing on the back "This is how I would've dressed if I could have attended." Ain't I witty?



Days passed and I heard nothing from Wesley, so I began to think he had accepted my refusal. Then I got an email from Maureen Turner of the Valley Advocate. She said a letter had come in the mail purporting to be from the Springfield Library Association. In fact, it was written on official SLA stationary. The letter was a warning that someone was appearing nude around library property and asking would the media please help in apprehending this sexually deviant person. It was signed by someone claiming to be the head of security for the libraries. There was a picture accompanying the letter. It was the nude picture I had sent as a joke to Wesley.

I don't know how he got the Springfield Library Association stationary, but I found out that he had sent similar letters to every media outlet in the Valley. I called Wesley on the phone. It got emotional. He cried and asked how could I reject him after all that he had done for me, couldn't I at least have sex with him out of pity? I told him to never call me again and if I ever saw him anywhere near me I would kill him.

It would be years before I spoke to J. Wesley Miller again, and when I did I didn't kill him. Actually, the photo did not have the negative effect Wesley was hoping for, as everyone who saw it recognised it as a hoax. Still I wanted nothing to do with Miller; if he would pull such a stunt who knows what else he was capable of? When we finally crossed paths after several years it was, not surprisingly, at a public meeting. Wesley was there in full regalia, the orange jump suit, the purple bikini, the bulging codpiece. I noticed that he had added chains and motorcycle insignia to his get-up. I remembered that someone told me that they had seen him riding shotgun on the back of a motorcycle in Northampton's gay pride parade, with his arms wrapped tightly around the waist of the leather-clad driver. It made me wonder if he had finally found a boyfriend.

I intended to ignore Wesley's presence at the public meeting. He walked right up to me.

"Greetings and salutations, Thomas!"

"Get away from me Wesley."

"I only want the chance to say I'm sorry. I only did it because I loved you and because I wanted to protect you."

"Protect me?"

Yes, I wanted to destroy your reputation so that you would give up on Springfield and not waste your time on that evil city. You were too good for them. I wanted you to spend your time and your talent on something that deserved it. I'm happy you finally moved out. I was glad when I heard that you went to Amherst."

"Good-by Wesley."

He walked away. Later that evening he got roars of laughter by standing up and doing an impromptu hula dance right in the middle of someone's boring political speech and again when he asked during a question and answer period whether the city had considered turning the York Street Jail into a leather bar. He suggested that patrons could rent out the cells for sexual activities.

But now J. Wesley Miller is dead. Or rather he's been dead for four months and we're just learning about it.

Wesley, you evil nutcase, rest in peace.

Postscript - Someone convinced me that I should reprint this poem by Wesley that originally appeared in the January 1998 issue of The Baystate Objectivist. Ironically it is a lament for the closing of Johnson's Bookstore. That's ironic because Wesley once boasted to me that he had helped to cause the store's closing. Such contradictions are classic Wesley, you could never be sure where he was coming from. The word "lugete" that he uses over and over I believe is Latin meaning, "Oh woe!" So why didn't he just write that? Because Wesley took a perverse pleasure in confusing and annoying his readers by being purposely obscure. What makes the poem worthwhile however, is that most of the poem consists of a list of memory triggers for anyone with deep roots in Springfield. It's worth reading for both the poetic nostalgia and thinly veiled sarcasm.


J. W. Miller in 2004

Johnson's Bookstore Funeral Ode
by J. Wesley Miller, Esq.

Johnson's Bookstore's gone for good;
Springfield's down the tubes.
Doctor Seuss won't puff it up;
Basketball's for Boobs.

All Monarchies must end,
All Monarchs have their fall.
And when at last they do,
It burns the hides of all.

Lugete, Oh Lugete! Johnson's Bookstore's dead.
Lugete, Oh Lugete! Springfield won't be back.
Out of nothing, nothing comes.
Into nothing, nothing goes.

Once downtown was compact
And you could stroll around
Browsing, buying, snacking, joying
From end to end of town.

Forbes and Steiger's, Greene's,
Meekins, Packard, Wheat.
Poole's and Penny's, Kresge's
Neiser's and Stillman's couldn't be beat.

And when we went to the Public Market
Victoria Square was the place to park it.
Brigham's Lerner's Enterprize,
McLellan's, Haynes and True's.

Carlisle's, Kane's, Okun's, Stearns
The Waldorf for a bowl of stew.
Graffito stenciled on Union Trust;
While Brunton Sleeps Springfield Rusts.

The Georgian, Jensen's, Jackson's;
Spiral staircase in Child's;
Adaskin's, Hadley's, Regal's;
Al Strohman was all smiles.

Broadway, Bijou, Poli,
Arcado and Paramount,
Capital and Court Square,
Kimball, Highland, let's be done!

Bricks and mortar fall to dust
Like Abyssinia, Greece and Rome.
When Doctor Seuss passed through
He said, "This is not my home."

Lugete, Oh Lugete! Johnson's Bookstore is dead.



Today's Video

To Chief Flynn.