Reddpath

It was an unspoken agreement among the 30,000 residents of Sedona to never speak ill of their community. Bad things happened to people who said bad things about Sedona. It was, after all, a land considered sacred by the Native Americans that once populated area. No one would have lived in Sedona at all if the sluggish National Park Service had acted more quickly or had been more lavishly funded by the United States Congress. With its amazing array of soaring red rock formations, it should have been a national park. By the time this dawned on the people running the National Park Service, too much of the territory was already in the hands of private landowners and the agency didn’t have a large enough checkbook to buy them out and turn the red rocks into a national preserve. Over the years Sedona flourished on its own accord and turned into a community dominated by five groups: retirees, tourists, real estate agents, artists and those who believed in the New Age (a movement charac

Just two days before classes started, Trevor Windgate pulled into campus amid fanfare never before known to Lewis & Clark. A small convoy of three black SUVs with smoked windows and omni-directional high-frequency antennas rolled onto campus and were parked at egotistical angles. Windgate climbed out of the rear seat of the middle vehicle. He was accompanied by the school’s athletic director and the basketball team’s head coach. From the other vehicles came four men, all wearing dark suits and shades on an overcast day. There were coiled wires coming out of their ears and they occasionally mumbled into their cuff links. That, and their immutably stern faces, gave observers the unmistakable impression that Trevor Windgate was already under protection of professional bodyguards. Former U.S. Secret Service agents, if I had to guess. It was all part of the pomp and stagecraft orchestrated by the Athletic Department to make sure its improbable new recruit wouldn’t have any regrets about

Fiona “Ginger” Marciano, the first conceived of their six children, was born with the glamour gene. From her earliest day Ginger sought the limelight and yearned to be rich and famous beyond definition. It was part of a syndrome common to first-born children who are showered with unprecedented quantities of attention. It created an emotional addiction that required constant feeding, yet could never be satiated. She became a devotee of the fake-it-until-you-make-it motivational movement. She felt perfectly natural pretending to be something she was not. “Don’t be who you are,” she told her younger sisters, “be who you want to be.” Ginger did exactly that, carrying herself like a Hollywood starlet, believing life wasn’t really worth living unless it was done in the limelight. Her every stride, her every glance, facial expression and movement was done under the gaze of imaginary motion picture cameras. Ginger fancied herself being watched by millions. She patte

This is a story of Lolita Firestone and Miles Zusman, a woman who finds her place in life, and a man lost within his own fraudulent storyline. It is the tale of Lolita Firestone’s historic rise to becoming the world’s most powerful person, though the retelling of the extraordinary chain of events that bewitched those around her could not have been told without the cooperation of her constant companion and Boswell, one Miles Zusman. Nor would it have ever come to pass if not for its geographic pinpoint in the dead-center of the State of Arizona in a small city called Sedona, a town that many years ago was named after a young woman named Sedona Schnebly, wife of T.C. Schnebly, who together built a large two-story home that also served as the area's first hotel and general store. Lolita was a struggling Hollywood actress on the cusp of something astonishing. Miles was an aspiring politician who was preparing himself to run for a seat in the A

Trevor Windgate was the first McDonald’s All American high school basketball player to enroll at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. They recruited Windgate for his perimeter shooting. By mid-way through his junior year he would become the greatest scorer in the history of the Northwest Conference. Marketers anticipated his turning pro, joining an NBA franchise and becoming an endorsement machine. It was only a matter of time before he would have athletic shoes named after him and lend his visage and imprimatur to web portals, colognes, energy bars, over-priced automobiles and globally distributed electrolyte drinks. Tens of millions of dollars a year were assumed. It would become an odd footnote that one of the nation’s very best high school athletes would choose to attend a tiny, obscure institution of higher learning named after western explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, a school that only came to fame after it was disclosed that former presidential para

Albie and Margharita Marciano took too seriously the biblical decree to be fruitful and multiply. No sooner were the nuptials completed than they got busy procreating. The fruits of their furious efforts sprang forth a mere nine months after their wedding date in the form a daughter they named Fiona, who later renamed herself Ginger after the ship-wrecked and breathy glamor-girl played by Tina Louise on the television series Gilligan’s Island . Albie was a science teacher at the local middle school, during an era when it was still legally defensible to physically assault students who didn’t do what they were told. Father accumulated a well-worn reputation for strong-arming and bitch-slapping errant pupils. Margherita was a frazzled mother and housewife. She escaped the pressures of child rearing by watching soap operas and Downy commercials. Both parents came of age during the Great Depression. The lessons of those days seared my parents in different ways. For Albie, it l

Miles Zusman sat down at his desk that night and went to work on some new position papers. He was trying to find the words to galvanize the Arizona electorate. He would do that by appealing to their fears, which was the best way to get people to show up at polling stations. Politicians had long since given up on the power of positive thinking. They didn’t give a shit what Norman Vincent Peale had to say about that. You could always count on people being pessimistic by nature. There was plenty to fear — such as immigrants, taxes, overregulation, the repeal of the Second Amendment, watching the Social Security trust fund run dry, being the victim of a violent crime, homosexuals and the general coarsening of society. The antidote to all their fears was so obvious: policies such as low taxes and big prisons. Miles also had some legislative proposals under development, including a bill to further promote solar energy, an industry in which Arizona, with all its intense sunlight

We were given one day off and it was back to practice. Roman Hoyt didn’t want any let-up. After a titanic battle against Puget Sound we were battered and bruised. There were blisters on the soles of our feet, contusions on calves and thighs, black and blue marks, hip pointers, sore and dislocated ribs, hyper-extended joints, twisted ankles, strained knees, loose teeth, pulled muscles, jammed fingers and cracked toenails. Our movements were tentative and compensating. If we had lost the game the pain and anguish would have been three or four times more agonizing. I went to the far end of the gym and lowered myself to the floor with great effort to begin stretching. Alonzo Croft was heading my direction. He was looking better than most of us. He didn’t get much playing time and hadn’t sustained many injuries, though I detected a slight limp. When he noticed that I noticed the limp he accentuated it, taking his injury from an ankle sprain to a dislocated knee. He kept coming and he

The address given to Vinny by sergeant detective Clyde Jablonsky led us to a historic section of the city’s downtown. The area was full of badly aged buildings from the turn of the century. They were constructed of red bricks whose color had been faded and stained by decades of punishment from inclement weather and air pollution. The windows were so opaque you could not begin to see what was taking place inside. Some windows were cracked and taped over. The ridges of many buildings were lined with pigeons that defecated freely, scorching the upper portions of the once majestic structures with stark white streaks of bird shit. In some areas, moss and ivy had sprung to life and were migrating up the walls. Tiny shards of broken glass glinted in an almost ornamental way along the sidewalks. Why the city had not taken more care in preserving its historic roots defied explanation. Vinny pulled his Jeep Cherokee to the side of the road, wondering why this hot- shot investigator was ho