In order to explain the Transatlantic Superset and its importance to world history, I would have to explain to you what our parents did for a living, but that’s impossible. We might get killed. Some of them are involved in politics, you see, and anything I reveal could be used against us by our enemies. I know that at least one them – the politician who started it all by making a pass at Trish – has been caught a couple of times involved with very nasty human traffickers. He always gets away with it by saying he didn’t know what was going on, but we know for a fact that he does. He’s totally repulsive. He pretends to be a born-again Christian, he’s incredibly pompous about it, but if you know what sex addicts are like you can see that he’s pathetically desperate.

So you’ll never know what my father did for a living, except that he worked for the United States Government. He was very secretive, and manipulative, and he used my natural patriotism against me, making me feel guilty about resisting his vicious, hateful attempts to control me, so that now my mind is all twisted up and broken and I have no sense of identity because I can’t get separate from America.

I’m thinking of the Bob Dylan lyric:

Now the rainman gave me two cures
Then he said, “Jump right in”
The one was Texas medicine
The other was just railroad gin
And like a fool I mixed them
And it strangled up my mind
And now, people just get uglier
And I have no sense of time

He did did this so completely that I am only realizing now, after all this time, that my father is probably the sole reason I never wrote anything. He knew that I wanted to write the Great American Novel and he systematically destroyed my ability to do that … my train of thought just broke again. Ironically, there’s a deeper pain to be revealed. I’m exhausted and sad trying to write this …

But maybe I should start with the Methodist Church here in Chicago where we became known as the Wolf Pack … because it was really the fact that we were spending Sundays at the Church that attracted the attention of the political players and caused such a disaster for the conservative party of France, narrowly averting an international crisis that could have led to nuclear war.

That church, which shall remain nameless, was small, and out of the way, hidden deeply in the woods near a nature preserve, but diplomatically it was one of the most important churches in America. I wish I could explain it to you, dear reader, but you can never understand. Once again my mind grinds to a halt. What a joke it is for me to pretend to be a novelist when I can’t describe basic facts of my own life in plain English.

I can’t tell you after all how this came about, this would be giving too much away, but this church was known because diplomats from England and France had attended it for generations. During the cold war it became like an informal embassy. Elected officials and intelligence officers would use it at neutral territory. Presidents ate breakfast there. And during my sophomore year at Ravenswood Academy it was my habit to bring my friends, the ones who called ourselves the Sickie Souse Club but who became known to the world as the Wolf Pack, the American half of the Transatlantic Superset, to eat Sunday morning breakfast with the elites. Afterwards we would sit through the minister’s morning introductions, and before the formal service we would split for the bible study room we’d been assigned where we would watch Brinkley, smoke weed and fuck. It may sound shocking to you, but there was nothing unusual about our behavior. As far as I could tell, all the adults were doing things like that and worse. That was 1985. It was a different time. I miss it because it still felt as though the United States was a serious country. We were young cold warriors, rising through the ranks of the ruling classes.