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The reopening of businesses has caused COVID to spike and now these same businesses are shutting their doors as the plague rages. The first cases to afflict the area owed their roots to Rancho Viejo, the wealthy enclave a few miles west of Brownsville where the white and brown residents have no racial conflicts since both groups are rich. Several of their children traveled to Spain when the pandemic was beginning to strike that country and these privileged kids returned from their expensive vacations infected.

The same twenty-somethings find themselves responsible for the present COVID scourge. When the governor, another Trump trumpeteer, announced that there would be no law enforcement for refusing to wear a mask or maintain social distancing, Brownsville's youth interpreted that pronouncement as a signal that normalcy had returned and in their thirst for alcohol, drugs and sex rationalized Coronavirus as another conspiracy by the industrial-military complex for lack of a better scapegoat. They packed the clubs that are now closed.

Jack O'Connell and Mort Heinman hook up most Friday evenings for dinner and drinks. Sometimes friends accompany them, but the fresh outbreak, or more accurately the arrival of Coronavirus in all its glory to the border, has filled the usual company with paranoia.

La Scala, a pizza joint on Palm Boulevard near downtown, never has much business as it specializes in take-out, but the interior is spacious and dark and lends itself to that mafioso ambience that is so appealing in the movies where offers are made that can't be refused. Management, besides serving a variety of other Italian dishes at a reasonable price, doesn't charge for corkage. O'Connell and Heinman call the joint the best deal in town. They plan to finish two bottles tonight.

"It's you and me this fine summer evening with a cool breeze blowing off the gulf," says Jack. "The less people I see, the less people I want to see. There's maybe a piece of ass or two on the side and that's it. The days of wine and roses are over although I can say I don't miss the roses. I hate them when I have to buy a dozen each Valentine's Day so my latest lay doesn't complain that her colleagues received beautiful bouquets and she didn't get anything."

"Then I'm going to deduce that you won't be attending Trump's rally in Tulsa tomorrow night," jabs Mort. "I hear it's going to be a real celebration with more than 120,000 dead and the numbers climbing and enough hotspots throughout the nation that might help Trump realize his 200,000 goal by the time of the election. He'll tell his rabid Republicans that he wishes more Democrats would have attended, but, sadly, they are all dead."

"His white cops have killed more black men the last two weeks, so he's probably right. The idiot can't possibly win in November. Even Republicans are forming political action groups to defeat him. We are so sick of Trump turning the White House into the Theater of the Absurd. I believe that a wave of disgust is going to rise into a tsunami that washes him away. The motherfucker should have to walk the plank for his innumerable transgressions against humanity. You read that the City voted to remove the Jefferson Davis monument and by the next day it was gone. Some racist splashed white paint on a mural dedicated to George Floyd, another African-American killed by the cops in an unending rampage, but the artist told the newspaper that the attack on his work has inspired him to repair the damage and render his final product even more artistic."

"We didn't think it was going to take this long to win the Civil War, but the time has come for the 'good' whites to finally teach the 'bad' whites that their days of hatred based on color, gender, creed and sexual orientation have ended. Besides knocking their traitorous generals from their pedestals, we're going to topple their democratic dictator who believes he is king and intends to create a dynasty with his spoiled children."

O'Connell, a product of Buffalo, New York, and Heinman, born and raised in Miami, Florida, never planned calling Brownsville home, but time flew and they made their beds here. They have had to remake their beds several times, but that's the price writers and thinkers pay. They take chances and when their gambles backfire, they produce their best prose.

"I never like to wish ill on anyone, but stupidity, when it jeopardizes the well-being of the innocents, deserves its just punishment," opines Jack. "Like shit attracting flies, Trump will charm his cockroaches--nothing but white trash--and they will be filling the air with their spittle which they will mistake for hallelujahs. If there is a God, in the same manner he punished the Egyptians for refusing to liberate the Jews, he'll reduce these Neo-Nazis to a physical state that not even Job could handle. As to the infectious Trump, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see him attached to a ventilator for the next four months and forced to inhale his own hot air."

"Tulsa is learning that Trump isn't doing the community any favors. In Miami there were Jew haters, but I never experienced any physical violence. As to African-Americans, I never heard of any lynchings, so we don't know the extent of their suffering under white rule, but we accept with little knowledge of the details that it was pervasive. Because of Trump, Tulsa finds itself under the historical microscope and we're learning that in 1921 whites swept through the black neighborhoods and in an unexplained rage other than racial hatred killed 300 blacks. At the same time these same whites were erecting monuments to their Confederate traitors, they were digging graves for scores of blacks. The time for disgust is over. The time for outrage is upon us. We cannot lose in November. The South and their sympathizers must be defeated once and for all."