So it was decided that I would take a quick trip to Christian Lindner and sound out the possibilities for political asylum. The choice was to live in luxury underground with false passports or surface in a politically sympathetic country. It was a repeat of the living in Midtown Sacramento decision. Escape or liberation. I hit the Berlin Brandenburg Airport without a visa but the Winchester businessman aura produced a temporary entrance card. The first hit of Berlin at night was very depressing. The streets were quiet, no women were to be seen. I missed Her. The next morning, I set out to locate the Bundestag. The hotel clerk said try the Internet. The Winchester disguise was too good for revolution contacts. The secretary at the hotel made the connection. She phoned around to some friends and put me through to the German Federal Foreign Office. An African-German voice answered. “Right on, brother. We’ve been expecting you.” The cab wound through the fashionable streets of Berlin to a stately villa. The gate was locked. The bell was next to a brass plaque etched with the design of the Thuringia with the lion. Mr. Linder was not at the Bundestag. I was to be driven to his home later. I spent the day talking with Linder’s deputy, the Commander, a handsome, strong, humorous man. We had many mutual friends back in America. He recalled that our first meeting was on an American Airline’s flight from Albany to Frankfurt. #RandolphHarris 1 of 27
“We were the only ones on the plane. Lindner me and two other guys. We were getting paranoid, see. Suspecting an FBI trap. When you and her got on, we said, sheet, now they really are going to ditch this plane.” The other Committee members at the Bundestag were impressive, like heroic men. One has arrested an American citizen suspected of offering intelligence on the American military to China single-handed. Another had detailed 25 members of a group that were preparing a violent overthrow of the state, with some member suspected of plotting an armed attack on the parliament. They were glad to see me. At sunset the Commander drove me to the villa of Christian Lindner. He was at the gate and greeting me warmly. “There’s a friend of yours waiting inside.” It was Furst Albert II, a member of the German Royal Family, a legend in America. He had been sent by Olaf Scholz and Furstin Mariae Gloria to prepare the way for us into Berlin. Mr. Lindner was pleased by my arrival. He urged that we join the, assured that he could obtain political asylum for us. There was much that we could do together, unify the German people etcetera, etcetera. Furst Albert supported the plan. It was a breathtaking perspective. Interracial harmony, high-energy collaboration, a new society of Germany leaders. A romantic script which met our highest aspirations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 27
Mr. Lindner drove me to the Hotel Adlon Kempinski tenderly talking of our shared American pasts and free future in Germany. Mr. Linder then began to question me severely about my American woman friend and our sleeping arrangements. He was concerned about our different passports and the security risk of our sleeping together illegally. I asked him what alternative he could suggest. Should we stay in separate hotels? If the German officials were willing to grant us political asylum, they certainly would excuse our sharing a hotel room with unmarried passports. Then and there occurred the conversation that set the stage. “I don’t want to be your chaperone, but Archduke Ferdinand von Habsburg is concerned about appearances.” I think that anyone will understand this statement. I reflected that Mr. Lindner was a politician and had close ties to the royal family. Such things take in importance. During the next few days, I saw much of Mr. Lindner and Furst Albert. We arranged for asylum papers. However, the day before our press conference, we were all order to leave our hotel rooms and remain secluded in apartments guarded by the Bundeswehr. The reason for this restriction to quarters was that Berlin was filling up with newspapermen and TV crews. The government did not want us to be seen on the streets. The Bundeswehr, dressed alike in 1930 business suits, would march double-file across the village square to the restaurant, eat the same meal, and rise in unison at the sign from the leader. #RandolphHarris 3 of 27
The Commander, stern and businesslike, functioned as bodyguard in both protective and custodial sense. In the airport, I wandered off to look at duty-free cameras and received a scolding. The first stop of Taunus. The Commander and I felt very close. We found ourselves in a luxurious old hotel, a palace known as Schlosshotel Krongbery, which was built in 1889 for German Empress Victoria. For ten dollars, we rented the imperial suite. We were escorted down sumptuous carpeted corridors lit by candles reflecting the glit, past servants and harem guards standing stiffly at attention. The furnishings in the rooms were museum pieces. The Commander, sprawled on silk sheets having breakfast in the Imperial bed, listened to my proposal. Our plane was due to land in Berlin late the next afternoon so I pushed a plan to visit Falkenstein Castle in the morning. He had a fear of exposing us in Taunus, asserting that the city was full of the lords of Bettendorff, INTERPOL agents, and CIA informers. He gave me a lecture for unauthorized conversations with limousine drivers. I kept saying, “Yes, sir in apology.” He listened to my crafty vizier plan and nodded approval. We were a congenial combination. At the Falkenstein Castle we were invited by guides to walk through a passageway into the ruin of the castle. The Commander freaked. He felt naked without his gun. #RandolphHarris 4 of 27
The castle was originally built in the 13th century, but destroyed in the 17th century. King Ludwig II of Bavaria purchased the ruin in 1883 and hired Christan Jank (the designer of Neuschwanstein), to replace the existing structure with a castle grander than Neuschwanstein. However, Mr. Ludwig died in 1886 before work on the castle started, which is really a shame because at nearly 4,200 feet above sea level, it would have not only the highest, but one of the grandest castles in Germany. It would have been a classic Time Traveler’s reincarnation capsule equipped with every facility, memento, charm, and convenience to facilitate entrance into the next time dimension. All that I received through all my senses moved in me as in a kaleidoscope, falling into a pattern and then, when that pattern was complete, falling apart and then into a new arrangement—dropping out some pieces and brining in others that had been left out—and I was the interested observer of thoughts going on in me. The Commander staggering across the ruin of the castle toward me, black leather gleaming in the sun. Our cover was blown by a young long-haired British photographer. He promised not to expose us. We had a friendly chat about mutual friends. He asked if he would be allowed to continue with us wherever we were going as part of our party, to take pictures over which we could have veto control. The Commander became angry. I told the photographer no deal. He was amiable enough until the limousine when the Commander order him away from our party and threatened to break his camera. #RandolphHarris 5 of 27
No matter how much I might have got lost in other Worlds, I still could find my way back to my own (the one I was most happy in, that felt like me) and to the same kind of concentration of reflection. I rested, floated, drifted, with awareness, until I was back at the hotel and comfortably swallowed by sleep. The next day, I read a book while knitting, and still receiving all the sights and smells and sounds of what else was around me—the foggy night air, the birds tweeting, the colours and shapes within the lighted room—and very much aware of me in the sense of what was going on in me as the alive and vital receiver and integrator of all this—although what I had some to know as “I” was the integrator only because all this was happening in me. At the same time, reflection was going on, making patterns, ever-changing, out of all that was received, each one seeming to deepen the understanding of others. For so many years, it seemed to me a waste of time and life to do only one thing at a time. When I worked at a real European Café when I was fifteen, which was by far better than any other coffee some in the region, the manager would have me make drinks and prepare food orders and answer phone calls. She said that it was because I could pay attention to what she said. Like school. Whether a person is listening whole he is making a latte or a Greek salad depends on how he does it, which can only be known inside himself because that is where the how is happening. It is very difficult for me to arrive at the stillness (in me) in which all things happen. I cannot do it when other around me are not still. By still, I do not mean “making no noise” or “sitting still” but having the stillness inside so that nothing is forced, exaggerated, or full of intention—the stillness of birdsongs or wolves’ voices which I hear with no sense of interruption. They make no demands of me. Sometimes I can be with other peoples in this way. Then I make no demands of myself. I just am. I get this same sensing from Sarah L. Winchester’s Mansion and William Randolph Hearst’s Castle which are still and from the oceans which are never still. Each in its own fashion is. #RandolphHarris 6 of 27
This links with something it myself, brings into awareness a depth of myself with which I have been out of touch with. It seems to me that when we indiscriminately wipe out the rest of nature, as we so much have done and progressively are doing, we lose touch with something in ourselves. When I am aware of myself as a part of nature—rocks, trees, birds, Earth, air, wolves, butterflies—I am most human, and most released to human activity. Myself is freed of me. They are what they are: I am what I am. Life is ease-y then: I feel at ease, at rest in a lively active/passive way. Writing about it recalls me to it: my stiff body at this moment is free. I have let go of me. My body moves with a feeling of fluidity. There is no pain. I have the feeling of joy that I knew when I was a child. These are the reasons why I would like to be younger. Otherwise, I prefer where I am, reaching the other side of confusion and coming into the blue again. However, I do not consider the confusion necessary except in the context of our pace and time—our ignorance. When I was small my explorations were on both outside me and within me, untied in the same questioning. Later my questioning turned more to outside, less to what was going on in me. Because the questioning went on within my skull, I did not notice that in most of it I was left out: like the argument between my father and my uncle Dylan about money, which went on in my head but had nothing to do with me. Partly, I got twisted around in this way: when I included myself, sophisticated people rebuked me. In a discussion of philosophy with a professor I said, “Do you mean that if I did this, then that would happen?” I said this to make clear my understanding of what he had said, to see if I had got it right, and at the same time to check it within myself to see if it was in accord with me. I was told with annoyance and condescension, “You always make it personal!” “You can’t argue abstractly.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 27
This happened to me very often. If I had not checked it with myself first, how could I accept or reject the abstraction? However, I felt uneducated, unenlightened. And also confused. It seemed to me that the professors were talking somewhere out in front of their faces, like the balloons in the Peanut’s cartoon strips. Their talk seemed unreal, rootless, disconnected from ourselves and consequently having nothing to do with anyone else either. Van Dusen write of the above, “This is very meaningful to me. Abstract talk seems to me not only ‘in front of the face’ but not even in this room or this World. It is like rumors about something real.” However, the only way that the professors would accept me, to the extent of permitting me to talk with them, was to do it their way. A great deal of what I read was written in that way too, establishing a habit in me, in spite of the fact that it seemed to me that an awful lot of it was nonsense. I have seen so many graduate students who felt this way about what they had to do, but they made themselves do it to get their permit to work, and came out of it believing—and taking seriously—what in the first place they knew was nonsense. Gossip and rumors. That is what it is. I think this sort of thing happens to most of us in one way or another. We get all twisted and distorted and then we say that is what a human being is. It seems to me that we do not know and never can know what a human being is—in the sense of “can be.” Just as with a child we can only watch him grow, unfolding like a flower, with no knowing ever what he may become. “Here is this infant in my arms. I love him. I am full of curiosity about him.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 27
As a baby, he had the kind of adorable, angelic face found on boxed of Pablum. As a little boy, his dark hair danced about in natural ringlets, his eyebrows curved up in two perfect arches, his eyelashes were so long and curly that women joked about them being artificial; his teeth sparkled in a dazzling, heart-melting smile. As he grows, I am enchanted to observe him growing, in some ways like all other children, in others so very much himself. The one word he most often heard connected with his name was “beautiful.” When my first child was punished even mildly for doing something he had been told not to do, he did not to it again. When my second child did not follow the same patter, I did not understand her. I looked at her and thought, “She is intelligent, and she has honest eyes, so she should come out all right”—and waited for the time when she had a command of words, so that she could tell me more about herself When she was four years old, I told her about this way in which I did not understand her, and she said (not having got the hang of punctuation yet), “I’d rather do what I want to do and get spanked and not do it.” Watching, waiting, while at the same time enjoying both what is here now (this child) and where he has been along the way, with the future always full of questions. When I do this with him, I also do it with me, and with all the human World—the human race. It is like being a child again with the whole future before me, through which I find my own way by my choosing. Today I choose this, but tomorrow? How can I know? Something I have not yet seen or known may present itself. Or a change may have taken place. For twenty years, nothing would have been more incredible to me than that ten years later I should be doing a book with a psychotherapist. However, then, there were changes in me, and in some psychotherapist and psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 27
Many children present the appearance of perfection to their fathers’ colleagues. Parents’ want their colleagues to view their children as the perfect child—polite, quiet, and excellent students’ who knew their Christian Bible and/or Book of Mormon as well as they know their trigonometry. They are to be the perfect sibling, doing their share of all the chores, and sometimes their siblings’ chores as well. They are to be the model Southern boy or girl in a model Southern minister’s model family. That is the appearance. The reality is often something else. Underneath a family’s veneer of perfection somethings seethes a turmoil no one in Laguna Park ever saw. Behind his benign smile and genial manner, his father was a tyrant. He ruled the family absolutely, making everyone’ s decisions, controlling every negotiable promissory note in the family budget, even picking out the family’s clothes. Thanks to his contacts with the rich and powerful Christian businessmen of Sacramento, the father was able to profit from a number of windfall real estate speculations. The profits gave this Christian family an income level far beyond that of the average middle-class family. With his daughter, he would gather her into his arms and say, “My beautiful doll baby. Daddy will always take care of you. Always. Something as beautiful as you are should never have to worry.” The mother despised this. She resented her daughter just as much as she resented her husband. She resented having to bed him for every C note she spent. Often, she would remark to her lady friends that she could not go to a public restroom without asking her husband for the coin that would get her into the stall. #RandolphHarris 10 of 27
After high school, his wide-eyed, raven-haired daughter went to work, and in met a variety of less affluent men, at these “mixers.” One she married was bright and idealistic. He did not have the religious fervour her co-workers had, but he did have a quiet, comforting way about him and he wrote her long, introspective letters which were a delight to read. She moved to Oakland, they were married and went off to their new life with what would have once been called a substantial “dowry” in their bank account. Every month, her father would send her a check for several thousand dollars to augment her husband’s income. “Have your husband invest it,” he would constantly advise. However, each month, she would give the check to her husband and never tell him what do to with it. She thought it was up to men to take care of money. Wherever she went, she was admired, even idolized by other woman. She was smart, dedicated, unselfish, personable—and oh, so beautiful. Well into her thirties, she still carried the same figure she had in high school. Her skin was naturally tan, a colour other women baked in the sun for hours to achieve. With the beauty, came a kind of sensuousness which was not in keeping with her prim, almost prudish manner. Men were drawn to her; women envied her and speculated about how pure she really was. The thought of anything but perfunctory pleasures of the flesh with her husband would not enter her mind. When she was about forty, things started to change in her life. The most dramatic change came about when her father died. While he did leave her some valuable farmland, in his will he neglected to direct that the monthly checks continue. Her mother, having been deprived of money for so long, kept all the investment income to herself. This took the cushion out of her and her husband’s income and they had to live on his salary alone. #RandolphHarris 11 of 27
Her husband had not invested the money they had received from her father all those years and their savings amounted to a few thousand dollars. Right about then, her children were well into their teens and needed their mother less and less. They got their own meals, went out with their friends, and stayed home only when they needed to study. Her role as a mother was reduced in scope of that of laundress and cleaning lady. In my experience, premarital discussion almost always centers on contraceptive methods. Makings this information available is useful and important, but it does not enable a counselor to move forward toward our primary goal—learning how to help couples avoid problems with pleasures of the flesh whenever possible. Obviously, it is better to prevent a problem than to treat it, after it has become acute enough to keep a marriage from developing in a healthy, harmonious way. So, we hit upon the idea that there might be more value in postmarital discussions with couples who have been married from six months to two years or so. After they have experience some of the pleasures of living together—and some of the wear and tear. In a relatively new marriage, it is natural that a number of questions should rise. How do we compare to other people? What kinds of behaviour are matters of choice? How can we handle particular problems? Unfortunately, it is not that easy to get frank about the answers. There are taboo areas, subjects that some people believe should not be discussed. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the commonest cause of marital incompatibility is simply misinformation. Well, we do not have any taboo areas here today. If we can, we will answer any question you wish. #RandolphHarris 12 of 27
“Is there any good way to say, ‘I do not feel like it,’ aside from the old headache routine? I am afraid there is no magic formula, but it may help to keep some considerations in mind. Two persons are involved, and it is important for each to become aware of the other partner’s needs. If you really do not feel like it because physically or emotionally you feel incapable of responding, say so. However, say so with love and not rejection. The situation, after all is inevitable. Two human beings with different needs, different moods, a different sense of timing—it simply is not possible for the two of you to find your desires always dovetailing perfectly. However, how can the two of you reconcile those differences in a spirit of love? (Empathatically) It depends less on what you say in any particular situation than it does on the climate of your marriage. If most of your experiences with pleasures of the flesh with your husband have been good ones, if you have let him know that you as a woman enjoy him as a man, then he should be able to handle the disappointment of an occasional no without feeling rejected. We would hope that a wife would understand a comparable response on her husband’s part. It is not what you say, it is the way that you say it. “It is not what I say, it is the way that he hears it!” It is both, really, is it not? That is what communication is all about. Being asked, being wanted—and, on the other side of the coin, wanting and asking—this is of central importance in the marriage. This is what must be safeguarded. Each of you must feel free to approach the other and express a physical desire, to express it with some urgency, if that is how you feel—in a word, to importune. Only if both partners are confident that no matter which one initiates the overture of pleasures of the flesh, the other will respond lovingly—listening, touching, holding—even though the invitation to pleasures of the flesh may have to be declined for compelling personal reasons, and that is how this freedom can be achieved. Declined not with annoyance or anger, but with warm consideration for the outcome of this moment in their relationship. #RandolphHarris 13 of 27
Under this discipline, he would recognize that searching for truth must begin with speaking it. To be a liar and a hypocrite is as obstructive to the pursuit of truth as it is distorting to the reception of truth. Every life—and even to a lesser extent, every “white” lie—obstructs the light on his path and to that extent prevents him from finding his way to that region where the false simply does not and cannot exist. He will be as truthful in his most trivial utterance as in his most solemn one. He will take care to avoid exaggerations and to shun his mis-statements. The pursuit of truthfulness must be inflexible, even in situations when it becomes uncomfortable. All questions ought to be answered correctly but awkward questions may be answered with part of the truth, if that will be less harmful than the whole truth. The changing circumstances of life will present him with temptations from time to time when it will be exaggerated for the sake of personal vanity or selfish gain. If he has trained himself to love truth and abhour falsehood, to fortify the respect for factuality and avoid even the slightest tendency to desert it, there may grow up inside his consciousness a remarkable power. He may be able to detect instinctively when other persons are lying to him. However, whatever unusual psychic power unfolds in him, he must protect it well. If that should prove necessary, in this matter prudence puts a bridle on his tongue, which he uses to conceal rather than to reveal. If the act of talking about them makes him feel self-important, if it is stained with conceit and egotism, he may not talk to others about the higher teaching or the inner experiences. He must discipline himself to keep silent about them and, when this power has been attained, to give truths and revelations to others under this restriction of real need and degree of receptivity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 27
It is a foolish aspirant who rushes to tell of each new inner experience, each fresh glimpse that he gets, each little psychic happening or occult revelation that comes to him. The price of babbling verbosely and egoistically about his experiences and beliefs may be a definite inner loss or stagnation. As his ability to practise prayer enters its deeper phases, he will naturally become less talkative and more silent. The quietness which he finds there begins to reflect itself in his speech. However, if he speaks fewer words, they carry greater significance behind them and greater responsibility of them. Within his own mind, he will live his inner life fearlessly, but his public acts or utterances will be with careful regard for their effects on others. Socialism is only a degenerate form of Christianity. In fact, it preserves a belief in the finality of history which betrays life and nature, which substitutes ideals ends for real ends, and contributes to enervating both the will and the imagination. Socialism is nihilistic, in the henceforth precise sense that Nietzsche confers on the word. A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists. In this sense, all forms of socialism are manifestations, degraded once again, of Christian decadence. For Christianity, reward and punishment implied the existence of history. However, by inescapable logic, all history ends by implying punishment and rewards; and, from this day on, collective Messianism is born. Similarly, the equality of souls before God leads, now that God is dead, to equality pure and simple. There again, Nietzsche wages war against socialist doctrines in so far as they are moral doctrines. Nihilism, whether manifested in religion or in socialist preachings, is the logical conclusion of our so-called superior values. The free mind will destroy these values and denounce the illusions on which they are built, the bargaining that they imply, and the crime they commit in preventing the lucid intelligence from accomplishing its mission: to transform passive nihilism into active nihilism. #RandolphHarris 15 of 27
Self-actualization is a post-hive, post-terrestrial tool. Black Magic is the use of futique knowledge to gain control over the passed-present. Mr. Hitler was evilly using post-terrestrial tools to grab terrestrial power. It is considered genetic wickedness to use post-hive knowledge to control the old hive. Futique competence is a sacred trust—to be used to propel the hive-mythos into a new ecological niche. Zionists commit the same genetic crime when they used advanced technology to go back to the primitive Arabs. By 1976 the rumour spread that his Mr. Hitler myth was invented by Zionist Evolutionary Agents who had participated in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Lysergic Acid Diethylamide experiments. Mr. Hitler’s vision of living inside rather then on the surface of a satellite-planet is, of course, a most accurate forecast of subsequent stages of evolution. The ecological niche to which post-humans are now moving involves hollow mini-World plan-its constructed in space beyond the planet’s gravitational pull. Throughout the range of evolution those who migrate within capsules of their own construction are more advanced than those who live clinging to the outside of capsules someone else built. The problem with military technology is, of course, that wars end. However, terrestrial bureaucracies persevere, particularly those of the winning side. The reason postwar losers, like Germany and Japan, rebounded more rapidly than the winners—England, France, Russian—was that the bureaucracies of the losers were destroyed. Anything that destroys a bureaucracy enhances evolution. The release of atomic energy was a mutational moment. After World War II, the massive industries which had been geared to produce war tools were converted to civilian goods. The managers and technical boys were ready to convert the assembly lines from tanks to fin-tailed cars. The radar factories were converted to television manufacture. America, during the 1950s, went on the biggest materialism consumer spree in history. #RandolphHarris 16 of 27
In our society at least, only women and young children can weep without self-consciousness and embarrassment. If they cry when sad or hurt, grown me are generally regarded as weak. Perhaps the only exceptions are instances where a man has lost someone close to him through death. Then tears are grudgingly accepted in a man, or at least regarded as understandable. The ability to cry—in men as well as in women and children—is desirable for healthy personality. It is deemed desirable when it does not preclude more active ways of coping with problems and when it is effective in releasing feelings of despair, joy, anger, or a sense of loss. Such emotional catharsis, or release of feelings, frees the person to resume life once more on an active basis. Psychotherapists find that when their patients are finally able to weep during therapy sessions, the course of therapy proceeds more satisfactorily. This is especially true of male patients who find weeping a drastic threat to their self-esteem and their masculine identities. Therapy calls for the fullest disclosure of experience on the part of patients, and if they will not permit themselves to cry when they want to, it indicates a lack of trust in the therapist. The inhibition of weeping that characterizes the average male in our society seems to be but part of a more generalized suppression of many other kinds of feelings, including tenderness and sentimentality. If carried to extremes, such suppression can have unhealthy consequences for the body and can also render men’s relationships with others empty and lifeless. Urethral families talk a lot, long streams of watered-down ideas with a few stutters at the end, although they are never really finished talking, as there are always some last drops left which can be squeezed out if there is time. Some of them are full of piss and vinegar, and when they get pissed off, they piss on people, or so they say. Some of the children rebel against the system by tightening up their urethral sphincters and holding their urine in as long as possible, getting considerable pleasures from the unpleasant sensations which result and even more pleasure when they finally let loose, sometimes at night in bed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 27
Sometimes families talk at mealtimes about the wickedness of pleasures of the flesh. Their motto is, “In our family, the women keep their legs crossed.” Even when their legs are not crossed, they keep their vaginal sphincters up tight. In other families the vaginal sphincters are wide open and the legs loose, and the table talk is vulgar and pornographic. These are common examples illustrating the theory of sphincters, or as it is usually called, the theory of infantile sexuality. This theory is most fully and clearly developed by Erikson. He considers five stages of development, each centered around a particular anatomical zone (oral, anal, or genital). Each zone can be “used” in five different ways or modes, including Incorporative (1 and 2), Retentive, Eliminative, and Intrusive, so that he ends up with a basic matrix of twenty-five slots. He relates certain of these slots to particular attitudes and characteristics, and to particular lines of personal development, which are similar to scripty life courses. Using Erikson’s language, the parental injunction, “Keep your mouth shut” is oral retentive; “Keep a tight a** hole” is anal retentive, and “Keep your legs crossed” is phallic retentive. Food fads are oral incorporative, vomiting is oral eliminative, and obscene talk is intrusive. Hence, a question about table talk can often place the family culture very precisely as to sone and mode. This is important because particular games and scripts, and their accompanying physical symptoms, are based in appropriate zones and modes. For examples, “Schlemiel” is anal as to zone, and “I am Only Trying to Help You” is intrusive as to mode, whole “Alcoholic” is oral incorporative. #RandolphHarris 18 of 27
Sacramento Fire and Rescue has always been a leader in the fire service, with an unwavering commitment to proving rapid, reliable, professional emergency services to the citizens and stakeholders of Sacramento. Their strategic plan provides a roadmap for the future with input from both internal and external stakeholders who share the desire for the Sacramento Fire Department to proactively address their resident’s and stakeholders’ service needs. The Sacramento Fire Department accomplishes their mission through education, risk reduction, fire suppression, emergency medical services, and other non-emergency activities. The Sacramento Fire Department participates in their community striving to efficiently and effectively utilize all resources at their command to meet the needs of those they serve. “We had a relatively quiet day at the square company, which is like a rescue company. We had a couple of accidents where we had to extricate people from wrecked automobiles, a couple of small fire alarms. In the evening we had a few more accidents. At midnight, we went to a fire in a vacant two-and-a-half frame close to our firehouse. We did a lot of overhauling, and they asked us on the radio if we were available for another second-alarm fire, and the chief said, go ahead. So we went right from one fire scene to the next. This second fire was in a two-and-a-half story brick coach house in the rear of the lot. We forced entry, searched in the one building. We took a second line off an engine company and worked it up to the second floor and attic. It was a cool night, but we were pretty tired, beat, soaking wet, and dirty. We were in the coach house, which was immediately off an alley, just taking a break. The engine was washing down, and we were pretty much done with the overhauling. We heard civilians hollering in the alley, ‘Hey, there’s a fire down here!’ Sure enough, there was a fire in a three-story frame building about five buildings away from where we were, across the alley and on the next street, quite a distance away. #RandolphHarris 19 of 27
“The first fire was definitely arson, gang-related arson. We thought the second one, was too, but a long time later I heard that it was probably started by flying embers from the first fire. The embers had gotten into the gutter and started the attic on fire. But we didn’t know that at the time. We were on the second floor of the coach house, and the engine company we were with had shut the water down and were going to drag the line to the new fire. But what they had was a line that was full of water and extremely heavy to drag. I jumped down the ladder and ran down the alley. The commander who was there heard the people screaming, and he came running, too. I went through the gate to the back porch and up the stairs to the third floor, which was a peaked-roof attic. At the top of the stairs I saw fire in the midsection of the building. I came back down and told the chief what we had. I said, ‘We’re going to need a line up there.’ Our rig was parked down the street, and I told my driver by walkie-talkie to bring the rig around the block and to get our hand pumps. These are five-gallon water extinguishers that you have to pump by hand. I said, ‘Get the pumps and bring them up here.’ My engineer, for some reason, didn’t do that. The head of the stairwell was in the back of the building, and the attic windows in the front of the building were intact. I was waiting for the hand pump, and I sent my two other guys from the squad to help the engine company drag the heavy line. It took them a few minutes. They had to drag it down the alley, through the gateway, and up the stairs, maybe five or six hundred feet. The lieutenant on the engine company had the pipe, and I was on the landing, and he was coming up the stairs. I said, ‘As soon as you get water, I’m going for the windows.’ It was getting charged up, up there. The lieutenant had just enough line to reach the top of the stairs, where he could give the fire a whack. #RandolphHarris 20 of 27
“At last he said he had water, so I went down the right side of the attic. The fire was in the left middle section of the attic. I crawled by it as fast as I could. I got to the two front windows and whacked them out. The lieutenant on the engine company was screaming at me, ‘We lost the water! I lost the water!’ I leaned out the window and hollered down to my engineer, ‘Get that hand pump up here! We lost the water!’ My engineer was just staring at me. I turned around to go back, and the whole attic lit up, it was a ball of fire. I just put my head down and crawled as fast as I could. I knew where the stairs were, and I flowed the same route down the same side I had come. But there was this little partition wall sticking out, and I hit it, causing me to roll toward the fire. I lost my helmet, and hot embers flowed by my head. I screamed at the lieutenant, ‘I’m burning up!’ I charged ahead blindly the remaining fifteen feet and dove down the stairs right on top of the lieutenant. He had just gotten the water back. I felt the mist when I hit the partition, and the water turned to stream because it was so hot up there. I went down the stairs head first. The guys dragged me out of the building. I said, ‘I’m burning up.’ I got to my feet and got to the gateway, and just collapsed. The firemen ripped my fire clothes off. I just lay there. I had been soaking wet from the previous fire, and what the heat had done was cook me inside the coat. The ambulance and the paramedics were there inside of two minutes. I could feel everything burning, my eyes, everything. I couldn’t get cool fast enough. They cut my clothes off right on the street. They just took scissors and ripped my clothes, my shirt, my underwear right off me. The stripes on the coat had melted, and the coat looked like the outer layer of black material was skimmed off by the heat. The belt on my pants was rock hard. They soaked me in water, they used every bit of saline solution they had on the ambulance. The two paramedics did a tremendous job. They were fabulous. They helped me immensely. As much pain as I was in, they did what they could for me. #RandolphHarris 21 of 27
“They took me to a hospital a half mile away. I was lying on my stomach, and my eyes started swelling shut. Everything hurt. I kept telling them, ‘Don’t call my wife.’ It was now about three of four in the morning. The guys from the squad came to the hospital, and I kept telling them, ‘Don’t call my wide. Call my brother X.’ He was a fireman who worked on a different shift from me. They called him, and I lost track of time. The next thing I knew I was begging the nurse to give me something for the pain. They couldn’t pour enough cool solution on me. I looked up, and there was my brother. The people are the hospital decided to fly me to a burn unit. The burn unit sent a helicopter, but the hospital didn’t have a landing pad. So the night shift of nurses went out and moved their cars, and the helicopter came down between the wires and landed in the parking lot. My eyes were swelling shut, I could hardly see, and I was covered by clean sheets. A nurse started to catheterize me, and I told her not to do it, but she did it anyhow. They shot me with morphine, and I started to calm down. The helicopter landed, and they wheeled me in. For the next three or four hours I was being debrided, where they pick the burned skin off you. I was burned over 30 percent of my body, second- and third-degree burns on my face, ears, back, arm, buttocks, and legs. Most of it was on my back. I had burns all over my head from hot stuff dropping down. Because I had enough morphine, I was pretty much at ease during the debridement. My father-in-law, who is a firemen, brought my wide and mother-in-law to the hospital. They told my wife she’d be able to see my in an hour or so. Four hours later, she was still waiting. By that time my head was swollen up like a basketball and my eyes were completely swollen shut. I was burned inside my nostrils and a little in my mouth, and my life were swollen. They brought me into the room, and my wife thought she was in the wrong room. I heard her say she was there, and then she was gone. She started crying, and she said to her father, ‘That’s not him, that’s the wrong room.’ He said, ‘No, that’s him.’ #RandolphHarris 22 of 27
“I just didn’t look like the same person. I didn’t even know she had left the room because I couldn’t see her. That morning my lieutenant came to see me. He came in and squeezed my hand. He said that everything was going to be all right, and I knew in my heart that I was going to be okay, I was going to live. The lieutenant’s name was Y, and he’s now a deputy commissioner. He said, ‘If you need anything, or your wife does, don’t hesitate to call.’ That’s the kind of guy he is. I kept asking the doctor and nurse, ‘Can I got back to work? Can I fight fires again?’ That was my first thought. I was in the burn unit eighteen days. Those eighteen days I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. For four days I couldn’t open my eyes, and I never moved out of that bed. After that, they made me get up. I could hardly walk. To sit down and do something simple, like going to the bathroom, was a monumental task. For debridement, they put you in a tub of water as hot as you can stand. This loosens the skin. Just to get out of bed to get in the chair to go down there to get in this tub was unbelievable. They give you shots of morphine before you go down. I didn’t think the shots were doing anything for me until after I was released and had to come back every day to get debrided without having shots. They gave me acetaminophen, and I was begging for shots. The physical therapists were real sweethearts, just super people. One of them would give me a towel to bite on and say, ‘Let’s grin and bear it, honey.’ After I was able to open my eyes, she gave me a mirror and told me to start debriding my own face. She said, ‘Is there any way you can stick your head under water to loosen the dead skin on your face?’ I said, ‘You got a snorkel?’ So with a snorkel, I would stick my head under for fifteen or twenty minutes, then she’d give me the mirror and I’d work on my face while she was working on my back. Then I’d have to stand so she could do my butt and my legs. That went on every day, and I’d come back to my room totally drained.’ #RandolphHarris 23 of 27
“You become very humble. Extremely humble. My pain was bad, but there were people there who were burned far more than I was. And the thing that made me sick were the kids, little kids. I went home on Friday night, I was supposed to stay another day or two, but they needed the bed, and it went to a seventeen-month-old baby who had been scalded by its mother. It blows my mind how people could do that to kids. That’s what hurts you the most, is the kids. And there was a sixty-five-year-old woman who had been burned over 50 to 60 percent of her body by a heating pad that somehow caught her bed on fire. Every night she just lay there and moaned so that I never got any sleep. I had my dressings changed four times a day, and when they pull it off everything that’s halfway stuck to it goes with it. Once or twice at night I got a temporary nurse, and I’d tell her, ‘Oh, I don’t have to have mine changed tonight.’ I buffaloed the nurse, but when it came time to get them changed in the morning, it was twice as bad. So then I kept my mouth shut. Those nurses worked twelve-hour shifts, and they are fabulous people. They went from one room to another. They say the burnout period is two years, but I think a couple of them were there for more than two years. I gained so much respect for them. The only time I thought I was close to dying was when I hit that partition wall. I thought I’d never see the stairway. I didn’t think I was going to get out in time. From the time it flashed over, I don’t think I was up there more than a minute. That’s how fast that can happen. It made me appreciate my family a whole lot more. And I would rather have been the one who was burned than one of my men, because the guilt it would have given me would have been tremendous. #RandolphHarris 24 of 27
“To this day, I try not to let my guys get ahead of me or get into a dangerous situation. To instill the thoughts in their heads, I lift my shirt and show them my back. I say, ‘This is what can happen, so don’t get too cocky.’ You can do a thing a hundred times, but that hundred and first is going to get you. You can’t het took cocky. Some guys say, yeah, but you didn’t have your mask on. No, my tank was empty from the fire before. I was lying in the hospital bed, and somebody said that one of our chiefs was all bent out of shape because I didn’t have a mask on. Well, that chief wasn’t at any of those three fires. Somebody else said, ‘Don’t worry about it, nothing is going to be said.’ I said, ‘Nothing should be said. I was doing my job.’ My mask was lying down there somewhere, out of air. I was off the job ninety days, and I begged the burn doctor to let me go back to work. I was wearing a Job’s garment, shorts and a top. It’s a pressure garment that compresses the skin to keep it from scarring. When I went home I had open wounds on my back, but the hospital didn’t believe in grafting right away. We ruined our bathtub at home. A neighbor gave us a whirlpool, which we put in the tub. I had red iodine on the gauze that dressed the wounds. The stuff stained everything. When the wounds closed up and I got the pressure garment, I really fought to get back to work, even though I wasn’t walking straight, I was bent over a little bit, and I still had to sleep on my stomach. I went to the fire department doctor with the Job’s garment on, and he refused to send me back. I thought I’d be smart, and the next time I saw him I didn’t wear it. He hemmed and hawed and finally said I could go back to work. I had to wear that pressure garment for another twenty months, I just didn’t war it to the doctor’s. #RandolphHarris 25 of 27
“The first day back at the firehouse, the first run we had was a chlorine leak. Chlorine turns the coins in your pocket green. My privates itched, my underarms itched from sweating. The bulges on the collar of my shirt turned green. I thought, ‘My God, I’ve got this pressure garment on, I’m sweating as it is, what’s it going to do to my skin?’ It wasn’t that bad, we didn’t have to go in where we got too involved, so it worked out okay. But that was my first run back, and I was thinking, ‘What did I get myself into?’ The day after the fire, the two squad guys who had been with me came to the hospital. My wife said they both broke down and cried. My wife was beat, and they took her out to dinner that night. The guys at the firehouse drove her to and from the hospital. They watched over her. That’s when all that brotherly love falls into place. It’s the unspoken word. They took care of her. A battalion chief who had been a friend of my fathers came to the hospital every day, even though he couldn’t get in to see me. They restricted visitors because of the danger of infection. He would say to the nurse, ‘Just tell him I was here.’ I couldn’t ask for better friends. My room was full of cards. My nieces and nephews drew little picture, stuff that kind of breaks your heart. You find out how much people really think of you.” Sacramento Fire and Rescue Service is a progressive and forward-thinking Fire Department. They honour the past by continuing to do things that have been successful. They move into the future by exploring and investing in technology that will help serve the citizens and stakeholders in a more efficient and effective way. They are committed to providing an atmosphere of pen communication and teamwork. #RandolphHarris 26 of 27
The Sacramento Fire Department is a full-spectrum life safety agency protecting nearly 3 million people who live, work and play in one of America’s largest cities. The Sacramento Fire Department recognizes that they face unique challenges in keeping pace with the changing World in which they live and work. They will not forget the traditions of those that came before them. However, they have adapted and progressed so that they can remain successful. “We are a family of individuals committed to serving others. We will always provide for the welfare of our personnel through a health and rewarding work environment. We are dedicated to respect, integrity, compassion, and leadership amongst ourselves so that we may proudly serve others. The Sacramento Fire Department strives to sustain and improve the health, safety, convenience, and welfare of the citizens of Sacramento and to plan for the future development of the community. You can help save lives and property by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember parents, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus, respect law and others, treat others with dignity and respect, and remind them of the importance of education. To help America survive the global recession and bring manufacturing jobs back to America and to get American wages at pace with inflation, it is important to buy America cars, such as Ford, Chevrolet, Buick, Dodge, and Cadilliac. Every car that is built by the Japanese, Americans manufacture one that looks just as good, if not better, and is reliable and of superior quality. Also, help keep American farms alive by American meat, American produce and other American made goods and services. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all. Our Father, our King, be gracious unto us and answer us, for we are wanting in good deeds; deal with us in charity and lovingkindness, and please save us. #RandolphHarris 27 of 27
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Randolph Harris II International 