Buffalo Weather - First Installment - J. Dumas

I hadn't seen George since he put his foot in a bucket and made us all laugh, hopping about and bumping into the barstools in a feigned drunken slapstick. We had been a thing for a while back in the early 80's and I still held a little warm glow for him.

That last night we were all saying goodbye, a celebration of our graduating from Journalism school and a big farewell party. Now, I desperately needed to find him.

Alex, that simple fool. He must have been jealous. "You think you're so big." He said to George. Alex didn't hold his drink well. He got belligerent and ugly, we all knew that. We had been together for four years and had been referred to as the gruesome foursome. "You've always had the best girls and now your going off to that big job in D.C." Alex was getting louder. Half the Hooters crowd was now aware of this loud scene developing over near the far end of the lounge that we had commandeered for our party.

Juli tried to stop Alex. "It's time to go home now Alex." She was pulling at his right arm. Alex just shoved her off and continued his angry verbal attack of George. Thank God for the outage. We had one of those occasional power outages and the whole place went dark. For a moment there was complete silence, all you could hear was the rain coming down on the aluminum awning over the front window.

Then I heard George over the ensuing din, calling me. "Sandy, Sandy, where are you?". In the confusion of the darkness I couldn't get to where George's voice came from. I stumbled over a chair and found myself down on the floor beneath a table. Someone lit a cigarette lighter over in the far corner just long enough to pop one of our helium filled balloons and cause a loud bang. There was a burst of laughter from the crowd and then the lights went back on. Alex was sitting with his head cupped in his hands, elbows on the table, hair all rumpled and a dark cloud over his head, all by himself. Juli came over to me and helped me up. "Where is George?" I said. We asked Alex. He didn't know. We never found him. I haven't seen him since.

We had been unstoppable, the four of us, we had met as freshman at one of those department mixers and had not been apart for our entire college stay. Ultimately we all shared two opposing apartments on Woodrow Street across from the Yellow Fang, our hang out. Terrible Chinese food, but for some reason a very popular, usually "squeeze between the chairs" crowded place. Now we were all apart. Gone our separate ways.

Juli and I would write each other once in a while but I hadn't thought about him for years. Now, after bumping into Alex at the convention, I had to find George.

Sandy and I were already cooling by the middle of that last school year. I had started to take my work seriously and Sandy missed the party animal. Our clique was marked for demolition anyway: after four winters in the ice-trenches, everyone wanted out of Buffalo. Sandy wanted out of the whole Eastern seaboard, but when I landed the job in Washington that Alex had had his sights on, he accepted the Dallas opening Sandy’d been in line for, forcing her to bump Julie off the A-list for Newsday. Julie went to L.A., displacing a classmate who’d already bought the sunglasses, and somewhere way down the line, I guess, some low-end journalism grad from Suny Buffalo found himself sloshing a rag mop around a sign that read "Piso Mojado".

In D.C. I was treated for openers to a honeymoon of daylight barhopping with an emeritus type called, of course, Doc. It was Doc’s job to make me a familiar face in places where no one talked in front of strangers. Each bar had its habitues and each habitue had his connections. Or hers. Our daily rounds became routine before too long, and my mind began to wander. A girl named Myrna caught it wandering her way one day in a watering hole called "The Zebra", and when I asked her what she was doing in a place like that, she spelled it out for me in black and white. She was a little older than me, but her complexion was a big improvement over Doc’s. I spent the next few months seeing as much of it as I could.

Meanwhile, the job turned grim. My apprenticeship with Doc ended and I was assigned to cover a colorless congressional proceeding that ground on for months as bleak, unending and predictable as a Buffalo winter: snow, snow and more snow. These guys made jury duty look like a thrill ride. In the breaks between committee meetings, I hung around Capitol hallways trying to memorize faces in case they became famous. In the press lunchroom, I got to know one or two guys with something left to say, they hadn’t quite glazed over. Mostly I thought about Myrna and softball.

Summer softball is an institution in D.C., especially along the Capitol Mall. Everybody plays it. Girls with jobs in Georgetown and Bethesda hop the Metro after work and meet their boyfriends in HUD or Transportation or the NEA to play softball on the Mall. Myrna and I didn’t need the Metro: I strolled down the Mall from the Capitol building, and she walked over from her office at the F.B.I. .She was a "local", an agent who keeps an eye on the neighborhood, and she already had all the faces memorized.

It's been almost eight months since I made contact with George in the Zebra. At first there wasn't anything that seemed to connect him with the project, but after a season of snuggling and now, even more importantly, softball comraderie, I've noticed how the other three keep coming up in his conversation. Whether our post-platonic relationship poses a conflict of interest with my job at the Agency is a possibility too dangerously interesting to dwell upon.

Though he claims to have broken up with Sandra Fennel, he's obviously following her career with more than a friendly professional interest. Anyone reading her Newsday pieces can tell she's preoccupied with weather patterns, but he always makes it sound as if she's on some sort of Grail quest and getting closer with every article.

It's apparent that he's bored with his role as watchdog to a sleeping giant and rueful that the man who would have had his position, Alexander Polson, is making all the necessary corporate contacts. Naturally he's never described them as "necessary", but it can't be a coincidence that of the four, Polson is the only one working for a business journal.

George seems to regard Julia Chase as a brilliant but erratic decoy. Her sensationalistic docu-exposes are apparently providing some sort of poetic asymmetry to the larger scheme of their work, but he's critical as often as complimentary of her contributions. She is rather high profile, but I'm sure he overestimates the importance of her spotlight - no one remembers anyone more than two covers back.

George is such a guy - he doesn't seem to have the slightest concern that I might wonder about his abiding interest in his old schoolmates careers. Even if I didn't have my professional reasons, might'nt I be just a little jealous?

I told Doc that the Zebra was getting a little too well-frequented by the Capitol Hill set to be our rendezvous of choice, so I was surprised when he came in with company and headed over to my usual table. He stepped to one side as he arrived and, with a paternally enfolding gesture, presented a still-young-but-good ol' gal with a face that, even with a smile, seemed to mean business, and a dark blonde mane that said that wasn't all there was to life.

"Ms. Minkowski, may I present Ms. Sandra Fennel. She's very anxious to get in touch with George Bryant."

I stood there smiling like I knew what I was doing, all the while kicking myself for traveling all this way for what may have turned out to be a wild good chase. A dark haired woman about my age held out her hand. "Hello, I'm Myrna Minkowski. I hope you had a comfortable flight."

Surprised, I replied, "Why yes, I did, thank you. Dr. Bower here says you may know the whereabouts of George Bryant. He used to be a classmate of mine at Suny, Buffalo."

Myrna looked at me, rather studied me for a long minute.

Then, she replied, "Yes, I know him, I see him," she paused, "occasionally."

I hadn't expected such luck, so quickly. Still, the cool reception I got from Myrna bothered me.

"Do you know where he is now?" I asked.

"No, he's probably at work. I have his phone number here..." She opened a small bag and took out several business cards. She flipped one over. I passed her a note pad on which she wrote the number in a bold hand.

Feeling awkward, and not knowing what to say to this odd, but intriguing woman, I merely thanked her for her help and returned to my hotel room.

I called the number Myrna had given me and got George's machine. I left a message saying I was is in town and gave my hotel phone number. I put down the phone thinking I would try again in the morning.

In truth, it had not been a good flight and I was exhausted. It had been a long time since I had traveled anywhere but strange bed or not, I knew I would sleep well. I undressed and slipped into my blue flannel pajamas. As I washed my face and brushed my teeth, I thought about the events that had brought me to this city, a place I had never before thought to visit.

I had been in Phoenix, working for Newsday. Finally, I had worked my way up to an every other day column in the human interest section of the Republic. It was quite a prize after all the years of struggling with often uninteresting local politics or ghastly tragedies. I picked my own topics and often laced them with my own peculiar interests - my running themes, I called them. It had been at the height of the long summer that I had run into Alex Polson. I had moved to Phoenix to be rid of the frigid Buffalo weather once and for all, but 112 degrees is a bit of an extreme too. Inside the convention center, the weather was pleasantly controlled. It was an Information Technology convention and people, mostly men from all over the Southwest were gathered to see the latest innovations and office layouts. I was engrossed in a display of ergonomic keyboards and pointing devices when I heard someone calling my name, "Sandy, Sandy is that you?" My first thought was of George, the night of his disappearance, and I turned. It was Alex, grinning broadly. He had been to the beer kiosk a few too many times. Before I knew it, he was hugging me. I tried to look pleasantly surprised.

"Alex, how have you been!?" And he told me, all of his job changes, his unsuccessful marriage, his new job at the Dallas Business Journal. He was full of stories about projects he was about to start, things he planned to do, until he saw me stifle a yawn. Then he paused.

For the first time he really looked at me, "Say, you're looking good, how's life treating you? Got a new man in your life?"

I must have looked embarrassed, "No, nothing like that, I'm just really enjoying my work right now and I have a nice condo, just outside town."

Alex shifted his weight and looked bored with what I had to say. Was this the same guy we knew at Suny? I felt a mixture of repulsion and pity for him. Then he brightened.

"Hey, did you know George is in DC?"

I tried not to look as surprised and delighted as I felt, "No, how's he doing?" So, Alex had told me what he knew, which wasn't much, but at least he knew that he worked for the National Wire, and that he was doing well.

The jet lag had finally caught up with me. My travel alarm told me it was 11:42 as I slid my legs under the cool bed sheets. I did not wake up until nearly nine the next morning.

I woke up with a sudden jolt as the ear-piercing scream of the phone rang out. I sat up, took a deep breath and stretched for stars. The phone crowed like a rooster. I turned the volume down on the ringer and then watched it ring a few more times just to spite the evil caller who shattered my happy slumber. My head was an anvil of pressure on my toothpick of a neck. No more gin and tonic’s during happy hour for me. Again with the ringing, my sixth sense told me that if I picked the blessed chatter-box up, it was going to be someone from work asking me to come in on my day off. I guess my senses were out of whack.

When I picked up the phone and heard Juli’s voice, I thought I might have still been sleeping and having one of those really life-like dreams. You know, the kind where you think you're in the bathroom, ready to go when . . . oops! Like that except this was more like one of my recurring nightmares.

"Hello, is this Alex Polson?" Juli’s voice teetered between cool and confident and shy little girl. I paused before trusting my voice-recall. "Juli? . . . Juli Chase?" I uttered in shock. We hadn’t spoken since the graduation celebration at Hooters.

That was the night Juli told me about her affair with George. We had driven to Hooter’s in two separate cars, Juli and I in my car and George and Sandy in Sandy’s car. Juli had wanted to go separately so that we could go by The Treasure Tavern to get graduation gifts for Sandy and George. Sandy had hemmed and hawed over what to get for George and finally decided to choose a pair of bronzed baby shoes. I remember thinking that was odd, but never having been very attentive in shopping or gift-giving matters, I didn’t concern myself further. She found a poster of Boy George with a fluorescent blue boa wrapped around his shoulders, one of Sandy’s favorites, and grabbed it without a thought.

When we pulled into the Hooters parking lot and parked, I was about to get out when Juli grabbed me by the arm and said, "Alex, wait., I have to talk to you before we go in."

I knew I'd shaken Alex's faith in my allegiance to the project when I told him ... well, what I'd told him outside Hooter's that night.

But now he was really spooked. Here I am, calling him up out of the blue - definitely not part of the program. "Jesus, Juli, what are you ... "

"Shut up and listen to me, Alex. I know: no contact. But there isn't much time and I'm trying to save your bacon. Like you saved mine once."

There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Long enough for me to think a couple things through pretty thoroughly. In truth, why should Alex listen to me? This whole set-up hinged on us sticking pretty close to the plan. it's pivotal point: getting far apart - and staying there.

That's what I couldn't figure out. Alex's scene at Hooter's on graduation night had set the stage, in as public a place as possible, for the "break-up" of the Gruesome Foursome. Then George had played his part brilliantly, disappearing and starting the domino effect when he grabbed Alex's wire job in Washington. Sandy trots dutifully off to Phoenix; nobody reading her pseudo-science weather articles could possibly connect her with the project. And me. I'd stranded myself on the left coast without a Krusteaz Donut in sight, Sandy my only contact.

All according to Hoyle. But now ... everything seemed to be coming to pieces. Why in God's name were the others together in DC?

Alex still hadn't said a word over the phone. "Alex, look, I know you have no reason to, but you've got to trust me. I have to see you. I'm coming to Dallas."

Another moment of silence. Then I let out a sigh of relief as he grumbled, "Take Southwest. Love Field's not as conspicuous."

I was feeling good about how well things were going with Myrna. The tedium of my cover job was now not so hard to take because of my success in gaining her confidence. I was looking forward to meeting her this afternoon at the Zebra but I was taken totally by surprise when I walked in the front entrance and saw Sandy and Doc at the table with Myrna.

Fortunately there was a crowd standing around the bar partially blocking the view between us. I froze there for a moment oblivious to the hi pitch chatter of the patrons. I wasn't sure quite what to do. I approached just close enough to hear Sandy say something that sounded through the din like "the Hyatt Regency", then I ducked to the right down the hall to the rest rooms and the Zebra's side exit. I was sure no one at the table had seen me but I decided not to stay longer for fear I would be noticed.

It was possible Sandy had blown my cover. How could she? We had worked at the details of our plan for years and now when the first fruits of our slow work were being born . . . Sandy was jeoprodizing the project.

We had made contingency plans of course, but none that covered this situation. I would have to contact Alex. He may be in danger. I didn't dare go back to my apartment or my office just yet. A feeling of paranoia came over me as I walked hurriedly for the Metro weaving through the light evening foot traffic. Everyone I saw on the street was now a potential threat. Poor Sandy. If she innocently made this foolish move she would also be in danger. If she had turned double, then we were enemies, I couldn't believe that.

The last rays of the late spring sun were reflecting off the upper story windows of the Harriman Building as I ducked down into the Metro station. I slipped a pass card into the turnstile and pushed on through and down the escalator, a fatish lady with a four year old stood in front of me. A million questions raced through my mind as the familiar subway smells wafted up from the tracks below. Why had Sandy come to D.C.? How had she met Doc and Myrna? What were the implications of Doc and Myrna knowing each other? Had this all been part of another plan I wasn't privy to? Should I try to contact Professor Simon?

A glimmer of a strategy began to take shape in the back of my head. I shouldn't go back to my apartment or my office but I could call for my messages, maybe Alex or Juli were aware of what was going on. Maybe one of them had left a recording. I would wait until later in the evening and make the calls, meanwhile I would have to find a safe place to hangout. I jumped on the Bethesda train just as it was leaving the platform. The train trip would give me more time to think.

Checking the faces up and down the car, I spotted a pair of empty seats and dropped in. I strained to make sense of my situation, but the facts just wouldn't come together to make a consistent story. It was like I was playing out a part in a badly mangled work of amateur fiction. Out the window, broad colored stripes whipped by on the subway walls, punctuated occasionally by graffitti. Cave drawings of leggy, humped quadrupeds, floating in air, gamboled across my mind, trailing a tune from schooldays. Al would belt it when he'd got a few beers in on a Friday night, accompanying home-grown lyrics on a tiny toy guitar: "Friends to the end/ Till porkers fly/And bison pour down from the sky."

Reflected in the window, an ad curving over seats across the aisle read , "!EM WARD". The page-boyed face above the words smiled across at me, unspoiled by the image reversal. Did it matter to me which side my friends were on? They were my friends. Of course, they were each others’ friends, too. Four of us. Let’s see: four things two at a time, that’s maybe six; and then each relationship is two-way, so that’s twelve, and then there’s the various triangles, and of course outside relationships have a bearing… I regretted flunking statistics. The train’s brakes squealed into Bethesda Station, and I got off.

Washington’s subway has no sleeping drunks. Buffalo’s drunks have no subway. My head reeled at the mismanagement, as I strode angrily to the escalator and up, taking the steps two at a time, wishing to God there was an old lady to shove aside. I emerged into the Sheraton Hotel, which in fact was where the subway ended. I called my voice machine, listened, then left the building by a side stairwell.

The voice message was from Al. Knowing that my place might be bugged, he had spoken in pig-Latin. "Isten-lay osely-clay Orge-jay ," the tape began. After about six rewinds, I gleaned the following: When Al happened on Sandy at the convention, he noticed something. It was Sandy’s left ear. I know, that sounds like it was on the floor, but really, it was right where it belonged. But not quite. Now, you should know that Al had been in an excellent position, back in Buffalo, to carry out detailed reconnaissance and mapping operations on Sandy’s ears, if you know what I mean, because, while Julie and I were playing around behind his back, he and Sandy were playing behind mine. We were, like, back-to-back. How do I know this? Al told me so that night at Hooters, after Julie told him about us. Four people, two at a time… Yikes! What’s next? My mind boggling, I fled the consquences under cover of the blackout, Sandy’s frightened call ringing in my ears. And that’s the truth, no matter what you may have heard.

Earrings were a fetish of Al’s. And even though it wasn’t terribly fashionable then, Sandy had acquired a tiny hole at the top of each ear just for the nocturnal attachment of little Al-teasers. Before long, one got infected--it turns out spit is germy. It healed with a little dent, but Sandy always liked big hair, so no one but Al ever noticed. I’m a leg man myself.

Sandy turned up at the convention without that dent. How did Al notice? Well, like I said, it’s a fetish. And Al, despite what some people will tell you, is a touchy-feely guy. He almost mentioned it, but something, maybe it was the faux-crab luncheon echoing in his taste buds, put him on alert. Now, eight years (Has it really been eight years? For some of us, maybe; to me, it seems more like two. Of course, there was that difficult-to-estimate stretch earlier in the decade when Myrna and I were doing the large-animal tranquilizers), eight years, as I say, will change a person, and she was appropriately plumper and had the big hair right, but turkey ham doesn’t really taste that much like ham, if you remember ham, and Al remembered ham better than most, and his sniffer told him that the toothsome butterball before him was pure turkey. So what does he do? Runs a little test: drink, act soused, drop some bait, and see what happens. What happened is "Sandy" took the bait and a plane to D.C. that same night. Al gave her Doc’s phone in place of George’s and Doc, tipped off by Al, says he’s George’s roomate and meets her at the airport. She’s not among friends.

Al, it turns out, has a business relationship with Doc. Al provides Doc, and the F.B.I., with certain hard-to-get information concerning the Dallas business community, and Doc doesn’t bust Al for conspiracy—yet.

Even as I was staggering out of the Sheraton, Doc and Myrna were seeing to it that "Sandy" would no longer be bothering Al. But now Doc would be bothering me. Unless I bothered him first. Bothered him fast. Bothered him big time. Really bothered him, you know what I mean? I pondered my options over a napkin at an all-night falafel stand. Things were growing darker and more confused, despite my best efforts to pull them together. I sensed there may be no way out that would not leave a terrible mess. The "Project" seemed very far away.

From the journals of Prof. Archibald Simon, Meteorology Dept. SUNY Buffalo.

January 6, 1980. Systems finally came back with the results of my last run. Usual griping about the time my programs take on the parallel processor, but 3 weeks of recursive reiteration is a small price to pay for accuracy. Luckily, seniority still has a few perks. Factoring in the 5th degree variables was the key. The model has generated a transiently periodic attractor with 3 hyperbolic coefficients which replicates local precipitation patterns to within 6 decimals. Now the big question is - what are the global atmospheric input coordinates feeding the attractor?

March 21, 1980. Can't be sure until I've done a few more runs, but so far the GAICs are almost all stabilizing at points south of the equator, instead of north as one would expect. Apparently the attractor has a broader surface function repertoire than I had originally assumed.

June 16, 1980. Today's results inconclusive but suggestive. Had Bryant and Fennel cross-tabulate and crunch the numbers independently to be sure.

August 23, 1980. Final results conclusive and somewhat disturbing. We've established stable 5-degree geostatic isoplots for South Africa, Indonesia, Chile, Brazil and Taiwan, retroactive to mid-1974.

December 5, 1980. Following the obvious hunch, I had Polson run an extensive correlational battery with Third World industrial statistics. It can no longer be doubted but that lumbering and industrial activity in the coordinate countries is producing global-scale chaotic pattern formation.

May 15, 1981. The GAIC location project (whimsically referred to by my student assistants as the "Buffalo Weather Project") has taken on a problematically political aspect. Chase and Polson have been correlating the occurence of global conflict "flashpoints", market fluctuations, governmental instabilities and multinational corporate activities with our transient attractor pattern data and have persuaded me that what I had thought must be an inadvertant disfunction-of-scale effect is probably a concerted effort to conduct "diplomacy by meteorological means."

September 3, 1981. Though my students feel we should publicize the results of our research, they're afraid the mathematically abstruse nature of the "evidence" will prevent its being understood by a wide enough audience. In order to gather hard descriptive evidence, and monitor the activity of the principal players, they've decided as a group to switch majors (not the first time for any of them) and take jobs in strategic areas of the media. Due to the politically sensitive, and consequently personally dangerous, nature of the project, they've agreed to work separately in order to conceal their team effort and hopefully prevent their "being taken out" (as Ms. Chase grimly put it) all at once should any of them be discovered.

I waited for George in a corner booth of a little hole-in-the-wall breakfast/lunch place called Egg Heaven. The waitress refilled my coffee for the second time and went away again. What did I think I was doing here anyway? I should just leave and go back to Phoenix, I thought. The past should remain right where it was. I was just fishing out a two dollar bill, when George came in. He stood rather nervously by the door peering at the booths. I waved. He made his way down the crowded aisle and dodged the waitress and patrons until he got to my booth.

"Hello, Sandy," George smiled sheepishly as he slid into his seat. "I'm sorry for my odd behavior last night."

"You were behaving oddly?" I was puzzled.

"Oh right, how would you know? I haven't slept at all and I'm a little fuzzy headed." He turned over the coffee mug at his place. Almost at once the waitress filled the cup. George watched the coffee flowing and sighed.

"Would you like to order?" The waitress tapped her pencil against the order pad.

"Uh yes," said George, and without looking at the menu said "Polish sausage and eggs, scrambled. Sourdough toast...thanks." The waitress scribbled and looked at me.

"Two eggs, over-medium, fruit, and sourdough toast, please."

When we were alone, George sat, saying nothing, just stirring his coffee.

"Well? What kept you up all night?" I asked.

"God, I feel like such a fool, Sandy. I never should have doubted your loyalty to the project, if there even is a project any more." So he told me about glimpsing me at the Zebra, about riding around on the subway, being afraid to return to his apartment. He described Alex's weird phone call and wandering around some more. Then he said he'd called his message machine again and had heard my message. At this point our food arrived. George daubed catsup over his hashbrowns and began to eat ravenously. My fresh summer fruit tasted delicious. I munched grapes as I watched George. He was beginning get grey hair above his forehead. He looked up, right at me watching him. Suddenly self-conscious, I tucked my hair behind my ears. George stared harder at me.

` "Your ears!" He exclaimed around a mouthful of sausage.

"They're still there, I hope," I tried to sound playful. He was acting very oddly.

"No, it's good, the dents are still there. You're not..." He broke off and stared off beyond me now. "That rat! Alex! What's he trying to pull?" Then he looked back at me and smiled the first real smile I'd seen from him so far. "Sandy, why did you come to D.C., really?"

I put down my fork. "I came to see you. I thought enough time had passed. Whoever came up with that no contact idea was taking this project thing way too seriously." George looked surprised. I continued, "Really George, I just wanted to see you, to talk like we used to."

George saw that I meant what I was saying. "I'm sorry Sandy, for doubting you." A long minute passed. The clamour of the diner ebbed and surged around us, forks and knives, plates and mugs tapping and clattering, laughter and the smell of fresh newspapers.

"Sandy," George said suddenly, "I actually wasn't going to meet you here this morning, but I changed my mind after I called Professor Simon."

"Oh?" What else could I say? "What did he say?"

George drained his coffee mug and pushed it to the edge of the table to signal for more.

"He said, over the past few years the project model has become increasingly non-predictive. Apparently, too many other variables have come into play because of the changing poltical, industrial and economic situations. Global warming is just an unforseen side effect. Until an even more sophisticated model can be generated which will probably involve some new level of computer technology, it won't be practical to control the weather. It was becoming impossible for the First World countries and corporations to predict the outcome of their own weather manipulations. Then El Niño worsened as a result of all the collective efforts..." George paused, sighed again, "So all this cloak and dagger stuff isn't necessary any more." He smiled a weary smile and shrugged.

I could hardly believe I was hearing this. At last, I, we all could get back to our own lives and our own long postponed projects. "George, that's great! Maybe I'll take a real vacation, do some of my own writing."

George nodded in agreement. We paid the check and went out.

"So, would you like to take in a film? We have plenty of time."

JULIE

George and Sandy had called to tell me the news, but it didn’t really sink in until I picked up the newspaper and read this:

---

OBITUARY

---

SIMON, ARCHIBALD, born Oct. 11, 1925, in Newark, N.J., passed away October 5, 1989 in Buffalo, NY. Was a renowned scientist and professor at SUNY Buffalo in New York. Had he lived, it is believed that Professor Simon’s research may have yielded valuable information linking global warming to economic, industrial and political changes. Authorities claim that the Professor's death brings to an end an extensive project that included a network of agents stationed throughout the world. Professor Simon was very active in the Buffalo Meteorologists From Mars (MFM), a philanthropic organization that raises money to educate local children about science-related topics. He is survived by his loving Dalmatian, Soldier. Friends may call from 4 to 8 p.m. Sunday, October 9 at The Buffalo Inn Mortuary Chapel. Services will be at 10:00 a.m. Monday, October 17 at the chapel. Interment will follow at SUNY Buffalo, Meteorology Dept. In lieu of flowers please send donations to The Foundation for Disgruntled Amateur Writers of America (DAWA) at 1315 E. Av. R5, Palmdale, CA 93550

---

Buffalo Weather, Installment 12 - Mitschlag Bastante

MANDY

"Soldier! Here boy! Stay out of the aisle, Sweetie."

It's great to be on the train heading back to Buffalo again. Living in Phoenix was hell for this snow-bunny, but that's all over now. Doc & I'll go over the new weather data real cozy-like, in the chalet at Bison Bluff after a few good runs on the pistes. That is, if he manages to give Myrna the slip like we planned. She's a sharp one. "But I'm not going to worry about that now, am I, Puppy Dog?"

It's too bad about Archie. He got scared, wasn't ready to move forward with the rest of us. Probably just as well. His weather expertise was invaluable during Stage 1 of the project, but he kept insisting that we confine Stage 2 to Earth. Such a small mind. Thank heavens I got him to feed George that line about the whole thing being dead in the water, right before I took him off the project ... for good. Yes, it is too bad. But I have always wanted a dog.

By now my little twit of a sister has hooked back up with George & the others & re-formed the Boresome Foursome, or whatever they called themselves. Fine by me. When the time comes she'll do whatever I tell her, just as she always has. Even during the years I was doing time.

But what in hell made Alex suspect that I wasn't Sandy? "You know the difference, don’t you, Soldier Boy? But I never thought Al was as smart as you."

Anyway, now that those four are out of the way, we can proceed as planned. Funny how they all left Buffalo just when they should have stayed put. If they really wanted to stop the project, that is. Upstate is the center of everything. They'll never know - until it's too late - how their "no contact" contract left the door wide open for the Doc & me.

Yes, those few weeks when I took Sandy's place at Newsday were like an eternity. How can anyone stand so much sunshine? Give me Buffalo weather anytime.

"We're almost home, Soldier honey - & look: it's starting to snow!"