CALIFORNIA CHRISTIAN CRIMINAL CALIFORNIA CHRISTIAN CRIMINAL and/or Dusty’s Book of Before & After Salvation Poetry w/Ax-Grindings RICHARD GARTNER WITH GEORGE GARTNER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My brother, George Gartner, who did his best to add to, edit, and dial in this book, after my basic formatting, and who accepted me without question, and across the board since we first met while both of us were in our twenties. (George, as in this book, is also helping with the second book in the Angel series The Archangel Michael with me, and, as the Lord wills, will continue with or without me in Angel, Demons, and Spiritual Warfare, which is the next book planned to be written in the Angel Series.) My niece, Allana, is my heir and is now an entire sixteen years old. She (or the thought of how she could be) inspires me to great efforts now in my last years. My friend and attorney Ray Castello, who if you know the difference between a few and far between friend and a friendly acquaintance (of which we all have many) actually defines the term for my part, though he is just being the way he is with- out trying. My San Jose, California, Pastor, Daniel Herrera, who has been of such a great help and encouragement to me. My friend, Ron Seward, who had the idea for the nucleus of this particular book, as it was his idea to write precursors to my poetry, explaining what happened in my life to inspire a particu- lar poem. As things progressed, doing that made this a book in its own right, instead of inclusions into other books I am writing. The entire Tate Publishing Staff, who have had to have patience with my conniption fits here and there. CONTENTS Foreword........................................................................................11 Preface to this Book .......................................................................13 Life Before: Letter to the Judge and A Feel for the Wheel ............21 Letter to the Judger ....................................................................26 A Feel for the Wheel ....................................................................27 Life Before: Mummy Dusty ..........................................................29 Life Before: Jonah ..........................................................................37 Jonah .........................................................................................37 Life Before: Mummy Dusty Continued ........................................45 Mummy Dusty ...........................................................................52 Life Before: Keyweshark ................................................................55 Keyweshark ................................................................................65 Life Before: Sanitation Engineers ..................................................69 Sanitation Engineers ..................................................................78 Off to Panama ...............................................................................83 Off to Acapulco and San Diego .....................................................89 Welcome One and All ..................................................................97 Got Me Going in Circles… ...........................................................99 Guess Who? ................................................................................105 Still Got Me Going in Circles… ..................................................107 Off to Lompoc and Home at Last! ................................................111 Crime Does Pay? ........................................................................118 Dirty Harry… My Hero! ...............................................................121 Soul Bowl...................................................................................125 Stagnant Waters ............................................................................129 Parole, Las Vegas, and Dodge Chargers .........................................133 In the Stretch by a Noise ..............................................................146 Los Angeles County Jail Revisited.................................................149 Skillet Versus the Prez ...................................................................163 Noah and the Ark .......................................................................167 Shakin’ the Dust Off My Feet ........................................................175 Label Slap ..................................................................................190 Dusty Shakes Off More Dust ........................................................193 David and Goliath .....................................................................205 Lola and the Mexican Mafia; Ernie and the Motley Crew ............211 The Spirits .................................................................................220 What Santa Didn’t Know ..............................................................223 Satan Santa ...............................................................................229 A Rocky Road to Salvation ............................................................231 The Puppeteer ............................................................................234 Salvation Time ..............................................................................237 Miracle Time .................................................................................243 Tobit, Tobiah, and Sarahr ...........................................................252 Stumble and Fall Time ..................................................................259 Moses .........................................................................................268 On Fire for the Lord .....................................................................279 Sunk by a Drunk ........................................................................285 Marrying My Sister? ......................................................................291 The Fire Bug ..............................................................................302 Forget the Bear and Put an Elephant on the Flag! ........................305 Starving to Write a Poem (Literally) .............................................311 Daniel and the Three ..................................................................321 Freedom Is Relative .......................................................................325 Crazy Dogwood Freeman ............................................................331 Two Hundred Dollars Minus Bus Fare ..........................................333 Samson ......................................................................................341 Publishing and Things ...................................................................349 Job .............................................................................................357 Dusty’s Construction Poem ......................................................363 “It Was All His Fault!” (Or George Goes to Jail Twice Because of Me!) ........................................................365 Forsooth and Ferwhat? ...............................................................368 The End .........................................................................................371 Applicable Scriptures and Commentaries Quoted in this Book (Sequentially) ...............................................373 FOREWORD Greetings Readers: I have spent easily some twenty plus years in juvenile halls, county jails, and federal and state prisons, which has had an impact not only on my life, my poems, my books, my outlook on things, and my salvation, but of course was causative of the title of this book, though it was not in prison that I received salvation. In the process of writing some of my other books, most nota- bly in The Angel Series, this book quite by accident came into being. I had published The Angel Jon in 2007 and was following up with the second in the series, The Archangel Michael, when the idea for Dusty’s Book of Before and After Salvation Poetry With Ax-Grindings came to the fore. (Which was this book’s origi- nal title.) This was as I had over a hundred pages of before and after sal- vation poetry, most of a funny nature or inspired by the humor I saw in events in my life, and then after my salvation I saw humor in some Bible stories and began to write what I called humorous epic odes, and though taking poetic license, I kept the basics to the actual Scripture. In any case, I didn’t know what to do with them all. These poems and epic odes dated back forty-four years worth of accumulation, and I was haphazardly inserting them into my second Angel Series book, The Archangel Michael, when a friend, Ron Seward, advised that he thought that I should put a precursor to the poems that actually described events in my life that some of the poems described—like Sunk By A Drunk or KeyWeshark, and so on. Then were all the multi-page epic funny poems that described biblical characters and stories. There was also the fact that The Angel Series are an on-going (so far) fictional tale with spiritual warfare going on between angels, demons, and men, and then inserting a poem haphazardly 11 Richard Gartner with George Gartner that has nothing to do with the book was confusing the issue/ storyline. So, once started on the precursor path, this book became almost an autobiography and right in the middle of writing The Archangel Michael I flat stopped inserting poems in Michael and wrote this book in about three months flat, as a third