Today’s story:
“Mike Golden’s Memphis”
by Mike Golden
“There’s something about Memphis. . .” Wild Billy Hicks often said to Stein. “Something…after spending over half my life here, I understand, but have never been able to figure out how to explain. I mean, what can you say about a city that refuses to take the confession of the man who claims he hired someone other than James Earl Ray to kill MLK, because – and They say this with a straight face — They don’t want to give him credibility! ”
Paranoia bubbling, the two middle-aged men cautiously moved one step at a time across the unstable tar paper roof of the fabled rooming house that Ray supposedly shot Dr. King from 30-years earlier. A friend of Hicks had a store above the new addition to The Civil Rights Museum – a space that was once Jim’s Grill, the low rent dive where the assassination plot had been hatched — so they climbed up a shaky handmade ladder through a homemade opening he had cut in his ceiling, and the next thing they knew they were looking down on the Lorraine Motel from a hundred times better angle than the alleged-assassin would’ve had from the bathroom two floors below them.
Hicks took a deep breath and looked at his old friend like he was trying to summon up explanations of their spent youth, then blurted, “What would you say, Jake, if I told you a reliable source claims Jack Ruby didn’t die of cancer in 1967, like the government told us, and that he recently contacted her?”
“Sure he did!” Stein grinned, flashing back on Wild Billy 30-years earlier, a Colt 45 twirling on his finger, as he talked him into diving with him from the roof of a building, down through the trees, crashing through the closed window of the apartment of the so-called shooter, two stories below them…
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