Pound for pound, man for man, woman for woman and parent to child, my team is full of the most beautiful of the roses!!!
It is no secret that when I put together the team to take apart the police department's evil system of spying on the gay community that I made careful choices. You know what's even funnier? Laurie picked some of them for me...you see, jealousy makes a person hate...and hate makes you do crazy things. I figured that I could win over most people that were involved in this crime simply by being myself, the genius in doing so is how carefully you have to select your friends.
You can't pick the ultra poor, which in Palm Springs is very difficult after a run in with Laurie. If you came with something, she found you and took it. If you were successful and she found out about it, she lied then took it from you. I chose to find people with families that loved them outwardly. Jonathan and his grandfather. Anthony and his aunt and mom. Christopher and his sister and mother. BK and his family. Martin and his family. Barbara and her family. Tracy and her family....Bessie and her family...Leah and her family...Missy and her family....and my guys and their families....Hell even our attorneys are married to each other....family was a good route but still not perfect.
Laurie knows that most families love their kids and help them so she devised ways to steal from the families of the men and women that she hurt. It wasn't enough to take from strangers...she wants to leave a mark. No wonder nobody likes her. At some point, the people, that she treats like plants, got too big for her to handle, so I grew out of the shade. I'm still waiting for my friends to grow through the gates of her garden.
The world is a much bigger place than Laurie realizes. I've lived in it...she hasn't. What Laurie thinks is impossible, is. Laurie and her brother don't have the room or the gardeners to keep her little rose garden within it's walls...so like plants always do, they are out growing her...they don't need her.
Among the roses Laurie planted other roses that like to choke the life out of our stems...they are called the police. Because they don't like the way we look, act or behave, the police stunted our growth and choked off the garden spot that was once a beautiful and fertile landscape for us to thrive. Laurie didn't like that people looked at us and not her...so her solution, as it always is, is scorched Earth. "Burn the roses that are the prettiest to the ground if they won't grow for me," Laurie and Brian say. "Plant more police if they won't do as I say; teach them a lesson they won't forget"
Laurie tried to close down the places that the roses grew....the places where gay men and women and their friends go...the places where Laurie isn't noticed, overlooked by people that appreciate beauty and difference. Say terrible things about those places and people, take away their beauty, tell people that they are poisonous....whatever it takes to make her rosebud the only one in town. Still nobody noticed her. They walked right past. They wouldn't even stop to smell her...and you wouldn't want to because inside her rosebud was her brother...an Africanized bee that will sting and attack you with all of his friends.
"Look at me, look at me," Laurie would scream and yell, but that too, turned the people away. Since they shunned her, Laurie with her brother thought, "I know what to do, we'll kill the rose that grew outside of the garden that everyone likes so much, that will make them understand how much better I am than him..." So for years and years Laurie and Brian tried to kill off the beautiful rose that was stronger than the two of them combined....and one day...two more roses showed up outside of the gate to join me. "We'll stop her," they said...so the three roses decided to work together to find others that would help us bring back the beauty that is Palm Springs...a decision that made Laurie hate us even more.
Then brilliance struck us, why not talk to the roses that we know aren't like her...the ones she once spoke so horribly about us to...and it worked. They too were tired of Laurie and Brian's stories of evil and anger and jealousy. If we grow in lots of places she can't get to all of us...and that's what we are doing.
Christopher appreciates my beauty in a way that no other person ever has...and now he realizes the sacrifices I made so that he too could grow here in California. She did horrible things to Christopher and locked him away where nobody could find him...kept his mom and sister from helping him and tormented him the entire time while he was in solitary confinement where only she could look at his beauty. He grew along spiritual lines...and knew someday he would return to grow in the garden next to me. Laurie just knew she could hurt him again....
By the time Christopher returned things had changed...he knew that I'd been working...and working...I brought in new gardeners, pesticide for Brian and plucked Laurie from the garden transplanting her far from Palm Springs....you could still smell her, but her thorn just isn't big enough, go figure.
Now it's winter and we are wondering what will happen in the spring...but as my friend Bette would say, "...with the sun's love, in the spring, becomes The Rose".
I love my friends....it's time to grow toward the sunlight.
