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MARCH 6-12, 2019

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THE LEDE

“The rules are simple: the last man standing. There’s not a whole big list of rules that you gotta follow. Basically, you go out there; they throw the flag. Next thing you know, you go into a focus where nothing else exists except you and this other guy. The rule is, just beat him. Beat him down. If you’re cuttin’, bleedin’, he is, too. Last man standing.”

PHOTO BY THEO WELLING

GUIDO DREISEWERD, DEMOLITION DERBY DRIVER, PHOTOGRAPHED NEXT TO HIS CAR AT THE ST. CHARLES COUNTY FAIR ON SATURDAY, JULY 31 riverfronttimes.com

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Third Act

lujawon Davis is hard to forget. Nailed in an FBI-staged bomb plot as the Ferguson uprisings were still rolling, he has only recently been released from federal prison. RFT staff writer Danny Wicentowski profiled Davis in 2019 while the once-promising actor was still locked up. (It’s definitely worth your time to go back and read that one on our website.) For this week’s cover story, Danny reconnects with him and picks up the story as Davis prepares for a third act — now as a free man. It’s a fascinating piece and one that I promise you won’t soon forget. —Doyle Murphy, editor in chief

TABLE OF CONTENTS Publisher Chris Keating Editor in Chief Doyle Murphy

E D I T O R I A L Digital Editor Jaime Lees Interim Managing Editor Daniel Hill Staff Writer Danny Wicentowski Contributors Cheryl Baehr, Eric Berger, Jeannette Cooperman, Mike Fitzgerald, Ryan Krull, Andy Paulissen, Justin Poole, Theo Welling, Ymani Wince Columnists Thomas Chimchards, Ray Hartmann Editorial Interns Zoë Butler, Holden Hindes, Erin McAfee, Jack Probst, Victor Stefanescu A R T

& P R O D U C T I O N Art Director Evan Sult Production Manager Haimanti Germain M U L T I M E D I A A D V E R T I S I N G Advertising Director Colin Bell Account Managers Emily Fear, Jennifer Samuel Multimedia Account Executive Chuck Healy Director of Public Relations Brittany Forrest

COVER All Eyes on Him

C I R C U L A T I O N Circulation Manager Kevin G. Powers

He was the star of an FBI sting operation. Now out of prison, a changed Olajuwon Davis looks back on the “wicked” plot that took him down

E U C L I D M E D I A G R O U P Chief Executive Officer Andrew Zelman Chief Operating Officers Chris Keating, Michael Wagner VP of Digital Services Stacy Volhein www.euclidmediagroup.com N A T I O N A L A D V E R T I S I N G VMG Advertising 1-888-278-9866, vmgadvertising.com

Cover photo by

PAUL NORDMANN

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HARTMANN Faisal Khan’s Well-Aimed Middle Finger St. Louis County’s public health director met the people where they are BY RAY HARTMANN

n normal times, flipping off the citizenry is not regarded as a best practice among public health officials. Certainly, it’s a course of action that has been contemplated thousands of times by beleaguered medical experts accosted by imbeciles while attempting to explain science. And that’s just Dr. Anthony Fauci. In the last month. In Congress. But you don’t see it every day. It’s rare enough that it garnered St. Louis national news attention when the county’s acting health director, Dr. Faisal Khan, gave the middle finger to a crowd of mouth-breathers who were abusing him about mask breathing. That now-famous punctuation mark on a St. Louis County Council meeting dominated by the issue of mask mandates wasn’t on many Bingo cards. County Executive Sam Page’s order to impose the controversial mandates was the hot item of the night, and the council would vote 5-2 to reject it. That was the uninteresting part and resolved nothing. Page’s mandate was just a strong suggestion since it seemed accompanied by no enforcement mechanism. And no one quite knows what the rejection of a non-enforceable thing translates to in real life. But Khan’s piece of the story was both interesting and important. He wrote a letter the next day to council Chairwoman Rita Heard Days complaining about xenophobia, as well as the racial and physical abuse he said he experienced during the meeting and as he left it. His story was aired widely across national media. Khan’s health department had recommended the mask order to

Page, and he was there to defend it. To the surprise of no one, Khan had been booed lustily by an overflow crowd of angry county residents that bore a striking resemblance to a frenzied MAGA crowd. Khan, who became an American citizen in 2013, complained understandably about references at the meeting to his status that certainly created an appearance of xenophobia. And there was this: “Several audience members started mocking my accent while I was presenting to the Council,” Khan wrote. “I heard people doing their impersonation of Apu, a caricature character from The Simpsons television show that mocks people from South Asia such as myself.” Khan said things got worse on the way out. “After my presentation was completed, I tried to leave the chamber but was confronted by several people who were in the aisle,” Khan wrote. “On more than one occasion, I was shoulderbumped and pushed. “As I approached the exit and immediately outside the chambers, I became surrounded by the crowd in close quarters, where members of the crowd yelled at me, calling me a ‘fat brown cunt’ and a ‘brown bastard.’ After being physically assaulted, called racist slurs, and surrounded by an angry mob, I expressed my displeasure by using my middle finger toward an individual who had physically threatened me and called me racist slurs.” Some of the facts regarding what Khan endured are in dispute. Days and Councilman Tim Fitch, who was called out specifically by Khan, both deny that Khan was treated unfairly. They say a reference to Khan not being licensed as a doctor in the U.S. (he is in his native Pakistan) was a subject openly discussed by Khan at an earlier meeting regarding his qualifications for the post and his legal ability to issue health orders. That may be, but the subject had no place being discussed at this emotional hearing, especially not in front of this nasty crowd. And as to other pushback about the accuracy of Khan’s account, Khan should be taken at his word that raging anti-maskers stepped far over the line in hurling racial insults at him.

Masks are a metaphor for selflessness. During a pandemic they should be a symbol of community and national sense of duty, much like rationing was at the outbreak of World War II. In other words, good for Khan that he flipped off some folks. It was a form of what’s commonly described in the public-health world as meeting the people where they are. Khan essentially met rage with rage, which doesn’t happen enough from rational people in the nation’s culture war. The hundreds of emotional residents who showed up mask-less at the council chambers — to the delight of the COVID-19 delta variant — do not speak for most of us who live in the county. It’s a generalization, but a safe one, that most people are rational enough to understand that a mask mandate is an annoyingbut-necessary evil in a resurging and deadly pandemic. There’s no reason for them to show up screaming back at irrational fools in MAGA gear. Even setting aside that the stupefying scene at the council meeting was a potential super-spreader event, there was no upside for the enlightened to confront the unenlightened there. So, whether there were hundreds of loud people at the meeting Tuesday, or thousands, they do not speak for county residents, not even a little bit. Page and Khan are correct. The pandemic is real and worsening again. Wearing a mask in public indoor spaces is a matter of common sense, not the abrogation of some fabricated human right to endanger the health of others.

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The council members who voted against the mandate — including Democrats Days and Councilwoman Shalonda Webb — couched their opposition to what has become Page’s customary disregard for the council’s very existence. Both say people should wear masks, and Fitch doesn’t appear to disagree on that point. So, the hot-button issue was diluted to a process issue. Why didn’t Page approach the council before he approached TV cameras with Mayor Tishaura Jones to announce his action? And what’s the point of having a mandate that’s really a suggestion, especially if it’s going to prompt unhinged people to bay at the moon? Those are reasonable enough objections, but at the end of the day Page and Khan occupy the higher ground. The anti-mask hysteria is itself a virus attacking too many brain cells across America. It can be traced to a certain twiceimpeached cult leader’s psychotic narcissism, but that’s beside the point now. What matters going forward is that reasonable people informed by experts such as Khan need to start fighting back with as much passion as the reality-deniers. A counter-narrative cries out for forceful airing. As was noted from the beginning of the pandemic, masks are a metaphor for selflessness: They protect other people more than the mask-wearers. As such, during a pandemic they should be a symbol of community and national sense of duty, much like rationing was at the outbreak of World War II for the Greatest Generation. It’s time for a forceful, positive emphasis on the life-saving importance of masks, not some primand-proper defensiveness against unhinged rants about tyranny. On this subject, public-health officials need to meet irrational people in their dark place. Flipping them off is a fine place to start. n Ray Hartmann founded the Riverfront Times in 1977. Contact him at rhar tmann1952@gmail.com or catch him on Donnybrook at 7 p.m. on Thursdays on Nine PBS and St. Louis In the Know with Ray Hartmann from 9 to 11 p.m. Monday thru Friday on KTRS (550 AM).

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NEWS

Mask Mandates Return to Divided St. Louis Written by

VICTOR STEFANESCU

harles Wagstaff likes to water the plants lining the patio of Pizza Head on South Grand. It’s not his patio or his restaurant — he just does it. Armed with translucent gloves and a face mask, the 88-year-old tends to the well-kept patio that lies under the second-floor apartment he has called home for 30 years. And he wears those gloves when he goes on the bus, too. “I wear the gloves because everybody touches the overhead rail and the poles — just trying to take care of me and everybody I come in contact with,” Wagstaff says. It’s an ethos that officials urged people to adopt as St. Louis and St. Louis County returned to mask mandates last week in hopes of curbing a new surge of COVID-19 cases. As of July 25, those aged five and older, with some exceptions, are required to wear masks indoors and on public transportation in the city and county. “We came together once to protect each other, and I’m confident we can do so again,” St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said at a news conference the day the mandate took effect. But not everyone sees maskwearing in the same way as Wagstaff. Political opponents of Jones and St. Louis County Executive Sam Page immediately announced plans to fight new mandates. Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a suit against the city and county, claiming that the public health orders were “unacceptable and unconstitutional.” It was another sign of the divide that persists across the region and state, even as outbreaks of the delta variant have turned Missouri

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Protest organizer Meaghan Hagen is against COVID-related mandates. | VICTOR STEFANESCU into one of the country’s COVID hotspots.

n Creve Coeur, Conway Road at North Ballas is usually calm on Sunday nights. The intersection borders Mercy Hospital St. Louis, and aside from night-shift traffic, you might see a few pedestrians from the wealthy St. Louis suburb. But on July 24, the Sunday before the new mandate kicked in, the intersection was blaring. Hundreds of demonstrators lined sidewalks equipped with anti-vaccine posters, Gadsden flags and a stretched banner advertising a COVID conspiracy site. There were chants and recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. The demonstrators were there, according to organizer Meaghan Hagen, to protest Mercy’s upcoming vaccination requirements for all employees. “I cannot believe that in the United States of America, we have people that are having to choose between an experimental medication or their job,” Hagen says. Mercy announced the new requirement as the delta variant of COVID-19 rapidly spread throughout the state, according to a news release on July 7. “It is essential that we take these steps in order to protect

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the health of our co-workers and our patients at Mercy,” Dr. William Sistrunk, a Mercy infectiousdisease specialist, says in the release. “As health care leaders in our communities, it is important we set the standard to prevent the spread of COVID-19.” Hagen says the protest focused on vaccine mandates, and not on the shots themselves. But a quick scan at some of the posters, such as one that reads “Fauci Ouchi,” blurs that focus. It’s a mix of antimandate messages, arguments that claim Christian authority and at least one likening the vaccine requirements to Nazi tactics. Ed Granger, a retired Ballwin resident, says the vaccine is a trial drug — a popular talking point for vaccine skeptics, but one that discounts thousands of clinical trials and testing before the Food and Drug Administration granted Emergency Use Authorization. Granger also claims vaccine mandates go against the constitution. Private employers can mandate vaccines, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Despite Granger’s rhetoric around vaccine mandates, he says if he knew the science surrounding vaccines, he would be more open to the concept of receiving a vaccine. But if people show up at

his front door with a vaccine, he would apparently pull something on them. “Give me the science, give me the informed consent,” Granger says. “And then, let me make my choice. Don’t shove it down my throat. Don’t come to my door with a vax because I’ll say, ‘ ou pull yours out, I’ll pull what I got for you.’” Granger says that same dynamic goes for masks — he would be more willing to wear them if people showed him scientific backing for their efficiency. Perhaps only a person or two on the jam-packed sidewalks were wearing masks. Also, noticeably missing from the Facebook-generated protest, were Mercy employees. I could only find one woman who said she worked for the health system. The woman, who would not give her name, says she works at a Mercy facility in Jefferson County. She says she will move to a different state before complying with a vaccine mandate. “So I’m getting ready to start nursing school, I’ve worked my butt off to get here, and now they’re telling me I have to get an inoculation — it’s not a vaccine — that I have to get an inoculation in order to keep my job,” she says. “So, they’re trying to take over my health and my rights, And that’s not right.” She, like Granger, was wary of the science behind the vaccine. “First of all, it is not FDA-approved,” she says. “There’s not enough research. They really did just put it out quickly.” The woman claims about 50 percent of the hospital workers that drove by honked in support of the protest. Hagen says people under vaccine mandates are terrified, but concedes the protest is unlikely to affect Mercy’s mandate. And that seems to be the case. In an email to the Riverfront Times, a Mercy official writes that the hospital’s position remains unchanged. “While Mercy respects differences of opinion about the COVID-19 vaccine and co-workers’ right to assemble and make their voice heard, Mercy’s stance remains unchanged,” writes Joe Poelker, a senior media relations specialist at Mercy. “We will require all coworkers to be vaccinated by Sept.

30 to protect our co-workers, patients and communities.”

ack on South Grand, Wagstaff was much more optimistic about vaccines than the demonstrators at the protest. “From a very early age, I had the flu shots and pneumonia shots, the diphtheria shots, the smallpox shots, three polio shots,” he says. “I mean, I was brought up [in] the age of inoculation. I think health experts know what they’re talking about. I don’t understand people that just still are in denial.” And Paul Lubbers, a pharmacist at the Medicine Shoppe on South Grand, believes vaccinations are key for St. Louis’s return to normalcy. “We want to get back to a little bit of normalcy here in St. Louis, but obviously, we can’t do that if people are still, you know, going around unvaccinated or not wearing their masks appropriately and spreading it around,” he says. Lubbers says people coming into the store today were compliant with the mandate. He also says if individuals come into the store maskless, the pharmacy can sell masks to them. Ali Mohsef, owner of The Vine Mediterranean Cafe and Market, says his business is complying with the new mandate. “If it is necessary to curb the outbreak, then it’s fine with us,” he says. Across the street at Rooster South Grand, Assistant Manager Teresa Haines says some patrons forget to put their masks back on when going to the bathroom and moving within the brunch spot. Even so, she has not been met with any major opposition to the new mandate. At Rooster, enforcement of the mandate has come from the business itself. Haines says the city did not provide them with information regarding the new mandate, to her knowledge. “Our boss sent us an email this morning,” Haines says. “We told the crew at the beginning of [the] shift that this was happening, but we did not, as far as I know, we did not receive any information from the city, other than what was reported on.” Masks, Wagstaff says, are a way for him to look out for himself. n

Congresswoman Cori Bush and dozens of supporters slept at the U.S. Capitol to fight the end of an eviction ban. | COURTESY CORI BUSH

Rep. Cori Bush Unveils Unhoused ‘Bill of Rights’ Written by

JENNA JONES

ays before the federal eviction moratorium was set to expire, U.S. Representative Cori Bush introduced the Unhoused Bill of Rights to Congress. Announced July 28, Bush is proposing a federal resolution that calls on Congress “to permanently end the unhoused crisis by 2025,” according to a press release from Bush’s office. Bush said the goal is attainable if lawmakers and the country “finally dedicate ourselves to prioritizing those in our communities who have the least.” The resolution would make the crisis a public health emergency and provides a list of more than 30 recommendations to guarantee housing, health care and livable wages for unhoused people. “The unhoused crisis in our country is a public health emergency, and a moral and policy failure at every level of our government,” Bush said in the press release. “As someone who has lived in her car with my two infants while I was working a full-time job, I know the daily trauma and stress that comes with the perpetual instability of not having a safe place to live.”

Bush’s release said the Unhoused Bill of Rights would protect unhoused individuals from the violation of their fundamental civil and human rights. It also proposes raising federal funding to “historic” levels to give state and local governments the resources to provide 24-hour support for unhoused people. Other components of Bush’s proposal include funding for shelters, transitional housing programs, supportive services, public restrooms, hand-washing stations, showers, laundry facilities and water fountains. The bill also would aim to develop “holistic, health-based, and non-carceral solutions” to the crisis. Both federal departments, such as the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and community-led organizations would help contribute to the solutions, according to the release. In addition to the organizations, the release says they will also reach out to unhoused advocates to address both the unhoused and public health crises. Tent Mission STL is one such organization. The organization is a team of volunteers that seeks to help the unhoused through community outreach. They provide “temporary, emergency tent sheltering, guidance, and necessary supplies for the unhoused in St. Louis during the Covid-19 health crisis,” their Facebook page reads. In the release, the organization said the time for the federal government to help local communities supporting the unhoused is long overdue.

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“We live in a country whose approach to homelessness has been criminalization, a state where harm-reduction workers are forced into the shadows because it is still a felony to distribute clean syringes to IV drug users, and a city that doesn’t have a 24/7 emergency walk-up shelter for its residents,” Tent Mission STL said in the press release. The organization also said it’s crucial, when helping unhoused residents, that the government follows “the lead of unhoused folks and local activists in order to mitigate harm and uphold the dignity of the unhoused community.” “Congresswoman Cori Bush’s Unhoused Bill of Rights takes important strides in that direction,” the organization added in their statement. The resolution has support from many St. Louis organizations, such as the Arch City Defenders and Action STL. The bill also boasts support from several national organizations: the National Coalition for the Homeless, National Health Care for the Homeless Council, the National Homeless Law Center and the National Alliance to End Homelessness all are listed as endorsers. Co-sponsors of the bill include big names, such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, NY-14; Rashida Tlaib, MI-13; Jamaal Bowman, NY-16; and Ayanna Pressley, MA-07. The bill has thirteen other co-sponsors. Bush said this is the first federal resolution of its kind. You can read a summary of the bill on Bush’s website, bush.house.gov. n

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Sam Page, County Battle Over Masks Written by

JENNA JONES

t. Louis County Executive Sam Page said at a press conference last week the mask mandate that began Monday is still in place despite a county council vote to rescind it. Page argues that the order does not restrict businesses and therefore does not trigger a newly passed state law that limits the ability of local health departments to issue public health orders. But that’s an issue that will likely be worked out by the courts, he added. Even before Tuesday night’s 5-2 county council vote against the mandate, state Attorney General Eric Schmitt attacked the order. He filed a lawsuit on Monday, claiming twin mandates implemented in the county and city are illegal. Until the lawsuit is resolved, Page said, the new health order — which says everyone five and older, with few exceptions, must mask up in indoor public spaces — will stay in place. That’s sure to anger those who crowded into Tuesday’s council meeting to fight the new mandate. Signs reading “Stop the Tyranny,” “My Body, My Choice,” and “We Will Not Comply” popped up throughout the mostly maskless crowd. Councilman Tim Fitch, R3rd District, led the charge to rescind the public health order. “Sam Page and his supporters have done their best to make this discussion about masks versus no masks — they want to divide us,” Fitch said at the meeting. “Before we have that discussion, we have to settle his blatant violation of state law by issuing this so-called mask mandate.” Councilwoman Lisa Clancy, D-5th District, voted against rescinding the order. She released a statement today agreeing with Page. She said based on what she has heard from legal experts, she does not believe the council’s vote last night has the intended effect of actually rescinding the public health order. “It will, however, confuse the people and businesses of St. Louis County,” Clancy said in a press release. “As Dr. Khan said during his testimony last night, it will also cause more misery and more

St. Louis County health director Dr. Faisal Khan fields questions from the County Council during a contentious July 28 meeting. | SCREEN SHOT death.” Dr. Faisal Khan, director for the St. Louis County Department of Public Health, attended the meeting to answer council questions about the mandate. He pleaded with the council to keep the mandate in place and said the decision was based on rising COVID-19 cases. Khan said it was his duty to inform the council the delta variant is “poised to cause more misery, more death, more disease, an increase in hospitalizations and inflict further damage on the population in the St. Louis region.” “I ask you, I plead with you to set aside your umbrage over process issues and permission sequences and listen to public health, and please stand by this order,” Khan added. Khan’s pleas were met with disinterest by most of the council and jeers from the crowd. Most council members critiqued the way the order was issued rather than the mandate itself. Clancy, in her release, said because of this nuance, she will introduce a mask order at the next council meeting, which is scheduled for August 3. Fitch told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch he’d be “all ears” about a mask mandate if Page and Khan brought it to the council first. Councilwoman Shalonda Webb said in a press release before the meeting that she takes “issue with the County Executive bypassing the St. Louis County Council and unilaterally making decisions for the people I represent with any official that doesn’t represent them.” Webb said she supports masks, but that the real problem is not enough people getting vaccinated. She added she does not approve of a mandate at this time. Councilwoman and chair Rita

Heard Days, D-1st District, expressed frustration to Khan about previously following restrictions and still ending up in a “predicament.” She questioned Khan on what they did wrong. Khan replied that we didn’t tell the virus how to behave. To accommodate the crowd, Days extended the public comment session from one hour to two hours, and more than 40 people got up to speak. In contrast to the council opposing the legality of the order, many commentators opposed the mask itself. The commentators pointed to their small businesses or “civil rights” as the reason for their lack of support. Others took aim at Page in their three-minute time slots, calling him a dictator or

Health Director Alleges Assault, Accused of Lying Written by

DOYLE MURPHY

t. Louis County’s public health director is battling accusations that he lied about being assaulted and called racist slurs last week at a County Council meeting. Dr. Faisal Khan wrote in a letter to council Chair Rita Heard Days that he was surrounded as he left the chamber after pleading for a mask mandate in front of a hostile, maskless crowd. “On more than one occasion, I was shoulder-bumped and pushed,” Khan wrote in the letter. “As I approached the exit and immediately outside the chambers, I became surrounded by the crowd in close quarters, where members of

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tyrant. A select few spouted conspiracy theories about the vaccine and COVID-19 itself. A very small minority in the crowd, including two pastors and state Representative Michael Burton, supported the mandate. Alonzo Adams Jr., a pastor, gave an impassioned speech, revealing that he had lost family members and friends to COVID-19 as he called on the council to keep the mandate in place. “We are dying, we are sick, so I would like something to be done about it,” Adams said. “I’m hoping a lot of people know that if your mask doesn’t work for you, that’s fine, but a lot of people are dying because you choose or choose not to, and that’s your choice.” n the crowd yelled at me, calling me a ‘fat brown cunt’ and a ‘brown bastard.’” He said he lost his composure after the confrontations and flipped off his antagonizers as he left. But surveillance video obtained by KMOV shows Khan walking past a crowd outside the chambers, seemingly without a physical confrontation. There is no sound in the video. Another video filmed by KSDK shows his walk up the aisle inside the chambers, and again there doesn’t seem to be any shoving. There is a brief gap between the two videos, and Khan has continued to insist that the events he described in the letter are accurate. “I completely stand by my assertions,” he said in an interview on Monday on St. Louis on the Air after host Sarah Fenske asked about the footage. “One segment of one video, or whatever it may be, does not capture my experience that evening.” In yet another video, shot from the audience and posted by activist Umar Lee, Khan is walking away from the lectern when someone calls out something that

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STL Police Chief Resigns with $290K Payout Written by

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

fter just fifteen months on the job, St. Louis County police chief Mary Barton is retiring, police announced on Friday. Barton said in a news release it had been a “privilege to serve” as chief and that she “could not be prouder of the men and women of this Department.” The chief’s exit comes after a rocky tenure in which the department wrestled with allegations of racism — and with Barton herself accusing the department of discrimination. Citing unnamed sources familiar with the situation, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Barton filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last week. While the specifics of her complaint aren’t known, submitting such a document is the first step in the process of filing a formal lawsuit alleging employment discrimination. But it appears that the matter won’t go that far. Instead, Barton and the county Board of Police Commissioners arrived at a $290,000 settlement. She will step down at some point after taking a leave of absence on Sunday. Barton’s removal has been months in the making, with the chief being the subject of the board’s criticism first in January and then in June, according to a copy of the settlement obtained by the Post-Dispatch.

Appointed in May 2020 as the department’s first female police chief, Barton entered the role of chief with more than 40 years of experience on the force. She stumbled through a series of controversies, including denying the existence of systemic racism in the department and, later, the release of an audio recording featuring Barton’s brother-in-law, a 911 dispatcher with the county, using the nword on a police radio. In April, Barton was subsequently the subject of two symbolic “no confidence” votes in the St. Louis County Council and the Ethical Society of Police. In her statement, Barton said, “Our community members should know the officers of the St. Louis County Police Department will continue to serve our residents in the most professional way, positively impacting lives through their genuine commitment to public service.” n

starts with an f-word. It’s hard to hear the last bit, but the video’s description says it was a racist slur. The reaction of those in the crowd indicated it was at least something bad, and Days followed up by warning that the council could have people removed. At a council committee hearing on Monday, police from the county and Clayton who worked the meeting said they did not hear any racial slurs as Khan left and did not see anyone physically confront him, although one security officer told the committee people jeered Khan as he passed. One woman followed them to the elevator and told Khan he was rude for flipping them off, the officer said. The contrasting accusations surrounding Khan’s exit have quickly overshadowed the issues he came to the council meeting to discuss. With the surge of the delta variant in Missouri, the county and city had reimposed an indoor mask mandate. Khan told the council more misery and death would follow if precautions weren’t taken now to slow the spread while the county works to get

more people vaccinated. Dozens of maskless opponents filled the audience and took turns at the public microphone to argue against the masks, including those who described County Executive Sam Page as a dictator, claimed Vitamin D was the real solution and a woman who encouraged the audience to scream, “We will not comply!” The council ultimately voted 5-2 against the mandate, although Page has since said the council lacks the authority and the issue would likely be resolved by the courts. On Monday, political opponents of Page and those fighting efforts to compel compliance safety measures to stop the COVID surge gleefully circulated videos of Khan exiting the chambers, claiming the footage proves he lied. In the meantime, the city has asked anyone who was at last week’s council meeting to quarantine after the discovery that at least one of those who attended has tested positive for the virus. Missouri remains one of the country’s hot spots for the delta variant. n

Chief Mary Barton is heading out — with a fat settlement. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI

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THE BIG MAD POSTURES OVER PEOPLE Workhouse 2.0, an act of “love” and COVID’s victory in the county Compiled by

DANIEL HILL

elcome back to the Big Mad, the RFT’s weekly roundup of righteous rage! Because we know your time is short and your anger is hot: THE “LOVE AMERICA” ACT: U.S. Senator Josh Hawley’s latest move to bolster his insurrectionist-coddling national political career is the Love America Act, a proposed piece of legislation targeting “critical race theory” that would ban federal funding to any school that teaches that the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States “is a product of white supremacy or racism.” However, the bill would mandate that students actually, you know, read the documents, which is just a bad idea if you’re trying to construct a Hawley-approved fantasy history of America. Take the Constitution, a document that echoes the society of its slaveholding founders — complete with “compromises” that protected slavery as a political and economic force for generations — but also laying out the unmet ideals of equality and freedom on which they hoped to build a nation. In 1854, another Republican politician with a critical eye for history noted that the Constitution had attempted to “hide” slavery until a time when it could be fully abolished, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.” Seven years after writing those words, President Abraham Lincoln led his country to a bloody war to ensure that, someday, loving America could mean something else than white supremacy and racism. That fight is ongoing. That’s what loving America looks like. NAME GAME: Welcome to the CJC Annex! Strangely, we had never heard of it until it popped up in one of the mayor’s press releases. “Annex” sounds nice, like a little coffee shop or one of those co-working spaces from pre-COVID times. So what is this CJC? Well, this is weird: It seems to stand for City Justice Center, the name of one of St. Louis’s jails. Actually, the only jail, because the city says it finally closed that hellhole the Workhouse, except for the off chance of needing it for CJC overflow. Anyway, probably just a

strange coincidence. Whoa, here’s another weird part. This CJC Annex is on the “campus” of the Workhouse, the city says. And the city moved about 140 detainees there over the weekend while it tries to fix those pesky non-locking locks at CJC. Now hold on, it seems the annex is actually just part of the Workhouse? There’s no coffee bar? No co-working space? Man, this is the dumbest rebranding ever. POWER TRIP AND FALL: It would have been enraging enough if the vote to rescind mask mandates in St. Louis County had been the only newsworthy thing to come out of last week’s County Council meeting, but since we live in hell now, there were several added layers of absurdity heaped onto the whole affair. There’s the fact Mark “Get Off My Lawn” McCloskey deemed it necessary to waddle into the affairs of the county and show his smug stupid face at the event, despite the fact he famously lives in the city. (Cynics might suggest that he’s only trying to glom onto whatever culture-war flashpoint he possibly can in order to trick the people into supporting his utterly vacuous run for public office, and yes, that’s also what we’re suggesting.) Then there was the treatment of county health chief Dr. Faisal Khan. Euphoric anti-maskers are pretty sure they now have unshakeable gotcha video evidence that he lied about being “subjected to the racist, xenophobic and threatening behavior” of the COVID-welcoming audience. And that is super convenient if you’re looking to distract from the sound argument that the county has a responsibility to take at least mild measures to slow a deadly virus. Still, we’re betting he didn’t express his displeasure by extending his middle finger for no reason at all. To top it off, the council’s decision to strike down the mandate wasn’t even based on public health or protecting constituents, but rather on power and proper procedure. That two Democrats would join the Republicans in voting down the measure simply because County Executive Sam Page didn’t consult with them ahead of time reeks of a power-tripping tantrum, during a time when hospitals across the state are literally filling to capacity as the delta variant surges so hard in this state that it’s made us international news. Where are the fucking adults? Why must we insist on making mistake after endless mistake on this issue, defaulting toward dysfunction at every turn? The fact that COVID itself decided to make an appearance at the maskless affair should surprise absolutely no one, but what’s most maddening is that, even if that results in a wave of sickness through those who attended, it seems clear that no one who was there will learn a damn thing. They clearly haven’t yet — why start now? n

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RIVERFRONT TIMES

He was the star of an FBI sting operation. Now out of prison, a changed Olajuwon Davis looks back on the “wicked” plot that took him down BY DAN N Y WICENTOW SKI

rom the roof of his downtown apartment building, Olajuwon Davis is surrounded by his past. In front of him curves the Gateway Arch, which was once widely reported to be among his potential bombing targets before his arrest in an FBI sting operation in 2014. To his right looms the dome of the federal courthouse where, several months later, he pleaded guilty to weapons and explosives charges. More than six years have passed since that hearing, and Davis is out of prison. The former member of the New Black Panther Party and an FBI-cited example of “Black Identity Extremism” has returned to St. Louis — but not as he was before, as a militant, activist or would-be rebel trying to live outside the legal system. Today, Davis says he only wants to be himself. He’d like to return to what was once a promising acting career, to leave his past behind and to again feel the lights of a camera, the eyes of an audience following him onstage. But Davis can’t escape the events that changed him. In his first postprison interview, he describes the impact of his unwitting role as a leading man in an FBI sting operation as “a mind-shaking experience.” Davis was arrested on November 21, 2014 — three days before the announcement of a grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown. The U.S. Attorney’s Office summarized the allegations against Davis in a press release: “Planning and conspiring to ignite explosive devices during the Ferguson protests.” The accusations shocked those who

had only known him as a gifted activist and rising young actor. Still, in some ways, he now sees his imprisonment as a blessing. “It gave me an opportunity to shed a lot of the beliefs that I had taken on,” he says. “I was young and on fire — looking for something to empower me, be a part of, identify with. All of that has changed greatly for me. It took for me to be isolated, and for me to go through what I went through, in order to realize that.” Davis’ unusual path, from the Ferguson protests to federal prison, was extensively detailed in a Riverfront Times cover story in August 2019. Based on prison interviews with Davis, the story chronicled how he arrived at the growing protest against the police shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 — and how the sight of the bloodstained pavement shook him to the core, and made him wonder, “Am I next?” Days later, on August 14, police forces temporarily pulled back from the main area of the demonstrations near a burned QuikTrip in Ferguson. In response, a stretch of West Florissant Avenue became a rolling, protester-controlled parade of blasting music, honking car horns and dancing Continued on pg 19

Olajuwon Davis has a new place to live and a new life to lead. | ERIN MCAFEE 16

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ALL EYES ON HIM Continued from pg 16

crowds. “It was beautiful, incredible,” Davis says, reflecting on that day’s heady combination of protests and celebration. That same day, the RFT photographed Davis and his fellow Black Panther members peacefully directing traffic. At one point, the black-clad group even acted as a buffer for police officers as they escorted emergency workers to an injured protester who had fallen from a vehicle. At the time, Davis’ life was at a crossroads. He had recently completed acting work for a featurelength independent film, his first major role. But outside the set, he had grown increasingly attached to a web of beliefs that injected conspiracy logic into his worldview. He adopted the quasi-legal language of the “sovereign” citizen movement and identified as an “aboriginal Moor.” The beliefs alienated him from his family and supporters. Soon after, though, he made new friends. At the protests, he connected with two men who quickly became solid members of the ew Black Panther Party — a loosely organized Black power movement that borrows the name and look of the original group from the 19 0s. The St. Louis chapter contained a handful of active members, including Davis. He had appointed himself the group’s “Minister of Justice and Law.” The new recruits were enthusiastic about supporting the struggle. They were also confidential informants working for the FBI. Davis trusted them completely, and, with their guidance, he would ultimately attempt to purchase what he thought was a pipe bomb — after which Davis was immediately swarmed by federal law enforcement. “I remember seeing myself on the news when I was in county jail, maybe another day or so after being arrested,” Davis says. “They had me on Channel 5 news, that I was going to blow up the Arch.” Davis maintains that he intended to buy the explosives as a middleman and never considered using the pipe bombs to attack a landmark or target a protest. But that’s what the post-arrest head-

lines blared — with the reports citing “unnamed law enforcement sources” with inside information about the foiled attempt at domestic terrorism. “I remember just feeling so defeated,” Davis says now. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, my life is over.’” n early January 201 , a new student walked into a prison classroom in a federal corrections facility in Milan, Michigan. It was the semester’s third theater workshop for the instructor, Sergio Barrera, a graduate student with the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project. Each week, Barrera spent 90 minutes leading some twenty inmates in improvised theater scenes and preparations for the semester’s performances. It was Davis’ mustache that caught Barrera’s attention first. Wide as his face and styled to points, Davis’ facial hair wasn’t the only thing that set him apart from the other inmates.

launch into song from a “stage” made from nothing but a few chairs pushed next to the wall in a multi-tiered cellblock. “I just remember him standing there, and everybody just stepping aside,” Barrera says. “He was in the center of that open space, and all eyes were on him.” Looking back on what he knows about Davis’ past, Barrera wonders if those same talents made him the perfect casting choice to star in the FBI’s stage-managed bomb plot. “He’s essentially being targeted for being good at who he is, right? These are qualities that have potential to move the masses,” Barrera points out. “He’s so likable, so relatable, and there’s charisma behind it. For an intelligence agency, maybe these are the types of people that you fear — because you don’t know how much power they hold.” Perhaps. Ron Himes has a slightly different theory. The founder of St. Louis’ Black Rep, Himes had di-

“He’s so likable, so relatable, and there’s charisma behind it. For an intelligence agency, maybe these are the types of people that you fear — because you don’t know how much power they hold.” “One of the great things that I appreciated from him was his vulnerability,” Barrera recalls. “The fact that he was willing to just display his authentic self in front of men he knew nothing about.” Davis stayed in Barrera’s theater classes through two semesters. As an instructor, the program barred Barrera from asking his students about the reason for their incarceration. But while on a long drive to prison one week, Barrera says one of the other college-aged instructors caved to curiosity and Googled Davis’ name. Barrera says he was initially frightened by the results. The reports described a violent bombing campaign thwarted by the FBI. Over time, however, Barrera says he came to see something different in Davis, a presence the young actor used to command attention, deliver a monologue or

rected a fifteen-year-old Davis in a 200 stage production of the antiApartheid musical Sarafina. He had followed the young actor’s career from then on — until it was halted by Davis’ other endeavors. “He was serious and committed to the work,” Himes recalls of Davis’ role in the musical. “It was shock and disbelief for me when he was arrested. one of that seemed to fit the character of the person that I knew. one of it seemed to be feasible.” Himes lived through the civil rights era of the 19 0s. He had experienced the rise and fall of the original Black Panthers, their ranks cut away by FBI infiltration. In these movements for civil rights, Himes reflects, it always seems to be the young, the most idealistic, who pay the steepest price.

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“This has been a continuous fight since the time Black people landed in America,” he says. “Each generation of young people picks up the mantle, and when you are in that phase of life, in that phase of the movement, what you see is the need to be totally committed to effecting a change. ou believe there are righteous people who believe like you believe.” And in that moment, Himes cautions, “that has the capacity to make you vulnerable to manipulation.” That’s what the FBI was looking for, Himes concludes. “They needed to find a pawn,” he says. “They needed to find someone that they could manipulate. And unfortunately, in this instance, it was Olajuwon.”

n early February 2020, just a few days before his release from federal prison, Davis says he was summoned to a meeting with an investigator from the FBI. He was already looking forward to a different life, reconnecting with his family and friends, maybe even returning to the acting career he had left behind. But the FBI wanted to talk first. It was a kind of exit interview. As a convicted domestic terrorist, Davis had spent most of the last decade assuming everything he did, said and wrote was being monitored and logged somewhere. The FBI, he says now, “wanted to feel me out, to check my temperature.” “We had a pretty good discussion,” he says of the meeting with the agent. “We talked about psychology, the tactics they use to get me on.” At one point, he distinctly remembers the agent remarking that the bureau was interested in checking in on him one last time, and then adding, “We just want to make sure you’re not going to get out and start a revolution.” While Davis says he was flattered — “I was really kind of shocked at how much they think of me” — it was a later question that truly caught him off guard: The agent had turned the interview around, asking for Davis’ advice: “What could we have done to prevent you from going down this path of violence?” Davis says he challenged the question. After all, weeks before his arrest in 201 , the FBI’s confidential informants, both with felonies on their records, had given Davis the cash to purchase several

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Olujawon Davis is trying to return to acting after his once-promising career was interrupted. | BOBBY HERRERA

ALL EYES ON HIM Continued from pg 19

pistols on their behalf — a federal crime of “straw buying” in its own right. The FBI could have arrested him at any time after that, long before he was approached with an opportunity to buy explosives. “But they didn’t do that, they continued to bring me along, until I broke,” Davis says now. “I told him that. My exact words were, ‘You were wicked for that.’ You could have stopped all of it, there wouldn’t have been terrorism; there wouldn’t have been bomb charges. I wouldn’t have been in prison all this time. But you all did that.” Davis’ experience as the target of an FBI sting operation isn’t an outlier. An analysis of convictions obtained through FBI sting operations between 2001 and 2011 suggests that a suspected target’s total inability to supply, plan or even generate a plausible idea to carry out an attack is immaterial: In 150 sting operations evaluated

by journalist and researcher Trevor Aaronson, he found that an FBI informant “provided all necessary weapons, money and transportation” in a third of all cases. That appears to be the case with Davis, who was convicted alongside a second New Black Panther member named Brandon Baldwin. Both men pleaded guilty to identical sets of charges in 2015, but the evidence included in their pleas shows no scenes of detailed bomb planning or specific intent for destruction — and no mention of a plot to bomb the Arch. In documents filed with the court, federal prosecutors disclosed that the FBI’s informants had paid for the illegal purchases of firearms. But in previous interviews with the RFT, Davis and other family members say that the official account fails to show the lengths to which the informants won not only Davis’ trust, but his financial dependence: At a time when he was unemployed and isolated by his fringe beliefs, Davis says the informants gave him an apartment, paid his rent and even supplied living expenses

and transportation for his pregnant wife. And in return for that loyalty, he had followed them on a path to becoming a domestic terrorist. Davis doesn’t dispute his role in the weapons and explosives purchases. Evidence included in the pleas depicts him as enthusiastic about obtaining the bombs. He is quoted saying that he needed the pipe bombs “ASAP,” and, even more overtly, that he had “put it out there that he was a terrorist.” Meanwhile, Baldwin, the second Black Panther, was quoted in his plea as floating an idea to “knock a cop… an important cop” and naming then-Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson. In all of this evidence, however, it’s not clear where the bomb “plot” became more than just a story that two guys told each other within recording-range of FBI microphones. In a 2015 interview before Davis’ sentencing, thenU.S. Attorney Richard Callahan denounced the anonymous “law enforcement sources” who had leaked the list of supposed targets to news outlets.

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Callahan’s explanation at the time was telling: He explained that he refused to publicly discuss details on the targets selected by Davis and Baldwin — not because of security concerns, but, Callahan said, because they were “totally unrealistic” and to talk about them at all would “almost inaccurately sensationalize these charges.” This was the wicked twist in logic beneath the FBI’s sting operation, which had held the hands of its two actual targets from beginning to end: On one side, the supposed bomb targets were too sensational to treat credibly. On the other, as Callahan would later tout in a press release after the guilty pleas, the arrests of Davis and Baldwin had “undoubtedly saved lives.” As for Davis, he carried the reputation as a would-be Archbomber through prison. In his first years, he says, he was “very standoffish” around new acquaintances, especially “if they would hint at any type of criminal activity, or breaking the rules.” He couldn’t help but wonder, “Damn, did the FBI send them at me, too?” n

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CAFE

[REVIEW]

Rising and Shining Coma Coffee delivers a delightful dining experience in its sophisticated new home Written by

CHERYL BAEHR Coma Coffee Roasters 1034 South Brentwood Boulevard, Richmond Heights; 314-250-1042. Temporarily 7 a.m.-4 p.m. with evening hours coming soon

hen Macy Holtzman returned home to St. Louis from living in Chicago, she was greeted with a big request. Not only had her family — who had never been in the hospitality business — decided to open a coffee shop: They wanted her to help run it. To say she was taken aback is an understatement. As she tells it, she actively tried to talk every single person out of the move. It just seemed so out of left field growing up, coffee in the Holtzman household was ground grocerystore brand, heavily doctored with cream and sugar, and seen as a way to simply power through the day. As she got older, Holtzman’s views remained consistent with that approach, so it seemed funny that she and her family would task themselves with running a place dedicated to the brewed beverage. However, in some ways, the idea made perfect sense. As owners of the University Tower high-rise in Richmond Heights, Holtzman’s family felt the building needed a coffee shop. They had the space to do so on the ground floor, and they felt that Holtzman and her brother Corbin, who each have a background in business, would be the perfect people to make their vision happen. After talking it out — and with a little bit of coaxing — Holtzman relented and took the lead in opening Coma Coffee Roasters five years ago. It didn’t take long for her to realize she had a passion for both coffee and the restaurant business

Coma Coffee Roasters has expanded with a new space and happy hour-friendly offerings, such as outstanding chicken and waffles (lower left). | MABEL SUEN in general. Even before the shop served its first latte, she was opening her eyes to a world of coffee that she didn’t know existed, and the better versed she got, the more she wanted to learn. That passion also extended into food service and hospitality in general. In no time, Holtzman found herself doing much more than running a coffee shop she was passionately giving St. Louisans a superior coffee and food experience. For nearly five years, Holtzman, who handles the day-to-day operations, and her brother built Coma into a shop and roastery that has become known for some of the city’s best coffee, even as the place tends to fly a bit under the radar (at least to those not in the University Tower complex and immediate surrounding area) compared to other top-tier coffee spots around town. Holtzman admits that there was an initial challenge in getting people to understand that Coma is more than an office building coffee shop, and when you drive up, you can see why there would be that impres-

sion. The shop sits on the ground floor, just off the lobby, of a sleek, modern high-rise building filled with attorneys and medical offices. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary in downtown Chicago, but without the foot traffic of a big city business district, you have to know it’s there and seek it out. And people have been doing just that — so much so that Holtzman saw an opportunity to expand to attract an even wider audience when the space across the hall became available. The former occupant, Blue Sky Tower Grill, had closed, and Holtzman seized upon the chance to move into its bigger digs and take advantage of its much larger and better-equipped kitchen. With that extra space also came an opportunity to expand Coma’s menu beyond simple daytime fare. With Blue Sky gone, the building and surrounding area had lost its natural happy hour spot. Holtzman wanted to provide that, but she knew that Coma would need to be much more than a coffee shop to do so. With that in mind, she hired a chef, brought

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on a beverage director and took her next big leap in the hospitality business: expanding Coma’s identity from simply a daytime coffee spot to an evening meeting place. The gorgeous, modern space that Coma has now occupied for the past three months begs for that sort of concept. The soaring, twostory room looks like the sort of restaurant you’d find in a modern art museum. Floor-to-ceiling glass encloses the room on two sides, an aesthetic that carries over to the half-wall of glass that serves as the railing for the upstairs loft area. The place does not feel sterile, though. The coffee bar, which sits in the middle of the first level, takes up much of that floor’s real estate and provides a cool, bustling hub filled with plants, pastries and other warm touches. In expanding to include evening service (temporarily on hold at press time due to a staffing shortage), Coma has not lost its fundamental identity. Daytime offerings remain solid, such as the Brussels sprouts hash, an outstanding dish of the roasted and balsamic-dressed

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HELP WANTED ST. LOUIS AND SURROUNDING AREAS

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COMA COFFEE Continued from pg 23

vegetables tossed with crispy bacon crumbles and topped with two sunny-side-up eggs and chives. The flavors — earth, salt, savory, sweet — are in perfect harmony. That balance is also present on the breakfast sandwich. Unfussy yet interesting, the dish features two pieces of griddled and sea saltdusted Companion white bread filled with a fried egg, bacon, aged cheddar and a drizzle of honey that ties everything together. Blackberry and burrata toast is another dazzling daytime option. A thickslice of toasted sourdough is topped with the luscious cheese, whole blackberries and microgreens, then dressed with honey, balsamic and black pepper. It’s avocado toast’s glamorous Italian cousin. If its wonderful daytime fare sets a bar, Coma’s new evening offerings hit it — and then some. The Brussels sprouts that were so delicious on the breakfast menu are also excellent when dressed for dinner. Here, the vegetables are fried to a crisp, then glazed in a sweet and spicy Asian barbecue sauce the effect is similar to hot braised chicken, only vegetarian.

Daytime kitchen manager Miranda Mooney. | MABEL SUEN Chicken and wa es is another dish that flawlessly bridges the day and evening concepts. Rather than simply chicken tenders placed atop wa es, Coma integrates the flavors. The seasoning on the thick strips of chicken tastes similar to that in the waffles both have a whisper of warm spice that is brought out by the hot honey and cinnamon butter that garnishes the dish.

Cauliflower tempura is shockingly delicious. Perhaps the menu’s sleeper best offering, the battered vegetables have a crisp, golden exterior and perfectly cooked interior. However, the unexpected addition of a very light honey garlic glaze makes them transcendent. The fried pickles are another tasty snack item. Bread and butter pickles are covered in mildly spiced breading, giving them a warm

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heat that is mitigated by a side of dill-forward ranch dressing. A simple steak salad, dressed with onions, tomatoes, blue cheese crumbles and dressing, is noteworthy thanks to the perfectlycooked ribeye. The medium-rare steak, glazed with balsamic, then sliced and served atop the greens and accoutrements, would be at home on a steakhouse’s table. Even more impressive is Coma’s goat cheese burger, a smashed patty topped with so much of the tangy cheese it oozes out from every side of the bun like a glorious mess. Sun-dried tomato aioli mixes with the cheese to form a mouthwatering concoction that could be bottled and sold like they do their cold brew. That you can have such a magnificent burger, then wash it down with a mind-blowingly delicious pistachio latte for dessert is the beauty of Coma — and a testament to how, like Holtzman, sometimes you need to be pushed down a path to know it’s where you were meant to be all along.

Coma Coffee Roasters Burrata and blackberry toast ......................$9 Cauliflower tempura ................................... $9 Goat cheese burger .................................. $14 •Carryout, curbside and dine-in

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SHORT ORDERS

[ S T. L O U I S S TA N D A R D S ]

Go Nuts Mound City Shelled Nut Company has thrived in St. Louis for nearly 40 years Written by

CHERYL BAEHR

yron Smyrniotis will never forget the sight he saw when he first peeked through the windows of Mound City Shelled Nut Company’s thenstorefront on Delmar Boulevard. It was 1973, and he was casually checking out the business after hearing from the former owner’s nephew that it was for sale. What he saw didn’t do much to convince him to take the leap. “It was empty except for a one hundred pound bag of peanuts,” Smyrniotis recalls. “That’s all that was left in the entire store.” Still, Smyrniotis felt like he was the person to turn the business around. Armed with an entrepreneurial spirit and a penchant for tackling challenges, he decided to go all-in. “I had no experience and didn’t know anything about anything, but I took out a second mortgage on my house and bought the business,” he says. At the time, Smyrniotis was not the obvious choice to take over Mound City, the storied nut company that had been in business since 1917. An engineer by trade, he had a good job with Emerson Electric, working for their electric and space division. Though he had every intention of continuing on in that role, he was looking for an investment opportunity and was curious whether that might be Mound City after learning that the founder, Ben Kessel, had passed away. Kessel’s widow was looking to sell the business, and Smyrniotis figured he’d fix it up, sell it and move on to his next investment. It didn’t go that smoothly. “I was a little frustrated for a minute,” Smyrniotis says. “There was no one there to help me, and [Kessel’s] wife didn’t know any-

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Mound City Shelled Nut Company was little more than a shell when it was last sold in the 1970s. Now, it’s going strong. | ANDY PAULISSEN thing about the business. I found some records, called some of the people he was buying from and started placing orders within about four or five days. They were supposed to start coming in the third week of November, but there was a national truck strike that delayed everything. We didn’t get our first shipment — pecans — until December. I packaged them up and our entire retail store was pecans. People came in and asked if I was going out of business. I told them, no, we are going into business.” As Smyrniotis got his feet underneath him, he realized that owning and operating Mound City was going to be more than a side hustle. He asked for time off from Emerson Electric to focus on his business but eventually had to leave that job behind. Aided by some of Mound City’s former employees who had come back to work for him, he was able to grow the business and start franchising it. The first one was off Ballas Road, followed by locations in the Central West End and Columbia, Missouri, and they enjoyed a good amount of success. However, Smyrniotis did not like the franchise arrangement because he did not have as much control over the processes and brand as he wanted. He even-

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Byron Smyrniotis (center) with his Missouri City Shelled Nut Company crew. | ANDY PAULISSEN tually terminated those agreements and focused on opening his own company stores and seasonal locations, which had a roughly fifteen-year run. During that time, Mound City developed a reputation as much for its chocolate-covered nuts as its plain shelled ones. Smyrniotis credits his grandfather with this development. A Greek immigrant who came to the United States with a friend who was a chocolatier, the elder Smyrniotis had restaurants and a candy shop on

South Grand called Busy Bee for years. When Smyrniotis bought Mound City, his grandfather told him that he had to also have chocolates, and began making them for the business. His grandfather’s technique, coupled with ultrafresh nuts, dazzled his customers. “The advantage we have is that we process all the nuts we cover, whereas most of the chocolate guys buy theirs in cans,” Smyrniotis says. “We roast and chocolate cover and always use pure chocolate, while others use thinners

Mac’s Local Eats is still open at Bluewood Brewing Company for now. | MABEL SUEN Chocolate-covered offerings have become a customer favorite. | ANDY PAULISSEN [BURGERS]

Mac’s Local Eats Isn’t Closing After All Written by

CHERYL BAEHR

R The business has been a University City mainstay for decades. | ANDY PAULISSEN and chemicals in theirs.” However, Smyrniotis insists that you do not need to cover his products in chocolate to enjoy them. As he explains, Mound City’s nuts are superior because he buys them directly from the growers, not from a distributor. This prevents the nuts from sitting in a vacuumsealed can in a warehouse for months, thereby resulting in a fresher product. He also believes in the importance of roasting the nuts to the point where they will achieve their peak flavor. While other nut companies, including the large brands, roast to the minimum level to do this quicker and ultimately cheaper, he insists on taking his time. “It takes longer to really roast them the way they should be,” Smyrniotis says. “If you taste them roasted properly, the flavor is so much better and different than what you buy out of a can. There is just no comparison.”

Though he’s been at it for nearly 40 years — and never intended to have that long of a run — Smyrniotis has no plans to change anything at Mound City for the foreseeable future. He jokes that he spent years intending to sell it, but there was always one more thing he felt he needed to do. Eventually, he realized he wasn’t going anywhere else. Once he got there, he knew there was nowhere else he should be. “I realized that the great thing about a small business is you can make changes with the snap of a finger, and I really liked that,” Smyrniotis says. “When I was in corporate America it took an act of Congress to make change, but here, if I want to do something, I do it. I’m very spontaneous, so I like that. Still, we haven’t made drastic changes — just a bit of fine-tuning here and there. We’re still doing our thing day by day by day.” n

eversing an announcement from last week, Mac’s Local Eats (1821 Cherokee Street, 314-3937713) will continue operating inside of Bluewood Brewing Company. The burger outfit will remain open inside of the brewery Wednesday through Sunday for the foreseeable future. The news, announced via Mac’s Local Eats’ social media pages, is a dramatic about-face in a saga involving the food counter and the brewery that began last Wednesday. That afternoon, Bluewood announced over social media that the wildly popular burger spot would “no longer be operating out of Bluewood Brewing after August 3, 2021.” No reason was given for the decision. Reached by the RFT, Bluewood confirmed the news but declined to comment. According to its recent post announcing its continued service out of Bluewood, Mac’s Local Eats learned of the supposed closure via social media and has since confirmed its business relationship with the brewery. “There have been a lot of questions over the last few days about our plans for the future. Our intention has always been to honor the terms of our lease so we will continue to operate inside of Bluewood Brewing from Wednesday through Sunday for the foreseeable future, regardless of their operating hours.”

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The post also notes Mac’s intent to find a larger location as it continues to grow. Reached for comment about these latest developments by the RFT, both Mac’s Local Eats owner Chris McKenzie and a representative from Bluewood Brewing Company declined to comment further than what their social media posts state. Mac’s Local Eats has been serving out of Bluewood Brewing Company since September of 2019. Prior to that, the beloved burger brand developed a robust following as a food window inside of Tamm Avenue Bar, in which it operated from 2017 until 2019. You can read the entire statement from Mac’s Local Eats below. Hi Mac’s Local Eats Fam, There have been quite a few questions over the last few days about our plans for the future. Our intention has always been to honor the terms of our lease so we will continue to operate inside of Bluewood Brewing Company from Wednesday through Sunday for the foreseeable future, regardless of their operating hours. We are actively looking for a larger location as we continue to grow, but we do not plan to cease operations after August 3rd. We never stated that was the case. In all honesty, we read the announcement along with all of you on social media. We will continue to serve our food so that we can take care of our Mac’s Local Eats team of 20 employees. This is our #1 priority. They are the reason that we pivoted to open our drivethru lane during the pandemic. They are the reason that we want to continue to operate in our current kitchen at Bluewood Brewing. Your continued support means the world to us, and we’ve got your burgers ready. n

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NEWS

St. Ann’s newly opened Heya dispensary was carrying the wildly popular strain, I decided it was time to see what my forehead might have to say. Heya’s version of the strain clocks in at 17.3 percent THC, and cost me $73.36 for an eighth after tax. When I opened the bag I was surprised to find that nearly all the weight came in the form of one big bud, about the length of one of my fingers, ranging in col-

or from forest green to purple to light green, especially in the center, with orange hairs and a fine coating of resin throughout. On breakup it gave off a sweet, citrusy smell with peppery and fuellike notes, consistent with the fact that caryophyllene, limonene and linalool are the strain’s dominant terpenes. On inhale that fruity and sweet candy taste that gives it its name was prevalent, almost like black licorice but without the

bitterness. It’s a pleasant and flavorful smoke. As for effects, let this be a warning to you: This is definitely a “creeper” strain. I did not notice much in the way of effects immediately, but felt myself slowly soaring up and up and up over the course of about twenty minutes, until I was looking down from above like I was on a hot-air balloon ride. The high leans a bit on the sativa side, but is pretty balanced overall — I was happy and chatty, didn’t feel debilitated or couch-locked, and it was a relaxing high, but not so much so that I felt particularly tired. At the same time, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a good strain for getting shit done, simply owing to the fact I was so incredibly stoned that my brains were reduced to scrambled eggs. It also didn’t strike me as particularly good for pain, but to be fair that’s not what it’s known for. It’s known, apparently, for sparking conversations with one’s own forehead. On that front, it delivered — but that was a personal conversation that just isn’t fit for print. ou’ll just have to pick some Runtz up and start chatting with your own dome if you want a glimpse into what’s on the minds of the forehead community these days. You won’t be disappointed. n

[MODERN LIFE]

to receiving the product — isn’t quite as simple as firing up a food delivery app and scrolling through a menu from your favorite Chinese restaurant. For one thing, as Jane general manager Jordan Everding explains, your delivery driver isn’t some stranger they’ve hired through an app. Instead, the entire process, from product to driver to vehicle, is controlled by the local dispensary. Doobie is just the “delivery partner,” Everding says. What Doobie does offer is the online system that unites Jane’s cannabis menu with delivery-tracking software and payment processing. It’s here that things get a little more complicated. First, customers are required to create an account with Hypur, a third-party payment processor that links to your checking account — which charges the full amount of your order at checkout. Everding says this system meets Missouri’s legal requirement that all cannabis purchases are paid for on-site. It means that the entire delivery is effectively cashless. For some customers, these steps may pose a digital barrier, and Everding acknowledges that customers could be

wary of linking a bank account or setting up a Hypur PIN number just to get a delivery. But at least for now, this is the only avenue for legal cannabis delivery in St. Louis. (Everding also notes that while the current Doobie order form appears to feature an alternative form of payment, the field listed as “Pay by phone” actually connects customers with a Jane employee — who will then walk you through the steps of making a Hypur account to finish the payment process. Everding says that the current menu will soon be updated to better reflect the payment options.) Customers should also expect to provide their Missouri medical marijuana card number and an ID or driver’s license. They should also to be available for a phone call from a Jane employee who will finalize the order. (Remember to keep your Hypur PIN number handy!) Additionally, the delivery driver will require you to sign a form and provide your medical card and ID once again, all steps needed to comply with the state’s “seed to sale” tracking system. Granted, these are a lot of extra steps. But in an interview, Everding says the first

[STRAIN REVIEW]

Tommy Chims Smokes Heya’s Runtz Weed Written by

THOMAS CHIMCHARDS

here are few, if any, strains of cannabis on the market right now enjoying the level of hype that surrounds Runtz. A hybrid created by crossing Zkittlez with Gelato that debuted in December 2017, the strain has been referenced by name in more than 100 rap songs, according to lyrics website genius.com, earning a reputation as one enjoyed by the most discerning of smokers. In keeping, it became common at the end of the 2010s for black market dealers to attempt to pass off a lot of their wares under the name, making the concept of fake Runtz its own inside joke in both stoner and rap culture, elevating it to the point of a status symbol in the latter. (One example, from the 2019 SOB x RBE track “Mosh Pit”: “What the fuck is twenty bands? Bitch, I’m getting real cash / N*ggas smoking fake Runtz, bitch, I’m smoking real gas.”) The hype was not without warrant, and that was soon proven when the popular cannabis site leafly.com named Runtz its 2020 Strain of the Year. “Runtz checks each box and tears up the scorecard,” the publication noted. That assessment is borne out by reviews from satisfied smokers on the site as well. “Took two bong rips an I was floating over a rainbow into never land,” writes one. “I saw Peter Pan an shit my pants. I woke up in the bathtub” “IT LOOKS LIKE IT COULD BEAT YOU IN A FIGHT AND THEN STEAL YOUR WIFE, AND IT SMELLS LIKE AN OOMPA LOOMPAS DUMPHOLE!!” raves(?) another. “this will have you talking to your forehead,” asserts a third. So naturally, when I noticed that

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Heya’s Runtz strain came primarily in the form of one enormous bud that comprised most of the eighth we purchased. | TOMMY CHIMS

Test Driving Weed Delivery Written by

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

rom a dispensary to your front door — that’s the promise of Doobie, St. Louis’ only cannabis home delivery service, which on July 22 marked its first day of ferrying orders to medical marijuana patients in the metro area. While the service can feel at first like DoorDash for weed, Doobie presently connects patients only with products at Jane Dispensary (6662 Delmar Boulevard, University City; 314-464-4420). On a recent weekday, the service sent a shiny white van with ice-cooled bags of THC gummies to a residence in south St. Louis. But actually getting a delivery of cannabis — which in this test case took about two hours from placing the order

AUGUST 4-10, 2021

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Don’t let this delivery sit on your stoop for long. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI week of the delivery service has shown just how needed it really is — and how eager customers are to enjoy the convenience of on-demand cannabis. “From a regulatory standpoint, we have a lot of hoops to jump through,” she notes. “But I just think people are so excited to have cannabis delivery. Everyone has been so patient and so understanding, and they’ve been willing to charge through the mud with us to get to the point where we can pull up to the front door and give them cannabis.” The additional steps to making cannabis delivery work underscore the complexities of operating in the industry while the federal government still considers the product an illegal drug. On one hand, the existence of a service like Doobie couldn’t exist without the state’s legal structure: While dropping off a Doobie-branded bag with the ordered THC edibles, Jane’s delivery driver told the RFT that he appreciates the extra paperwork: It means the Missouri State Highway Patrol is alerted when a (legal) weed delivery is out on the streets. The driver was understandably grateful to not be confused for a drug trafficker every time he left the store with a new order. On the other hand, major financial institutions still consider the cannabis industry risky, forcing dispensaries to rely on cash transactions or companies like Hypur. To encourage medical marijuana patients to try the delivery service, Doobie’s fee is waived through August. Everding tells the RFT that the fee will eventually run at a flat rate of $10 per delivery, though she added that the business is

The first week of the delivery service has shown just how needed it really is — and how eager customers are to enjoy the convenience of ondemand cannabis. also considering a tier-based structure based on the distance for delivery. As far as the delivery footprint, Everding says the store is accepting orders from customers as far out as St. Louis County “a little further west” of Interstate 270. “We wanted to be the only delivery in the area right now,” she says, “so we wanted to make sure we can serve as many people as possible.” For more information about setting up a Doobie-enabled doobie delivery, visit TryDoobie.com. For a more hands-on account of Jane Dispensary products — including the stupifying “Bubba Fett” cannabis strain — go to our site and check out the RFT’s own Tommy Chimchards for the full writeup. n

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AUGUST 4-10, 2021

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CULTURE [ARCADES]

Game On The Neutral Zone keeps the fun alive even as its Chesterfield Mall home dies a slow death Written by

JACK PROBST

hesterfield Mall is a ghost town these days. The food court is entirely empty, save for the tables and chairs that remain in place. Most storefronts have their metal gates pulled down for good. The carousel that used to be the centerpiece of the building is gone. Once thriving, the mall is now all but deserted. It’s an eerie sight. evertheless, one corner of the mall has kept its head above the water throughout the pandemic and the ongoing internet-fueled decimation of brick-and-mortar storefronts. On the eastern side of the building sits an AMC theater, a two-story V-Stock (a retail store filled with physical media, comics and action figures galore), a standard Cheesecake Factory and, most importantly for our purposes, a heavenly place called the Neutral Zone (291 Chesterfield Center, 314-301-8697). Since moving from south St. Louis County to Chesterfield Mall seven years ago, the eutral one has provided an atmosphere perfect for both the casual gamer and the obsessive arcade lover. The throwback business houses over 0 arcade cabinets, pinball machines and even a couple of skee-ball games. It’s a truly wild selection to see in one place, with a literal timeline of arcade games that surrounds you when you enter. And unlike the golden days of arcades, you don’t need to worry about bringing pockets full of quarters, and there’s no change machine spitting out jingling coins. Instead, the eutral one charges a flat fee for unlimited arcade time (though the exact dollar amount can change from day to day, so it’s good to call ahead). In the ’ 0s, you couldn’t walk through a mall without passing

Eric V. competes with his son on Dance Dance Revolution: Extreme. | JACK PROBST an arcade. The sounds of Pac-Man chomping away at flashing blue ghosts and Donkey Kong stomping on his tower melded together with beeps and boops of dozens of other games. Kids of all ages would surround machines, pumping quarter after quarter into games like Galaga or Joust, trying to top the high score. Video games were taking over the lives of players everywhere. In the ’90s, you could play The Simpsons or Ninja Turtles beat ‘em ups with three of your friends. Fighting games like Street Fighter II were kings of the arcade. ou could hear the ominous voice of the announcer yelling “FI ISH HIM” in Mortal Kombat all over America. The graphics got better, some of the games got more graphic, but there were still plenty of spots where folks could waste their time shaking a control stick. By the 2000s, it was rare to see arcades in malls. Home gaming consoles from intendo, Sony and Microsoft killed the arcade star, but the passionate video game lovers — like the ones that run eutral one — would give arcades a 1-Up, bringing enthusiastic fans of classic

games back to their glory days. While they do have a couple of cabinets running emulators of retro games, almost every game in eutral one’s collection is original. Some of the essentials might get upgraded — like CRT monitors that have passed on and are no longer manufactured anywhere, or cabinets with wood that hasn’t stood the test of time — but they’re all treated with love, and it shows. They replace the parts they must so that patrons can enjoy the memories of youth without fail, and they preserve the things that make these cabinets special. ou can tell the original Space Invaders cabinet saw some shit in the ’ 0s by the cigarette burns that permanently melted little bumpy circles into the control panel. It’s a detail you would miss if you don’t have manager Tom Lohmann showing you around. “ ou gotta have years of technical knowledge to work here and to fix this,” Lohmann jokes while he gives the side of a cabinet a whack to wake up a game with a blank screen. “That Fonzie magic works. ou won’t believe it, but it does.” Lohmann, whose favorite game

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is Tron, has a head full of knowledge when it comes to the games under his care. Point to a cabinet and he might tell you an anecdote that happened in the one, or tell you which games in their arcade library have all their original components. He even knows his fair share of arcade “easter eggs.” (Play 250 levels of Mortal Kombat 2, for example, and the game will turn into Pong.) The eutral one is so special, in fact, that it’s become a destination for diehard arcade fans around the country. Lohmann has seen folks drive miles just to play their Dance Dance Revolution machine, a favorite among rhythm game enthusiasts and people that like to look silly in public. Romance is something you might be surprised to see in the arcade, other than the love between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, but a couple once got engaged in front of the game they played together on their first date. On an average day, parents come to get lost in the screens of their youth while they hold up their little ones to try them out, making video game memories of their own. Then you have the regular customers who frequently visit to support the local business and indulge in their button-smashing habit. “I have a couple of customers that come in almost once a month. They’ve been coming here for years,” says Lohmann. “They play Junior Pac-Man and compete against each other, and they bet who pays for the next time they come in. So they’ll be on this thing for like two or three hours. They probably have all the high scores on it.” If you want a piece of the arcade at home, the eutral one can help with that as well, with some custom-built arcade cabinets for sale that are loaded with hundreds of classic games from every decade. The arcade also sells new and used collectible toys, from Funko Pops to GI Joe to Transformers to Star Wars figures. If you played with it when you were a kid, there’s a good chance they have it for your collection. In sum, the eutral one revives that sense of wonder from your youth and reminds you of a time when all you needed was a few quarters to have fun. “We sell nostalgia,” Lohmann says. “It’s a powerful thing. I sell your childhood back to you.” n

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AUGUST 4-10, 2021

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SAVAGE LOVE MUM AND DAD BY DAN SAVAGE Hey, Dan: I’m a 24-year-old gay man with a 31-year-old bi boyfriend. I’ve known since we got together that he’s a lot more sexually experienced than I am, but it’s never been a big deal before now. This weekend, he met my parents for what we thought would be the first time. But it turns out that ten years ago, during his “big bi slut phase” (his words), they had a threesome. I recognize that no one did anything wrong — they were three consenting adults — and it’s not like anyone could’ve known that he and I would get together in the future. But also, my boyfriend fucked my parents! I’m mortified, he’s mortified, they’re mortified, and I may never be able to look at my parents again. Please help us find a way to move past this! I Knew He Was Into Blondes I’ve been writing Savage Love for almost thirty years — it’ll be thirty years this September — and I rarely get letters that surprise me anymore. But after reading your letter today… and then laying in a dark room with a cool washcloth over my eyes for six hours… I came to a few of realizations. First, I can still be surprised. Thank you for that. Second, if couples in their forties with teenage children at home are gonna have threesomes with guys in their twenties — and some are — there will always be a hard-to-quantifybut-nevertheless-ineliminable risk that their children, once grown, could wind up meeting and fucking and even falling in love one of the guys their parents had a threesome with back in the day. Third, since I helped create a world where forty-something couples with kids sometimes have MMF threesomes with twenty-something bisexual dudes, IKHWIB, this is all my fault oh my God what have I done can you ever forgive me. With that said, IKHWIB, do you know who I think should weigh in on this? The former mayor of Minneapolis. “If they’ve been able to laugh about this, that’s a good sign,” said Betsy Hodges, who was the mayor of Minneapolis from 2014 to 2018.

“It might be a while before he can look at his boyfriend and not think about his parents having sex. That’s a tough thing to navigate, but laughter helps.” It may seem kind of random that the former mayor of Minneapolis is giving you sex advice, IKHWIB, but Hodges reached to me after I posted your letter to Twitter, where I told my followers — the former mayor of Minneapolis among them — that I was going to run your letter in my column even though I didn’t have the faintest idea what to tell you. Betsy Hodges, on the other hand, knew exactly what to say. “He has to ask himself if the boyfriend is worth it,” said Hodges. “Everything really depends on the strength of their connection — which will have to be weighed against whatever tension now exists between IKHWIB, his boyfriend, and his parents. Can they navigate that tension? If any of them feel bad (as opposed to mortified) about what happened and they aren’t motivated to work through this and don’t have the tools for doing so, this will go sideways.” The Honorable Betsy Hodges suggests that the four of you have a conversation about what happened and how you want to handle things going forward. “Having that conversation — which I know sounds dreadful — could actually help them think about this less,” said Hodges, “especially if they get to a point where they can laugh about the insanity and awkwardness of the situation they’ve all found themselves in.” You can laugh about this until you pass out, IKHWIB, but if you can’t suck your boyfriend’s cock without thinking about your dad sucking your boyfriend’s cock, you may not be able to get past this. If you can’t look at your mom without thinking about her sitting on your boyfriend’s face, you might not be able to get past this. If you can’t take your boyfriend’s load without thinking about the load he dropped in dad or your mom or both (21-year-olds have great stamina and such short refractory periods), you might not be able to get past this. You might be able to, like Hodges said, think about this less. While I’m doubtful there’s a memory hole out there big enough to stuff this in and tight enough to

prevent it from falling right back out, IKHWIB, perhaps your parents have already shown you how it’s done. I know when I came out to my mom, IKHWIB, she had a really hard time being around any guy I was dating due to the unwelcome mental images that plagued her when she saw me with a boyfriend. She could look at my sister and her boyfriend without picturing her little girl sucking that boy’s cock, but she somehow couldn’t look at my boyfriend without picturing that brute sodomizing her little boy. It took some very awkward conversations, some raised voices, and, yes, some laughter before my mom successfully willed herself to stop conjuring up mental images of me getting my ass fucked. Maybe with some time, some awkward conversations, and a little laughter you’ll be able to purge all those unwelcome mental images of your boyfriend railing your parents from your mind too. I guess my point is, if the parents of gay and straight kids can pretend not to know what they damn well do know, i.e., that their grown children are sexually active adults now, and if they can learn not to torture themselves with unwelcome mental images of our partners fucking the shit out of us, IKHWIB, seems to me that we should be able to do the same for them: recognize that our parents are sexual beings and at the same time expunge all unwelcome mental images from our minds. Yours is a much heavier lift than most, I realize, but if your boyfriend is worth it, IKHWIB, you at least gotta try. P.S. Perhaps this verse by poet Philip Larkin will help put things in perspective… They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. ou’re not the first person whose parents… well, let’s not say your parents fucked you up. Instead let’s say you’re not the first person whose parents were a little extra. Good luck. Follow Betsy Hodges on Twitter @BetsyHodges. Hey, Dan: I’m a woman in her twenties in a relationship. I have a great

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connection with my partner, we communicate well, and the sex is the best in my life. There’s only one thing getting in the way: My partner and I started going out six months ago, immediately after the end of a relatively short but very intense relationship. I was with my previous partner for about a year. We were deeply in love but eventually broke up because he moved to another country. While I love my current partner and want him in my life, I am finding it hard to commit. I think what’s holding me back is not having the time to process the end of my previous relationship. I feel as if my ex still takes up space in my heart and this prevents me from fully letting my new partner in. I want to let go of the thought of my ex (we haven’t even spoken in half a year) and open fully up to my new partner, but it’s been difficult because the story with my ex feels unfinished. What do I do? Worried Hasty And Confused Klutz You may always feel regret about your previous partner since it ended for reasons outside either of your control and his — and just for the record, there’s no guarantee you won’t feel some regret about your current partner, if your new relationship ends, which it might. (I mean, it’s only been six months. A little soon to be tossing “partner” around, if you ask me, which you did.) But did your last relationship really end for reasons neither you nor your ex could control? If he had no choice but to move to another country and/or if there was no way for you to go with him, okay, then the end was outside your control and his. But if he could’ve stayed and chose not to, WHACK, or if you could’ve gone with him and chose not to, well, then it didn’t end due to circumstance outside your control. Focusing on that — reminding yourself that an active choice was made to finish that relationship off — might help you get past the somewhat paralyzing degree of regret you currently feel. And if that doesn’t work, WHACK, perhaps a little more of the best sex you’ve ever had will do the trick. My new book, Savage Love from A to Z, is available now for pre-order! mail@savagelove.net @FakeDanSavage on Twitter www.savagelovecast.com

AUGUST 4-10, 2021

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AUGUST 4-10, 2021

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AUGUST 4-10, 2021

RIVERFRONT TIMES

Riverfront Times, August 4, 2021

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