went and found a man hiding in the car under an old
blanket and she arrested him. He was all dirty and
ragged and skinny and he smelled bad. His hands were
all big and red. Mother said that he was a drunk and that
he was sick in the head but he wasn’t very old. He’d
made a hole in the bottom of his car and put a lot of duck
food on the ground beneath it so the ducks would come
underneath where he could grab them by the neck and
kill them without anybody being able to see what he was
doing. Mother said that Daddy’d arrested him for doing
the same thing once back before the accident. She found
five dead mallards and seven of the brown ducks and two
white ducks under the blanket with him but they were all
already dead.
JAMES PATRICK DUBIC
I. From the SAND C ITY SHORELINE RAG
AND TATTLESHEET, May 22, 1981:
DUCKNAPPER NABBED YET AGAIN!
by RAG Staff Writer Thom Homart
The RAG learned yesterday that twenty-nine-year-old
aerospace heir James Patrick Dubic, a former part-time
instructor in the department of computer sciences at
Monterey Peninsula and Chapman Colleges, was arrested Monday evening by Police Officer Mrs. Virginia Matson on multiple charges stemming from the alleged
theft and slaughter of fourteen ducks from El Estero Park
in downtown Monterey.
Officer Matson, who was recently promoted to the
head of the Monterey Municipal Police Tac Squad
(where she replaces her husband, Thomas Philip Mat-
son, paralyzed in a tragic skateboard accident during
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Scott Baker
the Parent-Teacher Day celebrations at Monterey High
School last fall), was off duty at the time of the arrest. She
had taken her daughter Julie, four, to the lake to “get her
out of the house for a while” when Julie noticed that
there were a lot of ducks going under an old car parked
near them but that none of the ducks that went under the
car ever came out again! She told her mother and Officer
Matson investigated, only to find James Patrick Dubic
hidden under a blanket in the backseat. With him under
the blanket she found a cloth sack labeled Dewer’s
Duckfood containing fourteen recently killed ducks. The
floorboards of the car had been removed and duck
pellets scattered on the ground beneath it to attract the
birds.
Dubic is currently out on bail on previous charges
stemming from the alleged sale of a large number of sea
gulls and a smaller number of cats to five ethnic restaurants here on the Peninsula and in Salinas. The restaurants in question— Casa Miguel, La Poubelle de Luxe, ■
The Ivory Pagoda, Shanghai Express and Ho’s Terrace
Cafe— have been charged with serving the sea gulls,
which are protected by state, federal, county and city
law, as duck and chicken in a variety of dishes such as
Cantonese duck, Polio Mole, and Duck a Vorange. The
cats are alleged to have served as the basis for a number
of beef and rabbit dishes.
Dubic, furthermore, has not only been convicted on
three previous misdemeanor charges involving what
might be termed violence against domestic birds and
wildfowl but is also the man whom Monterey County
Prosecutor Florio Volpone attempted last year to prove
was the actual head of the dognapping ring that in the
last five years has been responsible for the deaths of
thousands of Central California Irish Setters and Afghans sold to the Mexican fur industry for their beautiful
“pelts.” Though we here at the RAG cannot disagree
with Judge Hapgood’s ruling to the effect that the
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353
evidence Prosecutor Volpone produced was insufficient
to prove Dubic guilty before the law of the dognapping
and related conspiracy charges— which is to say, guilty
of them beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt— yet
we cannot help but feel that there is something at the
very least quite suggestive about the fact that Dubic has
been arrested and charged with similar crimes on at least
forty other occasions in the recent past. Though it is not
perhaps completely fair for those of us here at the RAG,
in our capacity of armchair quarterbacks, to suggest that,
as the saying goes, there’s no smoke without fire and that
there must have been some compelling reason for not
just one but all of our local police forces to keep on
arresting Dubic again and again for the same kind of
alleged crime. . . .
II. The Trial
“Objection sustained,” Hapgood said but it was already
too late. Volpone’d been able to get the jury thinking
about the dognapping charges again, with that bit about
Mexico thrown in to appeal to their racism. The bastard.
He knew as well as I did that that was all bullshit, that I’d
never had anything against dogs. Or cats either, and he
was trying to get them to believe I’d been killing cats too,
and that wasn’t, true. I’d always loved cats, I’d even had
one o f my own for a while and he knew it, but it didn’t
make any difference to Volpone, he was going to try to
get me for the cats anyway.
“ . . . a rubber duck,” Wibsome was saying the next
time I bothered to tune in to him. I hadn’t been missing
anything. I’d heard it all before time after time and
anyway he was even clumsier than usual today. Probably
because he knew there was no way his particular brand of
rhetoric was going to get me out of anything this time, no
matter how hard he tried, so he wasn’t even trying.
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Scott Baker
“A rubber duck,” he continued, “which the late Robert Tyrone Dubic had the habit of filling with bird shot and ball bearings before he used it to beat his defenseless
five-year-old brother into unconsciousness. The same
rubber duck with which he often threatened to kill that
younger brother, James Patrick Dubic, here before you
on charges from what the prosecution claims is a pathological hatred of birds in general and ducks in particular.
“But I ask you— is there anything really all that sick or
irrational in the defendent’s feelings about birds? Would
you, any of you, have had a great fondness for the
creatures if you had been repeatedly beaten by a sadistic
older brother with a lead-filled rubber duck during your
formative years? If you had been so badly mauled by
your aunt’s flock of geese that you were hospitalized for
three days? Would you have had any overwhelming love
for our feathered friends if your grandfather had disinherited you in favor of a bird sanctuary in Guatemala, a country which neither you nor he had ever visited? Is
there anything odd about the fact that James Patrick
Dubic is, as you yourselves have heard him testify,
disgusted with the evident hypocrisy of people who
publically demand increased protection for the California environment while at the same time spending a fortune in certain local restaurants for meat
from wild
boar they know perfectly well have been killed illegally
inside the Los Padres Forest preserve?
“I’m not going to try to pretend to you that James
Patrick Dubic is immensely likeable, or that he’s just like
everybody else. He isn’t. But what he is is a man of
intelligence and principle, a former teacher who was
always respected by his students, and he is neither
irrational nor insane. His dislike of birds, regrettable
though it may be, is a perfectly normal reaction to the
rather unique and unfortunate circumstances of his
childhood. . . .”
It wasn’t going to work. Not this time. Wibsome
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355
wasn’t even trying. They were going to lock me up again,
and not just for a little while this time. Maybe even get
me committed to Atascadero, put me away for the rest of
my life by claiming I was criminally insane. That
sounded like what Wibsome was really after this time.
Get me out of Father’s hair for good. And even if they let
me out later he could always have me put back in if I
made any more trouble for him. If they ever let me out.
He’d like that now, with Mother remarried so she
couldn’t make him do anything for me anymore.
“We’re going to appeal,” Wibsome told me when he
came back and sat down again. Meaning that there was
no way they weren’t going to find me guilty. “Those
articles in the RAG— I’m pretty sure we can prove they
prejudiced the jury and kept you from getting a fair trial.
And there may be other things I can turn up when I’ve
had the time to study the court recorder’s transcripts of
the trial for a while.”
“Wibsome,” I said, “you know I didn’t have anything
to do with the dogs, or with those cats either. You know
how I’ve always liked dogs and cats— ”
“Of course, Jimmy.” He didn’t believe me even
though he was supposed to be on my side. “Not the dogs
and cats. Just those nasty, nasty birds.”
“Yes!” He was laughing at me again. Just like Bobby
used to, before they shipped him off to Vietnam and
killed him. But if I ever got out of here I was going to get
him just like I was going to get all the rest of them. That
oh-so-sweet little girl and her bull-dyke mother and her
paralyzed father who was the one who’d lied about me at
that other trial, the time that he’d been the one who’d
arrested me. That bastard who’d written all those
articles for the RAG and all those restaurant owners
who’d tried to put each other out of business by accusing
each other of having hired me to get their sea gulls and
cats for them, when all the time they’d hired me to get
sea gulls for them themselves and they knew I wouldn’t
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have anything to do with killing cats. And Judge
Hapgood and Florio Vclpone and the jury and Wibsome
and my father and the ducks.
All of them. But especially the ducks.
III. From the SAND C ITY SHORELINE
RAG AND TATTLESHEET, August 8,1983:
. . . remember that the judge and jury agreed with our
editorial staff and that Dubic was sentenced to three
concurrent terms of ten to twenty years in the state
penitentiary. Since then his lawyers have made repeated
attempts to have his convictions overturned, most recently by charging that the RAG's crusading editorials and reportage unfairly prejudiced the jury against him
and so precluded the possibility of a fair trial. Dubic’s
lawyers accompanied this latest appeal with a simultaneous multimillion dollar suit against the RAG and its editorial staff for libel and defamation of character.
We are very happy indeed to report that Dubic’s
appeal has been denied and that all charges against us for
libel and defamation of character have been unconditionally dismissed.
IV. From TH E BUZZBOM B, House Organ
o f the Dubic Aerospace and M unitions
Industrial Group, January, 1984:
Aerospace Guidance System Division Chief Damien
Holmes announced today the purchase of t h e o t h e r
c h e s s p l a y e r , In c ., designers and manufacturers o f the
popular p r o g r a m m e d p r o line of computerized tennis
opponents, as well as of the increasingly popular computer games s h a r k a l e r t , r o b o b r a w l, and g e t t h e pr o w le r b e f o r e h e g e t s y o u . “With their genius for innovative software and our technical expertise,” Vice President
The Lurking Duck
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Holmes told the Buzzbomb, “it shouldn’t be more than a
matter of months before we’re not only light-years ahead
of our competitors here in the United States but even
further ahead of everybody else in the rest of the world,
and most especially our counterparts in Soviet Russia.”
V. From “Philanthropy for the Year 2000,” a
speech delivered by Jam es Damien Dubic to
the Orange County League of Republican
Women, March 19, 1984
. . not just new ways o f doing things that have never
really done anybody much real good. To put it another
way, we don’t want to compete with any of the other
charitable and philanthropic organizations now operating, we want to put them out of business altogether by making the very need for charity and philanthropy
obsolete.
“Furthermore, there’s no question in any of our minds
that our society’s future lies with increased computerization. Now, there are some disadvantages to this, as I’m sure some of you may have noticed every now and then
when you’ve caught a computer error on your bank
statement or your Mastercharge, but that kind of problem doesn’t come from using computers, it just comes from the fact that we haven’t been using computers long
enough to have learned everything there is to know about
using them. A good comparison would be to think of
yourselves in the same position as the first railway
passengers, who inevitably got covered with soot and
smoke from the locomotive’s engines because nobody’d
yet found out how to make them bum cleaner and how to
keep the smoke away from the passengers. But after
trains had been around for a while they found all sorts of
solutions to the problems, so they weren’t really problems at all anymore.
“But let me get back to what we at the Dubic Founda
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tion are trying to do right now, which is to find new ways
to use the future’s increased computerization for the
social good. Not just new ways of doing old things—like
a robot soup-line to compete with the Salvation Army’s
human volunteers—but ways to do new things altogether, things that nobody’s ever been able to do before. And we’re pretty sure we’ve found some new ways of doing
things, all of them so far based on the concepts of shared
computer time and decentralization.
“Let me make that a little clearer for you. Take a look
at oh, any of the big banks here in California. Bank of
Amer
ica, UCB, even the Japanese Maritime Bank, any
bank with a lot of branches scattered all over the state.
All their records are computerized, but there’s no way
that any of these banks could have ever afforded a
separate computer system for every one of their
branches, even if they’d wanted to have them for some
reason. No, what they’ve got is a single master computer
connected by telephone linkages to separate data terminals in every branch, so that each branch is sharing the master computer’s capabilities with all the other
branches. There are even a number of companies that
rent their spare computer time to companies too small to
have a cost-effective computer capacity of their own.
Dubic Aerospace is one such company, which is one of
the reasons 1 know what I do about the subject.
“Anyway, ladies, think about what would happen if
you took the whole process one step further, and took at
least some of the data terminals out of the branch offices
or whatever and put them into the employees’ homes, so
that you had a double telephone linkage working for you,
not only between the master computer and the branch
offices, but also between the branch offices and the
employees’ home terminals. There are an awful lot of
peripheral benefits we haven’t yet had a chance to
examine to be gained from having people work at home
like that— no commuting time wasted and less traffic
jams, for one thing, possible savings on expensive office
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space for another, to pick just two examples— but that
sort of thing’s not really what we, as philanthropists, are
interested in right now. What we want to know is, how
can we find new ways to use this development to make
things better for people?
“Well, one of the first things we thought of was the way
this could help shut-ins, perfectly competent and intelligent people who because of some accident or chronic illness are unable to leave their homes or, even worse,
have been condemned to live the rest of their lives
confined to their beds. Just think what it would do for
these people’s sense of self-esteem if they had a way of
holding a real job and of becoming more or less self-
supporting. Not to mention the savings to society involved in getting them off welfare. This wouldn’t really affect all that many people, probably, but it could make
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