Hero Worship – NEARING THE END OF THE LINE

SATURDAY NIGHT IN DOVER-FOXCROFT: REC CENTER, 1961

The Rec Center over at Central Hall runs on Friday and Saturday nights. On Fridays it’s open exclusively to the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders; Saturdays, it belongs to the big dogs of Foxcroft Academy. Guests are allowed in only if one of our students has personally invited them, and secondly if the invitation has first been cleared with a faculty advisor of the Rec Center Committee (of which I am now a member— I’m the freshman class of ’64 rep) and a permission pass signed by our principal, is presented at the door upon entry. Yeah. We run a tight ship.

Now, I’ve never ever been a committee-kind-of-guy, but this Rec Center is one of the most important things in my life. I’d be so damn lost if we didn’t have Rec Center to look forward to on the weekends. But being on the Committee does mean that I have to man the check-in table in the foyer for a half hour one evening every other week. Because if someone without the official and required ‘invited-guest’ pass manages to slip on in past, me without me catching it (and immediately alerting the faculty advisor or chaperons on duty), I’d probably get kicked off the committee. And I don’t want that.

So tonight, here I am, happily walking the frigid little fifth of a mile in the snow storm from my house to Central Hall. And when I push my way in through the front doors, I check in with whoever is seated at the greeting table and then begin to clomp up the old wooden staircase toward the second floor, drawn forward by the tantalizing thrum of the muffled jukebox bass.

Forty per cent of the reason I love coming here every week is the music, pure and simple. The other sixty can probably be summed up by the title of that 1940’s book (that I’ve never read) titled The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Because that’s me. Lonely heart. Lonely hunter. But a hunter who’s actually pretty pathetic at the hunting, if you wanna know the truth.

At the top of the landing, I stop to stare in at the dance floor, which I can’t really even see yet as it’s cloaked in total darkness. (Ah. It’s a slow one. Jim Reeves. “He’ll Have to Go.”) I’m not too crazy about bumping into anybody in the dark, so I’ll just stand here listening until my eyes have started adjusting to the change in lighting from the brightness downstairs.

Though love is blind, make up your mind

I’ve got to know

Should I hang up, or will you tell him

He’ll have to go?

When I can partially make out some of the shadowy, slowly-swaying couples leaning into one another in hugging embraces (oh yeah, that must be nice), I venture in. Stepping around and in between them, I hang a right and make for the coatroom door which, when I push it open, lets the lone, 60-watt, bare light-bulb-hanging-from-the-ceiling brightness flash-blind the dancers in the dark nearest the door, as well as myself all over again. The music muffles when I close the door.

This room’s the size of a really small office. And, as usual, there’re mountains of jackets and coats piled up here, there, and everywhere, right on the floor even. I unzip my parka, wiggle out of it, and bury it under a pile over in the far corner so I’ll know where to dig r it when it’s time to go. Then, it’s back out through the door. And the new song starting up is “The Bristol Stomp” by The Dovells.

The kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol

When the do the Bristol Stomp!

Really somethin’ when they join in jumpin’

When they do the Bristol Stomp!

I drop myself down in one of the chairs over on the left side, the boys’ side, of the hall, and wait for my night vision to catch back up with me again. The dance floor is actually a basketball court with a hoop at either end, one fixed just above the coatroom door and the other, down at the far end, hanging just in front of the stage. The seats are lined up on either side, left and right. And it’s kinda funny, the left side by some unwritten law being the boys’ side. The girls all park across from us on the other side of the hall.

I watch the couples gyrating to the peppy rhythm. “Bristol Stomp” is pretty lively and yeah, some of’em are really going at it. Me though, I’m pretty much a watcher, basically. Not that I wanna be. I don’t like to think about it too much, but each time the music starts up and the couples rise to meet each other out on the floor, our two segregated rows become, by default, the wallflower rows, I guess.

Yeah, we’re the wallflowers, the shy ones. The ones who are not part of a couple. Not really by choice exactly.

Oh sure, I mean physically…all we’d have to do is get ourselves up on our own two legs and just… walk over there. And just ask somebody, if you have the guts. But the thing of it is, some of us have learned that it’s a whole lot longer walk, plodding way back across the floor when somebody just looks right at you and says, “No.” Especially when a fool bunch of her girlfriends all bust a gut giggling like crazy just as you’re turning around and feeling stupid.

And…isn’t it dumb, and totally unfair how it always has to be the guy that asks. The girls can’t really get shot down, can they. Not when they never have tobe the ones asking. Well, unless it was a Sadie Hawkins dance, which we never even have. And then, too, oh yeah, it’s perfectly all right for the girls to just step right out onto the dance floor in two’s or three’s or four’s and start dancing up a storm together to rock’n’roll songs. But you’d never catch a bunch of guys doing that. It’d be pretty much frowned upon, you dig?

So… yeah, at least they have something they can do instead of just sitting over there like a bunch of morons. Like we do.

Anyhow, most of them left sitting over there in their own little Lonely Hunter Hearts row aren’t ones I’d even want to ask to dance with me. Why? Because stupidly I’m a movie-romantic. See, I go to the movies every week on my allowance. Practically no matter what is playing. So I see all kinds: westerns, comedies, gangster-flicks, horror, sci-fi and, yeah, the love stories. I would never admit this to my buddies, but the love stories? For some reason, they really get to me. Basically, because I can’t help identifying so much with the male leads on the screen in all of those boy-meets girl plots. And then I just can’t help fantasizing all the time that some day, some girl, some Sandra Dee or Natalie Wood, is actually gonna take an interest in me. And then… you know, we’ll get together. Dating. Somehow.

Problem is… it’s just never that day.

Oh God, you wanna know something embarrasing? My favorite show on TV (well, next to The Twilight Zone that is) is something titled The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. It’s a silly sit-com starring Dwayne Hickman as Dobie and Bob Denver as Dobie’s comical beatnik sidekick, Maynard G. Krebbs.

The weekly plot is almost always a variation on the same theme: Dobie has his heart set on Thalia Menninger, played by the gorgeous Tuesday Weld (one of the biggest reasons it’s a favorite show of mine) but she’s totally out of his league, see? Sound familiar? Yeah. The Heart of the Lonely Hunter? Story of my life.

P.S. you can add Tuesday Weld to my Sandra Dee and Natalie Wood list.

OK. Enough watching. I’ll come back upstairs here real soon, but as always, first I’ll just zip back down stairs to scout out which, if any, of my Maynard-G.-Krebbs pals have shown up.

The Rec Center is an entirely different planet downstairs. It’s well-lighted, and looks sort of like a little teen-age gambling casino. The card games always consist of poker, cribbage, and black jack. You can also sign out a chess or checkers set, and so usually there’s always one of those brainy games ongoing too, surrounded by its usual small handful of kibitzers looking on. Me, I mostly can be found playing cribbage or chess. But then too there’s the noisiest thing going down here: the ping-pong table. Ping pong is fun.

So sure, I enjoy it down here and all, but I have to say it: my lonely-hunter heart remains up there in the romantic darkness of the second floor, with all Dover-Foxcroft’s Dees, Woods, and Welds practically living out there on the dance floor.

Part of my problem is that three-quarters of the kids who show up here on Saturday nights are the upper classmen. Well, mostly sophomores and some juniors. The popular seniors (and some juniors) what with having their driver’s licenses and their own set of wheel, have obviously discovered better things to do. Like ‘parking.’ Parking out on lover’s lane. Or parking in the public beach parking lot.

OK, ten minutes have gone by down here. I start to take a deep breath, planning to head back up there with my new New Year’s resolution to honestly ask some girl to dance, when the head advisor appears and pulls me aside. “Glad you’re here tonight, Tommy. Eddie hasn’t shown up. So, I’m afraid I’ve gotta ask you to pull a double shift at the check-in table.”

“What? A whole hour?”

“Yeah. Afraid so. 8:30 to 9:30.”

“But, jeez. That’s a lot.” Man, why does this always happen to me? I mean, I just knew, damnit, that between 8:30 and 9:30? With my luck, that’d be the exact same time that the girl of my dreams, whoever she might be, will show up, alone without a date, and would be looking over the dance floor… someone, anyone…”

“Yeah. But… what can I say? It is what it is. So, can you do this for me?”

“Well… sure. I guess.” Me thinking, Oh sure! But… don’t you see? I was planning to make my move!

“Thanks, Tommy. You’re a good man.”

And then he’s gone. With me glaring at his back thinking, Well why don’t YOU do it then! I look at my watch. Oh well, I’ve still got forty minutes or so left before having to man the table. And plus, after that, I’ll still have 9:30 to 10:00 at least. Anyway, I head for the stairs.

As I start jogging up, I’m hit by a very eerie silence up there. Which is odd. Because even if it’s them just deciding what next song to play, where’s the usual loud buzz of conversation? So I’m feeling that old movie line: It’s quiet. TOO quiet. And then too, jeez, what the hey? The lights are all on. Somebody’s turned the lights on! Is the Center what, closing early? Man, I hope not.

I sort of blunder in. Whoa! All the seats are empty! And what else!? I see everybody’s crowded around in a big semi-circle, facing the stage with their backs to me. But… there’s no one on the stage. I can see that! So… what’re they all looking at? Curious, I squeeze myself into the crush and worm my way in to the front. OK. So there’s some guy, some man, standing at the center of the semi-circle. And he’s got a guitar, and he’s talking. But I can’t hear him that well yet. So I have no idea what he’s talking about. But uh… he looks… and sounds… very familiar! But who in the…?

And then it hits me!

Ohmigod! That’s my French teacher there! Mr. Bennett! Reason I didn’t recognize him at first is I’ve never seen him before without a sports jacket and tie. And then again, too, I’ve always only ever seen him in the classroom, never anywhere else, so… well, he’s… out of context here. Especially holding a guitar. And look at him! He’s wearing a very cool ‘dickie,’ like a turtle neck, under his shirt… and he looks… I don’t know, just so surprisingly casual. And cool. And so what’s he doing here then? I mean, he’s not an advisor, or anything.

The Meddibempsters of Bowdoin College, 1960s. Mr. Clay Bennett, 4th row (right). Strangely, James Howard, front row (alone), was also my high school English teacher at the same time…

Mr. Bennett is a super-great teacher. I’ve fallen head over heels in love with French this year. English will always be my favorite class, but French is a close second. And it’s all on him. When he speaks French, he sounds so authentic. And he makes it fun when we practice those… nasal sounds. Like the on at the end of garçon: -ongh… gar ’çongh!You almost have to wrinkle your nose to say it right. Fun, like I said.

And he regales us some with a few of the memories of his sojourn in Paris. And his recollections leave all of our heads dancing with sugarplums of, say, a bicycle parked on the grassy banks of the Seine, and a romantic afternoon consisting of a baguette, fromage Français, a bottle of wine, and… a friend. Heady stuff. And like I said, I love the class, even though oddly I’m barely passing it, thanks to all the strenuous French literature translation assignments, and the verb tenses. But all in all, I am in awe of this teacher, and I really can’t say that about hardly any of the teachers on the faculty.

And now (surprise) here he is suddenly playing the guitar in his hands, his soft beautiful chords floating around us, and now his voice beginning to sing… surprisingly… “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” And no, not like The Tokens sing it. The way he sings it, because he’s making it his own. And it is really working. My God, I love it. His voice is gorgeous.

I remember now hearing that he was a member of Bowdoin College’s highly regarded acapella chorus, The Meddibempsters, and his vocal training is so obvious. I mean, wow. He’s good. You can feel that everybody in this crowd, like me, is totally knocked out by his performance, and we all want an encore at the end of the song but, no, it looks like that one is all we’re gonna get. However, this little one-song concert is something I’ll long remember, I’m sure. And I’ve just made me a conscious decision: I’m gonna go back and spend a lot more time practicing on my guitar.

And man, I’m just thanking my lucky stars this thing didn’t go down when I’d be stuck downstairs, sitting at the check-in table. So happy I lucked out. But speaking of my check-in duty, it’s pretty close to that time. And since nobody seems to be in any hurry to start the Top Forty music back up again (everybody, content to just be standing around in a daze marveling that one of theirs teachers could be so talented), I guess I’ll have to accept the fact that I’m not gonna get to ask somebody for a dance, at least for right now. But there’ll still be that half hour left between 9:30 and 10:00 though. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky then.

Yeah. Right.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So here I am, sitting alone at the table, loose-leaf notebook open in front of me in which I have to log everyone’s comings and goings. And it hasn’t exactly been busy. One set of parents popping in to pick up their daughter. That’s pretty much it, because it’s late. I nod at the guys continuously go back and forth, going up and coming down the stairs. And try rather meekly to engage the giggly girls who are doing the same in clever conversation as they flit by. The restrooms are down at the far end of the hall; that explains the majority of the traffic. Other than that, I’m spending my time contemplating what I’ll probably do after the place closes down. Play basketball upstairs with my brother and his buddies? Join a couple of my own pals and sneak into the movie theater to see who’s there? Oh well. I’ll figure it out.

(yawn) This job is so boring.

Until it isn’t.

The front doorsuddenly gets yanked open, letting in a rogue blast of frigid, wintery wind and a swirl of snowflakes! And right behind that gust, in stumbles four young men, not boys! Their faces rosy. And just bursting with energy. Talking loudly and animatedly about… I dunno, something. Fortunately the door manages to slam itself shut. These guys look like they’re freezing, like they’ve been walking outdoors rather than riding in a vehicle. And they’re too busy yakking to have noticed little me yet.

Even though they’re in their civvies, they’re all sporting their tell-tale Air Force parkas. So. They’re flyboys. Flyboys from Charleston Air Force Base, eight miles southeast from here, up on Charleston Hill. The flyboys? They aren’t too popular with the homeboys around here, as you might imagine. Not enough girls to go around… is the word on the street. But that doesn’t have much to do with me.

So far, they’re so wrapped up in babbling to each other, I don’t even exist. Whatever the topic of their animated excitement, it seems to have something to do with something outside. I decide to introduce myself. “Hi, guys!” They don’t hear me obviously. It’s like I really don’t exist. Before I get a chance to clear my throat and repeat my friendly hello, I hear one of them say, “OK. Let’s go!” And as if somebody fired a starting pistol, all four are swarming up the stairs!

“WHOA there!” I yell (to no avail). I panic and find myself jack-knifing to my feet and bellowing, HEY! YOU GUYS!! I SAID, STOP!!”Miraculously, they hear that one. And freeze, up by about the seventh step. Then all four crank their heads around and let their eyes fall on me. Down here. In the foyer. I don’t say anything. They don’t say anything. A moment passes. They all look at one another. Then down they come. All four. To crowd around my dinky little table and lean their faces in at me with rapt interest. Like I’m a bug or something. One of them leans his face in too close, eye-to-eye, our foreheads nearly touching. His face is a blank. A big, blank poker face. “Well…?”

I find I have to swallow before I can choke out a response. “I’m sorry.” Jeez, I can barely hear myself. “But… see? This is a high school thing. Foxcroft Academy has…”

“A high school thing? So what’re you doing here, shrimp boat? You can’t be what, even in third grade yet? Right?”

I have to swallow twice this time. And I feel a drip of cool sweat sliding down between my shoulder blades. “No… uhmmm, ninth grade. “

“Oh, come off it! That can’t be right. I’m afraid I’m gonna have to ask you show me some ID.”

OK, I don’t like the way this is going. At all. After all. I’m a little chicken-shit, aren’t I. And I’m already wishing I’d just let them pass on by. With, you know, me just ‘accidentally’ looking the other way. But now I have to say… something.

“You gotta be a student at the Academy, to come in.”

“My God. You really talk fast, don’tcha. I can barely understand you.”

“Or Be. Invited,” I manage to add.

“Oh, that! Sure. I know that! That’s OK. Because… I am invited, see? By… Jim. You know Jim, don’t you. Of course you do. Everybody knows good old Jim. Am I right?”

I haven’t been this frightened since that time on my paper route when I got cornered by a growling German shepherd for a half hour. I keep thinking, Where IS everybody? Anybody? Why hasn’t somebody just strolled by…?

“Well, see… you gotta have a signed pass.” I mutter. “Signed by the principal.”

Here, he shakes his head patiently, but with a big wolfish smile. “Ah! So you’re… the hall monitor. Oh my!” And then he does something I really don’t like.

He puts his hands on my shirt. I figure, Here we go. He’s gonna beat the crap outta me, but no. Instead, it’s like he’s just intimately… straightening my collar, and then dusting off my shoulders, like maybe there was something on them, like, you know, dandruff or something, but still all the while smiling at me, like I’m some little kid and he’s my dad, getting me spiffed up to get ready for school. It’s something that bullies like to do.

“You know what I’m thinking,” he says. I don’t say anything. I just wait for him to tell me. “I think… you and me? I think we’ve become friends. Don’t you? Don’t you feel that?”

I’m just looking down at the toes of my shoes.

“So what I’m thinking is, you’ve thought this whole thing all over, right? And because we’ve become such good friends now, you’re going to invite me to go… right on right up those stairs with our other three friends here and… then… hey, it’s all good, right? Am I right?”

I nod.

“Can you just say it? That you’re inviting me?”

I nod.

“Then… please… say it.”

I am so ashamed. “I… invite you.”

“Aw gee, thank you so very…”

Suddenly, the front door gets practically kicked open, letting in another rogue gust of frigid, wintery wind and a swirl of snowflakes! And right behind that gust, in stumbles …a cop. Wait, no, not just a cop. THE cop: Bill Fair!

(OK. I admit it. This image of Robocop is a stretch, but (if you’d ever MET Officer Fair) it’s not that much of a S T R E T C H…)

When you think Officer Fair, think Alpha Wolf. Officer Fair is big. Officer Fair is solid. Officer Fair’s face and neck are a lunar landscape of pock marks and scars. Officer Fair has… a reputation. Officer Fair can be frightening just to look at. I’m frightened just looking at him right now, and yet I’m so glad he’s arrived. It’s like the wind just blew the door in and (surprise) The Abominable Snowman is suddenly standing right in front of you… and studying you!

And Officer Fair has left the door wide open.

What I’m suddenly seeing is these four guys shrinking smaller and smaller. It’s unbelievable. They’ve become one big, cowering, little gang. If they had tails, you wouldn’t be able to winch them out from between their legs with a chain.

“Bill?” says the guy I just invited to go on upstairs. It rocks me that he’s on a first-name basis with Officer Fair. His voice noticeably shaky, he adds, “We didn’t mean nuthin’, I swear to God!”

“Honest-to-God’s-TRUTH, Bill,” whines another. “We just come in here to… find out what time it is! Is all.”

Officer Fair is a man of few words. Right at the moment, Officer Fair is a man of no words. Officer Fair is known as a man of action rather than words.

“We were just leaving, Bill. Really. I’m serious.” All four of them are edging around him now, trying to inch themselves toward the open door. Officer Fair isn’t budging out of their way much, meaning they’re really going to have to squeeze themselves past him to get out, which turns out to be about as easy as being born.

“So… hey. Whattaya say, Bill. Please. We’ll just be on our way. Alright? OK?” If looks could kill, four coffins would be getting ordered from Lary’s Funeral Home right about now.

But then, in a couple of blinks, they’re gone. Just like that. They succeeded in squeezing their way past The Man, and he’s followed them out. The door slams shut. It’s over. Crisis averted. (Well, for me, but probably not for them.)

God bless the U.S. cavalry.

Jesus, breathe, Tommy!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, so now that I’ve half-gotten my wits back about me, and I feel my heart rate slowly and steadily ticking itself back down to near normal… and even though I haven’t entirely stopped shaking yet, everything is becoming crystal clear now. Yup.

So, in retrospect it’s now so obvious that Officer Fair had been tailing these fellas before they’d shown up here. That they’d been on the run, running scared from him for whatever reason or other. And so they’d desperately crashed in here to get themselves lost in a very big building with a large crowd of people in it. Which explains why they so needed to get themselves the hell upstairs and out of sight as quickly as possible: to mingle in with the crowd or, even better, find some little cubby hole to disappear in.

“How’s it going? Did I miss anything?” asks my replacement.

I give him the look. “Well, it is now.”

He frowns. “Uhmmm… OK?”

So I suppose I oughtta tell him the whole frigging story. And I do. About how a squad of four soldiers barged in here and roughed me up but good! And about how, since no one was around here to help me out, I’d decided to string’em along as long as I possible could— you know, acting scared and all, but really? Just keeping them down here, on the bottom floor, with me. You know, so nobody else, upstairs, would get hurt, right? And about how it actually worked. About how I was able to hold out just long enough for the cops to show up and kick the door in, rough them up, handcuff’em, and drag their sorry butts off to jail. And yeah. Now I suppose I’ll probably hafta go in and ID’em and all, in a police line-up or something. Plus, you know, then they’ll probably want me to testify against them in court.

Now boy, let me tell you, wasn’t he some impressed!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

You know what? To heck with hanging around here for the last dance, especially since I probably would never actually get around to asking anybody to dance anyway. Shoot, I’m rounding up Richie and Dale. I’m gonna talk’em into sneaking into the movie theater with me to see if there are any interesting girls, that need to be walked home. And then maybe we’ll hit Rocket Lanes. Mostly pretty much so I’ll have enough time to wow them with my practically unbelievable story along the way. Yeah.

home

POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART II

“POET … PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART I” ended with the following:

“Omigod! A memory suddenly clicks on in your mind! Oh SHIT! I know what this is about!”

Everybody leans forward. The gorilla football coach, sizing you up with a crocodile grin says, “So how ‘bout you and me, we have us a little sparring session out in the gym this afternoon? You could, you know, give me some pointers.”

With a futile shake of the head, you mutter, “For crying out loud, I can’t believe this is happening all over again!”

But it is.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A JOURNEY OF 1000 MILES BEGINS WITH…

“It’s a strange life, no matter how you shake it, it’s a strange life…” – Dave Mallett

Please know that I can’t write fiction to save my life. Believe me, I’ve tried. So whatever it is I end up writing, it always comes directly from real experiences. The above little round-table dialogue happened just as I’ve described it, if not word for exact word. And the conversation left me feeling that our good ol’, typical, every day teachers’ luncheon had (whoosh!) just suddenly deep-sixed itself straight down Alice’s Wonderland rabbit hole!

I mean, put yourself in my shoes—someone you’d just met, somebody to whom you had spoken only those three, maybe four sentences (in your life), just suddenly willy-nilly turns the conversation inside out and upside down just like that! By outing you as a boxer. I mean, If I’d been as a matador, would that be any more bizarre? I was looking her eye to eye across the table thinking, OK, so who’s the dweeb that let the escaped inmatein here?

Meanwhile, it was a little excruciating, the way everybody just keptsitting there, silently gawking. Things had gotten creepy fast. I was like, C’mon people! Say something! Can’t somebody at least say, “Well. This is a little awkward, isn’t it!” I was all knotted up in frustration.

And then, like I said, it hit me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

You know, it so amazes me how one little decision you make can bend the vector of your life in future ways you’d never imagine. Just as a beam of light bends when it passes through a clear glass of water. And once you make that decision, and then go forward with it, you‘re living in an imperceptibly altered universe.

I made a little decision back in 1966. I was a college junior at the time.

I’d started hanging out in the gymnasium, basically because my roommate and I had taken up playing handball two or three times a week. I was experiencing a lot of stress from some of my classes that year (especially chemistry), and it helped me relax, and burn off some of my nervous energy. Plus, at the same time it was getting me into excellent shape. I’d been jumping rope there, doing pull-ups, push-ups, crunches, etc. almost every week day. And the feeling I was getting from the workouts was so satisfying, so incredibly therapeutic.

But anyway, I started noticing this young guy who was also showing up daily at the gym. A loner, it seemed, just about my height and weight, and short like me. Anyway, he was sticking to a regimen similar to mine, but with one big exception. There was a punching bag hanging down, over in one corner of the room. Not the big bag (no, not one of those Rocky Balboa’s frozen-hanging-steer-carcass-punching-bags in the slaughter house meat freezer), but the small one known commonly as the speed bag or peanut bag. About the size of a football.

And man, when he went to work on that thing, I couldn’t take my eyes off his “magic.” Yeah, I just called it magic, even though it wasn’t anything you can’s see in the movies from time to time. In fact, most serious athletes training for the ring could probably match this guy’s speed and timing on it. Because those guys all learn to do that, don’t they.

But here’s the thing: (1) I’d never personally witnessed someone doing the routine up close and personal, and never right there in the same room as I, and (2) it turned out that there was a kind of crude beauty to it. This guy’s fists made the little bag “disappear” in a blur! And even watching him up close, I could not see how he was possibly pulling that off.

He’d start off with a probing little punch or two at first, and then more taps, but once he’d let his fists go and got that little blur of a bag purring like a twelve-horse Yamaha outboard motor, his arms would seemingly no longer be moving. And surprisingly his fists didn’t seem to be all that busy either, although of course they were doing what they had to do. I mean, his mitts were just casually rolling, not that fast either, round and round about each other in the air like a large pair of twiddling thumbs. Or, so it seemed, almost like some little old lady’s’ hands when she’s crocheting.

But… man, he’d ply that bag into a frickin’ leather tuning fork! So from my inexperienced point of view, it looked amazing. I mean I saw his two arms, attached to that rackety blur, as a pair of biological jumper cables keeping that noisy little motor running. It just looked so cool.

I definitely knew I would like to try my hand at it.

But I was shy, so I waited till he’d left. Then I tiptoed over to the bag and gingerly gave it a couple of friendly, nothing-burger, taps. Of course the bag didn’t do anything more notable than swing back and forth a couple of times and then (not being at all impressed with my assault) fell right back sleep again. Just hanging there, practically taunting me with its superior, leathery That all ya got? Punk?

So I followed that up with a serious, sharp punch with my lightning right!

Before my left got a chance to fly up there into the fray to back me up, that rebounding bag of cement whapped my nose one hell of a nasty blow that raced shockwaves of excruciating pain right through my eyeballs and on back to my unsuspecting brain! I was wobbled, nearly dropped right there in a one-punch knockout loss! My eyes, immediately blinded behind a welled-up flood of tears; my wasp-stung schnozz oozing, but not with blood! I mean… hey. Baby, that HURT!

I staggered away like a drunk, desperate to get myself safely out of range before another attack of the damned thing! I mean, bite me once, shame on you! Bite me twice, shame on me!

The pain took only a little while to fade. But the black and blue bruises all over my ego would hang in there for days. I have to admit it: I’m a snowflake. I have a fragile ego. And this… it just felt so… unfair. Blindsiding me with Newton’s Third law like that. I never saw it coming.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I saw the guy again a couple of days later, approached him, and humbled myself. “How the hell do you do this?” I asked. “Not that I’m necessarily planning on trying it, mind you.” And yes, there I actually was. Momentarily lowering my self-esteem by allowing myself by playing the old See, I’m just asking for a friend card. “I mean, you make it look so easy.”

This young man was a true gentleman. He generously took me under his wing and walked me through the ABC’s of it. Who knows? Maybe he took one look at me and saw a potential future heavyweight champion of the world.

“First and foremost, this is not a punching bag,” he began. “It’s a speed bag. Idiots come in here, take one powerful haymaker swing at it, to show how tough they are, and bust the thing. Then, guess what. We don’t have a bag for another a couple of weeks. So. This bag is not about power or strength. It is about speed and timing only. OK?”

“OK!” In my mind, I checked off No punching the punching bag. “Got it.”

“So then…” And he began walking me through the exercise in slow motion. It was like stop-motion photography. “It’s a one-two-three count rhythm you’re after. Like in music. So, think of yourself playing an instrument. A percussion instrument. With your hands.

“So first of course you make fists, right? Only then… instead of striking the bag knuckles-first, you bat it away with the side of your fist. Picture yourself driving a nail into a plank of wood, bare-handed. You wouldn’t use your knuckles for that, would you. No. You’d bang it like your fist was a hammer. Or… think of knocking on somebody’s door. Normally, you’d tap with your knuckles. But if you were a cop serving a warrant, say, you’d hammer the door with the side of your fist: bam bam bam! It’s the police, OPEN UP!”

“Side of your fist… got it!”

“OK. Now for the rhythm part. Here’s the bag, just hanging there, right? OK. Watch what happens when I tap it with the side of my fist.”

He does that: the bag flies backward, strikes the rear of the overhead horizontal backboard Bang! to which the bag’s swivel is attached. It flies back (just as it did when it nearly coldcocked me the other day) and, in rebound, slams the backboard in the front: Bang! Rebounds back again, once again striking the rear of the backboard. Bang!

“See? Bam bam bam. One two three. That’s your percussion instrument rhythm.”

I was perplexed. “Uhmm… Wait. I counted four. The bag came back again and hit the board for a fourth bam.”

“Oh, right! But like I said, we only want three. So what you do is… you don’t allow the fourth one to happen.”

“Uhm… I don’t?”

“No. You stop the swings after the three-count. And you do that with the next strike of your fist, catching it in motion. Which starts the count all over again. See?” He demonstrates with the bag, very much in slow motion. “Fist! One two three. Fist! Bam bam bam. Fist! One two three. Fist! Bam bam bam. Fist! “And so on and so forth.

“So no, as you see, there’s no fourth bam allowed. And, as you also saw, I was only doing this one-handed. Which is the best way for you, a beginner, to get your timing down. OK, first do it for a while with your right; then switch over and do it for a while with just your left. Then when you get tired of that, you’ll alternate using both: right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam…and so on.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oops! We’ll stop here.

OK, a little voice inside my head just whispered all private to me, “You’re getting boring, Tommy.”

So… suffice it for me to quickly say that (A) I managed to get so I could do this using both fists… still in slow motion. Then, (B) with both fists fairly fast. Pretty soon, you could say I was getting pretty fast indeed. Soon after that, if you saw me standing there working that speed bag, you could easily surmise, “Wow, check him out. Now that guy’s a boxer, if ever I saw one.”

But wait! It gets better! My gymnasium friend started teaching me little tricks, like getting my elbows and forehead involved in the fray. Without bragging, I have to say (again, without bragging now) that as a Speed Bagger… I… was… MAGNIFICENT! I had graduated Maga Cum Laude from Speed Bagging University. I should have had my own float in the Rose Bowl Parade!

It’s a shame they didn’t have Speed Bagger competitions back then. Just sayin’.

OK, OK, OK. Let’s just let it stand that I was… ahem… in my own opinion, pretty darned good at it, alright? (Not to blow my own horn, of course.)

SO, THANKS FOR READING, AND THANKS FOR SUBSCRIBING. AND KEEP YOUR EYE PEELED FOR THE FINALE: “POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART III COMING SOON!

home

“If you could read my mind, Love…” Part 2

“If You Could Read My Mind, Love…” Part 1 ended with…

“At long last, he launches right into it. And all of us, the vast, entire WGUY radio listening audience everywhere, is finally given the lowdown.

“And the lowdown is… kind of incredible.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Yes, I’m here to tell you that the “lowdown” (note the quotation marks here) was indeed a tad incredible. And I remind you that you were warned in Part 1 that the story, though true, was a rather silly story as well. So there’s that.

But OK. The voice that came on the air came across as dark, authoritative, and rather harrumphing, leaving all of us 17 year old “adults” and younger (we, the demographic majority of WGUY’S listenership) suspecting that the man might be the President or CEO of WGUY, if not of the American Broadcasting Association itself. And in the following not-verbatim-nutshell, here is what he “regretted having to impart”:

(stock photo– not Jack Dalton)
It had long been no secret that our DJ, Mr. Jack Dalton, considers himself a champion of Democracy, and had long been feeling seriously distressed about the indefensible state of affairs in East and West Germany— namely the Berlin Wall.

Mr. Dalton, who was obviously feeling the frustration of his utter sense of powerlessness that many lone individuals feel in the face of his inability to take effective action when needed, decided to take it upon himself to perpetrate a one-man protest.

Consequently, and unfortunately, he arbitrarily chose our WGUY broadcast radio station to be the platform to rally the largest population possible into action.

In so doing, he impulsively locked himself inside the station’s sound studio, and refused to come out.

He then began the playing and replaying of that dreadful song that had become his personal anthem.

And finally, our listeners must rest assured in the confidence that any other such event such would never be allowed to re-occur at WGUY. Mr. Dalton had just had been summarily fired. End of story.

Now, I think a lot of us 17 year old and younger “adults”felt that firing the poor man was excessively harsh. We were used to seeing our own age group getting summarily punished, for our own little crimes and misdemeanors, all the time, but never an adult. Especially not an adult that we looked up to and who, in our callow opinion, had done little wrong.

First of all, the incident had given us something that was mysteriously fun to speculate on throughout the day. Something that wasn’t boring for a change. Secondly, we all pretty much loved our Jack the DJ Dalton. His was the disembodied radio voice that woke us up practically every morning, that spoke to us every day— an adult who actually seemed to ‘get’ us, you know? Plus, our daily entertainer; he’d come out with the wildest and craziest funny things sometimes. It was easy to feel he was one of the few adults who seemed… on our side. In a way, he seemed one of us.

But more importantly, he was the bringer of our MUSIC, which was our daily bread.

And then, there was something else to consider. Just what, exactly, was his “crime?” Standing up for something he believed in? Being against the Berlin Wall? I mean, who wasn’t? What, were we kids the only ones willing to look at this and see The Big Picture? I mean, the boys in my circle were starting to take the man’s firing personally. It was an injury, an injustice that had been perpetrated on them, damnit! And for them, this was a cause worth fighting for. The hornets’ nest had been stirred up. Oh, my pals were talking it up, big time. Like something needed to be done.

Honestly? I felt somewhat that way myself, onlynot nearly so strongly. In my home and upbringing, the parents laid down the law, and the parents administered the justice, so to speak. The rules were (well, mostly) common sense rules and you just had to go with them, didn’t you. I mean even to me, the little delinquent of the family, that seemed fair. Hey, I was a real little sneak when it came to breaking some of the rules, but every time I got caught at it, like it or not (and oh, I never liked it), it always turned out it to have been my own stupid damn fault.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I‘d grown up feeling that in the long run you just had to accept the status quo. Didn’t seem to me like there was that much of a choice anyway. So… when this WGUY flap went down, I felt bad for the guy, sure. And yeah, I felt some of the emotional turmoil too. But in the long run like I said, I was like, he got fired, that’s too bad. Yeah, I liked his show and everything, but… oh well then. What can you do?

Little did I know that an onslaught of angry phone calls were being made from all over the place. WGUY’s office phone was reportedly ringing off the hook. People didn’t like their DJ getting summarily fired, did they. They were angry. And they were busy making it clear to the fire-ers that they wanted their fire-ee summarily reinstated. But me? I was out of the loop. I’d just gone home, watched a little TV, and then to bed. I never found out until the following afternoon when I went back in to work and got the new “lowdown” from some of my friends who popped into the garage to tell me the “great news.”

Huey Cole’s Esso, 20 years before I worked there…

What great news? The radio station had been amazingly overwhelmed with the hundreds of protests and the owners had finally caved in to the demands!

Wow. I was shocked. Now my pals (who, like me, lived thirty-five miles away from the GUY studios) had found all this out through the grapevine, second-hand. They themselves personally had nothing whatsoever to do with the outcome. Yet, by the way they were strutting around and claiming victory, you’d think they’d stormed the Bastille and chopped off Marie Antoinette’s head.

Teen-agers. You gotta love’em.

But anyway, it was all over. It had been a bloodless coup. Jack Dalton was right back on the air that evening and right back on the old payroll, like nothing whatsoever had ever happened. The proletariat had won the day over their capitalist oppressors. The world that was WGUYville was still a democracy. So. There would be Jack Dalton’s music. And all was well in the land.

And sure, I was happy for our DJ.

But… SPOILER ALERT: everything I’ve told you… you’ve gotten from the point of view of my 17 year old self. A kid’s point of view. A kid’s version of “the lowdown.” But as always, there were other points of view. More about this soon.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The brain is a frickin’ file cabinet, isn’t it. And this one little pretty-much-forgotten event has been occupying one or more of my brain cells for almost sixty years. And in all those sixty years, I can recall only one other time that this incident conjured itself right up out of my subconscious memory. That happened ten or twelve years ago at the library where I work.

Four or five of us on the staff were, for whatever reason, chatting about some of our favorite novelty songs. Doctor Demento’s name had come up, bringing along with it such crazy titles such as Steve Martin’s “King Tut,” Tom T-Bone Stankus’ “Existential Blues,” Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha”, and “Junk Food Junkie” by Larry Gross, to name a few. And suddenly, bing!, the “West of the Wall” thing had popped up unbidden in my mind, seemingly out of the blue since the song is not a novelty tune in and of itself.

“Do any of you remember a particular song called ‘West of the Wall?” I asked.

The question got me blank stares and the shaking of heads.

So OK, I launched into the strange saga of WGUY’s for-me–memorable episode when, suddenly, one of our library clerks, Jeannie Tabor, joyfully interrupted saying, “Oh my god! I DO remember that happening! It was so… weird, wasn’t it!”

Actual X-ray of my brain…

So there were a pair of us then! Two of us each with a brain cell that had been harboring this identical data (no doubt in the form of ones and zeros), data that had been lying dormant all these years like a little time capsule waiting to be opened! So then, excitedly, we both went on, telling the story together, as each of us remembered it. What fun!

But it didn’t take long after that for our little time capsule excitement to subside, the fun little memory curling up again in our respective brain cells and going right back to sleep. In my case, never again to be awakened from its little vampire crypt until… one month ago, it just popped back up in my head (who knows why) and got me thinking of the incident as a possible topic for this blog. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But wait, there’s more! As I began to compose this post, I remembered how ridiculously surprised I’d been when Jeannie had confirmed my little story. And I started to wonder… who else, if anyone, might also remember it.

So what did I do? I fired up my laptop and did the standard twenty-first century thing. I went to Google. I figured there must be more people out there who remember it.

Well, even with Google, finding info on such obscure little happening wasn’t easy. For half a day, I worked my butt off like a private eye. And finally… I did manage to find a few conversational traces of a thread in the Facebook archives.

The following four quotations from old Facebook messages (once posted by a few now-disembodied texters) are all I was able to dig up from the some six decades of the digital graveyard:

“Kent Taylor Smith Hi Kent. Yup, I was listening that day and heard it. It was about the same time that I went into radio. BTW: Are you still with THE WAVE?”

“On August 13, 1961, East Berlin closed its border with West Berlin and erected a wall to stem the flow of Easterners to the West. This brought to mind a song, sung my Toni Fisher, titled “West of the Wall” which was released the following year, around June ’62. Well, one thought led to another and Bangor’s dawn to dusk radio station, WGUY, came to mind. They played all the “good stuff,” including “West of the Wall.” So, now I’m thinking did they really play “West of the Wall,” continuously, one day as a kind of protest, or is this just the confused memory of a 12 year-old adolescent? I don’t recall the names of the ‘jocks’ at WGUY who might be able to answer this torturous question. Is there anyone out there to help relieve this pressure? Perhaps the guys from Bangor, Maine – Radio & TV?”

“The event happened, it was so long ago nobody remembers it other than it happened. I first started working for WGUY in 2000 at the 102.1 incarnation. Nobody involved with the station then, or since, was involved. I even asked Bob Mooney about it once and he could barely remember it.”

“Your memory is very good, John. I remember that incident. Yes, a DJ on WGUY named Jack Dalton played “West Of the Wall” continuously for several hours. I don’t recall it being a “protest”, but rather a publicity stunt to draw attention to the station. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the aftermath, but if my memory is somewhat close, he was “fired” and then “rehired.” Someone else might have a clearer memory on that part. BTW, publicity stunts were quite common at that time. A DJ would “lock themselves” in the studio and play the same song multiple times, get “fired” and get “rehired” after listeners protested the firing. Side note: studio doors don’t have locks on them.”

So: there were some little data packets of the same ones and zeros lodged in the brains of these guys, just like they’re still lodged in Jeannie’s and my own. Cool.

I’m always finding it very fascinating to be reminded that each of us has one of these biological, state-of-the-art, digital recorders installed right behind our eye sockets and that they’re on all the time, picking up any and all of the vibrations of our five (known) senses and forever cataloging, collating, and cataloging them. I mean, jeez, who knows what all else is stored away in these things? Could be anything. Could be everything. Put’em all together and what’ve you got? Maybe only the entire history of the earth. One soul at a time.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So now, allow me to stop here and make this little shout-out to any of you (out there) who have happened by chance to stumble onto this particular post, right now… who were living here in the WGUY World greater area back in ’64, and who also have some first-hand knowledge of this event. If so, could you, would you (please, please, please) leave a comment or two about it in the comment field at the end of the post? Like, you know, what you were doing at the time, what you remember thinking about it at the time, etc. Who knows, maybe there’s a lot of us. Maybe we could start a club. Or a support group, lol.

But no, seriously, all kidding aside, I’d really appreciate you checking in if that’s the case.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Alright, I’m going to close here by swapping my 17 year old’s hat for my 77 year old’s one, and focusing us on the last few sentences of the fourth quotation from the Facebook thread I’d unearthed with Google’s help. This is what the gentleman said:

“My memory is a bit fuzzy on the aftermath, but if my memory is somewhat close, he was “fired” and then “rehired.” Someone else might have a clearer memory on that part. BTW, publicity stunts were quite common at that time. A DJ would “lock themselves” in the studio and play the same song multiple times, get “fired” and get “rehired” after listeners protested the firing. Side note: studio doors don’t have locks on them.”

Notice the use of all the quotation marks, where he says “fired” and “rehired”? That’s not the same thing as simply saying fired or rehired, is it. He has also called it what it actually was: a “publicity stunt.” And if you were an adult back then, you would have seen it for what it was too. But on the other hand, if you were a 17 year old or younger, all full of piss and vinegar, you’d probably see it as a call to arms, as many did.

It’s like the station put on a little play. And why? To generate more interest in WGUY… that’s why To do something that would increase the numbers of their young listeners, something their sponsors would appreciate. And of course, that’s what it did. It worked. The adults back then did know. Of course they did. And it’s easy to imagine them rolling their eyes and getting quite a kick out of it. It’s easy to imagine them sighing, shaking their heads, and saying something like, “These crazy teen-agers. They’ll believe anything.”

But it’s the guy’s last sentence, his “Side note” that’s making me smile today.

“Studio doors don’t have locks on them.”

That’s right.

They don’t.

home

WINGS

In remembrance of our Dad on this Veterans’ Day, Raymond Edward Lyford (1920-2016), who served in the Army Air Force and flew 35 missions as a radar operator on the B-29 Superfortress Bombers in World War II. His B-29 was shot down in a jungle in China. However, the aircraft was patched back together to fly more missions, thus being dubbed “Patches” (pictured below)

strange, me

being past middle-aged

balding

& not just a little insignificant

& still looking up to

my john wayne

ted williams dad–

knowing intellectually that

there are no heroes

not really

but having to plead guilty

to the charge

of hero-worship

of romancing with my

inner schoolboy heart

the mystique of that silver

b-29

terry and the pirates

fly-boy chapter

of your story

where you

flight-suited

& bomber-jacketed

all zippers & insignia

roared the wild blue yonder

in your seat-of-the-pants

roger-wilco world

of cabin pressure

intstruments

radar bogies

mae wests

bomb-bay doors

clamoring hearts

white knuckles

bated breath

curses

prayers

Home

THE BIG BANG THEORY

Prologue: 1951

Picture this. I’m five. Not only am I five, I’m short for my age. Don’t take up hardly any room.

Me, front seat, middle. No bucket seats back then. Just bench seats, I think they were called. Bench seats and no seat belts. Riding in Uncle Archie’s car. Archie driving. Dad riding shotgun, to my right. Me in the middle. Dad and Archie in steady conversation. Just two low voices. Blah blah blah. Me, not even coming up to their shoulders, the conversation literally and figuratively going right over my head. Nothing to do with me. Me, practically not even here, but I’m used to that.

My world right now is this dashboard in front of me. It’s all I’ve got. Nothing else to look at, not being able to see out the windshield. But it’s on my level, so… yeah, the dashboard. And… the ignition key plugged into it. I’ve been fixated on the ignition key for some time now. And the tiny beaded chain swinging from it. Shiny. Swaying. The only thing moving in my world right now. Like a little fishing lure for bored eyes.

Finally. Dad’s and Uncle Archie’s attention are suddenly focused on something up ahead and off to the left. Some house being built. By some friend or acquaintance of theirs. Whatever. I’d been waiting for something like that.

“Well, that’s coming right along.”

“I’d say so. ‘Bout another month maybe.”

Quick as lightning, I clamp that key in my sweaty little fist, twist it once to the left, then jerk it back to the right, and have my hand lying back in my lap like nothing ever happened as the car coughs, convulses jarringly, and K’POW! farts off a shotgun blast of a backfire before returning to normal.

Dad: “What the hell was that!?”

Uncle Archie: “Damned if I know! She never done that before.”

Fortunately, no one looks down and asks me. Why would they? I’m just a five year old. I’m not even here.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Let me begin with this obvious fact: automobiles are vastly different today than they were in the 1950s. They’ve evolved over time in the same way Man has evolved. On a sliding scale from the simpler to the more complex.

Who knows where each will end up when our sun finally implodes, sucking our solar system down inside the event horizon into its own black hole with it? If that even is what happens. Hell, I’m no physicist. But I do know a thing or two about what cars were like way back in 1950sville.

So many things were different.

All cars had manual transmissions back then. Why? Because there was no alternative, of course. The automatic transmission in cars were not commercially available yet. Meaning when you applied for your driver’s license, you knew you’d be taking your road test on a stick shift. No letter D for Drive, R for Reverse, or P for park. Meaning you’d have to have become intimate with the dreaded clutch pedal. I know. That’s scary. But I did it. In fact, we all did it.

But also meaning that the harder-than-nuclear-physics, manual-gear-shifting diagram was also something you’d have to become intimate with. Which is why you didn’t see Marty McFly jumping into, and driving off in, any 1950s cars in Back to the Future I.

I’ve already mentioned seating in The Prologue. Sports cars had bucket seats, but common cars did not. Plus nobody had seat belts in the 1950s, and nobody wanted those nuisances either, when they finally came out, as Chuck Berry’s song lyrics of “No Particular Place to Go” so aptly expressed years later: “Can you imagine the way I felt? I couldn’t unfasten her safety belt!”

Plus you’ve probably heard about those “suicide doors,” too— doors that opened up in the exact opposite direction than they do today. A leftover from the slower-speed, horse-drawn carriage days, a suicide door was an automobile door that was hinged on the rear-facing side, rather than the front-facing side.

Today if you’re barreling down the highway doing 70 and one of your passengers foolishly tries to open a car door, it’s nearly impossible. The wind’s 70 miles per hour blow-back pressure will fight to keep that door from opening up. In the 50’s however, many car doors (especially back-seat doors) were still designed to open in the opposite direction.

As a child, I was seated one afternoon in the back seat of our suicide-rear-door car while it was tooling down the road, probably at 50. For some reason (curiosity maybe) I grasped the door handle of the door on the driver’s side and began to open it a crack (can’t for the life of me remember why… although being naturally stupid and too curious for my own good immediately come to mind). As soon as I got the door barely inched open, the hurricane blow-back caught my door like a sail and just flung it open, practically catapulting me like a tiny, human, seat-beltless cannonball straight out onto the road in front of oncoming cars! Fortunately for me, my hand strength was practically zero so the door handle was just torn right out of my grip. My fingers got painfully sprained though, but I was still sitting, alive and whole, on the back seat. A hard way to learn a lesson

Ah yes. Life in the good old dangerous days.

But now to my main point. There is one big difference between the cars of the Nifty Fifties and today’s automobiles which I’ve never even thought about until lately, one which pertains to the incident I barely touched on in my prologue. More about that in a bit, right after I tell you a little story by way of introduction. It’s a true story, as all of my stories are. Never had any luck at all at creating literary fiction.

This one occured in 1960… me, thirteen going on fourteen. The year was 1960, but my parents’ car was a big, black, bulky 4-door 1948 Plymouth.

A cousin of ours who was two and a half, maybe three years older than me, lived in Massachusetts. Each year he’d summer at our place for a few weeks. His family was obviously better off than ours, financially anyway, because Wayne always seemed to have the coolest things. Cool clothes. Cool roller skates. Cool transistor radio. Cartons of cigarettes with usually one cancer stick nonchalantly propped up there like a pencil in behind his ear. A wad of twenties in his wallet at all times, and somehow always more where they came from. And fresh from the city streets of Boston, all the latest off-colored jokes to entertain everybody with. And most important, Wayne had just gotten his driver’s license. That was big. Because with him around, sometimes we had wheels. A lot of the popular town guys and all the girls couldn’t wait to see him show up every summer. In our redneck world, it was like having a lesser Elvis (notice how that almost sounded like a lesser evil? {Freudian slip, there}) come and stay at our place. I practically worshipped him (until I didn’t).

Now Dover-Foxcroft is situated only five miles from Maine’s gorgeous Sebec Lake. And that lake was huge in our summer social lives back then. We kids of just about all ages hitch-hiked out there and back almost every day. There was the municipal beach that was always pretty packed with the bathing-suited summer folks from away. The beach had its own concession stand for hamburgers, chips, cigarettes, and sodas, plus the usual male and female changing rooms and rest rooms. There was the marina next door to the beach where the wealthy tourists moored all those luxurious outboard and inboard motor boats.

The marina had a small convenience store too for beer, pastries, some groceries, fishing tackle, live bait, and boat rentals. The wonderful, magic roller rink was right there too (and oh, that makes me go all weak with nostalgia, just thinking about it once again). It was the jewel in the crown, if you ask me. All the beautiful girls from near and far skated there. In short, like the song, the lake was “the magnet and I was the steel.”

One Sunday afternoon, we wanted go back out there to retrieve something we’d left at camp so I, Denny, and Wayne went to dad to beg for the family car. Dad was a TV and radio repairman who did service calls over a pretty large portion of the county back then. Yes, even on Sundays. Here’s how the conversation went down:

Dad: I dunno. I’ve got a service call over in Milo, so I’m gonna need the car.

Us: We just wanna go over and back to pick up something. It won’t take long.

Dad: All right, But I’m going to need it in a half hour then.

Us: Half hour tops, no problem.

So we all piled into the Plymouth, me calling “Shotgun!”

It always felt so adventurous back then to just take off in a car not being driven by an adult. It gave me a new-found, giddy feeling of freedom that I was still just getting accustomed to as I grew a little older. Inside the car it was always just boy talk. Sometimes about girls. Sometimes about places we’d been, more specifically about where Wayne had been, like Quebec City, since he’d traveled all over and we really hadn’t. Sometimes it was about cars. That day it was about cars.

Denny and I didn’t know anything about cars, especially anything technical about them. What was important to me was getting my own license soon and just go off cruising to who knows where. I mean, just imagining what it was going to be like, sitting behind the steering wheel someday and actually driving someplace by myself was so enticing it was all I could think about. That, and the impossible dream of actually buying a car of my very own.

So yeah, we were talking cars that day. And for one reason or another, I brought up the memory I still have of causing such a satisfying backfire in Archie’s car, way back when I was five years old.

Me: And all I had to do was turn the ignition key off and then back on. Ka-bang! It was so cool!

Wayne: Yeah I’ve heard of that. And you know what they say?

Me: No. Whatta they say?

Wayne: That the longer you wait before, you know, switching the ignition key back to ON? The bigger and better the backfire!

Me: No shit!

Wayne: I shit you not.

Me: Well, my backfire was pretty loud, you know.

Wayne: Wanna find out if it’s true though?

Denny: No! We don’t. It’s Dad’s car. Besides, we ain’t got time to…”

Me: Of course we wanna find out!

So, long story short, there is this big hill at the end of Lake Road that rolls you down into Greeley’s Landing, where the roller skating rink, the Marina, the little store, and the Municipal Beach are. Guess what the name of that hill is. Mile Hill. Mile Hill, because you can just roll downhill on it for a certified measured mile.

And only five minutes later we’d reached the crest of that Mile Hill, and had started heading down. Wayne shifted the Plymouth into neutral, and we felt gravity begin to take over, pulling us along. “Here we go,” said I, me in the co-pilot’s seat.

“This is not a good idea,” radioed Denny back there from the tail gunner’s turret.

I twisted the ignition key to the OFF position as we gradually began to build up speed in our silent dive toward the lake below. It was a quiet drive down, nothing but the sizzle of the tires on asphalt. It would take slightly over a full minute to reach the bottom, where the road levels off about a hundred yards before becoming the boat ramp. “God, I wonder what this one’ll be like!” I marveled. Houses and camps and trees were beginning to sail past us on both sides of the road at an accelerating rate. Wayne tapped on the brakes now and then so we didn’t get rolling so fast we’d end up in the lake.

When we could see the blue water up ahead, Wayne said, “OK. We’re pretty much here. Do your key thing.”

‘Roger Wilco,” I responded.

“I still don’t think this is a good idea!” Denny reported from the turret.

But I responded with, “Bombs away!” I twisted the key back to ON.

There was a split-second of held breaths in pure silence.

And then… HIROSHIMA!

The car was rocked by the most devastating detonation I’d ever experienced at that point of my life! And when I say “rocked,” I am not kidding! The car spasmed! And oh man, we’d definitely gotten our backfire alright! The backfire of the gods. The noise of the blast was a deafening assault, and then the continued roaring that followed was unbearable if not injurious. You. Couldn’t. Even. THINK!

Wayne hit the clutch and let the car roll to a stop off the side of the road. Then he put her in gear, and turned the key back to OFF, thank God. The roaring stopped. I suppose that brought silence, but for a minute or three the roaring in my skull still reverberated so loudly, you couldn’t have proved it by me. We just sat there for a while.

Finally, after we’d gotten our breathing under control, if not our heart rates, Wayne looked over at me and said, “Well, you’d better get out and check out how loose the muffler is, OK?”

“OK.”

Now here is a moment I will never forget as long as I live. Rather than get out, I just opened my door, hung my head and upper torso down off over the edge of the seat, bracing myself with my two hands in the gravel to keep from falling on my head. And took me a look-see. After a moment I pushed myself back up in onto the car seat again. I let out a long sigh. And then I said it.

“What muffler?”

Because nothing but jagged, smoking, metal shards dangled hellishly from both of the now-empty ends of the exhaust pipes that had once secured either end of the muffler firmly in its place. So. There was no muffler. Or… what remained OF the muffler lay strewn in a metal debris field spread over forty or fifty yards behind the rear bumper. An explosion of, for us at least, unimaginable force had blasted a steel muffler to smithereens!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now two things I want to say at this point: (1) I have already admitted that I knew little, next to nothing really, of things automotive, so I had no way myself of technically understanding (let alone explaining) what had just occurred here; and (2) I’m worrying here that you, dear reader, might suspect me of using a little (or way too much) exaggeration in the hopes of over-dramatizing my description of what had just happened beneath Dad’s ’48 Plymouth. To try to make a pretty good story an even better story. I say this because if I were in your shoes, I think you would also find me leaning toward being the Doubting Thomas here about the way I’ve described this… happening.

So. If it please the court, I would like to enter into evidence my Exhibit A:

This incident occurred in, or around, 1960 as I’ve said. Much later (48 years later, to be exact), an essay appeared in a February 24^th, 2008 syndicated weekly column of The Bangor Daily News. The column’s name was Click and Clack. Click and Clack were actually two brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, a couple of comics whose other field of expertise lay in their lifetime careers as a couple of automobile mechanics. People seeking automobile and general automotive related advice and answers to questions would write in with their queries to the Click and Clack Brothers. On the date of publication mentioned above, this particular column title jumped right out at me: “HERE’S HOW VEHICLES WITH CARBURETORS CAN MAKE ADOLESCENTS GRIN.” I saw this, and I suspected right away what this was going to be about and, sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed.

See, I’d been wondering off and on over the years just why the three of us experienced SUCH a thunderous explosion that afternoon instead of just a heftier little backfire. By reading this article, my question was answered with a single word: “carburetor.” As they explained, cars these days no longer have carburetors. They’re all fuel-injected now.

And they go on to explain one particular, pertinent fact about carburetors, along with including a funy little story of their own (please do yourself a favor and read it, for a chuckle). “When you turned the ignition key off in an old car, the carburetor would continue to allow gasoline to pour into the cylinders. That gasoline didn’t get combusted, because the spark plugs weren’t firing so it all got pushed out into the exhaust system where it basically just continued to sit there, waiting for something to happen. When you turned the ignition back on, that first spark would ignite not only the fuel in the cylinder, but all of the fuel sitting in the exhaust system, too. And, kaboom!”

So let’s apply that explanation to Dad’s unfortunate 1948 Plymouth’s muffler. OK. I switched off the ignition key. This allowed gasoline to begin pouring into the cylinders and beyond, unabated. Now with my Uncle Archie’s car, back when I was five, I switched the ignition OFF and then right back ON immediately, so whatever little gasoline had dribbled into the exhaust system just made a feisty little kaboom. But in Dad’s Plymouth, unbeknownst to us, we traveled a full frickin’ mile while gasoline was happily filling up the muffler and “waiting for something to happen.” Is it any wonder then that the damn thing blew itself all to hell when I turned the key back to ON? The only wonder is that it didn’t catch the car afire, that the fire didn’t engulf the whole car in an instant ball of flame and melt us like three marshmallows! Wow.

Once again I plead temporary and/or permanent stupidity.

And that just leaves the second part of the fireworks— namely, facing my dad later in the day. Stay tuned.

home