The Human Brain – NEARING THE END OF THE LINE

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

A couple days ago I was haphazardly streaming my way through YouTube heaven when I happened to stumble upon a clip from a 1984 movie I hadn’t thought about in decades, a clip that got an immediate giggle out of me and, at the same time, felt like an old friend. That movie is Teachers.

**TEACHERS (1984)**
**Tagline: They fall asleep in class. Throw ink on each other. Never come in Mondays. And they’re just the teachers.**

And despite being the typical, somewhat cheesy 1984 comedy that it is, it really caught on with us teachers all over the country back in the day, leaving us all feeling somehow exonerated (you know, from always getting ragged on for having such the cushiest job in the world, getting all our summers off with pay, and then forever being the butt of that old adage: “Those who can, DO; those who can’t, TEACH”).

Now, there are a number of great ‘teacher movies’ out there on Netflix, Prime, Tubi, or whichever, a few of my all-time favorites being Up the Down Staircase (1967), To Sir With Love (1967), The Paper Chase (1973), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Dead Poets’ Society (1989). These five are equally as entertaining as Teachers, but seem to have been scripted with just a little more class.

However, whereas they can be characterized as maintaining a sharper focus perhaps on particular aspects of the classroom world, Teachers manages to leave no stone unturned. It manages to hit on practically every conceivable thing that could go wrong (and often has) in that school-calendar-world of students, teachers, and administrators.

And in the same way M*A*S*H and Catch-22 expose the absurdities of war—

and Office Space exposes the virtual Chinese water torture of mundane cubicle-life with its personnel chained to a daily grind of filling out useless forms, fighting with faulty office fax equipment, and putting up with obnoxious superiors—

**…STOLE MY STAPLER… BURN THIS PLACE DOWN…**

Teachers exposes practically every single one of the possible chaotic frustrations of the profession. Basically it’s a comic catalog of all the classic “zoo” foibles common to the professional educators’ world.

And sure, “Zoo” is likely to come across as a little too harsh an over-exaggeration for you remembrances. But that could partly be due to the fact that school boards and administrators always strive to represent their schools publicly as professional ‘well-oiled machines,’ especially in the eyes of the taxpayers, parents, and even their students. In other words, a lot of the (let’s call them) ‘less savory occurrences‘ get effectively swept under the rug of PR.

But hey, what if I’m not even referring to the student body when I say “zoo”? Surprised?

I mean, we can all look back on our high school days and remember our teachers, can’t we. And sure, you loved some. Some were boring as hell. Or even stupid. And some you may remember as being kind of rotten and/or downright mean. But regardless of all that, you felt confident that you knew them, right? And of course you did. To some extent.

To the extent they allowed you to know them. But never fully. Because face it: you were the students, and they were the teachers. They, the adults. And you, the kids.

But… what if I told you (me being the whistle blower here) that behind closed doors, your faculty… yes, your teachers of English, French, Latin, German, Spanish, mathematics, sciences, home ec., orchestra and marching band… your principals and assistant principals… were, in general, surprisingly… not one whit more adult than you or any of your classmates back then?

That behind that faculty lounge door was a bunch of… old “kids?”

Sure. Some were twenty, or maybe twenty-five. Some were in their forties or fifties. And some were shamefully (Good Lord!) still gripping their tenured status with white-knuckled-fists well onto five years or more past their retirement age. Some married, some divorced, and some about to be divorced. Some of them even being bullied, some even doing the bullying? Some ADHD. Some doing drugs. Many needing anger-management classes. And all of them insecure in one way or another.

Well, I kid you not. And yes, I know. They looked like adults, didn’t they. I mean, man, they had looking like adults right down to a science. But let’s get to the truth.

And in so doing, I ask that you join me in watching that clip from Teachers. So for a good time, click on the link below. Then I’ll join you for a little discussion on the other side.

And just so you know, the man in the clip turning the crank on the ancient “office copier” has been nicknamed Ditto by his peers. Why? Because (A) this type of caveman “copier” machine was known as a duplicator, a mimeograph, or… a “ditto machine” (welcome to the past, boys and girls); (B) because Ditto is the one always hogging the office ditto machine with no regard for others; and (C) because he hates teaching, so he’s always cranking off dittoed worksheets to keep his classes busy so he doesn’t really have to teach.

**1980’s CUTTING-EDGE, STATE-OF-THE-ART COPIER**

His classroom management style is this: he keeps all of the students’ desks facing away from him, so they won’t view him while he sits in the back of the room reading the newspaper. His students have been trained to pick up their daily copy of the freshly-dittoed worksheets from his desk upon entering the classroom, to sit quietly at their desks working on that worksheet, and, when the bell rings, to deposit their completed worksheets back on his desk upon leaving. This goes on day after day after day. No other interaction between ‘teacher’ and students.

One day Ditto drops dead from a heart attack behind his newspaper. Still, throughout the day, the kids come and go, come and go, none never noticing that the man seated behind the newspaper is a corpse!

(And by the way, every school I ever worked in had a copier-hog pretty much like Ditto. Yeah, Teacher World in my experience was a lot like the world of M*A*S*H, character-wise.)

Anyway… I hope you enjoy this silly clip depicting a teachers’ lounge altercation (which I personally find much more realistic than you might be inclined to believe):

OK. First, let’s be honest.

(1) The movie’s old. Forty years old to be exact. So yeah, it’s dated.

(2) Dated, and a little cheesy, but not cheap. I mean, just look at the stellar cast:

Nick Nolte

JoBeth Williams

Judd Hirsch

Ralph Macchio

Richard Mulligan

William Schallert

Laura Dern

Crispin Glover

Morgan Freeman

(plus a host of wonderful, now-all-but-forgotten character actors

(3) And yes, this scene is silly. Not quite slapstick, but silly. Meant to be silly. The movie’s a comedy.

(4) But the movie’s a satirical comedy, a lampoon. And satires poke fun at situations that actually… are.

So if you are judging this scene as being totally unlikely, a scene that would-never, could-never–happen in such a place as a work room for professional educators… think again. Because in a moment, I am going to share with you a scene that I once personally witnessed, very similar to the one in this film.

Allow me to present my qualifications, my credentials, to even have an opinion on this:

I served 34 years in the trenches of schools (both public and private), and just like all other lifetime career educators, I’ve had the opportunity to witness a patchwork quilt of sometimes unbelievable ‘situations,’ so many in fact that had some gypsy fortune teller ever shown me in her crystal ball scenes of my teaching career future… who knows? Perhaps I would have remained the hapless gas pump jockey to this day.

But OK, here we go. Let’s take a quick look-around-peek (with the dimming flashlight of my memory) at my past, real-life Teachers ‘movie’:

Oodles of bomb-scares, of course. Wherein I sometimes, along with a squad of my equally untrained bomb-squad colleagues, helped the cops check out every locker in the building.

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

Breaking up tons of boys’ room fights and, more than once, getting slammed into a wall, so doing.

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

Enduring a three-weeks-long scabies epidemic that took out three-quarters of the school population (including the teachers) throughout that time.

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

Getting a surprise day-off from school one mid-morning due to a ‘temperature inversion’ caused by the paper mill’s stench-bucket-smoke from the towering stack right next door, commingling with the dripping 95-degree humidity outside to form actual CLOUDS inside the building (I’m dead serious here), floaters right up there against the ceiling tiles, clouds that actually began drizzling a toxic “rain” down upon us, the hapless school population—

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

Participating (yes, illegally) in a couple days of a sign-waving labor strike during our three-years-long contract negotiations.

Not actually a strike photo, just a news clipping of one of our many protests leading up to the strike. (BTW, I’m the menacing, moustachio’d dude in the jeans jacket, 3rd from the left)

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

Oh, and this one’s a riot: being ‘schooled’ by a (pretty-much “brain-dead”) Special Ed administrator during a mandatory faculty meeting that “It is an infraction, by law, for any member of the faculty to share the records of one of our students with any party outside that student’s family or school counselors.” Guess what. Within a couple of weeks of that presentation, that particular “administrator” (who couldn’t administer himself out of a wet paper bag) inadvertently did just that: he himself inadvertently sent one male student’s private records to the family of a totally unrelated female student! As you can imagine, the parents of said male student threw a fit, and threatened to sue the school.

But see, that’s only Chapter One of the saga. Because in the following school year, right after officially warning all of us teachers again of the legal importance of never giving out any student’s info to any other party, this man, this idiot… (wait for it) did it again! And not only did he do it again… he accidently sent that very same male student’s records to the very same female student’s family! AGAIN! Swear to God on a stack of Bibles! I have old teacher friends who will back me up on this. You can’t make this stuff up.

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

At one point in time, in one particular school I taught at, anyone (teachers, students, cafeteria help, custodians, and even students) were allowed (for a while, anyway) to just drop by the main office and place any needed, public, school-related announcement into a designated box. Such announcements (i.e., “The Chess Club will meet tonight in room 222 at 6:00 this evening”; “Wrestling practice is canceled this evening”; “Would Billy Greenwood report to the office at this time”; etc.) would then be read daily, before and right after school, by the high school principal.

This practice came to an untimely end however after some wise-ass kids put the following ‘announcement’ into the box for four days in a row. “Mike Hunt must report to detention hall this evening. If Mike Hunt fails to do so, there will be consequences.” After two days of the principal’s booming voice reading “Would Mike Hunt please report to detention hall this evening!” the third day’s readings got a little cranky: “Would Mike Hunt please report to detention hall tonight! If you’ are MIKE HUNT, I personally guarantee you will regret failing to do as you’re told!”

The message, it turned out, was not repeated on day four. (1) No Mike Hunt was enrolled in the school at that time, and (2) the way “Mike Hunt” sounds if you say it fast… (Uhmmm… ok, sorry… yeah, I’ll let myself out…)

But this is a true story, and that’s when the practice of the open announcement box in the main office ceased forever.

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

Anyway, after 34 years in front of the chalk boards, I’ve garnered thousands of these never-a-dull-moment, “text-book -looney-bin” anecdotes (to pilfer a Stephen King quotation from his book, On Writing). I’m sure all career teachers have. But the capper of all cappers in my life was that year a certifiable, text-book looney-bin sociopath and career criminal conned his way into the headmaster’s position and took the school for an unforgettable ride.

He lasted almost the whole year, but not quite. And as a result of my calling him out and getting him fired, even long after he had disappeared into the ether, I received a couple of spine-chilling threats from him (that’s over an eight-year period). And as tempting as it is for me to launch into tell you that story, I can’t allow myself to do it. Neither you nor I have the time, since I when I’ve done so in the past, I’ve always become a veritable Rime of the Ancient Mariner storyteller once I get started on that one.

But it’s also a true story, and that man became my personal albatross.

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

No, instead, I’ll conclude with the memory of another little account, one that got triggered in my mind by that film clip from Teachers… a dining room story.

Well, calling it a dining room is a gross exaggeration. What it was in reality was an oblong, boxcar-like box with a single door and no window. And it sat off to one side, against a wall like… something out of place, like an afterthought on the floor of the student cafeteria. The cafeteria itself was a fairly spacious hall with the usual kitchen-side, take-out windows where you’d pick up your trays, napkins, silverware, and the daily entree of your choice, and carry your loaded tray over to any of the circular tables surrounded by cafeteria chairs. But off on one side was that box. The faculty’s box.

I’m not sure what its measurements were, but it housed a long table inside, long enough to accommodate probably eight, maybe ten chairs to a side, meaning the room could seat a very crowded dozen and a half teachers at a time. Close quarters. Barely room enough to push your chair back against the wall behind you when you were finished and would be making your exit from the table.

Yes, this is where each mid-day, we of the faculty would come together to commune and break bread together (I’m tempted to say feed— the arrangement, such as it was, so much resembling a trough). Meanwhile, outside the box, a little sea of kids chattered away at their special, clique-designated tables.

Likewise, the faculty was comprised of its cliques as well, only in this setting, all cliques were sardined together around the same table. You had your jock clique (coaches and P.E. teachers); your smug intellectuals from the English wing clique; your politicos (the hawks and your doves, the hard-hats and your hippies); the newbies and the tenured; your misogynists and your pro-feminists; those who loved kids and those who obviously didn’t; and those who felt comfortable in their own skin joined right next to those who obviously did not.

All at one table.

Oh, and by the way… down the middle of the table, among the salt and pepper shakers and napkin holders, you also had the ashtrays because you also had the smoker and non-smoker factions. Which was an ongoing problem. Because back in the 70’s and earlier, the smokers had rights. The non-smokers? Not so much. Just the frickin’ way it was.

So if you were breaking bread at this table and the carcinogenic haze was tickling your throat and making you cough; if it was aggravating your asthma; hey, even if it was slowly killing you: just SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP. I think some rationalized it this way: I mean, what the hell? What difference does it make? We all live and work right under the paper mill smokestack anyway, so…

Yeah. I know.

But eventually that little controversial kettle of fish finally managed to get added to the faculty meeting agenda. And as a result of that meeting, after everyone who had something to say had aired her or his particular grievance, the issue was brought to a vote. And wow! The motion to ban smoking in the teachers’ dining area (if only DURING the actual lunch period) actually carried!

It really wasn’t so much though, was it. I mean, if you were already in there on your free period, (actually, we weren’t allowed to say “free period”— we were instructed to always say “planning period,” so it wouldn’t sound like you were sleazing off with nothing to do) you could smoke to your lung’s content right up to the first second of the ringing of the lunch period starting bell. So you know, obviously your smoke would still be right there, in the room, fresh as a daisy as the faculty and staff came filing in with their trays.

So no, it wasn’t much, but it was a start. Better than nothing.

Until that day…

A typical day, really. Conversations about… who knows what?…Richard Nixon, maybe; or who was getting stuck chaperoning the upcoming prom; or Jaws, the movie perhaps; or the long-lines-at-the-pumps gas shortage… whatever.

And then something happened.

We had this athletic coach, OK? He was seated a couple of chairs down from me. And what he did is suddenly pluck a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket. Yeah, he did it just like he’d done it hundreds of times before in there. I guess something like that pretty much gets to become muscle memory after so long. You don’t even have to think about it. Maybe you probably don’t even realize you’re doing it, half the time. It’s a habit.

But two or three people noticed him do it, and somebody said, “Ooops.”

He stared back at her and said, “Ooops what?”

And she responded “Ooops, weren’t-you-at-the-last-faculty-meeting-oops?”

But by now he’d already tapped the ends of three filter tips out of the pack. “Ooops. I can’t remember if I was… or not.”

“Oh, you were there,” the man seated directly across the table from him said. “You were there.”

“So?” Suddenly all the side-conversations had stopped.

“So we took a vote.”

“Huh!”

“And we all voted that there’s no more smoking in here during lunch hour. While we’re eating.”

“Well, no. We didn’t all vote for it. For instance, I didn’t vote for it.”

“Yeah, well… the majority voted for it. And the majority rules. Maybe you haven’t heard, but this is a democracy.”

By now he had a Marlboro dangling from his lips. “So, uhh, exactly WHEN… did you, all in the majority, vote for this new rule to go… into effect?”

Somebody else said, “It automatically went into effect when the vote was tallied.”

“That right?” Coach said, but he wasn’t looking at the person who had just spoken. He was looking straight ahead at the guy seated across from him. The elderly gentleman.

“That’s right,” the gentleman said.

“Funny. I don’t remember anybody announcing that at the meeting.” A grin was starting to spread over Coach’s face, and he’d begun fishing for something in his pants pocket. It was pretty obvious he was fishing for his lighter.

“Didn’t hafta be announced,” said the elderly man (whom I shall henceforth refer to as Mr. Ellison.) “It was understood.”

The Zippo was out now. “What, so… if I didn’t understand, you’re calling me, what, stupid now?”

Somebody with a frown said, “Hey. Come on, Coach…” but failed to explain his point in words. I know I was feeling very uncomfortable. I’m betting most, if not all, of us were.

Coach was smiling, Ellison wasn’t. “You’re not stupid.”

“Well… thanks. For that.“

Damn. It felt like we were in some dumbass wild west movie all of a sudden. The poker game scene in the back corner of the saloon where one guy’s just told the other guy, ‘I’m sayin’… you cheated!’ And the trouble was, Coach really was stupid. And he lived inside this big, muscly body with a great big ego and a little boy-child’s brain. He was a bully. A might-makes-right bully.

A sudden metallic click! His Zippo, popped open now, had a little finger of flame burning above it.

Ellison spoke like some steely-eyed Marshall warning the hot-headed gambler he’d better leave his Colt revolver right there where it was, in its holster. “You’re not gonna light that cigarette, in here.”

“Oooh! I’m not? Why? Oh no! If I do, you gonna run and tell on me?”

A female voice further up the table snapped, “Jesus Christ! Hey, little boys, no fighting on the playground, OK? For cryin’out loud, would you listen to yourselves?! Do you have any idea how silly you sound?”

But Coach went right on. “Hey, who made you my old man all of a sudden?”

Somebody said, “Aw jeez!“

“I said,… Who made you my old man?” And he poked the tip of his Marlboro into the flame. Smoke arose.

After thinking for a moment, Ellison began, “Truth be known, I bet if your father was here, he’d wipe that shitty……” but stopped when he saw the wiggily smoke ring expelled from Coach’s pursed lips traveling across the table toward him.

“You were saying…?”

With a brush of his hand, Ellison waved away the smoke ring as if a fly. “I was about to say… if truth be known, and I was your… daddy…”

Coach tensed at the word.

“… I’d be slapping your punk face six days from Sunday again, wouldn’t I… sonny boy? Now here, stub that cigarette out,” he added, sliding an ash tray sliding over across the table.

“Hey, I know what. How ‘bout I stub this butt right in that ugly kike face of yours?!”

BAM! The back of Ellison’s chair whacked the wall behind him as he struggled to rise to his feet! “OK! Now you’ve done it!”

BAM! Coach’s chair! “Not YET I haven’t!”

Amid tipped-over sodas and shouts of “GUYS!” “CHRIST ALMIGHTY!” “WHAT THE FUCK!” “STOP IT!” and “IDIOTS!” Ellison, caught up in what looked like a wild paroxysm of a Saint Vitus’ dance, was tearing at his sport jacket, futilely trying to rip the damn thing off his shoulders while Coach had already crawled a quarter of the way across the tabletop, only thing holding him back being the grip somebody’d managed to get on the back of his belt!

It was pandemonium! It was a ruckus! It was a…

ZOO!

And when the first teacher to bail reached the door yanked it open, (surprise!) two horrified boys on their hands and knees (having had their ears glued to the doorjamb all the while) toppled inside and pretty much had to be stepped over.

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

So yeah, I don’t find my Teachers clip to be that unrealistic, although it was a little over-dramatically done. And secondly, I do think that our needy little inner child (I suspect I’m talking about the ID here) remains with us all of our lives, hiding out inside us, right behind that Look-at-me-I’m- an-adult façade we project before ourselves like some medieval shield. And when things get too stressful in our lives, it steps out of the closet and, yes, look out, here it comes!

I guess I’m sounding a little… Lord of the Flies, huh.

So anyway…

When I first decided to focus on my memory of that violent little lunchtime incident for this post (the fight over smoking in the teacher’s “dining room” box), a film clip from another movie-favorite of mine kept nagging at me, wanting in on this discussion. I thought about letting it and finally, yeah, I’ve caved.

The film is of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And I call the scene, the I Ain’t No Little Kid, Nurse Ratched! scene. And yes, I believe it provides a suitable little capstone for the topic at hand…

Thanks for reading, by the way.

TAGLINE: If he’s crazy, what does that make you?

Please leave a comment if you’d like in the field below, and then click on “POST COMMENT.” I will read it and respond.

ON PEGGY LEE, ONE OLD SONG, & ME

I fell in love with Peggy Lee in 1955. It was love at first sight. She was a tall, blonde bombshell. Thirty-five years old.

Me, I was nine. And short for my age.

**Your humble author, Tom Lyford (1946–20??)**

Some kids get a crush on a teacher. Never happened to me though. Why? Because all my teachers up to that point were wrinkly, mean, old bats who didn’t even like kids, especially boys!

So… I got a crush on sex symbol instead.

And so how did I ‘meet’ the famous Ms. Lee? Well, I’d seen the animated Walt Disney movie The Lady and the Tramp earlier that year. Of course, I had no idea who Peggy Lee even was, let alone that she’d played some part in that film’s production.

However, one night a couple months later, The Wonderful World of Disney aired a half-hour documentary on the making of that movie. And part of that program focused on the producing of that film’s soundtrack, with clips showing some of the behind-the-scenes work going on in the sound studio.

And there she was.

Now see, in the movie there are a pair of villainous, female Siamese cats named Si and Am. And together they sing this catchy little duet called “We Are Siamese, If You Please.” I was fascinated!

And I learned from the documentary that both of their voices were recorded by the same person: one Peggy Lee. And me being only nine, and it being way back in the mid-fifties when just about nobody had a clue about anything technological, I was confused as to how she could possibly have sung both of those voices at the same time! I mean, one person, yet two harmonizing voices? At the same time?

That she could do that seemed… magical… so (along with the fact that she was obviously some beautiful fairytale princess) she beat out Roy Rogers’ wife, Dale Evans, and Superman’s Lois Lane in the pageant of my current, preadolescent heart throbs.

Very soon after, I went to work pestering my parents to buy me the set of little, yellow, plastic, 78 rpm Disney records featuring the music from The Lady and the Tramp. And they’d succumbed. Then I practically wore out the single with Ms. Lee singing “We are Siamese.”

Plus… I used to think about her a lot of the time. I mean a lot of the time. Like I said, I had a crush.

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

OK. So, time went by, as it always does. Well, only a year, actually. And then, suddenly, there she was again in my life. Only this time as a disembodied voice coming over the radio! And it wasn’t some silly little ditty she was crooning this time. No sir!

By 1956, I’d become quite the little radio head. Mom and Dad had got me this small blue AM radio, and that had become my lifeline to the phantom Boy Friend-and-Girl Friend World that I was aspiring to enter. And with an extension cord, I’d snaked it right in under my bed, so at night I only had to lean down over the bedside and work the magic of the dial. So many stations. So many pop love songs. And yeah, I was learning fast that… there was a lot to BE learned by paying close attention to what the popular artists were actually crooning about in between the lines of the lyrics.

Now unfortunately Mom harbored some very repressive holdover-tendancies from her early, churchy, holy-roller-days’-upbringing, especially where the subject of ‘the birds and the bees‘ were concerned. So that meant that there were often fragments of mysterious (to me) conversations I’d overhear from the big people talking in the next room, say– topics that I quickly learned I hadn’t better show any interest in finding out about, not if I knew what was good for me.

For instance, one day I stopped the family dinner-table chitchat cold in its tracks by just innocently asking, right in front of God and everybody, “Uhhmmm, hey, what’s sex, anyway?” Man oh man, did I ever get rousted right out of my chair and summarily dragged straight into my room! “You know very well what it is!” she accused, just before slamming my door and leaving me, the new prison inmate, lost and confused… and contemplating, I do? I already know what it IS? How can I already know what it is when…I don’t KNOW what it is?

But radio broadcasts? They didn’t give one rat’s patooty about absolute censorship, at least like Mom did. Oh it was still the repressive 50’s and all so, yeah, they didn’t actually spell everything right out or anything (like that), but there were hints all through the music everywhere. So yes, you could get… hints… and then your job was to try your darndest to imagine what they must be singing about in between those lyrics’ lines…

It was like trying to crack a secret code. But– enquiring minds needed to know. At least mine did. So that was a mission I was usually on.

So one day I bought Johnny Otis’s 1958 hit 45, “Willie Does the Hand Jive.” And when Mom first heard me playing it, she got as prickly as some old wet hen. She just assumed it just had to be referring to something deliciously naughty. (Turns out it really wasn’t though.)

“I know a cat named Way Out Willie…

Got a cool little chick named Rocking Millie…

He can walk and stroll and Susie-Q

And do that crazy hand-jive too…

Hand jive! Hand jive! Hand jive…

Doin’ that crazy hand jive!”

“Don’t think I don’t know what that’s about!” she growled.

“What?! Jeez, Ma! I think it’s just some new dance they’re doing!”

She definitely wasn’t crazy about that song! Which meant I really liked it, even though I didn’t have clue #1 about what the hand jive might even look like. But, since any message it contained (which it actually didn’t) appeared too crafty for even her to figure out or put her finger on (i.e., it didn’t contain any blatant “blaspheming” like, you know, the actual word “SEX”), her argument was too weak to even get off the ground. So I got to keep that 45.

But you can see what I was up against…

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

So one day in the steamy summer of ‘1958, Peggy Lee’s signature new siren song came a-wafting right over the old WABI AM airwaves. Yes, I’m talking about that sweaty, hypnotic, little finger-snapping number. You know the one: Fever.” And boy, did I ever do a double-take first time I heard that song! (Actually I pretty much continued doing double-takes every time I heard it after that.) And whenever that song played on the radio (which was just about every hour on every station across America!), I’d just find myself ever-so-slowly swaying back and forth in time to its slow rhythm. I couldn’t help it. It just seemed to happen on its own. The song had me in its thrall every time.

And oh, those were some pretty intriguing lyrics for a ten-year old little monk locked in his monastery cell, like I was. And for the first time in my little life, I was listening to a song that projected… atmosphere! I mean “Fever” took me somewhere. Somewhere else. Somewhere dark and delicious and private. Somewhere (I had no doubt) that I wasn’t supposed to be. But somewhere I perversely… liked.

I listened to that song over and over and over. And my inquisitive, prurient little mind worked tirelessly on decoding its coded secrets.

“They give you fever… when you kiss them
Fever if you live and learn…
Fever! Till you sizzle!
And what a lovely way to burn...”

My brain talking to me: Fever? When you kiss them? Fever if you live and learn…? Sizzle…? Oh please… let me ‘live and learn’ and ‘sizzle!‘ But… BURN…? In what way could burning ever be… lovely? I sorta wanted to find out, you know? And… would I ever… catch that particular “fever’?

(I really kinda hoped I would.)

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

And then fourteen more years passed. And in 1969, Peggy Lee recorded another blockbuster. And just like “Fever,” this one too locked right onto me and wouldn’t let go. But by then I was a college senior, and the attraction had nothing to do with a physical or romantic crush. This time, oddly, it was purely… philosophical.

It was a dark song titled, “Is That All There Is?” Please listen and follow along:

I remember when I was a little girl
Our house caught on fire
I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face
As he gathered me up in his arms and
Raced through the burning building out to the pavement
And I stood there shivering in my pajamas and
Watched the whole world go up in flames
And when it was all over, I said to myself
“Is that all there is to a fire”

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

And when I was twelve years old
My daddy took me to the circus
“The Greatest Show on Earth”
There were clowns and elephants and dancing bears
And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads
And as I sat there watching
I had the feeling that something was missing
I don’t know what
But when it was all over, I said to myself
“Is that all there is to the circus?”

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

And then I fell in love
With the most wonderful boy in the world
We’d take long walks down by the river
Or just sit for hours gazing into each other’s eyes
We were so very much in love
And then one day, he went away
And I thought I’d die, but I didn’t
And when I didn’t, I said to myself
“Is that all there is to love?”

Is that all there is
Is that all there is
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep…

I know what you must be saying to yourselves
“If that’s the way she feels about it
Why doesn’t she just end it all?”
Oh, no, not me
I’m not ready for that final disappointment
‘Cause I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you
That when that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath
I’ll be saying to myself…

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all… there is…

So, when I first listened to this song, I remember thinking, Wow! Your house burns down around you and you’re, what, not even impressed?

I could understand not being enthusiastic about a circus, because, personally, I wasn’t much of a fan of those things anyway.

But, Jeez! Your lover drops you and moves away? I couldn’t believe that anyone could just blow off that pain. I mean, I’d had that experience. And it had been a killer.

And then, to top it off, guessing that your own suicide just might be… yeah, right, too boring to even bother with? I mean, she actually laughed that off in the song. How jaded was she?

But then again, after listening to it over and over (which I did) and dwelling on it… well, after a while, I sort of got it. I could see how for some people that could be possible. Because looking within, I realized that if I were honest with myself (which I hardly ever was) well, it wasn’t as if I wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with depression, was it. I mean, I’d harbored some pretty dark thoughts myself, hadn’t I. And written some very dark and depressed poetry as a result. And in fact, philosophically I was really no stranger to the sense of meaninglessness in the world I saw myself living in.

So for me, the effect of this song was actually like merely slipping two or three extra shots of cappuccino into my mug of already pretty-rugged black coffee. And small wonder. Turned out the song was inspired by, and directly based on, a famous existential short story titled “Disillusionment,” written in 1896 by the famous existential philosopher Thomas Mann (1875-1955)– a man for whom Shakespeare’s quotation, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” pretty much summed up his take on life.

And me at that time? I was already (in my angry-young-college-man-youth-days) a budding little existentialist myself. Partly, I admit, because I was young and callow, and because existentialism was in vogue at that time with the college set, and like a little kid in a candy shop I guess I just wanted to try everything going. But then it had really caught on. Because my existentialism had actually gotten its first jump-start when I was a freshman back in ’64. I had enjoyed a well-acted performance of the play, “No Exit,” by the even more famous existentialist, Jean Paul Sartre. And alas, for me “No Exit” was a gateway drug.

I suddenly couldn’t get my sweaty little hands on enough Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre after that. And there’s an atheistic side of Existentialism, quite evident in “Is That All There Is?” So of course I flirted with atheism, but that outlook never really took complete root in my life, though I give it credit for having tried. But throughout the rest of college and for a fairly long while after that, I was just one more dark, little, agnostic, run-of-the-mill, wannabe-card-carrying “existentialist.”

Today at 77, I yam what I yam. I’m what I’ve eaten, what I’ve read, what I’ve watched, what I’ve listened to, and… the sum-total of everything I’ve ever experienced. And those old experiences? Man oh man, didn’t they just keep on barreling down the pike at me like cars and trucks the opposite lane, imperceptibly chipping away, nickel and dime-ing the reshaping of my overall personality and psyche a day at a time.

Today, each little chip is just a faded, barely-remembered memory-scar in my rearview mirror.

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So yeah, looking back it was hardly any biggie that I just happened to catch The Lady and the Tramp, and then discover that documentary with Peggy overdubbing her voice-overs in the sound studio.

It’s just something that happened. Something that managed to get my attention when I was at a very impressionable age. And… inadvertently pinned the soon-to-become-influential Ms. Lee on my map.

And then as things do, one thing (my little Peggy Lee crush) led to another little thing (my bigger little Peggy Lee fever) and Hey, Presto! my sexual awareness got a precocious little jump-start. Which eventually did lead me down the road to…

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep…

… and then, perhaps, on to my own, honorary, self-awarded, red-neck ‘PHD’ in ‘Philosophy.’

In the meantime, there have been busloads of other regular people and other celebrity artists rolling down my highway as well. And some of the latter and their works have sort of saved my ‘sanity’ from time to time. Looking back at the lowest points of the depression in my life and remembering how the arts and the artists have unwittingly served me as my phantom medical staff, I’ve often said that I’ve had to rely on ‘the kindness of strangers’…on the virtual anesthesia of the Dead Poets and Living Artists Society… on the spiritual transfusions of the Leroi Jonses, the Kurt Vonneguts, the Leonard Cohens, Janis Joplins & Lawrence Ferlinghettis and all those brothers and sisters of mercy moonlighting as my tireless, albeit unwitting, personal psychiatric staff, keeping me on spiritual ‘life’ support, and dosing me with their daily regimens of music, cinema, fiction, & poetry…“

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OK. All that aside, I’ve always really loved “Is That All There Is?” and I always will.

But on another note, a radically different and almost completely unrelated note, I can’t help but say that there is something… funny about how this song secured its foothold in the top-100 charts (I’m talking ‘odd-funny’ here, not ‘funny-funny’). And it’s this:

I mean, c’mon, way back in that decade where most of the other pop-recording-singer/songwriters were dreaming up successful pap like “Sugar, Sugar,” “The Yellow Polka-dot Bikini” and “Who Wears Short Shorts”??? Like who back then … who in their right mind… would ever even think to come up with a dark, existential, and atheistic piece like “Is That All There Is?” and then push it as a candidate for a top-40 hit song?

I mean, this song is from far out in left field, isn’t it? Like… you can’t dance to it. Well… I guess you could waltz to it, if you really tried. There is an orchestra in the background. But it’s mostly a spoken-word ‘song.’

And yet… a hit song it became. It actually peaked at #11 on the pop charts, which means at one time or another it was edging out the likes of its very strange bedfellows, Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie” and “Gitarzan” by Ray Stevens. And surprising as this might be, Peggy Lee and her “Is That All There Is?” took the Grammy in 1970 for Best Contemporary Female Vocal Performance, beating out Helen Reddy, Carole King, and Dionne Warwick.

I mean, according to Google, its success was reportedly “even a surprise for Capitol Records who, despite publishing it, predicted the song was too odd and esoteric to ever make it as a hit.”

So I’m asking rhetorically, Who woulda thunk it?? Besides me, I mean. Because… hey, I LOVE the song. It’s been a life-long favorite.

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

And now here you are, asking, “Is that… all there is…?”

Yep.

That’s it.

That’s all there is.

home

THE ONE GAZING BACK AT YOU (From Your Mirror)

I was 16 years old when Rod Serling knocked me out with a Twilight Zone episode titled “In His Image.” That was way back in 1963.

For any younger readers out there (though it’s doubtful I even have any of those), I imagine 1963 probably would sound like The Dark Ages. A world where the phone booths down the street were the closest thing to your nonexistent cell phones you could ever find. A world where there was no such thing as dialing 9-1-1. A world where cars didn’t have seat belts and the automatic shift transmission in cars would’ve been a wondrous and rare thing to behold. Where gangly aluminum TV antennae roosted atop the roof of every single house in town. And a world wherein they were still showing a lot of movies and TV shows in black and white. In fact, “In His Image” was aired in black and white.

Anyway, I’m dying to re-tell you about that episode, so let’s begin with the plot.

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

Main character, Alan, enters a New York City subway station very late at night. Oddly, the only other person there is an old woman, a religious fanatic, who feverishly presses one of her pamphlets into his hands. But Alan is suddenly being overwhelmed by excruciatingly loud electronic tones ringing in his head, and irrationally he believes this woman is responsible. He pleads with her to stop it, to get away from him, and leave him the hell alone!

And of course utterly confused and frozen in fear by his violent in-your-face reaction, she just stands there like a deer in the headlights gaping at him. Exasperated in psychotic desperation, he impulsively shoves her down and away! Unfortunately onto the tracks and into the path of a speeding subway train.

An hour later, and amazingly with no memory of the incident whatsoever, he calmly arrives at the apartment of Jessica, his fiancée—whom he’s known for only four days, mind you… (Say what?!?)

Together, they start the long drive back to Alan’s hometown. And during the drive Alan, exhausted, dozes off. In his fitful sleep, he begins muttering something about “WALTER.” When awakened, Jessica asks him, “Who is this ‘Walter’?”

He responds with, “What do you mean? I don’t know anyone of that name.”

Long story short: they arrive, and Alan is met by a number of discomforting surprises: (1) There are buildings he’s never seen before in town, buildings which apparently must have been erected in the single week he’s been gone; (2) His key no longer fits the lock on his Aunt Mildred’s front door, as it should; (3) The stranger who answers the door claims he’s never heard of any Mildred; (4) The university he works at is now nothing but an empty field; (5) It turns out that people he remembers seeing and talking to only a week before have been dead for years; and last but not least, (6) In the local graveyard, he discovers his parents’ gravestones are gone and have been replaced by those of some Walter Ryder and his wife.

Jessica doesn’t know what to make of this! Of course she’s disturbed, but … she loves Alan. She figures there must be some rational explanation, right?

While driving back to New York, however, Alan once again begins hearing the tones in his head , only much worse this time! Suddenly filled with a murderous rage, he orders Jessica to stop! She does! Then leaps from the car, and commands her to drive on. OK. She doesn’t have to be asked twice! Off she goes! But omigod! In the rearview mirror she spies him running behind her car, and brandishing a large rock.

Suddenly another car rounds the bend, striking Alan! However, he luckily survives the impact but is left with a large open-gash injury to his arm. Although there is no pain, when he looks down into the torn and gaping wound in his wrist… there is also no blood or bone!

Instead… only twinkling lights amid a confusing tangle of multi-colored wires and transistors below his skin! Alan freaks!

Quickly he covers his gaping wound with a cloth. Then hitches a ride back to his New York apartment where, poring over a phonebook, he manages to find a listing for a Walter Ryder, Jr. Aha! So he hails a cab, goes to the listed address, disconcertingly discovers that his key does fit this door, and warily steps inside. And abruptly comes face to face with his exact double!

A very shy and lonely man named Walter Ryder, Jr.!

OK, you can surely anticipate the frenetic conversation that must follow here: the desperate questions Alan will have to demand answers to…

Here are a few intriguing lines of dialogue from the tail-end of Mr. Serling’s script:

Alan: Well… What do you mean? Who am I then?

Walter: You’re… nobody.

Alan: No! Stop it, Walter! That’s not true!

Walter: Well, Alan, answer me this, then: who is this watch I’m wearing, hmmm? And who is the refrigerator in the kitchen? Don’t you understand?

Alan: No. No. No! I do not understand!

Walter: Well…you’re a machine, Alan. A mechanical device.

Alan: What?! I don’t believe that! I can’t!

Walter: And I can’t blame you, Alan. I wouldn’t believe it either. But it’s the truth. The fact is, you were born a long time ago. In my head.

Alan: What?!

Walter: Now, all kids have dreams, don’t they? Well, you were mine. You know. The others thought about… joining the army or flying to Mars, but they finally grew up and forgot their dreams. I didn’t. I thought about one thing only and longed for one thing always. Just one. A perfect artificial man. Not a robot. A duplicate of a human being. Well, it seemed harmless, not even very imaginative for a child. But then you see, I became an adult. Only somewhere along the way—like most geniuses— I forgot to grow up. I kept my dream. And I created you, Alan. Is that straight enough for you?

Believe you me, that was one fun and entertaining episode back then in those days. But for me, it didn’t stop at fun and entertaining. That little drama saw me kissing my 1960’s Ozzie-and-Harriet Show worldview goodbye in the rearview. The Twilight Zone had become catnip for my imagination.

After which I began gradually re-taking an inventory of this… reflection, this ‘individual’ staring back at me from the bathroom mirror. Going over and over in my head what I’d learned about anatomy in Health class and electronics in high school General Science. No, no, no, I didn’t think for a moment that I believed I was… you know, a robot or anything like that. No, of course not…

Of course I suppose if you really were a robot, you probably wouldn’t know…

But at the same time, wasn’t that kid in the mirror a fella…

֍who is “electronically” wired-up inside— all axons and dendrites, synapses, mini-volts and amps?

֍whose hard-shell skull acts as the protective housing for the soft-tissue computer-thingy that’s basically running the whole show?

֍whose heart is actually kind of an electronic blood and oxygen pump?

֍whose nose and mouth can be seen as ‘vents’ for oxygen and fuel intake?

֍whose pie-hole is pretty much a “food/fuel” processor, a Cuisinart blender with its grinding, tearing, crushing teeth?

֍whose sensorial eyes, nose, tongue, fingers, and ears electronically send their five-senses reports to the brain?

֍whose four bio-mechanical limbs provide for (a) mobility and (b) reach for procuring “fuel?”

֍whose four fingers and opposable thumb at the ends of each of the two upper limbs serve to retrieve the necessary operational “fuel” and transfer said “fuel” into the pie-hole?

֍whose stomach is a virtual chemistry-set fuel tank that breaks down and refines the “fuel?”

֍whose liquid waste byproduct is syphoned off and away by a run-off hose assembly?

֍whose intestines massage the byproduct gases and spent fuel rods toward and out of an exhaust vent?

֍who comes with spare parts: the extra brain hemisphere, eye, lung, kidney, arm, leg, ovary and/or testicle?

֍and who, like most machines, comes with a limited warranty?

Yeah. You know. Just sayin’. Is all.

But… something else too. You know, every once in a while, some little thing or other happens to me that takes me back to those comparisons. For instance, one thing that’s been bugging me off and on ever since I was a kid is that maybe twice or so a year, I suddenly become aware of a brief, mysterious, nearly subliminal tone. I could be reading, say, or bicycling, or be in the middle of a conversation when all of a sudden, there it goes. Right out of the blue, hmmmmmm…

Sometimes in my left ear, sometimes my right, but never both at once. And it only lasts thirty seconds at the most before fading out. Damned if I have any idea what causes that, but I can tell you what it reminds me of. In primary and junior high school, an audiologist would visit for our annual hearing tests for, you know, our health records. He’d place a big, black, heavy set of headphones over our little ears and play us tones that would range all over the map from easily audible to almost inaudible to not audible at all. That’s what this phenomenon sounds like! Either that or a muffled, low-volume TV test-pattern hum from the 50’s.

It still happens to this day, but I’ve grown accustomed to it by now, and usually just joke about it to myself— Just the old brain uploading its periodical software update from the aliens. Or…who knows… maybe I really am a freakin’ robot…

Llike Alan.

Eeek!

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OK. Here’s a little something I scribbled back around 2005. After I’d just barely turned sixty.

I, ROBOT

I sing the body electric… state-of-the-art

luxury sports utility vehicle of the species

Nothing like me ever was. Built to

last, to take a licking and keep on

ticking…

Modeled after the redundancy principle—

extra kidney, lung, eye, hand, foot, brain hemisphere—

the five senses hardwired into software-bundled hardware,

and connected in spaghetti-tangles of fiber-optic nerves

to the mother of all motherboards!

My each and every cell vacuum-packed with its own

copy of the spiro-encrypted, double-helixed,

micro-schematic blueprint. Each digit stamped

with its own encrypted, model-identifying, swirl-pattern ‘scan code’

O I am the quintessential, self-replicating, self-healing,

self-cleaning, psycho-medical, chemico-robotic

Circuit City wonder— drop me on an alien

planet and watch me replicate myself,

invent the wheel, steal fire from the Titans, change the water into

wine, and… when there’s enough

typewriters, and enough

time… I will compose

Hamlet

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

Hmmm. Yeah. Robots. And Artificial Intelligence (A.I.).

Ever since before the 1950’s, the subject of robotics has been burrowing its technological head like a worm into the global consciousness. Sci-fi movies and TV shows. Automated machinery taking human workers’ factory jobs. And decade after decade, ever more state-of-the-art robotic and A.I. toys and novelties piling up under our Christmas trees. Rock’em Sock’em boxing robots. Children’s cute little robot “pets.” Roomba robo-vac vacuum cleaners. Digital chess player software that can check-mate any of you John Henry wannabe chess-masters out there, unless you formerly ask it to give you a sporting chance. And of course those nondescript little devices we plug into our living room wall sockets which, with the Open Sesame cry of Hey Google! are standing ready to do our bidding , anything and everything from controlling our thermostats to playing us a Tom Waits tune upon demand like some damn jukebox.

“So, put another nickel in

In the nickelodeon

All I want is lovin’ you

And music, music, music”

On news network broadcasts, we’ve long marveled at bomb squad robots approaching suspicious “packages” left on sidewalks; we’ve watched documentaries extolling the never-ending progress of anything from the newest, most improved, and more-lifelike-ever sex doll “bots” to cyber-soldier warfare robots for combat. I’ve watched the testing of frightening stainless-titanium “dogs” right out of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and those teeny, tiny, CIA flying robot “mosquitoes” with spy-cams. Driverless cars (and even driverless 22-wheelers now) tooling down our open highways, constantly taking digital correspondence-school drivers’-ed classes as they roll. And meanwhile, all of us continue to be plagued every day and all day by ad-agencies’ A.I.s phoning and texting us, goading us into finally surrendering to that unwanted new car warranty.

And talk about a brave new world, today living among us is a large, ever-growing population of cyborgs (cyborgs being organisms that have restored function or enhanced abilities due to the addition of some artificial component or technology).

So, me? I’m a cyborg by definition. Because I’m looking at the world through artificial lenses and listening to my Tom Waits collection through hearing aids. Now, today, many totally deaf people today can actually hear, thanks to cochlear ear implants. We’ve come such a long way since the Helen Keller days. And literally millions of people around the globe are not only walking about on stainless steel knee and hip replacements, but are also using robotic hands and feet with natural flexing fingers and toes. And artificial hearts! Plus wonder of all wonders, today if you want we have robotic organic 3-D “printers” that will ‘print’ you up a brand-new, fully-functioning liver for your next transplant! To us in our seventies, it’s feels like the future has already fallen behind us into the past.

So hey, what do I know about all this? Not much. Not technically. But like most baby boomers, I‘ve grown up on a long, steady diet of science fiction movies. And these days, you can actually learn a lot about robotics and A.I. from cinema. In the old days, not so much.

Sci-fi thrillers in the ‘50’ were so off-the-wall bad, they were known by the derogatory term, schlock. But we didn’t know that then. And as a kid I tried to watch every one of those that came to town at the local theater. Too many of those actually, and way way before I was old enough not to be traumatized. As a result of my helpless obsession, I ended up suffering from an acute case of juvenile robot-phobia.

For instance Gog (That’s G-O-G, Gog). Gog came out in 1954 when I was only eight and scared the living bejesus out of me! The movie is set in a top-secret underground military research facility where scientists are experimenting with cryogenics as a method of slowing down astronauts’ metabolism for space travel hibernation. The entire base is coordinated by a single supercomputer, NOVAC, and its two robot minions, Gog and Magog. And therein lies the problem.

An invisible ufo hovering above the installation has gained remote control over Gog. And since the E.T.s on board are dead-set against allowing earthlings to go rocketing hither and thither through their space, an onset of mysterious and ‘unexplainable’ deadly mishaps have been happening. Like this one:

When one absent-minded scientist haplessly returns, after hours, to the soundproofed cryogenic lab to retrieve something he’s left there, in horror we watch the pressurized door automatically closing slowly behind him… like a Venus Fly-trap! Of course it takes a fumbling moment or three for him to catch on to the fact that he’s been… sealed in, but by then it’s too late.

We watch the thermostat dial on the control panel in the empty observation room outside nefariously turning counter-clockwise, ultimately plunging the room temperature downward toward the ultimate freezing point (−346 °F). And he panics of course (as did we eight year olds in the audience, having already noticed the deadly white frost crawling relentlessly down the liquid nitrogen pipes)! Sure, he bangs his fists, and even a hammer against the plate-glass lab window. And of course, he cries for help, but… by then it’s too late in the afternoon as all of his co-workers are home. And by now, ice crystals have begun icing his eyebrows and moustache. The gruesome process takes about three on-screen minutes, after which our man in the white lab coat, now a greyish-blue “corpsicle,” topples like a felled tree trunk.

Yeah. Think about it. Me, eight years old.

Gog was my first robot. And I prayed it would be my last.

My second was Robbie, “Robbie the Robot.” He (or it) crept into my consciousness as part of the cast of the 1956 film, Forbidden Planet. Ten years old this time, but still spooked by the thought of the dangerous Metal Men. To me Robbie looked like a mechanical, ink-black Michelin Man, and more than just a tad too stranger-danger for preadolescent me.

Despite the discomfort Robbie engendered in me, however, the concept (primitive as it was back then) of what someday would be known as artificial intelligence was intriguing. Anyway, at least Robbie wasn’t anywhere near as terrifying as Gog though, and by ten I pretty much knew what everybody knew in those days: in reality, robots were never ever going to amount to anything more dangerous than that clunky old Wizard of Oz Tin Man.

Robbie the Robot

Still though. You never… really knew, did you.

My third (and, nostalgically speaking, my forever favorite of all time) was the one simply and unimaginatively known as “Robot,” or “the Robot.” He (well, it spoke with a man’s voice) was one of the main characters in the ensemble cast of the Lost in Space series, which aired from 1965 through ‘68.

“Robot” functioned both as the bodyguard for the crew and the on-board technician most responsible for completing the mission of finding the crew’s way back to earth. Although endowed with superhuman strength and futuristic weaponry, he also exhibited such comfortably human trappings as laughter, singing, an occasional sadness, and an entertainingly snide sarcasm that often bordered on mockery.

But most endearing of all was the manner with which “Robot” went about executing his third assignment, being the protective “nanny” for Will, the youngest member of the crew.

His frenetic “Danger, Will Robinson!” accompanied by his flailing arms, still remains a familiar iconic echo in today’s pop culture.

And if Will Robinson loved him, then he was OK in my book.

But it was those outwardly human characteristics that gave me my first real inkling of what a creative artificial intelligence might, or could, actually look like… or be like someday, in the impossibly faraway future.

And finally, I must give a tip of my hat to all the robots featured in Isaac Asimov’s 1950 collection of short stories titled I, Robot, which I discovered later as a young adult. What a read, what a hoot that book was, and perhaps still is. As it was for me with Lost in Space, Asimov’s not-taking-himself-or-his-premises-too-seriously was such a delight.

Plus, as the budding sci-fi aficionado I was becoming by then, I was fascinated by the three, fail-safe, Universal Laws of Robotics Asimov came up with.

֍First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

֍Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law

֍Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws

My opinion? All artificial intelligences in real life should only be allowed to be created with these safety protocols required. Of course, we all know that’s never going to happen, don’t we, since we can never trust our scientists and technicians to actually have the common-sense-wherewithal to do that. If we could, then such a fate as The Terminator’s “Rise of the Machines” could be completely avoided.

What? Don’t think something like “The Rise of the Machines” is a realistic possibility? Wow. And Mom nicknamed me “The Doubting Thomas.”

Ever hear of Stephen Hawking, probably the most respected and eminent physicist the world has known this side of Einstein? Well, guess what: after he died, he left us with the following dire warning: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.”

I take his warning to heart. Not just because of his reputation as a genius in physics, but because I see our human race as a hollow species of sheep who’ll complacently allow the biggest, greediest, most unthinking monsters-in-charge to run, and ruin, everything. I mean, hey, if there’s quick money to be made by allowing an army of sentient, self-replicating machines free-reign, then… Jesus H, it’s time we go looking for a Sarah Conner.

But hey, listen, I’m no Paul Revere here. No, what’s on my mind has much more to do with the idea of our own inner (I’m gonna call it) ‘programming.’Our inner biological programming (think gut feelings) that’s always on the alert for threats to our personal danger.

Like this scenario: OK, I just know the ice on this pond is probably way to too thin to be safe. You know what? I’m taking my skates and going home. Or Jeez, this one:. This too-overly-friendly dude is creeping me out. I know it may sound crazy, but I’m kinda getting the vibe he could be a serial killer or something. Gonna end this conversation now. I’m so outta here!

Alright, here’s a personal example. From me:

Another weird little phenomenon has gotten my attention off and on ever since I was a kid. It happens whenever I’ve somehow managed to find myself perched up on some extremely high place, somebody’s roof, say, a really tall ladder or, God forbid, the edge of a steep cliff. Especially when, against my better judgement, I can’t help myself from looking down! Because that’s when something very peculiar always happens. Sure, there’s the terror, pure and simple. Hair standing up on the back of my neck. Muscles freezing up in a full-body lockjaw as I imagine myself in an arm-pin-wheeling freefall with the ground rushing up at me at E=MC². And vertigo? Of course, every time.

But there is something else, a very peculiar “something else” going on a little embarrassingly… (Man, I can’t believe I’m actually going to try to describe this thing.) Oh, let’s just say that… down below…down there… down there in my…you know, “nether region?” Alright: my groin. OK, OK! My gonads. Whenever I’m teetering on a high perch of any kind, I always get this uncomfortable and urgent sensation, a physical feeling. Think…pressure. A buzzing pressure. Down there. A slightly nauseating, invisible-hand squeeze of the scrotum that’s got a subliminal, joyless, joy-buzzer buzz to it that dizzies me, leaving me weak the knees.

Yup. That’s my old nads haranguing me with THE ALARM! They don’t speak English, so of course they communicate in biological “language.” I’ve experienced it often enough over the years, that I can easily translate it for you. Here it is:

“Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! Stop lookin’ down, fool! Whattaya think you’re doin’? Back up right NOW! Get us off this diving board! Get us off the edge of this cliff!

Listen! The two of us? Down here? OK, we got this one job, see? It’s called PROCREATION PROTECTION, alright? It’s called tryin’ to save your sorry-ass species from extinction, is all!

What, you never heard of a little somethin’ called “The Darwin Awards?”

Yeah. My nads can be very sarcastic…

And what’s that but the “voice” of ‘programming‘ talking? All living things are ‘programmed’ like this for the survival of the individual so that the survival of future generations of the species can be guaranteed. My gonads are obviously wired up and always on the ready to trigger that extreme, automatic, Darwinian fear of falling… the same way a common house cat’s programmed to be terrified of cucumbers.

Oh, what, didn’t know about cukes and cats? Well… apparently cats have a vestigial fear of snakes, whose rather cylindrical bodies are similar, in a way, to cucumbers. I’m no expert, but it’s apparently due to an embedded leftover memory burned into their DNA from generations long ago, back when snakes preyed upon their ancestors in the jungle. However, what I am an expert on is YouTube videos, so I can expertly advise you that, for a good time, go straight to YouTube and key in “cucumber and cat.” Then sit back and marvel at dozens of videos featuring prankster cat owners sneaking a cucumber onto the floor directly behind their cute little fur balls. You won’t believe the acrobatic conniption-fit responses.

(OK, actually I’ve put a great link for this down at the end of this post. So when you get there, go ahead. Knock yourself out.)

But furthermore, my nads’ Fear-of-Falling programming also includes the additional strategy of flooding my brain with a rush of irrational delusions. Like… ok, gravity isn’t satisfied with just sucking me down, no, but like some Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea giant squid, I’m become positive it’s roped its invisible tentacles around my ankles and has begun tractor-hauling me forward as well as downward! Yes, gravity tugging me horizontally! I’m sure of it!

Gravity (with a capital G) is Evil Incarnate. It just can’t wait to reward me with a Darwin Award toe-tag. And yeah, I can get how crazy that sounds, but…

Gravity is not our friend, boys and girls.

But OK. Back to my thesis here, my big message: Instinct Equals Biological Programming.

Instincts are the products of our digital cerebral clockworks, controlling all living things’ behaviors. The ones and zeroes behind bears hibernating. The ones and zeros behind new-born ducklings “imprinting” on the first biological entity they encounter. The ones and zeros behind Killdeer just knowing to lead predators away from its nesting eggs with its comically-feigned, broken-winged limping. Or the cicada nymphs knowing to climb down that tree trunk to burrow into the earth and suck the liquids of plant roots for exactly seventeen years. Or the fun-to-watch, high-stepping mating dances of the Blue-Footed Boobies, where the Boobies with the biggest and bluest feet get the girl every time.

Cats purring to manifest contentment, dogs wagging tails to manifest happiness, and human males…? Well, human males haplessly manifesting sexual interest in a way that once made the iconic 1940’s movie star Mae West ask, “So, is that a rocket in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

(sorry…)

But you know, these behaviors don’t get learned in school. You ask me, the universe is just one colossal, highly engineered cuckoo clock…

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

So anyway, thanks for reading; and here’s your reward: just one af many, many YouTube cat-cucumber videos out there. Enjoy.

Home

THE STRANGE CASE OF CENTRAL HALL AND THE X-RAY SPECS…

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Every little town in America had its ‘hot spots,’ where the kids growing up there were concerned. For me, born and raised in the 50’s and 60’s in little Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, USA (population back then around 5000), my personal hotspots list includes the following: The Piscataquis River and its old Indian Cave; the kids’after-school hang-outs, Lanpher’s Drug Store and Peter’s Pharmacy; Center Theatre; The Bowling Alley, Rocket Lanes; Sebec Lake Roller Rink; the Milo Drive-in; the Sugar Shack; and the Rec Center at Central Hall. In fact, Central Hall itself.

Ah yes, Central Hall, now newly renovated and recently dubbed “The Commons.” Today the building’s two-storied floors are what, brand new? Immaculate? Stunning? Polished? Air-conditioned? Up to Code? A jewel in the town’s crown? Yes. All of the above, and then some. A dream come true. And everyone, including me, is delighted about it. However…

There is a little child still living inside of me. A child who remembers everything. A child who can, at will, rewind all the natural brain’s virtual reality “films” going back all the way to the 50’s and 60’s. All the way back to kindergarten (1954-55). But this “little child” (not the man I am today) prefers the old Central Hall. The venerable, shabby old building where the town’s four schools held their bi-monthly school assemblies during school day afternoons.

For the schools had no gymnasium back then, no place large enough to hold all the students. So our entire Pleasant Street School student body (tiny bodies) were lined up in twos and, shepherded by our teachers, we all snaked our way down over the tenth-of-a-mile of sidewalks to file into the upstairs “auditorium” section to be seated, right along with all the kids arriving from the other schools.

I remember those assemblies: we had one on hypnosis, one delivered by a man who had just returned from a recent sojourn up in the Arctic, a guy with an amazing photographic memory, and another man who brought wild birds with him, including an eagle and a huge owl that seemed to be able to rotate its head around a full 360^o. I loved them all, and especially the getting out of school part.

The town’s churches put on their musicals at Central Hall, the schools presented their plays there; the annual town meetings packed the place to the rafters, as did the inter-school basketball games; and of course The Kiwanis Club put on their now-in-retrospect embarrassing “Minstrel Shows” there. We K-12 kids all had to perform in those minstrel shows so, yeah, I was in a number of them. Here are photos from two of those, one with me as a little hobo and another of me as an elf.

I’m that little hobo on the far right, the cutest one…

And now I’m te cute little elf on the far left…

Yes, those minstrel shows were something else! But the most unforgettable show I ever watched there happened one evening in August, 1957, making me eleven years old at the time. As a fund raiser, the Methodist Church’s Three-M Club (think Mister, Mrs., and Miss) sponsored a famous hypnotist at Central Hall.

Since the above excerpt from The Piscataquis Observer is at least partially unreadable, here is the actual text…

PROFESSOR BARRON FEATURED HYPNOTIST AT COMING SHOW

When the show “Hypnotic Marvels” opens in Dover-Foxcroft on Tuesday Night, Aug. 21 [1957] at Central Hall, the star will be Professor K. Barron, an American who has traveled throughout the world making a study and application of therapeutic hypnosis in Egypt, Italy, and India.

His studies of Indian fakirs, Arabian mystics, and Holy Men have made him one of the world’s foremost hypnotists. He demonstrates pain control and post-hypnotic suggestion where a strong suggestion is placed in the subject’s mind, and after the subject is awakened the suggestion persists.

All proceeds from tickets will be donated to Three M [Club] to a local charity.

And as a publicity stunt the day before, the hypnotist drove his Cadillac convertible (top down) all the way up and down Main Street, blindfolded! And… (and this was the kicker for our conservative little God-fearing hamlet back then) he was accompanied by (GASP!) a blonde bombshell in a bathing suit sitting high up on the back-seat back-rest, just a-waving like some Miss America at the wolf-whistling, cat-calling throngs crowding the sidewalks on both sides of the street. It seems now, looking back, like something right out of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, something the King and The Duke might have pulled off.

The night of the actual show, the Hall went standing-room-only with the balcony packed to overflowing. My cousin and I had to worm and squirm our way up into that balcony, where we ended up watching the whole thing scrunched down on our knees, with our little torsos pressed up against, and half hanging over, the balustrade, and our gawking little faces hanging down almost directly over the stage. Best damn seats in town!

Surprisingly we got to witness a dozen high school seniors take the stage as volunteers. (I mean, wouldn’t you think school kids would need to get signed parental permission slips before participating in something as sketchy and adult as being used as guinea pigs for the pleasure and entertainment of the masses? Well, in the twenty-first century, yes, of course they would. But back in 1957, nah, not at all. (So… welcome to the 50’s, ladies and gents.)

After weeding out the few volunteers who obviously couldn’t succumb to Professor Barron’s hypnotic ministrations, though they tried, he seated the kids (in their collective trance) in a horizontal line of chairs situated across the back of the stage. From there during the show, he would sometimes direct two or three individuals to stand and come forward for whatever particular demonstration he had in mind, leaving the rest of them just sitting and waiting there slack-jawed and with no affect whatsoever (and that just seemed so weird, seeing them all shut-down like that). But at other times he’d marshal the entire little zombie posse forward to participate.

As was the case for his first demonstration, in which he temporarily turned these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds into “kindergartners” being treated to an afternoon at the “local movie theater” to watch a collection of “Disney cartoons”. And as those “five- and six-year-olds,” they were soon gigglng and tee-heeing delightedly at the hilarious “situations” on the “movie screen.” And keep in mind, this random group consisted of a variety of types, from an obvious wallflower to a couple of cheerleaders and one big and menacing-on-the-gridiron football hero, who was now up there tee-heeing on that stage like some little girl.

But suddenly, in the middle of one of the “Mickey Mouse adventures,” Professor Barron’s face took on a horrified expression! “Oh no!” he exclaimed. “Did you see that!? Mickey was just crossing the street when this big truck struck him!”

The mood-shift that this information sparked was immediate and palpable! All the “children” began crying. Even the entire audience was shocked at this turn of events. Shocked because it was so totally unexpected, but especially shocked because of the honest-to-God-real tears visibly glistening now down the cheeks of those horrified faces under the stage lights. I mean yes, even the big and burly hometown-hero, Gippy Thomas, was bawling. Actual tears. And honestly? I was shocked that Professor Barron would do that to them. We all were. Because in our minds, they were now innocent little kindergartners, weren’t they.

But then, almost immediately thereafter, we witnessed a boomerang mood-shift that set them all suddenly “rejoicing” as they were happily reassured, “Oh look! Mickey’s all right! He didn’t get hurt one bit! The truck actually missed him! Why, he was just playing a silly old joke on us all along! Isn’t that funny?!” (Cheers and happy laughter!) And so, the show continued on.

Next we got to watch our “little children” on a “nature-walk field trip.” And all was well, all of them out in the “forest” picking “wild flowers” and happily collecting colorful, fallen “autumn leaves.” I mean, man, those guys and gals were scurrying all about that stage— grinning, bending over, and plucking up all their little found-treasures when… suddenly… (here we go again…)

“Oh my goodness!What’s that?! What is that rumbling noise up overhead?”

The “children”? They had no idea what it was, did they. So… all cautious and solemn, and one by one, they lifted their innocent faces to the “sky.” And gawked.

“Oh my, boys and girls! It’s one of those great big black airplanes! Don’t you just love airplanes?” And they all grinned, of course, but you couldn’t help but wonder if actually they… you know, weren’t entirely sure that they did like those big, black airplanes… “Whoa! And just look! Aren’t those… two big doors opening up on the belly of the plane up there? Yes! That’s what they are!” You could see, as well as feel, the rising level of their concern sweeping right across all of their faces. “And WHOA! Would you look at that! Something… Something just fell right out of those two big open doors and, whatever it is, it’s falling right down toward us! Golly gee, I wonder what it is, what that might be…” By the fearful looks on their innocent little faces, I’m surprised that some of them didn’t suffer… you know, a little kid’s “accident.”

But then, just as quickly as he’d pulled that Mickey Mouse plot-twist earlier, he executed another old unexpected plot switcheroo: “Oh my goodness, boys and girls! Why that’s… money! Those are… dollar bills fluttering down all around us! Quick, kiddos! Better grab as many as you can!” And then didn’t the audience just roar to see those big high school kids running all around, leaping like deer, leaping up in the air, desperately plucking down the invisible “dollar bills,” and greedily stuffing away all that precious “long green” deep down into their “pockets!” It was quite a spectacle.

There were so many demonstrations that evening. For instance, after being given an in-trance, post-hypnotic suggestion, one boy tried to walk across the stage only to find his right foot seemingly “super-glued” to the floor. And no matter how hard he tried, the floor adamantly refused to release its claim on the foot. Now we, the audience, had been privy to the post-hypnotic suggestion when it was being applied: “The harder you try to pull your foot from the floor, the weaker and weaker your leg will become.” It got such a laugh when the kid finally threw in the towel, glared at Professor Barron, and yelled, “YOU did this! Come fix it!”

Another post-hypnotic-suggestion example was when a very popular girl, a cheer leader, was told, “After you wake up, whenever you hear the words, ‘Good night,’ you must look at me and say, ‘Shut up!’ And thereafter, each and every other time you hear those words again you will, once again, tell me to shut up, only with a growing and increasing anger each time. But, you will have no idea why on earth you were compelled to say that to me, or what it was you were so angry about.”

After those instructions, he woke her up and simply went on with the show as if nothing had happened. Of course then, after a while, he turned to us, the audience, and said something like, “Well ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been a marvelous audience. But all good things must come to an end. I’m afraid it’s time for us to say good night, and…”

(Shut up!)

Dead silence on the stage. The Professor looked confused. “I’m sorry. Did one of you just… say something…?” Everyone, including our girl remained perfectly quiet. It had been such a mousey little request, it had apparently slipped right under everybody’s radar. “OK, never mind. Apparently I’m just… hearing things. But anyway, be that as it may, it is in fact time to bid you all good night, SO…”

“Shut up!”

Our girl gasped! Her hands flew to her mouth. And now Professor Barron was looking at her directly, sizing her up. “I beg your pardon?”

“Ohmigod!” she said, while shaking her head no, no NO! “Never in a million years would I ever say something… something like… so…”

“So what? Do you mean so something exactly like what you just said to me?” He was doing a great job at feigning peevishness. And also, all of her peers were now staring quite a bit awkwardly at her.

“Listen,” she pleaded with a shaky little voice, “oh, please believe me! I swear on a stack of Bibles I never…”

“So what is your problem? Is it just that you really hate the show? Or just me personally?”

“No! I mean no, no, no, of course not! Nothing like that! And, I’m so sorry!”

“So… do you like my show?”

“Oh yes. Yes! Very much!”

“Ok. So what is it then? That you like my show so much…” (great sarcasm here) “that you were angered when I said it’s time to stop, that it’s time to say good night and…”

“Shut UP!”

This time all of her surrounding classmates turned at once and focused their darkly shocked, jaw-dropped confusion on her.

“Now… oh wow! OK. That was just plain a tad rude, wouldn’t you say? I mean, just who do you think is running this show? You? I guess perhaps you’re thinking you should get to be the only one who gets to decide when to say, and when not to say, good night, eh? Is that…”

“SHUT…………. UP!”

Wow. While our hypnotist went on feigning superior displeasure, you could see her classmates were obviously unnerved to the Nth degree! This inexplicable rising anger in her was now beginning to feel suddenly tinged with a frightening little extra bit of… something else. A little hint of I’m-warning-you danger?…an Incredible Hulk-ish and you won’t like me when I’m angry? They (who knew her well) (or at least who thought they had known her well) had just glimpsed something dark in their heretofore bubbly, ray-of-sunshine Pollyanna. A Don’t-tread-on-ME mojo they were finding more than just a tiny bit unsettling.

But no one was ever more shocked at it than she herself!

(See, this is what I mean. Isn’t the human brain just a marvelously mysterious organ??? I can’t get over it.)

I will say this, at least. Each and every time he played some hypnotic dirty trick on his subjects, he was always considerate enough to bring his subjects out of their trances by instilling in them a post-hypnotic promise of calmness and peacefulness, instructing them that they would awake happy, well-rested, optimistic, and energized.

Thank God for that, eh?

Now I think it’s obvious that we both realize, you and I, that this was an evening program I witnessed a little over seventy-one years ago. And I was, of course, only an eleven year old at the time, to boot. So, I can only hope that my long-term memory has withstood enough of the ravages of time to be at least to the point where I’ve maintained a fair amount of accuracy here in my reporting.

But for this last, and final, anecdote, (and there were so many more) I have no worries whatsoever. Because I’m confident that this particular scenario was just so bizarre, so unique, and so unusually delicious, that the memory of it was burned indelibly into my cerebrum. So much so that I’d readily wager that anyone else who witnessed this last little stunt at Central Hall, and is still alive today, would tell the exact, same story in very much the same way I am about to. It was that unforgettable.

So, you know how when you go to a local Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza, they always nickel and dime you to death throughout the better part of a half hour with a single shot of this here, and another single shot of something else there? And sure, those are impressive and all. Some sizzle and crackle, some whistle, some blossom like gargantuan peonies against the sky before blowing away in the wind, and some gift you with that satisfying, window-rattling ka-BOOM!!! you’re always waiting for. Yes, each is pretty damn great in itself. But then, at the end of it all, comes what everybody’s been waiting on: the Grand Finale! All of them mixed in together and going off like popcorn for the last ten steady minutes or so.

Well, I’ve gotta say, that’s pretty much the way old Professor Barron ran his virtual wild west show of hypnosis. Turned out he’d saved us the best for last. At the very beginning he had teased the teen-agers with the hint that, if they behaved well enough throughout the show, he just might share with them something at the show’s end that would be so entirely and truly “magical,” something that hardly anybody else on the planet could even imagine. The only stipulation he made was that somebody in their group would have to remember on their own to ask him about it at the show’s end. If they forgot, well… then too bad, it would be their loss. And he warned them that it wouldn’t be all that easy to remember to ask, what with all the variety of experiences awaiting them throughout the evening. (Me though, for instance, still parked as I was on my by-now sore knees up there in the crowded balcony? I’d forgotten all about that a minute after he’d offered the challenge.)

So when the evening did finally find itself on the cusp of saying that final good night, one girl did remember to ask. And so there they were at the end, all seated in that horizontal line of old Central Hall chairs upstage center, waiting like trained seals for him to spill the beans, whatever the beans turned out to be.

And him? He paced back and forth, frowning as if trying to think of the best way to approach the subject. “OK,” he finally said. “I have, within the breast pocket of this jacket I wear, an object. An object I dare say unlike any object any of you has ever seen, imagined, or will ever see again. Ostensibly, the object appears to be only an ordinary pair of glasses, but… an ordinary pair of glasses it is decidedly not, as you will soon see for yourselves.

“Because yes, I am going to allow each of you the opportunity of gazing through these magic lenses for yourselves. But I must warn you that what you will witness as you gaze through the ancient crystals will undoubtedly be somewhat disturbing, although look through them you must. For if you do not, you will never believe what your colleagues here will tell you that they themselves have seen. You will suspect them liars, you will see them as delusional, and yet… you will always be left wondering how such good and reliable acquaintances could, or even would, fabricate such a story with which they will inveigle you. Yes, you will always be left wondering. So…”

And here he slowly slipped his right hand into the jacket’s breast pocket and produced… absolutely nothing! Oh but he appeared to be holding up something– something pinched between his thumb and fingers. And his volunteer subjects? They made no indication that they were seeing nothing as he passed closely before them, even holding out his hand that they might examine “the pair of glasses” up close and personal. No, quite the opposite, they were leaning right in, studying the phantom object, and mulling it over with great interest. Of course we, the audience, understood what was going on right from the first. This was one of those The Emperor wore no clothes things. Only…in real life! These kids were seeing something, even if no one else was. It was an amazing spectacle to watch!

(There. Again, you see? The human brain! Go figure.)

“For these ancient ‘spectacles’ allow our eyes to penetrate through right through solid objects. Well, namely fabrics of all kinds.”

Now, as we watched, we could see the entire row of faces suddenly go all-knitted-brows as they took that in, and began pondering… what exactly it was they had just heard…

“Wait a minute,” interrupted the football hero. “You talking about those… those X-Ray Specs things they advertise in the back of comic books? ‘Cause I can tell you right now: they don’t work! Believe me. I ordered me a pair of those once, and they don’t do nuthin’.”

“No, son,” Professor Barron responded condescendingly, “Let me assure you that in no way is that… toy what I’m talking about at all.”

“’Cause they’re a rip-off is all I’m sayin’. No, they really are,” he warned the others, looking left and right up and down the row of students lest they too might end up wasting their money as well. “I mean, jeez, you couldn’t see nuthin’. I’m serious.”

Someone else, a male of course, piped up, “Are you sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’?”

“Could be. So, what is it you think I’m saying?”

“That these glasses let you, what, look right through people’s clothes and all?”

“Well, I’m going to let you answer that one yourself, young man. Right after you’ve had an opportunity to gaze through them.”

“No way,” said the kid, obviously intrigued.

“Ohmigod!” cried a female voice.

“GROSS!” said another.

“Alright, everyone. Time to stand up and stretch your limbs. At this time, I want you all to form a line. We’ll do this taking turns. Going one at a time.”

“Ohmigod!” repeated the female voice.

As they arose and left their chairs behind, it became apparent that the group was demographically split: the girls were hesitant, and feeling very ambivalent, to say the least, about what apparently was about to go down; but the only word to characterize the boys on the other hand was… eager. So much so that, just as the required line had nearly gotten formed, our football hero came bulldozing his way to the front, saying, “I’m going first!” The audience tittered at that. And then, there he was, numero uno, pleased as punch with himself at being firmly ensconced at the head of the line as was his right! Because might makes right.

“Young man,” Professor Barron admonished, “that was nothing but rude and selfish of you. You should be ashamed. I’m afraid I must insist that you go back and line up at the rear of the line.”

“What? No! I mean… come ON! I just…”

“Son. I must insist. And if you refuse to do as I ask, these glasses will return immediately to my jacket pocket. And just think how popular you’ll be then. It’s your choice…”

“Aw JEEZ!” But then our spoiled little bad-boy, hands shoved down in pockets, begrudgingly shambled back to last place in line while the audience happily roared.

(And by the way, dear reader, I’m not making this up. I swear on a stack of Bibles that this is exactly what happened on that stage that night.)

The guy who was now at the head of the line looked to Professor Barron for some direction, who then went on to explain, “All of you in this line will be facing the audience. I alone will hold the glasses. I will place them before your eyes for five seconds, while you behold these people. Then you will return to your seat, allowing the next person to step forward to have his or her turn. Are we all clear on this?”

The subjects all nodded and muttered their combined Yes in unison.

“Very well, then.” Professor Barron studied the boy, and then held the “glasses” up just above the bridge of the boy’s nose. Me, I couldn’t look away. I was sorely wishing I were that kid, who blinked a couple of times, leaned into the ‘glasses’ a bit more as if adjusting for focus, and… “Oh. My. God!” he gasped. His eyes went sweeping like a search light from left to right over the audience. “I mean… are you shittin’ me!?” Such enthusiasm sent a nervous-horse-like ripple down through the line of those behind him. The “glasses” were snatched away.

“Boys and girls. You must… you need… to watch your language. I want you on your best, most formal, behavior. Remember that! Now, you? Back to your seat.”

The boy turned on his heel and began shuffling back to his chair, rather wildly shaking his head.

“NEXT!”

Next, it was a girl who stepped forward. She looked imploringly at the Professor. “Do I really hafta do this?”

“I really think you should,” he replied.

“But… But… Do you realize… my parents are out there?!”

(A lot of laughter from the audience)

“Well, if you know where they’re seated, you could just look elsewhere. But come on now, you’re holding up the line.”

Awkwardly she sort of tried to press her eyes into the “lenses,” then uttered a shaky “No, NO!” and batted the “invisible glasses” away from her face the way you’d brush away an angry horne! But something… something very noticeable was happening to her cheeks. They were flushing a bright, hot, rosy hue! And almost immediately, her entire face and neck were both red, like somebody had just flipped an ‘on’ switch inside her! Shame was written all over her face. And it had happened in mere seconds. I’d never seen anything like it! “I feel like I’m gonna be sick…” she said, hugging herself and shaking her head as well, as she retreated back to her seat.

“Next!”

An eager boy stepped up to the plate. With the glasses in position, he made it a point to gawk right straight down onto the front row of spectators. And such a noisy bustle of people crossing their legs and hugging themselves you could barely imagine. “Oh WOW!” He looked the crowd over. “Oh yeah! Oh YEAH! WOW!”

“Next!”

And so it went. One after the other. And I swear every single girl blushed as crazily as the first one had! As did one boy, by the way. And when our football hero arrived, he couldn’t have been happier with the whole experience. You’d have thought it was Christmas morning. (Or that he had just scored a winning touchdown!)

Up there in the balcony, I was still wishing so hard that I could’ve been one of them on that stage. But, alas, they’d never picked anyone as young as me…

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

So anyway, in my book? That night goes down as probably one of the top-ten memories of all time that I’ve got DVR’d into that hard drive I call my brain. It was really one of those extra-special “moments” in time, like the remembered “moments” I’ve been sort of dwelling on in my preceding blog entries. This one only lasted a little over an hour, but as a result of witnessing that evening, my life was honestly changed.

FroEver since that night, I’ve been seriously preoccupied with pondering how this blob of gray matter in my skull actually works. And long since then, I’ve had to come to grips with, and simply accept, the fact that I’ll never, ever know. It’s kind of like that song written and performed by folksinger and agnostic, Iris Dement: “Let the Mystery Be.”

Consequently, over a long lifetime, so far I have made it a point to attend no less than a couple dozen hypnotist presentations, some boring, some intriguing, but none ever as intriguing as the showman, Professor Barron, allowed us to experience in 1957 at Dover-Foxcroft’s Central Hall. And back even in the mid-70’s (as I’ve related in an earlier blog post titled “If You Could Read My Mind, Love”… just go to the following url):

( https://tomlyford.com/2023/12/14/if-you-could-read-my-mind-love/ )

I also once enjoyed a year-long friendship with a retired clinical hypnotherapist form New York, who worked in hospitals and in the justice system. Loved talking to that guy. And I get it: as long as I live, I’m never going to get over marveling about the wrinkled little organ upstairs that acts sort of as my Hitchikers’s Guide to the Universe…

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

In retrospect, I found what went on in this little recap almost a little more cruel than funny at times. I suppose this is because I’m can now examine it now from an adult, twenty-first-century morality lens. But in 1957 everyone, including little eleven year old me, found it hilarious. It’s all relative.

Anyway… I guess that makes me guilty of having been born in, and having lived through, the middle of the mid-nineteenth century. It’s all relative. Isn’t everything?

So sue me. It’s like what Bob Dylan once told me through my stereo system’s speakers:

The times, they have a-changed…

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POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART III

WHAT HAPPENS IN BELFAST STAYS (not) IN BELFAST

Somewhere back in the 90’s, I had a teacher friend whose hobby was wood carving. He’d discovered I was dealing with practically terminal boredom, and suggested I take up “whittling” as a hobby. I decided to take him up on it. To me, it seemed perhaps he’d just tossed me a lifeline. His motif of choice was Christmas ornaments. Me, I was a little too dark right then for something quite as Jingle Bells as Christmas ornaments, but what should I whittle? Here I had this block of wood in front of me that could end up being… anything. I spent a long time just staring at it, very much I’m sure like Michelangelo stared at his block of marble before giving the world his David.

To me, it had to be something useful. I’m just not a doo-dads kind of guy. But what could I create that would be useful in any way? And to whom? Wait. How about something… psychologically useful. Yeah, how about something psychologically useful to… me? And then I did get an idea, albeit (like most of my ideas) one that was dark and complicated. But so me.

And here’s my finished product, my little own David though I like to call it myown little Tommy. And it’s been sitting on my shelf in the den ever since the 90s. Yeah.

This objet d’art (ha ha) commemorates a sad little childhood memory. Me, approximately age five, I’m guessing. My cousins, four or five years older than me. Meanies. Bullies. They owned two sets of boxing gloves. Too large for me, but they didn’t care. They’d just poke my hands down into them and cinch them on my wrists with twine.

And then there was the other little cousin, about the same age and size as me. They’d do the same to him. Then they’d gather round us and push us together as if we were a couple of bantam roosters in the cock-fighting arena and cheer, “There’s the bell! OK! Let’s go! Start punchin’, guys! Go for the faces! Go for the tummy!”

And this other little kid, who, I guess was a ringer? I’m pretty sure they’d given him some training. Because he knew what to do. Me? Not so much. I mean, basically I was just standing there with a big fat target on my nose, when WHANG!

And when my eyesight sort of slowly segued back into operation, I was on my back and blinking up at the too bright sky. And oh, all those mean and cruel cackles, hoots, and the catcalls.

So yeah, I guess you could say I’ve had a little experience in ‘the ring,’ metaphorically speaking. A sad experience. A humiliating one. But perhaps one that was instrumental in unconsciously encouraging me to make one of those altering-the-vector-of-your-life’s-path decisions I discussed earlier:

I became a lover, not a fighter.

I’ll give you the example, and then we’ll move on to what happened in Belfast…

OK. So I’m out in the hallway of my college dorm. A bunch of us boys (it was a mens’ dorm after all, no girls allowed ever) were horsing around, playing hall hockey. It was midnight, or a little thereafter. But there was this one kid I didn’t like so much who was seriously bugging me. He’d been rubbing me the wrong way ever since I’d first met him in the fall. (If you’ve ever read The Catcher in the Rye, think Ackley. Enough said?)

A couple of times already, just as ‘dI got the “puck” (think rolled-up-and-taped-ball-of-paper) lined up for a slap-shot with my broom (think “hockey stick”), he’d jab his finger into my rib cage to throw me off. And both times he’d done it so far, he’d giggled, which was super annoying. The first time I’d said, “Knock it off!” He giggled. The second time I’d said, “Cut it OUT!” and he’d practically giggled his head off.

The third time I simply stopped, turned slowly around, laid the hairy eyeball on him for a good fifteen seconds before explaining it to him in a slow, Clint Eastwood-like voice (OK, true, nobody’d ever really heard of Clint Eastwood back in 1966), “I wouldn’t wanna be you if you’re stupid enough to do that one more time. You dig?” So I turned to resume the game and guess what.

Yeah. He did it again. Sounding like some gaggle of flighty eighth-grade girls giggling it up big time at a sleep-over party. I threw the broom down, and turned on him. “What did I just tell you… Bob?” He was unable to answer, the due to the hysterical giggling shaking his bowl-of-Jello sides. I looked him over. Yeah, he was bigger than me. But all of the bad guys in Shane were bigger than Alan Ladd, so…

Now, keep in mind, yes, I was very aware of the fact that I had never even once in my life ever hit anyone, had never even swung on anybody. All the fights I’d gotten into in grade school were like grunting little wrestling matches, so yeah, I was nervous. But so what, I told myself, there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there. So I studied his head, looking for the best spot to land my knuckle sandwich. The jaw. Yeah. He looked to me like the type of guy that probably might have what they called a ‘glass jaw.’ I’d hafta swing up though, since he was taller.

I doubled up my right fist. Whipped it in an arc back down behind my butt, from whence I would launch the powerful haymaker swing of all swings that would drop him on his giggling ass. Why was I hesitating? C’mon Tom, you can do this thing! OK, count down time: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0!

I swung for the fences!

And totally missed…

The momentum my haymaker swing had accrued actually hurled me into the cinderblock wall where, like Wile E. Coyote, I slowly slid down onto the hall floor. I was dazed and confused. Bob too was a little dazed and confused. But at least he’d stopped that insane giggling. Duly embarrassed, I pretty much closeted myself in my dorm room for a week or so after that.

That was the first and last time I ever took a swing at anybody.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, my first ever teaching position ever: Belfast Area High School. On the coast of Maine.

I was terrified. All my life I’d been suffering from stage fright and, now, suddenly having to face classes of thirty human beings six times a day (too many of whom looked a lot more adult than I did) just sitting there staring at me? Waiting for me to begin doing whatever it was I was getting (omigod!) professionally paid to do? Human beings all suddenly required to address me as none other than “Mister Lyford”? I mean… hell, I was no “Mister Lyford,” not the last time I looked!

On top of that, they’d given me classes for which there weren’t enough books! They’d forced me to take the dramatics Coach job when I’d never even been in a play in my LIFE! They’d dumped most of the worst classes on me (a common dirty trick, I discovered, to play on the new hires). And one of my two Speech classes was filled with “students,” not a single one of which was willing to even stand up and tell me his/her name! Please forgive me for so often making comparisons to literary characters, but at that time in my nervous, incipient-ulcer life, I was Catch-22’s Major Major Major Major! In my first week, I was sure I’d made the mistake of a lifetime, allowing myself to ride the collegiate merry-go-round only to get dumped off at the end of the four-year-ride as an “educator.” I was a wreck. I used to walk the streets at night with the superintendent’s phone number in my pocket (I swear this is true), look longingly at each phone booth I passed, and try to get up the courage to call in sick for the rest of my life. OK, reality check: that wasn’t happening all year long, no. Mostly just in the first few weeks of the culture shock I was going through.

But then something happened. The Phys. Ed. department purchased and installed a speed bag in a corner of the gymnasium. And if anyone needed an outlet that involved hitting something, I was that guy. Of course a couple of things got in the way. (A) I was still The Stage-Fright Kid. If I were going to use said speed bag, it would have to be after school when no one was around to see me. Isn’t that sad? Me, The Performance Anxiety Poster Boy. Plus (B) some Neanderthal Moron straight out of one of Gary Larson’s future Far Side cartoons took a single, brainless, Paul Bunyan swing and obliterated the bagand me along with it like a pair of flattened tires!

So, during the long, two-week wait for a new bag to be shipped, I asked the Phys Ed Department to please “educate” (if that were conceivably possible) their “students” (using the term charitably here) on the differences between a speed bag and a heavy bag. Which they graciously did. And at last, there it was. The shiny new speed bag hanging there, my own little bottle of tranquilizer tablets. It had been a long wait. But every week night from then on, after all the little Neanderthals had walked or ridden their school buses home to their caves, I would materialize there before it The Bag and then… right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam… only at the speed of light, because I was that good. And oh! The relief!

Oh, of course custodians would show up to sweep the gym floor, and kids who were in after-school programs would pass through the gym on their way somewhere or other (and yeah, I could sort of feel some of them stopping behind me to watch for a bit, but that was OK since once I got in my groove, it was like I was cocooned in my own little bubble and the world outside no longer existed).

Ah! Mental health! It’s not overrated you know.

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

So, a week or so later, me ensconced in my desk before a very large study hall, my classroom door swung open. In the doorway stood the high school principal. My inner reaction was Oh shit! What now? Because I wasn’t quite ready yet for my English class coming up next period; no, I was striving desperately to flesh out some last-minute Hail Mary in that regard. Plus, I really had to wonder (worry-wart-me), had I possibly done something wrong to merit this visit? As a Major Major Major Major, I was always worried about that.

“Excuse me, Mr. Lyford,” he began, “but there are some students down in the gymnasium who were wondering if you’d be so kind as to go down there and give them a little demonstration on the new, err, punching bag.”

“What? Who, me? Um. No, I can’t right now. I have this study hall, you see.”

“Oh, not a problem, Mr. Lyford. I’m happy to sit in here to cover for you for the rest of this period. So…”

A fist had just clamped onto my Poster Boy heart and was giving it a crushing squeeze! “Well, I…”

“It’s a Phys Ed class. The teacher told me that a number of the kids have reported seeing you working out on it, and, well, they’d like it very much if you could give them a few pointers, you know.”

“Oh gosh… I dunno. I doubt I’m good enough to give anyone a demonstration…”

“Oh, sure you are. They say you’re very good. And it’ll be good for the kids.”

“Oh. Sure. Well, then.” With Irritable Bowel Syndrome threatening to come on, I took off my suit jacket and hesitantly draped it over the back of my chair. It was a very long walk (in my mind) down the halls, down the stairs, and out to the gymnasium on the other end of the building. When I pushed through the double doors and stepped into the gym, I was immediately mortified. My principal had said “some kids.” But my God, there had to be four Phys Ed classes waiting for me out there, if not more, all standing around the speed bag in a semi-circle. I nearly fainted. Phobias are powerful things, aren’t they. The human Red Sea parted, allowing me a slim corridor through which to pass. It really felt like most of my inner systems were shutting down. Sweat? I guess to hell I was sweating!

I have no memory of what I might have said to the kids and coaches. I stumbled through some kind of introduction I guess, but it probably didn’t make a lot of sense. I do know that I owned up to my nervousness. Whatever I said, eventually it was time came to face the bag. I know that my timing was way off, due to nerves, and I remember botching my routine on my first two or three tries which was so embarrassing, especially when I just missed getting slapped in the nose again by a rebound, as I had on day-one. “OK, I’m really nervous,” I confessed. “No shit!” somebody muttered in the crowd behind me. Yeah. Hecklers. All I needed.

But then my brain kicked in, telling myself I needed to begin slowly, as slowly as I had when I had my first lesson. So, that’s what I did. Slow-motion… right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam, which I’m sure was disappointingly boring to the mob. But… as I gradually increased the speed, I began to feel my muscle memory kicking back in.And as I no longer was facing all those faces in the crowd, only the bag itself, I could concentrate better and with that, I could feel my protective bubble-cocoon forming around me…

And then, I was AOK! Houston, we no longer have a problem! Man, I started loosening up, and then really letting loose! I watched the bag disappear into the blur right before my very eyes! And then, before I knew it, my elbows came into play. And then my forehead was getting its licks in, taking turns with my fists at batting that bag back! Right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right elbow-bam bam bam, left elbow-bam bam bam, forehead-bam bam bam… I mean, what a show-off! You know, sometimes when you discover you’re performing well, you can feel the mood change in your audience, and I was suddenly more confident that all was well behind me.

And then the class bell was ringing, although I barely noticed it. But the kids were heading off to other classes. But there! It was done! Over! Ended! I could breathe.

Well, not quite ended exactly. Because after that day, after… the word got out, a couple or more things began to happen…

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

Something I need to tell you about Belfast in 1968. It was one tough little town.

For instance there was a movie theater downtown. And there were a couple of levels in that theater, so that it was possible to be showing a movie on one level while having some entirely different type of event happening on the other.

So one of the other types of events was local amateur boxing. Now that would have struck me as perfectly fine. But their definition of amateur boxing seemed to mean NO TRAINING NEEDED. So it was come one, come all. Come as you are. Walk-ins off the street were fine.

Now the way that showed up in the high school scene is that on many a Monday morning (or sometimes even by a Wednesday morning, depending on just how laid up or crippled the “amateur” had become) I’d commonly see boys coming back to school with a black eye, one or two teeth knocked out, a bandaged fist, or an arm in a sling. Seemed pretty sketchy to me, but that’s how it was.

How that showed up in my high school teacher’s life is that suddenly I started getting shadowed by these big, 200-pound bruiser-types would stop me in the hall, or show up in my classroom after school, to invite me to come on down! They thought it’s be just great to get to spar a few rounds with me, a faculty member. Of course I had zero interest to become one of their outside-of school “friends” or their sparring partner. That was a pretty uncomfortable feeling. I would assure them over and over that I was not a boxer. They’d laugh that off because to them it was so obvious that that’s exactly what I was, and everybody in school knew it.

For a lot of them, they felt they didn’t need any special training because they had their muscled arms, their scarred fists, and their pea-sized brains. What else could they need or want? They didn’t “get” the speed bag concept. They had no clue how to work that speedbag because… We don’ neeed no steenkin’ speed or timing. We just knock your block off. They were the infamous one-punch speed bag mutilators.

After assuring them over and that I was just an English teacher and nothing else, they’d ask, “Well, why don’t you come down to the theater and be my trainer then?” They were utterly confused when I’d tell them, “No, you know what? I’ll be content just staying home, rocking in my old rocking chair on the porch during the evenings, just reading a good book. But I could see it in their eyes. They were imagining, This guy’s a professional, that’s what. He just thinks he’s too good to bother himself with our amateur stuff.

Anyway, the invitations kept coming and coming, pretty much throughout the year that I lived there. Honestly, I found it a little scary.

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

OK, I’m going to bring this post to an end with an odd-duck little Belfast anecdote. There are so many of them. This one happened in one of my two Speech classes, the one where nobody was ever willing to make a speech, even a small one.

There was one kid there, Peter by name, who took that refusal to the ultimate level. He just refused to talk in my class at all. You would never even catch him whispering to one of his classmates. It was as if he had taken a monk’s vow of silence. Sometimes I wondered if he was honestly able to speak, if maybe there was something wrong with his vocal chords. But then, I’d see him talking to people outside of class. Imagine my frustration.

I been at my wit’s end trying to think up some really easy assignment that even the shyest, most obstinate kid could get behind. And what I’d come up with was basically a somewhat disguised version of Show and Tell. I asked them to pick some object, nearly any object that was in some way important to them (an object that would help us learn a little bit about the speaker) and then say just a few sentences about it. That’s all. Maybe tell why it’s important. Maybe tell how, or even where, they’d got it. A memento of some vacation trip they’d taken, perhaps. A picture of a friend. Anything!

And here was the kicker: Anybody who did this, anybody who could actually get up in front of the class, show the class an object,and then blurt out three or more sentences about the object will receive a guaranteed automatic A+ . (I was willing to do anything to get the ball rolling in those strange souls. Sometime you just had to prime the pump.)

It worked somewhat well. Some kids did stand at the front of the room. Some kids did manage to mutter something or other. Hey, I was really getting somewhere! I was on a roll. And those students did receive their automatic A+ as promised.

All except Peter.

At first I thought he was actually going to participate. I’d said, “Pete? OK. It looks like your turn. You’re up. Whattya say?” He grinned. He was good at grinning. Grinned big time whenever I acknowledged him, actually. Not so hot at eye contact though. Never once looked me directly in the eye, did Pete. Didn’t look anbody in the eye as far as I knew. But after I called on him, and after honestly a two-minute period of grinning hesitation, he bent over and started rifling through his large duffle bag on the floor for… something. It was a good sign.

At last he pulled out his object. A portable radio.

“A radio,” I said. “That’s great Pete. I’m guessing most of us can identify with that choice. Good. So, go on up to the front, and then we’ll listen to your presentation, alright?”

It was obvious, despite the big Cheshire cat grin, that he didn’t want to do that. It took quite a bit of coaxing, but (yay!) he did finally walk himself up there to the front. I was pretty excited about the progress. “Alright, Pete. Go ahead now. We’re all ready.”

It was so weird, the way he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look at anybody. His eyes would dart left, then right, up, then down, but never a hint of eye contact. It was sad. Easy to imagine something very negative had happened in his life. And here I was, a totally inexperienced “teacher,” flying by the seat of my pants with all of this.

“Pete?”

No response. Nothing. He was just standing there, holding the radio. “We’re ready, Pete. You can do this. Just a few comments now, and the A+ is yours.”

By now I pretty much knew he wasn’t going to speak, and that added to the sadness. sad. “Peter? This is your last chance. C’mon. We’re waiting…”

Suddenly Pete lifted the little radio up chest high, examined it for a moment, plucked the little antenna up out of its socket, and turned the it on. Suddenly we could all hear ome disc jockey’s voice, talking it up to his fans. I allowed myself to listen for half a minute, and then said, “Pete? It’s time to say a few words…”

And what did Pete do? He responded by turning up the volume. “Well, OK. Guess that’s just about it, Pete. Last chance. Either you say something, or I‘m gonna have to ask you sit back down. OK?”

Grinning a chilling Jack-o-Lantern’s grin, now he cranked the volume all the way up. I mean really cranked it! That little radio put out a lot more oomph than I’d ever have guessed. And there he simply stood, a boy with radio in hand.

“OK. That’s it Pete. Have a seat please.”

Nothing

“Sit down, Pete. I mean it.”But he didn’t, he wouldn’t. “Rightnow” Either sit down, or you’ll have to go to the office.” I realized I might as well have been talking to the wall. He wouldn’t budge. I was sitting at the back of the room for this assignment, and at this point I stood up. “OK, you know where the door is.”

As I started walking down the aisle toward the front, Pete sidled off to his right. As I moved to follow him, he started moving up an aisle two aisles over. I strolled over to his current aisle and started moving up it, causing him to execute a long u-turn at the back of the classroom and occupy another one three aisles over.

“Aw, c’mon, Pete. That’s enough, now. Let’s not make it any worse. Out you go on your own, or I’ll hafta call the assistant principal!” That ultimate threat obviously carried no weight whatsoever that I could see. It had now become a surreal game of Catch as Catch Can. With chess moves, him always keeping approximately two aisles away from me! They certainly hadn’t prepared me for anything even close to this in our Classroom Management seminars and classes What was I expected to do?

Enough was enough. My teaching career was only days old and I had never anticipated, or even really imagined (until this moment) having to lay my hands on anyone, but… the other kids thought this was the most entertaining joke ever, and were beginning to cheer and egg him on. It had to end.

I decided to take a short cut. There was an empty desk in the row between Pete and myself, so I muckled onto it and began pushing, to bulldoze it sideways out of the line of desks! Like all of them in that room, it was an ancient wooden thing so old that Abraham Lincoln might have sat in it prior to the Civil War. Pete, still clutching the loud radio, saw what I was up to and frantically started glancing forward and aft for the best possible escape route! Now, just as someone comically yelled, “Look out, Pete, he’s a boxer!” one of the front legs of my desk got hung up on something, sending it toppling forward to crash onto the floor with practically thunderclap! Pete whirled back around to face me! Then we both found ourselves gawking down at the thing between lying there between us.

Like him, I was shocked at seeing the old desk lying there in two main pieces, split right down the middle from the concussion! But unlike him, I actually knew what had really just happened. Pete on the other hand, with “Look out, Pete, he’s a boxer!” still echoing in his ears, did not. For all he knew, I might have busted the desk in half in a rage with a single, mighty blow from my Heavyweight Champion of the World FIST OF FURY!

The only good thing about that was that I didn’t have to ask Pete anymore to leave my classroom. He just went scampering out that door like a rabbit with its tail on fire.

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

So now you understand why a lady from Belfast I’d never met looked at me across the teachers’ lounge table and surprised me, surprised all of us really, with, “So… you’re the boxer.”

It’s as I told you near the beginning of Part II: “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…”

And from that insignificant decision, simply to take up learning how to increase my timing via the use of something called a speed bag (a hobby basically no more momentous than, say, taking up baton twirling or coin collecting), I have been remembered through the decades by a high school faculty and student body, as the boxing English teacher.

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

Thanks for reading.

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POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST?

PROLOGUE

I present for your consideration a strange and very unlikely (but true) scenario. (Perhaps you might want to imagine me as Rod Serling, introducing the upcoming episode of The Twilight Zone.)

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

It’s lunchtime, and you’re seated at a long table in the teachers’ lounge, surrounded by a handful of your colleagues. You’ve been employed as a high school English teacher for twenty years or so now, but have only been teaching at the Academy for the last twelve.

You’ve come to know your co-workers well, as they have gotten to know you. Well, with one exception that is, being this newcomer seated directly across the table from you.

She’s been here for two weeks, but you two haven’t crossed paths yet. So one of your colleagues takes it upon himself to introduce you to this new face in the crowd.

You learn her name; she learns yours. Turns out she’s a temporary ed tech who lives in, and commutes from, Belfast. OK, fine. But you’ve noticed that her eyes have remained fixed on you for a bit longer than feels necessary. She’s studying your face.

“Your name is Tom Lyford,” she says finally.

“Yeah. That’s right. Pleased to meet you.”

She says, “And didn’t you used to work at Belfast Area High School, some twenty years ago?”

You say, “Guilty as charged. Worked there only for a year though. Why, have we met before?”

“No, but my boyfriend worked with you down there. Back then.”

“Oh. Really? OK. And what’s his name?”

So she tells you and, yes, you do recognize the name. You remember him, if only vaguely. But she continues to creepily appraise you a moment or two longer. Then… “So,” she says, “you’re the boxer.”

Everyone stops talking among themselves, and puts their forks down. This is probably one of the most absurd statements you, or anyone in that room, could’ve imagined. All eyes are on her, then on you, then back on her, and then back to you again as, after you do your double take, you laugh an uncomfortable laugh and ask, “The what?”

She says, “The boxer.”

“That’s what I thought you said. But… what? Boy, have you ever got the wrong guy. A boxer! Me? Hah! That’s a laugh and a half. I mean, I can’t believe you even said that. ‘Cause I was never…”

Jeez, the way your fellow teachers have their eyes locked on you now, it’s… embarrassing. All eyes roll back to her when she says, “Yes,” with conviction. “The name’s right. You both worked there twenty years ago. And the two of you remember each other, so… gotta be you. And he clearly stated you were a fighter.”

“No! Now, let’s put on the brakes for just a minute here, OK? This is a joke, right? ‘Cause… it is funny. Ridiculous but funny! OK so… somebody put you up to this, right? One of these jerks?”

She shakes her head, looking a little bruised. “Uh-UH. I’m serious. Look. I heard them say your name at morning assembly last week… when you made that presentation. And for some reason or other… I dunno… it just sounded kinda familiar. And when I went home last weekend, my boyfriend, Steve, wanted to know all about how my first week went, and among other things I told him, I happened to mention your name. And he said, ‘Tom Lyford? Hey, I knew him!’

And then eventually he got his hands on the right old yearbook, and there you were. Looking a little different back then, without the beard, but it was obviously you. ‘An English teacher,’ he told me. ‘And he was a boxer.’”

“Well, that’s crazy. I was NEVER…!” But man, the way everybody’s silently keeping their eyes locked on you like you’re some TV star in a live sitcom or something, it’s become so unsettling you’re a little at a loss for words.

And then one of the Phys. Ed. teachers/coaches leans forward and says to you with a twinkle in his eye, “So. You been holding out on us, eh, Tommy boy?” Which, jeez, puts an awful thought in your head: Gawd, are they all starting to wonder who the ACTUAL nut-job is here? The new stranger in town, or their self-proclaimed pacifist/poet/drama coach who, for all they know, might’ve been living among them all this time while secretly hiding out in the Witness Protection Program?

You remind myself to just say no to paranoia.

“Well, obviously, when you found me in that yearbook, it never said anything about me as a boxer, did it. No! It said English and speech, plus I was the drama coach, OK? C’mon now. it never said word-one about me being…”

Tom Lyford, Belfast Area High School Dramatics Coach, front row, far right–, NOT a boxer…

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.

So, PLEASE keep a sharp eye out for the second installment of POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST?? coming out SOON!…

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

“If you could read my mind, love…”

—Gordon Lightfoot

My wife and I were once befriended by a retired professional hypnotist from New York City. And when I say professional, I mean really professional: he wasn’t one of those fun, on-stage-showmen hypnotists that’ll turn you into a clucking, seed-pecking “chicken” for laughs and a quick buck. No, this gentleman’s distinguished career as a clinical hypnotherapist had him working in New York City hospitals and within the NYC criminal justice system.

During a high school assembly (at a high school where I was teaching), he shared this one famous, historical anecdote that really threw a monkey wrench into all that I thought I knew about the inner workings of the human brain:

Using a small probe designed to produce the mildest of electric stimulations when applied to chosen areas of the brain, one of her surgeons gently stimulated a random spot on hers. Immediately her face looked perplexed. When asked what she was experiencing, she replied, “Why, I just suddenly tasted a ham sandwich.” Further into the operation, the doctor once again applied the probe to another random location. Suddenly the woman was beaming happily. When asked to explain, she told the surgeon, “I was suddenly just sitting in a concert hall with my mother, but it was back when I was a child. And the music? It’s wonderful!”

To me this begged a lot of questions, not the least of which is… What sensations or memories might be tapped into if you, or I, were the patient lying on that operating table? I find this so intriguing.

Now, the above example has much to do with the overall behind-the-scenes theme of this many-episodes blog that you’re reading. As I attempted to explain in my very first post, lots of random memories are suddenly reawakening (popping up) in my 77 year old consciousness seemingly all the time now. And while some are the longer “story”-memories with their pretty convoluted plot lines (like my recent Gizmo Chronicles), so many more of them are just simpler “moments”-memories, little unimportant-yet-interesting moments that have been leaving me amazed at the beyond-incredible capacity of my brain to have catalogued so much of the minute-by-trivial-minute minutiae of my relatively long life.

Check out what this cool dude had to say about this:

NOTHING IS LOST

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
We could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.

There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

—Noel Coward (1899 – 1973)

Fascinating, no…?

As part of the Characterization portion of my high school English Creative Writing units, I often would ask my little writers, “Can you imagine having a ballpoint-pen-sized instrument which, when you secretly positioned it right behind the ear of the kid sitting in front of you, could download and reveal all their thoughts and memories?” My point was this: the interesting and well-written character sketches in literature need to go way beyond the mere standard mugshot-stats of height, weight, color of eyes, and color of hair. The kid sitting in front of you may appear outwardly boring and uninteresting at a glance, but once you peel back their scalp and take a peek inside that brain… SURPRISE! People are usually a lot more interesting that we may be led to believe.

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OK. I’m going to tell you a little story here, a bed-time story if you will. It’s not a great story or even an important one. Nope, no little Stephen King blockbuster here (although you may find that there is just a whiff of Stephen King-ishness about it). It’s a silly story, actually. But the thing to remember is… it’s a true one. And it describes one of the little “moments” that has recently just “bubbled up” to the surface of my dark and murky subconscious memories… almost as if, say, a brain surgeon had just pressed his electronic probe on just the right spot of my brain…

WEST OF THE WALL

So it’s late June, 1964. A beautiful, blue-sky, sunny morning. I’m at work downtown. Three weeks ago, I graduated from high school and now I’m earning the Big Bucks for college— to the tune of $46 dollars a week take-home pay at Huey Cole’s Esso station. Don’t laugh. $46.00 a week is fair pay for a kid my age.

Coles’ Esso, 20 years before I started working there.

At this point in my on-the-job training life, I’velearned almost just enough about grease-monkeying to be seriously dangerous, but fortunately that won’t be an issue today. Because we’ve got the full-time crew on deck tohandle the grease jobs, oil changes, and whatever else. Me? I’m strictly the gas pump jockey. All day long. Easy street.

But he tells me they’re the customer, and the customer is always right so I’d better do it and do it with a smile!

Pugs were the standard old bags’ dogs of choice back then.

I tell him OK, I’ll do it, but it’d be one hell of a lot easier to smile if that nasty little pug of theirs in the back seat would just stop snarling and nipping at my ankles, for chrissakes!

But hey, in the downtime at the station, which there’s usually lots of (our town being a regular Gomer and Goober Pyle Mayberry, R.F.D.), I’ll be lazing much of the day away slouched in the boss’s swivel chair, feet up on the desk, manning the phone, smoking cigarettes, and listening to my favorite station, WGUY Bangor. Listening to the top 40 is just about everything to me, so thank God I’ve got a job where the radio plays all day long. Plus, I like sitting behind a big desk. I tell my buddies, yeah, I got me a desk job this summer.

Around 10:00, just as another new song is beginning to play, a Chevy wagon with a family of five pulls up at the pumps. I mash my filter-tip Kool into the ash tray and head out. It’s a little annoying because I hadn’t caught the name of the new tune. All I’d picked up on is it was something about a wall. Oh well, whatever, I’m sure I’ll be hearing it again sometime. At some point down the road.

By the time I get to step back into the office and ring up the sale, there’s a bunch of commercials going on. But anyway, I slip back into the office chair, put my feet back up, and light up another cancer stick. And as always, keep a sharp eye on the pumps, lest my dad suddenly pulls in and catches me smoking. Sure. I know. I’m seventeen going on eighteen next month. An adult, right? But for some reason I’m just not ready to have that particular fight with the old man.

So, turns out the next song up on the radio is…

Huh! Hey, wait just a minute. That’s the same song as the last one, the one they just played. Which is pretty odd. I mean, they don’t usually play a tune twice in a row, back to back like this. But OK. Cool. I’ll take it. I wanted to hear it again anyway. Now I just don’t hafta wait till tomorrow or the next day. Which is great.

Surprisingly though, good ol’ DJ, Jack Dalton, seems to have forgotten to announce the title of the song. \Which is odd. Didn’t say anything at all, in fact. The song just started playing without even a word from him. But… so what? Anybody with half a brain can guess the name of the song anyway. I mean, it’s gotta be “West of the Wall,” since that’s the phrase getting repeated over and over in the chorus.

It’s a girl’s voice doing the singing. She’s probably a real babe, like all of’em. Plus, it’s one of those melodies that gets stuck in your head right away, you know?

Hmmm. So, it’s about the Berlin Wall over in Germany. About somebody on one side of the wall being separated from somebody else on the other side. Her lover obviously. It’s kinda sad. Like a Romeo and Juliet thing. I like sad songs.

But as it draws to the end, I’m focusing right in on it because I really want the title and artist’s name spoken. I still keep my little notebook at home, under my bed next to my radio, where I keep track of new titles and artists and where they’ve currently landed in the top 100. See? But that’s me. Obsessive-compulsive.

OK, now here’s something really odd. The song just came to the end, right? But then, it just simply started re-playing all over once again. For the third time! And still, not a word from the DJ. Not a word from anybody! So… what gives?

A kind of wild idea pops into my head. Maybe the DJ is the only one at the studio. For some reason, who knows why, he’s gotten stuck working alone today. And… guess what: he’s had himself a little emergency. As in… nature calls. Stuck in the bathroom! Maybe… probably, with a real bad case of the runs, or something. If so, man, wouldn’t I hate to be him! I mean, how awful would that be!? Not to mention embarrassing! You know, you’ve got this job to do. And your boss… not to mention all your listeners out there in radio land… are counting on you to continue their hit parade, but there you are, stuck behind a bathroom door and glued onto the porcelain throne, sweating like a pig, and praying desperately you’ll somehow be able to get back out there to that goddamn microphone. To crawl back if you have to! Anyway, can’t wait to hear his excuse when he finally does come back on the air. I mean, jeez, what would I say in a situation like that? Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but… see, there was this uhmmm… really insistent payola thug at the door practically threatening to kneecap me if I refused to play his client’s demo? Or… man, I was having this vicious nicotine fit, so I just stepped outside for a couple of drags when… all of a sudden… the wind just slammed the door shutbehind me! And it locked!

Yeah. Poor guy, stuck in the john right now and be going through a dozen possible alibis.

Ah! Here it comes… the song is ending.

Silence.

And then… the song just starts right up again! WHAT the…? Something’s going on… but…

Of course a car rolls up to the pumps. Followed by another. Damn it.

And of course the song is still playing when I return to the cash register. My God, a few more plays and I’ll have all the damn lyrics memorized, right down pat.

But wait a minute! What if this is something a lot more serious? Like, oh I dunno, did he have a heart attack or something? Yeah, and what if he’s just lying there on the floor unconscious? Or even DEAD? Holy crap! And what if this guy is obese? And what if, say… his three hundred and fifty pound body is lying there accidentally barricading the door like a human doorstop, so nobody can get in to help him?

Oh, for cryin’ out loud, would you listen to yourself. I mean, I really know the odds are that nothing that exotic, nothing that serious, is gonna turn out being responsible for the simple, never-ending replaying of “West of the Wall,” if that’s what the song actually is called.

Probably the poor soul really is suffering a bathroom emergency.

Still though, the song goes on. And on. For three hours, which includes my lunch break.

Meanwhile, I’ve been sharing what’s been going on with this phantom broadcast with my co-workers and even some of our customers who’ve stepped into the office. Got’em all scratching their heads for a minute or two. But they’re too busy to care, really. Their attitude? Yeah? So what?

So… I must bear this burden alone.

But for me, at this stage of the game, whatever it is going on here, it’s created kind of an electric, festive atmosphere. Spooky. I’ve kinda feeling this creepy 1938 War of the World’s broadcast feeling. Something right out of The Twilight Zone. You know, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” kinda vibe.

And by now, after all this time, I really do hafta be thinking, OK, there’s really gotta be at least a… somewhat unusual explanation for this. For something as bizarre as this.

Time ticks itself away…

Then…

Sometime in the late afternoon, close to the end of my shift, the music…

stops! Stops dead!

And suddenly… nothing but radio silence.

Frozen stock-still, I’m now gawking at the little radio on the shelf as if it were a TV screen.

Something’s happened! And it’s about time! But OK… what?!

I wait…

And WHOA! Suddenly the radio silence is broken by a crisp announcer’s jarring voice, loudly clearing his throat in a no-nonsense, this-is-serious kind of way. As if whatever it is he’s about to say will be a very grave news bulletin! Oh. My. God. I can’t help it! This is big! I’m all lik… have the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor again? Have the Russians invaded us? Has another President been shot? Have the monsters blasted Maple Street right off the frickin’ map? WHAT!?

At long last, a man who is not the DJ launches right into it. And all of us,meaning the vast, entire WGUY radio listening audience everywhere, is finallygoing to clue us in. He says, “I’m sorry to report…

He’s giving us the lowdown. And the lowdown is… kind of incredible.

END OF STORY

Thanks for reading. Please keep a vigilant eye out for the rest of this TRUE STORY, “West of the Wall; The Epilogue,” due to appear on your favorite device’s screen at any moment now…

One of many TIME CAPSULE MOMENTS in my brain.

“If you could read my mind, Love…”—

A woman lay on a hospital operating table. Although her brain was surgically exposed to the open air, she remained in no pain, wide awake, aware, and perfectly capable of conversing with her surgeons during the procedure. Using a small probe designed to produce the mildest of electric stimulations when applied to chosen areas of the brain, one of her surgeons gently stimulated a random spot on hers. Immediately her face looked perplexed. When asked what she was experiencing, she replied, “Why, I just suddenly tasted a ham sandwich.” Further into the operation, the doctor once again applied the probe to another random location. Suddenly the woman was beaming happily. When asked to explain, she told the surgeon, “I was suddenly just sitting in a concert hall with my mother, but it was back when I was a child. And the music? It’s wonderful!”

Check out what this cool dude had to say about this:

NOTHING IS LOST

—Noel Coward (1899 – 1973)

Fascinating, no…?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

WEST OF THE WALL

At this point in my on-the-job training life, I’ve learned almost just enough about grease-monkeying to be seriously dangerous, but fortunately that won’t be an issue today. Because we’ve got the full-time crew on deck tohandle the grease jobs, oil changes, and whatever else. Me? I’m strictly the gas pump jockey. All day long. Easy street.

Well, easy except for the fact that we’re a full-service gas station, meaning that on top of pumping the gas, I also get to wash the windshields, check the customers’ oil, check the air pressure in all four tires, and make sure the distilled water in the batteries is properly topped off. And that’s OK, but… there’s a couple of old ladies (old bags) who roll in here once a week and (if you can believe this) actually make me climb right inside their smelly old car and wash all of their inside windows! On top of all the other stuff! I mean, cripes, have they got a lot of nerve, or what!? It’s crazy, and believe me I’ve complained to the boss about it! But he tells me they’re the customer, and the customer is always right so I’d better do it and do it with a smile! I tell him OK, I’ll do it, but it’d be one hell of a lot easier to smile if that nasty little pug of theirs in the back seat would just stop snarling and nipping at my ankles, for chrissakes! (In case you don’t know this, little pugs were always the standard little old ladies’ dog of choice back then.)

So, turns out the next song up on the radio is…

It’s a girl’s voice doing the singing. She sounds cool. I like her voice. She’s probably a real babe, like all of’em. Plus, I like the melody. It’s one of those that gets stuck in your head right away, you know?

Hmmm. It’s this story about the Berlin Wall over in Germany. About somebody on one side of the wall being separated from somebody else on the other side. Her lover obviously. It’s kinda sad. Like a Romeo and Juliet thing. I like sad songs. But as it draws to the end, I’m focusing right in on it because I really want the title and artist’s name spoken. I still keep my little notebook at home, under my bed next to my radio, where I keep track of new titles and artists and where they’ve currently landed in the top 100. See? But that’s me. Obsessive-compulsive.

Anyway, can’t wait to hear his excuse when he finally does come back on the air. I mean, jeez, what would I say in a situation like that? Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but… see, there was this uhmmm… really insistent payola thug at the door practically threatening to kneecap me if I refused to play his client’s demo? Or… man, I was having this vicious nicotine fit, so I just stepped outside for a couple of drags when… all of a sudden… the wind just slammed the door shutbehind me! And it locked!

Yeah. Poor guy, stuck in the john right now and be going through a dozen possible alibis.

Ah! Here it comes… the song is ending.

Silence.

And then… What? The song just starts right up again! WHAT the…? Something’s going on… but…

Of course a car rolls up to the pumps. Followed by another. Damn it.

Somehow the song is still playing when I return to the cash register. My God, a few more plays and I’ll have all the damn lyrics memorized, right down pat.

But wait a minute! What if this is something a lot more serious?Like, I dunno, did he have a heart attack or something? Yeah, what if he’s just lying there unconscious? Or even DEAD? Holy crap! I dunno how big the guy is or anything but what if, say… his three hundred and fifty pound body is lying there accidentally barricading the door so nobody can get in to help him?

Oh, for cryin’ out loud, would you listen to me. I honestly know how stupid I’m being. I do sometimes enjoy framing all the boredom going onall around me as some tense movie plot. It’s crazy. But I know, I mean I really know the odds are… nothing that exotic, nothing that serious, is gonna turn out being responsible for the never-ending replaying of “West of the Wall,” if that’s what the song actually is called.

Probably the poor soul really is suffering a bathroom emergency.

Still though, the song goes on. And on. For an hour. Through my lunch break. For three hours. Meanwhile, I’ve shared what’s been going on with this phantom broadcast with my co-workers and even some of our customers who’ve stepped into the office. Got’em all scratching their heads for a minute or two. But they’re too busy to care, really. So… I must bear the burden alone.

But for me, whatever it is going on here, it’s created kind of an electric, festive atmosphere. And by now, after all this time, I’m thinking, OK, there really must be at least a… somewhat unusual explanation. For something as bizarre as this. For me, it’s generated this creepy 1938 War of the World’s broadcast feeling. Or like something right out of The Twilight Zone. I mean, I can’t stop going back to that one Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”

However, all good things must come to an end.

Sometime in the late afternoon, close to the end of my shift, the music… stops!

Stops dead!

Suddenly… nothing but radio silence.

Frozen stock-still, I’m left gawking at the little Zenith radio on the shelf as if it were a TV screen.

Something’s happened! And it’s about time! But OK… what?!

I wait…

And WHOA! Suddenly the radio silence is broken by a crisp announcer’s jarring voice, loudly clearing his throat in a no-nonsense, this-is-serious way. As if whatever it is he’s about to say will be a very grave news bulletin! Oh. My. God. It’s gonna be bad news, I know it. This is big. I’m all like, have the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor again? Have the Russians invaded us? Has another President been shot? Have the monsters blasted Maple Street right off the frickin’ map? WHAT!?

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.

END OF STORY

Thanks for reading. Please keep a vigilant eye out for the rest of this TRUE STORY, “West of the Wall; The Epilogue,” due to appear on your favorite device’s screen at any moment now…

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BRAINS

I’ve got this… thing about brains. No, not in the zombie way. But I’m just hung up on the very essence of the phenomenon we call the brain. For me, the human brain is an unimaginable, alluring mystery, totally worthy of pondering. So yeah, I think about the brain. Not all the time, but a lot. I read about the brain off and on.. And I often find myself writing about it. Hell, I’m setting out to write about it right here and now.

But being ‘only an English major’ I’m scientifically handicapped, aren’t I— way over my head in deep waters. No Bill Nye the Science Guy, me. I know that. But still, I just can’t seem to get myself past marveling at how you, I, and Bill Nye the Science Guy are totally reliant, for everything, on what appears to be nothing more than an approximately seven-by-three-by-four-inch “walnut”-shaped lump of Silly Putty nestled in our brain pans like some inert loaf of bread. And… that this lump is universally hailed by the entire civilized modern world to be the best damn Central Processing Unit and hard drive combo in the known universe, bar none. I mean, that just… boggles the brain. Yes, I’m incapable of anything more than writing odes to the human brain, inexpertly philosophizing about it, or asking the for-me-elusive-and-unanswerable cosmic questions about how this organ manages to do what it does. So this little essay is bound to end up just being another essay paying homage to the walnut-shaped lump.

Now wait! Don’t you go walking away telling me that, sure, the brain’s important and everything, but it sure as heck ain’t interesting! Are you kidding me? Interesting? Why, the brain is fascinating six ways from Sunday! And I’m betting I can prove that with just two freakin’ examples.

Example #1: Ever hear of Phineas P. Gage (1823-1860)? The man who did more for the science of brain surgery and neuro-studies than any man alive today?

Now hear me out. He wasn’t any white-coated scientist or doctor. So what was he? I’ll tell you what he was. Phineas was a common laborer who blasted out rail beds with explosives for a living. And I don’t know if he was a loser or not, but he certainly didn’t have enough brains to know you gotta be pretty darn careful when you’re tamping down blasting fuses into black-powder-packed holes with a thirteen pound crowbar! On September 13^th (13 being the unlucky number here), 1848, he was working for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad up in Cavendish, Vermont. He was whanging that crowbar into the rocks when a spark launched it like a Chines fireworks rocket right up through the side of his face and out the top of his skull, landing with a clatter on a granite slope some eighty feet away. And after the echoes died away and the smoke cleared, there sat old Phineas, conscious and as aware as any of the crew.

And he could still talk. And the next thing you know, he was walking back to the wagon that would convey him back to his lodgings in town where he would confound a physician brought to examine him. Yes, Phineas Gage who by all accounts should have dropped dead on the spot but instead went stubbornly on about the business of living minute by minute; then hour by hour; eventually a whole day; and after that a day at a time… tor twelve years! Yes, a frontal lobe partially lost and a ghastly fame won, our hapless survivor of “The American Crowbar Case,” as it came to be called, entered into the Annals of Science and Medicine as Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient, the individual who single-handedly contributed more than any other earthly soul to research regarding how specific regions of the human brain control personality and behavior , giving the big green light to decades of experimental lobotomies, all the way up through One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…and beyond.

Example #2: Would you believe me if I told you that there was once a famous case of somebody’s brain being kidnapped? Perhaps you have. If you haven’t, you may think I’m joking, or misinformed. I have to admit it does sound like something right out of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein… if not Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. But no, it’s true. And guess whose brain it was. Albert Einstein’s! It’s true. Einstein’s brain was stolen shortly after the autopsy was performed on his body right after his death in 1955? And you needn’t take my word for it. Just look up “Einstein’s Stolen Brain” on Google and you’ll get many links to articles and documentaries on the subject from a number of immaculately credible sources.

Or… why not simply sit back, relax, and enjoy this 3+ minute tutorial about it I’ve just borrowed from YouTube:

I can’t help but wish I were sufficiently brainy to be part of a scientific medical team that might get the opportunity to scrutinize the leftover fragments of what is allegedly the most ingenious brain in human history. I mean, just try to imagine for a minute all the recorded thoughts, ideas, memories, events, scientific formulae, facts, opinions, experiments, theories, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations that once resided (in biological ones and zeroes) in the brain with the I.Q. that was off the charts.

By contrast, most of us humbly presume that our cranial databases consisting of phone numbers, lottery numbers, computer passwords, favorite memorized song lyrics, movie quotes, baseball stats, family birthdays, and future calendar events that we’ve got socked away “upstairs” don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the Famed Physicist’s. But hold on. Not so fast…

Sure, Einstein’s brain probably is by far the Rolls-Royce of Gray Matter, but on a sliding scale? I contend that mine and yours are nothing less than a pair of shiny, brand-new Cadillac Coupe DeVilles. Because whatever the damn thing is that we’ve got sitting up there under the hood actually is… it’s constantly at work soaking up data like a cosmic sponge from every single thing our eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and fingertips come into contact with. 24/7. From day one (the birthday) until this microsecond. If you ask me, that’s one damn fine, unbelievably busy, multitasking piece of hardware.

And it’s said that under hypnosis, a subject can recall lists of long-forgotten birthday presents she/he received at any age. I mean, how’s that for a universe-class computer?

Mine’s a 1946 model. And like the old Timex watch commercials of the 50s and 60s, it’s taken a licking and kept on ticking. I just did the math, and I find that I’ve been drawing breaths for approximately 42,000,000 minutes give or take, in my lifetime. And that’s only so far. So, I’m getting pretty decent mileage.

And here’s a thought: just imagine hooking up a printer to your brain and commanding it to print out your brain’s entire stored cache from birth. Whattaya think that would look like, hmmm? I’m betting you could tape all the pages together and string’em to the sun and back.

Anyway— in my very first blog post, “Unstuck In time With Billy Pilgrim,” (posted about 24,500 minutes ago) I shared about how so many of my very-long-ago-forgotten childhood memories keep surprising me, just popping up randomly, unbidden and unexpected, into my conscious thoughts. And that’s in stunning detail to boot. The memory I kicked this blog off with was a particular one of when I was four years old, at a family reunion in the early 50’s up in northern Maine. I wonder how many megabytes that little stored event takes up in my skull. I’ll never know. And if I had to guess, I’d speculate that the total data capacity of the human brain is measurable only on yottabytes. Two minutes ago I didn’t know what a yottabyte was. But then I googled “What unit comes after terabyte?” The answer on my screen read “After terabyte comes petabyte. Next is exabyte, then zettabyte and yottabyte.” It turns out that a yottabyte is equal to one septillion, or a 1 followed by 24 zeroes. And honestly, that explanation goes right over my head. I can’t fathom it. A shame we’re not allowed to use the full 100% of our brain’s capacity.

Regardless of that, when I die… there goes my four year old’s family reunion memory.

And there are maybe gigabytes of others. And since I’m wallowing in the plethora of memories that are doomed to die of with my passing, lemme share another sample just for fun, one more specific, little, neural-ones-and-zeroes anecdote that’ll be rolling right along in the hearse with me on the way to the drive-by crematorium someday soon. And perhaps this one will further cause you to reflect on the gems you’ve got stored in that yottabyte treasure chest of yours. Think about all the currently out-of-sight, out-of-mind memories, which are endless, that you’ll be taking with you when your time comes.

So go ahead. Meditate a little. And take yourself a little stroll down your memory lane on a sentimental (and in many cases not so sentimental) journey. And surprise! See what might pop up.

OK. Once upon a time, boys and girls… back in the twentieth century…

OK. See, I have this kid brother. Twelve years younger than me. He’s an engineer. And after high school he enrolled in a Boston engineering college. I know that I, along with the rest of our redneck immediate family, worried needlessly about him leaving our safe, one-horse town environment to venture into the great, who-knows-what of…The City. But he flourished there. And upon graduating with his degree, he was immediately snatched up by a large technological firm and settled down in large housing development in a nearby suburb.

One day shortly thereafter, he telephoned us to relate the shocking news that in his absence someone, or more likely someones, had broken into his new apartment and stolen practically everything but the kitchen sink. Including his trash! (He figured they’d pretended to be transfer station employees and had unnoticeably taken their spoils in trash bags along with them out to the getaway truck.) We were horrified. So immediately my wife and I traveled down to his emptied-out pad to give him some familial love and whatever support we could muster. Late that morning however, we found him in good spirits, taking everything in stride. A lot better than I would have. He assured us that his was, in fact, not a bad or dangerous neighborhood, not really. And we were like… Oh, really?

Anyway, that afternoon we spent some time enjoying the horse races at the old Rockingham Park, dined out that evening, and eventually went to bed. I say bed. Phyllis and I slept comfortably on the living room floor. (Ah, to be young again.) I’m not sure, but I’m thinking The Beagle Boys left my brother his bed. Too large and difficult, probably, to smuggle out in a standard-size trash bag.

But then, sometime in the middle of the night, Phyllis and I were rudely awakened not only by the number of voices muttering just outside the apartment’s front door, but by the disturbing, pulsating, red, blue, and amber lights bleeding through the slats of the picture window’s Venetian blinds. Close Encounters of the Third Kind came immediately to mind. “I’m going out there,” I told Phyllis as I yanked on my jeans. I mean, if there was a ufo landing out there, I’d be damned if I were going to miss out on it.

So I cautiously cracked the door open and slipped out into the coolness of the summer night. There was a large crowd standing stock still on the front lawn, facing away from me and at the three or four strobing police cars, the firetruck, and the ambulance. I sidled in amid the rear of that crowd. I remember looking behind me and spying Phyl’s worried pale face watching me from beneath the lifted blinds.

It took me a few moments to take in all that I was seeing, especially the dreamlike little drama going on at the front end of one particular patrol car. Two cops were down on their knees, flashlights in hand. Curiously, they were peering straight in under the front end of the vehicle. And repeating something over and over. “Come on. Come on out from under there. Now!”

I was thinking, Out from under there? Out from under where? Under what, the patrol car? What would somebody be doing under a frickin’ patrol car? This just didn’t sound good. At all. And talk about eerie. In the frozen, hushed silence, this had all the makings of a bad fever dream.

I began looking around, surveying the lay of the land. The first thing I couldn’t help but notice were the tire tracks in the lawn. A vehicle had obviously come rounding the corner of our building to my left and driven this way, toward the parking lot in front of me, straight across the immaculately mowed lawn. And judging from the six- or seven-inch-deep tire tracks in the grass, and the gouts of mud and grass clumps spun all over the place, this vehicle hadn’t just been going fast, it had been accelerating! My eyes followed the tracks to where they morphed into a pair of black rubber smears on the asphalt of the lot.

“I said… come out of there. NOW!”

Also, a long chain of heavy iron links lay like a rope on that asphalt. Attached to the chain, spaced at intervals, were the uprooted poles that once held the links up as a barrier to vehicles, a fence if you will. Said car had plowed right through said chain link fence, for crying out loud.

“Hey! I’m serious, Mister! Come out!”

I returned my gaze to the tableau before us, as much as I could make out of it between the backs and heads of the witnesses in front. Of course, some of the backs and heads belonged to uniformed police officers. And there were several of them at this scene. I turned to my right and discovered I was standing next to a towering, black, muscled god of a man. I craned my neck up to speak to him and spoke very softly in the silence. “So, uhmmm… what… exactly… happened here?”

He looked down upon my pathetically inquisitive face. “They run him down,” he said. “They. Jus’. Run. Him. Down.”

Now, he didn’t voice that very loudly, but in the solemn quietness it was loud enough that three cops with stern glares immediately snapped their heads back around to see who had just spoken those very accusatory sounding words.

And me? Just like that old Kenny Rogers’ line? You’ve got to “know when to walk away… know when to run.” I executed a smart about-face and scampered back into the apartment with my tail between my legs!

Next morning when my brother, finally awake, stepped out of the bedroom, I hada coffee waiting for him. I’d just purchased the coffee at a convenience store a block away from the apartments, since the coffee maker had gone missing with the stereo, furniture, etc. But the real reason I had gone to the convenience store was to see if I could find out any information as to what had really gone down in the night before.

“So,” I said to my brother, “you like this neighborhood, do you?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Pretty much.”

“You feel safe here.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, I’ll tell you what. take the coffee outside. I gotta show you something.”

Out front in the sunlight now, you couldn’t possibly miss the egregious in-your-face evidence. The lawn was torn up a lot more than I’d been able to notice the night before. It was obvious now that the squad car had been gunning it fast and hard, practically all the way around one side of the whole building complex. Likewise, a much greater length of the uprooted chain fence lay snaked along the edge of the lawn.

According to the convenience store proprietor, the perp had tried unsuccessfully to break into one of the apartments during the day, while the three of us had been spending the afternoon at Rockingham Park. Somebody had caught him in the act, chased him away, and called the police. The cops had apparently decided to keep an eye on the complex and, in fact, had been surveilling the scene of the crime when the perp had actually returned. A chase had ensued, ending up with the perp being apprehended and scoring a free ambulance ride to a local hospital.

Before heading back for home, I asked my brother to send me any more information he could glean about the incident to me because… well, enquiring minds want to know, don’t they. So a week later, this news clipping arrived in the mail:

So. How important is this little incident in the larger scheme of things? Well, despite the fact that I thought it was pretty cool, it’s of no importance whatsoever. Unless you were the perp, of course, whose first name turned out to be Paul. Or some of the cops who ran over and arrested him to the tune of “Bad boys, bad boys. Whatchoo gonna do? Whatchoo gonna do when they come for you?” Oh yeah, and unless you were me, who got a really cool, momentary adrenaline rush from it, something I live for in this otherwise boring world.

But… see, when I die, this little recorded event goes straight down the tubes with me, both of us taking that long Green Mile ride to our local, drive-by crematorium. (Well, except now that I’ve shared it with you.) so for the time being it’s also temporarily nesting like a little egg among your brain cells, too.)

Now, look around. Look at all the people. The people you know. The people you don’t know. The gazillions and gazillions of people you can’t see, those that have lived on this earth since time immemorial and have long since passed. All those brains. Carrying what? Knowledge, that’s what. Valuable experience. Unspoken death-bed confessions. The key to Rebecca. The answer to what’s buried on Oak Island, if anything.

So having pondered what may have gone down the drain with Albert Einstein, whattaya suppose Janis Joplin’s brain took with her? Or Mickey Mantle’s? How about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s? Muhammed Ali’s? Elvis Presley’s? Johnny Carson’s? Leonard Cohen’s? Genghis Kahn’s? Charles Bukowski’s? Your buddy, Joe Six-pack’s? And what other odd jumble of things have you amassed in your hippocampus?

I think of all the zillions of important and unimportant brain records that get flushed down the toilet of death, millions and millions of times every week. How about you? Have you ever had these thoughts about… the brain?

Did I mention that I’m kinda obsessed with the human brain…? I think I did.

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ALTERED STATES II

In ALTERED STATES I, I described the effects that Percodan (Oxycodone) had on my… “sense of humor,” I guess you could call it. To keep from making a too long story even longer, I’d chosen to skip right over the early morning of that operation. So in this post, I’m backing up the clock to fill in that little gap.

Never having had any surgery other than the tonsillectomy at the time, I was of course nervous beyond nervousness. A day earlier I’d become violently ill while being wheeled down en route to radiology for a myelogram. (Myelogram? Think spinal tap) (no, not Spinal Tap the movie, just spinal tap the needle in the spine.) With no time for even a quick explanation to my gurney pilot, I swung myself down onto the floor and limpingly ran away down the hall. I ended up plunging head first into a ladies bathroom and, already making quite a mess of myself and everything around me, fell onto my knees before the porcelain throne and finished the job, all the while hearing the overhead speakers out in the hall issuing an all-points bulletin for the runaway patient on the first floor.

I turned myself in. And because it was obvious to anyone looking at my soiled johnny that I had blown my lunch, I had nothing to prove. So… I got wheeled back up to the 6^th floor, cleaned up, and put back to bed. My doctors were informed that I‘d been diagnosed with a case of the flu, so my procedures would have to be rescheduled for the following day, depending on the state of my health. I was ecstatic. Yes, it was only putting off the inevitable. And yes, I’m such a shallow person I was celebrating my reprieve like Catch-22’s Yossarian when a bombing mission had gotten scrubbed. Anyway, the delay gave me some time to talk to my roomie about what my operation would be like.

He however was hung up and dwelling on is how fast the knock-out anesthesia worked. “It was instantaneous almost! Like that!” he said with a finger-snap. “One minute you see the needle entering skin and then… whoa, lights out. And then suddenly you’re coming to in the recovery room, you know?” I enjoyed hearing about how quickly you’d go unconscious. Even though on the other hand that sounded just a little too much like dying by lethal injection at San Quentin, for my liking.

But on the other hand, it was… interesting, I had to admit that. And my brain had already started started chewing on this information, because I was desperate, wasn’t I. Needing something that would take my conscious mind off what was coming and keep it off, right up until the final moment. The proverbial bullet to clamp between my teeth, anything at all to take my mind off the buzz saw that was waiting for me over at the other end of the lumber mill.

Alright, here comes a silly thing. I had always wanted to be a writer. Not just a writer, but a successful one, a Steinbeck or a Hemingway, you know? And no, it wasn’t the lure of money. It was the great and overwhelming respect and esteem I’ve always felt for the Great Writers. They were my superheroes, just as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry had once been. It was a foolish thing but… see, I hadn’t figured that out yet, had I. And I wanted in, I wanted to belong to that fraternity/sorority. So consequently, I’d been scribbling my life away, jotting down great ideas on everything from diner napkins and to the back of my hand in a fix. And what had I accomplished thus far? Zilch. Absolutely nada. Well, nada and a gigantic pile of used notebook paper and diner napkins.

Why? Because I just couldn’t do it. No matter how I tried. I didn’t have the talent or the stamina it takes. And apparently with my little, small-time, one-horse-town life, I didn’t have anything to write about anyway. But back then, I was still looking. Looking, looking, always looking for inspiration and some usable material. Any material. And listening to my roommate, it occurred to me that I should take really good mental notes when I got the magic injection and went bye-bye. For The Great Book I was sure I was gonna write someday, who knows, I just might need to include a scene of someone getting anesthetized. My own experience would be an invaluable resource. So I began right away, imagining what it might be like, imagining what it might not be like, already preparing my mind to try to stay sharp right up to the end. If nothing more, at least it would be something to keep myself distracted, to keep my fear tamped down inside until this whole operation thing was over and done with.

Next morning, the big moment finally arrived with some guy in scrubs pushing a gurney into our room. I got manipulated onto it and then settled myself down for “the ride” (think The Green Mile, even though that book wouldn’t be getting published for a couple of decades hence). The P.A., or whatever he was, informed me he was going to give me a little muscle relaxant before we embarked. (Probably to keep me from leaping off the gurney if I got sick this time, such being my reputation after the day before.) I was expecting it to be in the form of a muscle relaxant pill but, no, he proceeded to lift the hem of my jonnie and with a syringe, inject me in the hip instead. No biggie. Didn’t hurt that much. Not as much as the Roman Centurion’s spear probably hurt Jesus when he slipped it into his side anyway.

Before leaving, I checked my watch. I wanted to have at least a pretty accurate idea for the record about how long I’d end up being under. “You need to take that watch off,” he told me. I wasn’t too happy about that but then, “Off we go,” he said, and it was off to the elevator with me and down about a mile of first floor hallway with Leonard Cohen’s sepulchral bass intoning “The Sisters of Mercy” in my head the whole way, as I watched the river of ceiling tiles passing overhead. OK, I’ve been told I’m a little overly dramatic at times and that may be true, but I was terrified, you know? And besides that, I honestly wasn’t all that entirely sure I was ever even going to wake up from the ordeal. I mean, I was totally a fresh-fish newbie at this business.

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

So. The guy parks me in the hall outside the O.R. and leaves…

OK, to my left is a large plate-glass window looking off into the very well-lit operating room. From my low-level position on the gurney, I can make out the gathering of powder-blue-gowned entities surrounding and hunched over what has to be the operating table. I can’t see the patient, but I’m well aware that I’m due to be next on that slab. It’s like waiting for the next available electric chair at San Quentin. I’m in no damn hurry though. Even though I’m praying for this whole hellish thing to get itself over with.

It seems like it’s taking just way too long.

I can tell you one thing. I’m not dressed for the air-conditioning here. This hospital johnny was never built for warmth. And all I have the thinnest blanket you can imagine covering me, and I’m starting to freeze.

Time marches on. Instinctively I glance at my watch, but of course it isn’t there, is it. I really don’t see why I had to leave my watch back in my room. It’s not a huge watch. I can’t imagine how it’d possibly get in the way of them operating on my spine, for crying out loud. I mean, damn, obviously it wouldn’t…

Jesus, how long is it gonna take for them to get done with the current body, and get my body on the slab in there anyway? I mean, come ON, people! It’s freezing out here. Hopefully they’ll at least have the heat turned up in there!

Time continues to march.

Suddenly… footsteps! From behind me in the hall! Somebody coming! Finally! I crane my neck to look, but it ain’t easy, stuck in the dying cockroach position. Ah, but here he is, yes, stethoscope dangling from his neck. He’s…

Wait! Don’t pass right by me! “Uhmmm, excuse me? Doctor?” Jesus, he doesn’t even have the common courtesy to slow down, let alone stop. “Hey. Doctor?” No good. So then, in my high school English teacher voice: “HEY!” And there. He stopped. And turning around, but looking confused, looking around like a guy who knows he just heard something, but…what? “Over here! OK?!” OK, seems like he heard that. God, what do I look like, a goddamn lump of laundry, or what? Or… jeez, I dunno, maybe he’s deaf? OK. He’s coming. Good. And here he is.

“Did you say something?”

Yeah. Deaf alright. “Yes,” I say loudly. “I did. Can you tell me what time it is?”

He leans down, getting a closer look at me. Kinda inspecting me. “What’s that?”

Yep. I was right. Deaf as a post. And me here not knowing sign language. So I try again, loudly and slowly, and enunciating very carefully, “What time is it?”

Now he bends down in even a little closer to my face, his stethoscope bopping into me, him looking a little pained and puzzled. “Sorry? What was that?” he says, shaking his head.

Jesus. “I said, WHAT. TIME. IS. IT?!” I mean, come on, gramps, you got a watch right there on your wrist.

He shrugs his shoulders. Shakes his head with a big, clueless, shit-eating smile. Damn, he’s giving up on me. So he turns, and with an I-give-up shake of the head, just ambles away, back on down the hall!

Where am I, the looney bin for crying out loud?!

More time passes. Guess I must’ve fallen asleep because without warning, I feel my gurney moving forward again. I can’t see the guy pushing me. But man, it’s about time! It’s a wonder I haven’t frozen to death by now. But anyway, we’re off and rolling.

The cart stops. Wow. This O.R. is very dark. Which is odd, considering the other one was all lit up so much more brightly. Well, it’s not pitch black at least, but still… and, surprise surprise, it’s no warmer in here than out in the damn hall, either. Which sucks. It seems my push-cart has disappeared.

Anyway, I tell myself, OK, let’s be ready. It can happen any time at all. Gotta pay very close attention when they put that needle in. And gotta remember all the details, what it’s like, drifting off so quickly into la la land.

But you’d think, though, wouldn’t you, that they’d have started by…

Whoa, somebody’s… crying? Oh yeah. Sobbing, really. What, in here? Right where I’m gonna get operated on?

My eyes are pretty much adjusting to the low light. I look around, take a better look-see. So there’s another gurney right next to mine. With somebody lying on it. And whoever he is, he’s just let out a long, whooping, baleful moan, like he’s trying to howl at the frickin’ moon! I mean c’mon, ladies and germs, let’s get this show on the road. I haven’t got all day! What did they, forget about me?

Actually, there’s more than two gurneys in here. There’s a lot of them. And… they’re not empty, either. Christ, it’s like a parking garage in here.

OK, now somebody somewhere off to my right’s muttering, jabbering like talking in her sleep.

Over and above the powerful clinical antiseptic odors, I smell vomit! Gross. And where the hell are my surgeons? And nurses? OK, I’m starting to panic. Somebody, cries, “Get me the hell outta here!” and it turns … that was me, and because I jumped up a little when I yelled it, a hot, searing pain I swear I can’t even believe goes ripping violently like a chainsaw up my spine. I collapse back, exhausted, promising myself I am never gonna even try to move ever again. Ever. It’s not worth it.

Oh sure, now other voices have joined in, moaning curses and pleas. It’s utter madness… Christ, I’m in a damn zombie movie!

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

Though I’m a slow study in the best of times, but little by little my re-awakening brain began connecting the dots, and piecing together the confusing but now obvious clues. That doctor in the hall? He wasn’t deaf. It was me. I was unintelligible. My flabby fat lips were connected to a brain-dead brain and were incapable of producing anything more than gobbledeegook. And when the intern, or whatever he was, the one who slipped the injection of “muscle relaxant” into my hip? No shit, Sherlock!. That was it! That was the very thing I’d been waiting for! But, damnit, I wasn’t ready for it! Was I. So yeah, I missed it! I must’ve been knocked the moment he withdrew the damn syringe from my hip. And all of that watching the ceiling tiles on the way down to the O.R.? That’s when I was leaving the O.R., not travelling to it.It was like that Dr. Hook song, “I Got Stoned and Missed it…

So there I was. Lying there, in the recovery room! Post-op. Moaning and mumbling like all of the other post-ops. So, it was all over. All over but the shouting. Me just lying there, waiting the long wait for my ride back up to the sixth floor, where I could commiserate and compare notes with my roomie.

And begin trying my luck at to scoring Percodan from the nurses up there. Chanting the chant: percodan percodan percodan!

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ALTERED STATES Part I

At a local hospital back in ‘51, I had my first experience of being put under with ether. My tonsils were to be removed. And little Chicken Little 4-year old me, my sky was falling. I practically had to be hogtied and dragged kicking and screaming, into the operating room. It wasn’t pretty. I didn’t care how sore my sore throat had gotten, I wanted no part of it. There just had to be some other way, any other way. Mostly because this was back in the day when doctors routinely got away with grinning right into your little face and lying through their teeth with impunity. “Now, this isn’t going to hurt one bit, son.” That bullshit lie had been lied to me every time I’d been hogtied and dragged to a doctor’s office before so I was expecting The Big Hurt, but I never expected anything like I was about to experience:

In my memory, this is kinda how it went down:

LITTLE TOMMY’S VERY 1ST BLACKOUT

(let’s play a little “game,” tommy)

my brain still freezing up with

all the new vocabulary:

“tonsillectomy,”

“adenoids,”

“ether”…

(let’s see if you can

count backwards

from a hundred…)

NO. NO! I DON’T WANT TO!

me, 4½, laid out on the table , a little

dissection-tray frog-in-a-johnnie

johnny on the spot box-canyoned in

by a faceless wall of halloween

gowns & masks

onestranger-danger-demon

unstoppering an evil vial of

hospital-fumes concentrate,

terror in a bottle, splashing

a gauze rag with the liquid

(ok, tommy, we start with 100…

right…?

then 99…

so…?

what comes next…?)

the ice-wet invisible-flame rag is

what comes next, slapped over

my mouth & flaring nostrils

and pressed

down

(come on, now… what comes next, tommy?)

stifling my silenced

fire-throated

screechface…

searing my cheeks…

burn-buttoning-up my eyes

what comes next is that i

become a kicking fighting

rikki tikki tavi clawing the

poison gag off my head and

flinging it splat against the wall

bringing reinforcements

bearing down on me like

towering thunderheads,

one for each limb, one to

clamp my face in a vise

bad-dream people

cooing sweet lies

hell’s pigeons,

overpowering

muscling me

drowning me in betrayal

pinning me down

me struggling down…

succumbing

down…

sinking down

down to the

bottom of a

cellar-dark

sunless

sea…

And right before I completely winked-out in the jet-black ink cloak of death—I saw something!

Bubbles!

At least that’s all I could think to call them. Not like soap bubbles though. You’d never’ve been able to make out bubble-pipe soap bubbles against such a black background. No, these were bright-white rings (not disks), like perfectly round onion rings, only pure electric white. Rising slowly up and out of sight… which is how I knew I was sinking down. Big ones, some small, and some middle-sized. Slowly spooling upward like the music roll in a player piano. And then suddenly floating up into my view as I was sinking my way down, came a definite surprise:

The frogman!

My brain immediately recognized it for what it was because I had a little toy Navy skin diver I’d gotten as a prize out of a box of cereal at home. You’d pack a little plastic compartment in him with baking powder, sink him in your bath water, and he’d bubble for a bit before eventually rise back up, supposedly for air. But the scuba man that I was passing on my way down seemed to be a drawing of one, just like all the little white circles, in that he was basically a pure white outline of a frogman. As if he’d been drawn with a white marker on a page of black construction paper. The vertical cylinder drawn down his back was the “air tank,” and the horizontal oval across his face, the face mask. Just a typical, basic line-drawing picture you might find in a coloring book for toddlers. And he wasn’t animated in any way, didn’t move at all.

And that was that

I woke up minus the tonsils but with an razor-cut sore throat, dried blood on the front of my johnnie (yes, I remember being horrified at discovering that), and the frosty six-pack of cream soda, my reward.

The dream excited me long after. I remember trying to describe it to Mom, Dad, my siblings, and the neighborhood kids, but I really didn’t have much of a command for words back then. “Black,” “frogman,” and “bubbles” didn’t translate all that well. They just thought it was funn. But that experience was really a big deal to me. Kinda magical. I’d never had dreams anything like that one before. And I dwelled on it for weeks thereafter, often trying to sketch that little Navy frogman amid all his bubbles with pencil on paper.

This is what gets me: The brain is such a magical little device. So mysterious, like something you’d expect to find residing in Alice’s Wonderland, like the hookah-smoking caterpillar for instance. But no, this marvel remains alive and kicking right upstairs, embedded just above the shoulders inside that body of yours – your very own little state-of-the-art-PLUS nano-computer, plugging away 24/7 at taking care of your business. It’s just that 99% of the time you’re so busy using the darn thing, you forget it’s even there. Of no conscious concern to you. And why should it be? Who’s got the time to contemplate their navel, let alone their brain all the time, right? I mean, we’d get bogged down in no time if we were continuously pondering all of the lobes and circuits and various functions going on up there. I mean, you’ve got a life to live, haven’t you.. So any philosophical queries about your brain just naturally hafta get put on the back burner, almost totally out of sight, out of mind.

However there are certain times throughout life when your sub-consciousness may get jolted out of its complacency, a time when you end up feeling a rare need to put those workings of that brains-on-board of yours under the microscope. A hospital is a common place for it to happen.

For instance I’ve known of a number of people (but two personally) who sustained temporary brain injuries. In both cases, the injuries seemed to temporarily knock out whatever the little censor-subroutine programmed into our gray matter is… the one that unconsciously keeps us (well, most of anyway) from swearing like jolly Roger pirates all the time in public. (Some of us don’t need a brain injury for that.) One of the patients was a young, fairly saintly Methodist Sunday school teacher, and when her parents came rushing to her side at the hospital, they suffered near deaths from embarrassment when confronted by her barrage of more loud F-bombs than was ever spoken by the cast in the movie The Boondock Saints. How odd, our brain…

Hospital administered prescriptions and anesthesia cantake our brains down paths less traveled, as can high fevers, mental illnesses, abject fear, and even extreme tiredness . Personally, over my relatively long lifetime I’ve personally experienced a fair number of bizarre reactions to hospital-administered anesthesia and medications. They weren’t so much fun when I experienced them, but they’ve become something fun to look back on and talk about in retrospect.

In 1977 I was hospitalized to undergo a laminectomy. Somehow I’d crushed a disc in my lower spine and was in such agonizing pain I could no longer walk or work. surgeon described the procedure I was about to undergo thusly: “Imagine your disc as a little can of crabmeat. When it gets squished , it pops right open, squirting crabmeat every which way. Some of the crabmeat collectson some nearby nerves, hardening there and putting a great deal of unwanted pressure on them. This pressure is what’s causing your extreme pain. A laminectomy is where we go in and scrape away all of that painful crabmeat.

My hospital roommate turned out to be a young Vietnam vet, obviously in much worse pain than I. Our surgical procedures were to be somewhat similar, with his obviously being the more perilous and painful. His injuries were located up along the forward sections of his spine, meaning that the surgeons were going to have to cut their way in from the front, and then push his stomach temporarily out of the way so they could get at his spine. The description made me almost pass out.

After his surgery the next day, he came back reeking of warm antiseptics and moaning ghastly moans in a troubled sleep, especially when they rolled him like a corpse-in-a body-bag back off the gurney and sacked him back onto his bed. I watched as they re-connected him back up to the IV’s and monitors. Then they logged his vitals and swept out of the room. And I, with nothing better to do, settled in for the long watch, waiting for him to come to. A half hour later his longer drawn-out moans started getting mixed with mumbled curses, primarily sighed F-bombs. And at last his eyes, the wild eyes of some crazed, stampeded steer, opened and burned into mine. “Fuck!” It was spat at me like his condition was somehow all my fault.

I said, “Hi.”

Then he jumped the bejeezus out of me by suddenly yelling, “HEY!” at the door to the hallway which had been left open. That volley had stopped a passing nurse in her tracks. She turned, smiled prettily, and said, “Yes?”

“Percodan!” It was spoken like a command, the way someone might say, “Your money or your life!”

Her eyes twinkled as she continued the pretty smile for an overly long moment, sizing him up. “Well, we’ll just have to see what your doctor has to say about that, won’t we.” And away she went on down the hall.

He fired the single word “NO!” after her. I was shocked. But she was gone. So what? The hallway was filled with ambulatory nurses, wasn’t it. And as each one passed, he’d stop moaning long enough to call “Percodan!” at them. They paid him no mind. Apparently he wasn’t unique.

It was both humorous and pathetic. And as time went on, his plea became an auctioneer’s sing-song: “Percodan percodan percodan percodan…” with his hand, held palm up like some legless beggar’s squatting in an alley of a Moroccan bazaar, awaiting alms. “Come on, people! You’ve got it. I know it. You know it. We ALL know it! Eventually, of course, it paid off. When it was time for his meds anyway, of course. A nurse did materialize, dropped the prescribed Percodan into his sweaty little palm, and cooed sweetly, “There. I hope you’re happy now.” He was, thank God. I rolled over onto my back.

A bit later, I noticed it had gotten very quiet. Too quiet, as they say in Hollywood lines. I looked over. And there he was, lying on his side, looking straight back at me, a big grin plastered all over his face. “You’re feeling better,” I observed.

“Oh, you better believe it,” he said. And then he started doing something terrible. He began struggling at pushing himself upward with his elbows and arms! He was trying to… get up!

“Hey! Whatta ya think you’re doing!?”

“Gotta… take… a piss.”

“No no NO! Stop that. Right now! You’ll rip out your damn stitches for Chrissake!”

“I’ll just be a minute.”

“NO!” I clawed the little hospital room buzzer out from under my pillow and laid on it, sounding the alarm, and started yelling, “Nurse! NURSES! HELP!”

He’d actually gotten his legs dangling over the side of the bed before a small phalanx of nurses and doctors rushed in and almost literally tackled him. They got him wrestled down onto his back. In the ensuing struggle, and as they went to work checking his incision, I unfortunately caught just a fleeting glimpse of his wound. And it was awful. A foot or so long, an “smile” cut across the abuse-swollen, pink-salmon abdomen like some Stephen King Halloween grin, all crazy-stitched back together with black surgical threads like the kind Polynesian natives used to sew up the eyes of their infamous shrunken heads back in the nineteenth century . I came close to gagging. Close to fainting. But…

I was also thunderstruck. I had just learned something. I was thinking, Wow. With a few-hours-old serious injury like that, and he was serenely smiling. He was gonna get up on his feet and head to the can. In all that pain. I mean, Jesus, that “percodan’s gotta be pretty powerful and mighty stuff!

Good to know…

The following afternoon it was my turn . I got wheeled back in and dumped like a side of refrigerated beef onto my slab of a bedbed. My roommate, my guru, was sitting up and waiting for me with an opioid grin. The pain got overwhelming. But in no time at all, my coach had me going through the routine by the numbers: Hey! Nurse! C’mon! Percodan percodan percodan… and right away I got to discover first-hand the perk behind what it was that put the perk in Percodan. It was magic. My body was dying in pain and yes, I knew this… but my brain didn’t. It was crazy. Oh sure, there was still a lot of pain, but it was nothing like the dreaded Percodan-less agony, was it. Not only that, I’d also discovered two side effects of The Big Perc that I was going to have to get accustomed to dealing with during my hospital stay.

The first being that Percodan left me drowsy and helplessly prone to drifting off to dreamland without warning several times a day. That wouldn’t be so remarkable if it weren’t for the dreams. I’d be in a car or on a bike that would start rolling, faster and then terrifyingly out-of-control faster and then, all of a sudden WHAM! I’d end up slamming face-first, eyes-wide-open into a brick or concrete wall. Short-lived little dreams, yeah, but they’d jar me awake so violently that I’d almost tear my stitches loose. And man, that was exhausting!

The second effect turned out to be really wild and weird, but didn’t involve dreaming. See, I’d brought along a couple of books to keep me entertained during my stay. One was a paperback anthology of humorous literature. In that one, I began reading one titled “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” a James Thurber short story.” Right from the get-go, I found it myself thinking, Wow, this is pretty cool, so funny! Another page or two into it, it had become outright hilarious, and I was giggling after every paragraph. I couldn’t get over just how damn funny Thurber actually is, you know? And then for some reason, my giggling wouldn’t stop. It was like the babble of a brook, just… on-going. And then…it started getting louder. Sounding more like the low roar of a river than a brook. Shit, man, I was crazy-giggling… I don’t know how else to put it. I mean, yeah, this was one of the funniest stories I’d ever rea in my damn life but somehow I’d gotten stuck in an endless loop. it just wouldn’t stop tickling my funny-bone. I couldn’t stop it. I mean, where were the brakes on this book? I was out-of-control in a world of Can’t-stop-it hilarity! Down-and-out gut-busting, hoo-ha gasping guffaws! Tears-in-my-eyes, snot-running-outta-my-nose, laughing-gas laughter! Sobbing, cackling, wheezing… demented! Help,-somebody-please-come-and-STOP-me… madness!

The two nurse angels of mercy (might have helicoptered down to into my jungle of unreality) began trying to wrench the toxic tome from me, but my iron hands would not be unclamped. I’d become a Charlton Heston. “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!” Momentarily , they were successful at managing to bend one finger back at a time…

They laid me down. They inspected my stitches. They told me to try to calm down. They told me I could have the book back later. “Now, you go to sleep now, alright?” I told them, OK. So they bid me goodnight. And before you could blink,I did fall asleep, totally exhausted. And I was swept right off to La-La-Land where, minutes later, I pedaled myself straight into a brick wall at ninety miles an hour!

On the morning of my final Percodan tablet, taken minutes before, my roommate suggested, “Let’s you and me take us a little walk.” Me being the Cowardly Lion, I cautioned that that probably wouldn’t be such a great idea, it being that we hadn’t been granted permission to stray from our room. By now, however, we were allowed to walking to and fro from the bathroom on our own but, still, I didn’t think…

Well, I wasn’t being paid to think, he countered, and come on, wasn’t I getting sick of being confined to those same lousy four walls too? And of course, I was. We donned bathrobes and hospital slippers. “But not too far,” I cautioned, to which he explained that it was only a matter of a few steps to the elevator. So OK. We stuck our heads out the door, scouted the hallway and, minutes later, pressed the elevator’s “Up” button.

“Let’s go right to the top, the penthouse suites.” And so up we went. And I’m guesstimating the was institution comprised a dozen floors at least. The elevator doors slid open. We peeked out. A low key kind of floor. Less busy than ours. Our kind of floor. We left the lift and shuffled straight across the hallway right into the first room we’d laid eyes on. Unoccupied, yes. Both beds made. Identical to our own downstairs, of course.

The view however, unlike ours, was gorgeous. We were at the top of the world. All sunshine and blue sky. Off to our left lay the shoreline of the beautiful blue Atlantic. Below us, the cityscape. All little streets and side-roads and intersections with toy cars and trucks crawling this way and that, stopping at streetlight intersections and moving on. We were looking for interesting landmarks.

And then we spotted one. The Golden Arches! Mickey D’s! Oh yes! “OK. I’m having the Big Mac meal” he told me. “Want me to pick you up a happy meal?”

“I dunno. Better than the jello and custard we’ve been eating. What toys come with’em this month?”

“Does it matter?”

“Nope. Just hurry back soon? You know I can’t stand the fries when they get col… oh, JESUS!”

Somebody’s loose kite just wafted right up out of nowhere to our window on an updraft of the wind outside, and began hanging there, at a tilt, a matter of inches in front of our very eyes!

“Holy shit!” my roommate added. “That’s a… That’s a… fuckin’ seagull!” And it was, that’s exactly what it was, beady little idiot eyes glaring straight through that window into ours, hooked-beak-to-noses! Hanging airily like a Casper the Flying Ghost balloon on the other side of the glass!

“Oh, wow, man…”

“Yeah.”

“Look at’im! Is he for real?” I mean, somehow, he was remaining just pinned right there in the middle of the air like some fake, yet realistic 3-D display.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I wanna know… like, just how the hell did he even know we were even gonna be up here anyway?”

And it was such a stupid, dumbass, and illogical question that I just laughed right out loud. And my laugh mad him laugh, and… well… that and the fact that I suddenly farted. And Jesus, that’s all it took, it was as simple as that. The giggles began. And the giggles didn’t stop . And oh no, before you could even find the brakes, it was already too late,we were laughing our asses off! Laughing way too loud, both of us, a somehow very strained and muscular laughter but at the same time, the hilarious laughter of little girls at a late night sleepover. And damn, I just knew the Big One was coming, I could feel it, grumbling up there like a winter’s worth of snow starting its grinding, gravitational slide down the roof, wave after wave of it. And then it hit! Both of us this time. Both at once. THE RAPTURE OF THE LAUGHTERS FROM THE RAFTERS! Avalanching down on top of us, burying us alive, smothering, suffocating us! Both of us this time.

Thankfully, a party of three nurses, clucking like a trio of petulant hens, found us. Down on our knees. White-knuckled fingers clamped desperately to the sill, hanging there, sniveling, a pair of snot-nosed, giggle-sobbing bats. Suffering lockjaw from the hard bellowing.

Emergency wheelchairs were rolled in, the “patients” expertly installed into those and then whisked back to the waiting elevator. The “down” button was pressed. (And man, didn’t we need our “down” buttons pressed.) And so down we went. Back down to our shared room, to be put to bed. A couple of naughty little boys. And the contingent of white-coated superiors who summarily “debriefed” them.

Yes, that Percodan was pretty powerful and mighty stuff! I’d never heard of it in the ‘70s until then, and I was surprised, (well, not so surprised, not really) to Google it and find out it is a combination of oxycodone and aspirin. I guess the surprise is that I was doing oxy’s way back then.

The laughter episodes herein can sound pretty funny. But the truth is, there was something very unfunny about it. That being that the uncontrolled, unstoppable laughing was a lot like having a terminal case of the hiccoughs from hell. Percodan, coupled with a innocuously humorous moment, triggered it, but there was the danger of not being able to untrigger it. It became more of an very unfunny seizure, actually. It was an exhausting experience…

So yeah, I find the workings of our brains interesting. Always have. Speaking of which I do, by the way, have a couple more “hospital anecdotes” lined up to add which, I believe, are purely humorous and true. I plan to share in these in “ALTERED STATES II. And if you feel you might be interested, please join me in this next episode of NEARING THE END OF THE LINE, coming out in approximately a week from now.

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Category: The Human Brain

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

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