“POET … PEACENIK… PUGILIST?PART I” ended with the following:
“Omigod! A memory suddenly clicks on in your mind! Oh SHIT! I know what this is about!”
Everybody leans forward. The gorilla football coach, sizing you up with a crocodile grin says, “So how ‘bout you and me, we have us a little sparring session out in the gym this afternoon? You could, you know, give me some pointers.”
With a futile shake of the head, you mutter, “For crying out loud, I can’t believe this is happening all over again!”
But it is.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A JOURNEY OF 1000 MILES BEGINS WITH…
“It’s a strange life, no matter how you shake it, it’s a strange life…” – Dave Mallett
Please know that I can’t write fiction to save my life. Believe me, I’ve tried. So whatever it is I end up writing, it always comes directly from real experiences. The above little round-table dialogue happened just as I’ve described it, if not word for exact word. And the conversation left me feeling that our good ol’, typical, every day teachers’ luncheon had (whoosh!) just suddenly deep-sixed itself straight down Alice’s Wonderland rabbit hole!
I mean, put yourself in my shoes—someone you’d just met, somebody to whom you had spoken only those three, maybe four sentences (in your life), just suddenly willy-nilly turns the conversation inside out and upside down just like that! By outing you as a boxer. I mean, If I’d been as a matador, would that be any more bizarre? I was looking her eye to eye across the table thinking, OK, so who’s the dweeb that let the escaped inmatein here?
Meanwhile, it was a little excruciating, the way everybody just keptsitting there, silently gawking. Things had gotten creepy fast. I was like, C’mon people!Say something! Can’t somebody at least say, “Well. This is a little awkward, isn’t it!” I was all knotted up in frustration.
And then, like I said, it hit me.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
You know, it so amazes me how one little decision you make can bend the vector of your life in future ways you’d never imagine. Just as a beam of light bends when it passes through a clear glass of water. And once you make that decision, and then go forward with it, you‘re living in an imperceptibly altered universe.
I made a little decision back in 1966. I was a college junior at the time.
I’d started hanging out in the gymnasium, basically because my roommate and I had taken up playing handball two or three times a week. I was experiencing a lot of stress from some of my classes that year (especially chemistry), and it helped me relax, and burn off some of my nervous energy. Plus, at the same time it was getting me into excellent shape. I’d been jumping rope there, doing pull-ups, push-ups, crunches, etc. almost every week day. And the feeling I was getting from the workouts was so satisfying, so incredibly therapeutic.
But anyway, I started noticing this young guy who was also showing up daily at the gym. A loner, it seemed, just about my height and weight, and short like me. Anyway, he was sticking to a regimen similar to mine, but with one big exception. There was a punching bag hanging down, over in one corner of the room. Not the bigbag (no, not one of those Rocky Balboa’s frozen-hanging-steer-carcass-punching-bags in the slaughter house meat freezer), but the small one known commonly as the speed bag or peanut bag. About the size of a football.
And man, when he went to work on that thing, I couldn’t take my eyes off his “magic.” Yeah, I just called it magic, even though it wasn’t anything you can’s see in the movies from time to time. In fact, most serious athletes training for the ring could probably match this guy’s speed and timing on it. Because those guys all learn to do that, don’t they.
But here’s the thing: (1) I’d never personally witnessed someone doing the routine up close and personal, and never right there in the same room as I, and (2) it turned out that there was a kind of crude beauty to it. This guy’s fists made the little bag “disappear” in a blur! And even watching him up close, I could not see how he was possibly pulling that off.
He’d start off with a probing little punch or two at first, and then more taps, but once he’d let his fists go and got that little blur of a bag purring like a twelve-horse Yamaha outboard motor, his arms would seemingly no longer be moving. And surprisingly his fists didn’t seem to be all thatbusy either, although of course they were doing what they had to do. I mean, his mitts were just casually rolling, not that fast either, round and round about each other in the air like a large pair of twiddling thumbs. Or, so it seemed, almost like some little old lady’s’ hands when she’s crocheting.
But… man, he’d ply that bag into a frickin’ leather tuning fork! So from my inexperienced point of view, it looked amazing. I mean I saw his two arms, attached to that rackety blur, as a pair of biological jumper cables keeping that noisy little motor running. It just looked so cool.
I definitely knew I would like to try my hand at it.
But I was shy, so I waited till he’d left. Then I tiptoed over to the bag and gingerly gave it a couple of friendly, nothing-burger, taps. Of course the bag didn’t do anything more notable than swing back and forth a couple of times and then (not being at all impressed with my assault) fell right back sleep again. Just hanging there, practically taunting me with its superior, leathery That all ya got? Punk?
So I followed that up with a serious, sharp punch with my lightning right!
Before my left got a chance to fly up there into the fray to back me up, that rebounding bag of cement whapped my nose one hell of a nasty blow that raced shockwaves of excruciating pain right through my eyeballs and on back to my unsuspecting brain! I was wobbled, nearly dropped right there in a one-punch knockout loss! My eyes, immediately blinded behind a welled-up flood of tears; my wasp-stung schnozz oozing, but not with blood! I mean… hey. Baby, that HURT!
I staggered away like a drunk, desperate to get myself safely out of range before another attack of the damned thing! I mean, bite me once, shame on you! Bite me twice, shame on me!
The pain took only a little while to fade. But the black and blue bruises all over my ego would hang in there for days. I have to admit it: I’m a snowflake. I have a fragile ego. And this… it just felt so… unfair. Blindsiding me with Newton’s Third law like that. I never saw it coming.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I saw the guy again a couple of days later, approached him, and humbled myself. “How the hell do you do this?” I asked. “Not that I’m necessarily planning on trying it, mind you.” And yes, there I actually was. Momentarily lowering my self-esteem by allowing myself by playing the old See, I’m justasking for a friend card. “I mean, you make it look so easy.”
This young man was a true gentleman. He generously took me under his wing and walked me through the ABC’s of it. Who knows? Maybe he took one look at me and saw a potential future heavyweight champion of the world.
“First and foremost, this is not a punching bag,” he began. “It’s a speed bag. Idiots come in here, take one powerful haymaker swing at it, to show how tough they are, and bust the thing. Then, guess what. We don’t have a bag for another a couple of weeks. So. This bag is not about power or strength. It is about speed and timing only. OK?”
“OK!” In my mind, I checked off No punching the punching bag. “Got it.”
“So then…” And he began walking me through the exercise in slow motion. It was like stop-motion photography. “It’s a one-two-three count rhythm you’re after. Like in music. So, think of yourself playing an instrument. A percussion instrument. With your hands.
“So first of course you make fists, right? Only then… instead of striking the bag knuckles-first, you bat it away with the side of your fist. Picture yourself driving a nail into a plank of wood, bare-handed. You wouldn’t use your knuckles for that, would you. No. You’d bang it like your fist was a hammer. Or… think of knocking on somebody’s door. Normally, you’d tap with your knuckles. But if you were a cop serving a warrant, say, you’d hammer the door with the side of your fist: bam bam bam! It’s the police, OPEN UP!”
“Side of your fist… got it!”
“OK. Now for the rhythm part. Here’s the bag, just hanging there, right? OK. Watch what happens when I tap it with the side of my fist.”
He does that: the bag flies backward, strikes the rear of the overhead horizontal backboard Bang! to which the bag’s swivel is attached. It flies back (just as it did when it nearly coldcocked me the other day) and, in rebound, slams the backboard in the front: Bang!Rebounds back again, once again striking the rear of the backboard. Bang!
“See? Bam bam bam. One two three. That’s your percussion instrument rhythm.”
I was perplexed. “Uhmm… Wait. I counted four. The bag came back again and hit the board for a fourth bam.”
“Oh, right! But like I said, we only want three. So what you do is… you don’t allow the fourth one to happen.”
“Uhm… I don’t?”
“No. You stop the swings after the three-count. And you do that with the next strike of your fist, catching it in motion. Which starts the count all over again. See?” He demonstrates with the bag, very much in slow motion. “Fist! One two three. Fist! Bam bam bam. Fist! One two three. Fist! Bam bam bam. Fist! “And so on and so forth.
“So no, as you see, there’s no fourth bam allowed. And, as you also saw, I was only doing this one-handed. Which is the best way for you, a beginner, to get your timing down. OK, first do it for a while with your right; then switch over and do it for a while with just your left. Then when you get tired of that, you’ll alternate using both: right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam…and so on.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Oops! We’ll stop here.
OK, a little voice inside my head just whispered all private to me, “You’re getting boring, Tommy.”
So… suffice it for me to quickly say that (A) I managed to get so I could do this using both fists… still in slow motion. Then, (B) with both fists fairly fast. Pretty soon, you could say I was getting pretty fast indeed. Soon after that, if you saw me standing there working that speed bag, you could easily surmise, “Wow, check him out. Now that guy’s a boxer, if ever I saw one.”
But wait! It gets better! My gymnasium friend started teaching me little tricks, like getting my elbows and forehead involved in the fray. Without bragging, I have to say (again, without bragging now) that as a Speed Bagger… I… was… MAGNIFICENT! I had graduated Maga Cum Laude from Speed Bagging University. I should have had my own float in the Rose Bowl Parade!
It’s a shame they didn’t have Speed Bagger competitions back then. Just sayin’.
OK, OK, OK. Let’s just let it stand that I was… ahem… in my own opinion, pretty darned good at it, alright? (Not to blow my own horn, of course.)
SO, THANKS FOR READING, AND THANKS FOR SUBSCRIBING. AND KEEP YOUR EYE PEELED FOR THE FINALE: “POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART III COMING SOON!
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 towonderwho 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!…
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:
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!”
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.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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.
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!
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 radiosilence.
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…”—
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:
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!”
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.
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.)
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 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.
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… 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…
I’ve gotta admt, several times during my one-month gig as… my little brother’s keeper, this song kept playing in my mind. It was quite popular in 1959, and it had been very popular with me ever since. Even if you’re very young and don’t recognize the name of the band, The Coasters, you are very likely familiar with their signature song “Charlie Brown.”
Anyway, here it is: “Run Red Run.” Hope you enjoy it.
The Coasters are an American rhythm and blues/rock and roll vocal group who had a string of hits in the late 1950s. With hits including “Searchin’“, “Young Blood“, “Poison Ivy“, and “Yakety Yak“, their most memorable songs were written by the songwriting and producing team of Leiber and Stoller.[2] Although the Coasters originated outside of mainstream doo-wop, their records were so frequently imitated that they became an important part of the doo-wop legacy through the 1960s. In 1987, they were the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“OK. This little piece was supposed to have been the epilogue, but… damnit, apparently it’s not. There was a little too much to cover. So once more I must say, once again, “Gee Whiz, be sure to stay tuned for Chapter 6, The Epilogue!“
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So… FYI: something totally unexpected happened approximately nine days into Gizmo’s visit. I got a phone call from California. It was Sandy. Of course. I didn’t know anybody else out there at the time. And after all the hello’s and how are you’s and how’s Gizmo doing small talk, she got to the point: her return was going to be delayed for another week. Some technicality. But she was sorry.
And there it was: Gizmo was ours for another seven days or so. Just like that.
That sudden change in plans kind of rocked us, to be honest. A confusing, mixed bag of emotions. Confusing like, Oh my God… NO! and, at the same time, Yay! Because we’d come to love the little critter, no one (I believe) more than me. He was continually growing on us. All of us, not just me. He was becoming one of the family. To me, a tiny baby brother. Still, a real handful though, for all of us.
What could we do? Obviously nothing, while Sandy and Brian were on the West Coast. So inevitably, we just rolled with the punch. We looked at our work schedules and set to figuring how we were further going to tweak our lives. We could do another week. We had to. And life went on with the little bugger.
Missy giving the Giz a drink
Chris entertaining Gizmo; Gizmo entertaing Chris…
I have to admit, the notoriety was still fun, albeit quite a bit taxing on our energy levels. The Giz had turned us into local, small town celebrities. Phone still ringing off the hook from families and individuals just dying to come over to have a taste of the Gizmo experience. Appointments still being pencilled in. So many of them, our home run was like a doctor’s office. And Gizmo himself was still fun. A barrel-of-monkeys fun. He had more energy than the Energizer Bunny, tearing around the house for three hours non-stop, wearing us all out. And then bless his little heart, all of a sudden, dropping straight to sleep in his tracks. Usually in one of our laps. And then he was so cute. And tiny. A little handful of silent sweetness. A joy to behold.
Sleeping against Chris’s belly…
Of course then unthinking someone in the next room would do something, like noisily pushing a chair back under the dining room table. Gizmo’s eyes would blink back open and then, bang! Look out. In a single second, he’d leap right up off your lap and be right back on his happy little warpath! The monkey naps lasted only fifteen minutes, that being all he’d need for his next Tasmanian four- or five- hour tour of deviltry. I have to admit, I’m grinning just thinking about it.
He loved games. Every day, quite a few times a day, Gizmo enjoyed his “egg hunts.” But instead of Easter eggs, he’d be searching all over for my empty, plastic 35 mm film canisters. Empty of film rolls, that is. What they had in them back then were his favorite treats: raisins, grapes, and pretzels. He loved popping off those film canister caps for his “Crackerjack-type “prizes” within.
And boy, did that little rug rat ever love to wrestle!
Wrestling…
That was the fun that wore me out the most. I’ve always loved going at it with frisky little kittens and cats, to the point where my hands would always end up with happy those itchy little criss-cross cat-scratches all over. But Gizmo never bit me. Often he would playfully close his teeth on my hands in what I knew were little love-bites. Just like cats do, only when they do it they’re signaling you to back off. Gizmo. He was a wrestling ball of electric energy!
Of course his favorite game unfortunately was still snitching one of one of my cassette tapes and absconding, with me the easy-to-escape posse humping behind on his trail.
So, all in all, entertaining our little guest wouldn’t be all that hard to endure for an extra week. Just gloriously exhausting
But… oddly, there was something going on with me that at the time I was consciously unaware of. Something subconscious, and psychological. It’s like I had fallen under a spell. So much so it was like Gizmo’s and my brains had practically merged. And I was thinking about him all the time, whether I was in school or at home. If I wasn’t talking about him with somebody, I was probably worrying about him. So OK, I guess I’ll have to call it what it was: co-dependence.
I didn’t know it before Gizmo came into our lives, but I was just a damn simian co-dependent waiting to happen. When he was happy, I washappy. When he was sad,so was I. And when he was very, very sad, as he was every evening when it was time for him to be put back in lock-up for the night like some little prisoner (which he literally was, which he had to be), oh man, I felt so terribly guilty. A lot of it was still the guilt hanging over me from shutting his tail in the door.
But most of it was… well, he was just so damn human. So it was kind of like, Hey, is it humane to lock up a very human-like child alone in a cage every night? No! Of course not. Would I want to be locked up in a cage every night? No. I would not. And you know, if the damn cage had been a lot larger, I think I probably would’ve crawled right in there with him to keep him company and keep him from getting so damn sad and lonely. Yes, that’s pretty messed up exaggeration, I know.
Oh, Gizmo was an artist when it came to tugging at my heart strings. I mean big time. Because whenever he would finally allow himself to be placed back in the cage for the night, he’d drop heavily down into the bottom compartment of his cage; select one of his two security pillows (usually the Chicken, occasionally Garfield); pick it up and hug it in his arms ever so tightly to his little chest for all he was worth; and then begin his slow, tragic rocking. Back… and forth, back… and forth. And you couldn’t cheer him up no way, no how. I knew a lot about depression back then, and the word “depressed” would begin echoing in my brain. Gizmo seemed so depressed. I couldn’t blame him. And his depression began to osmose into my own head. Yes, unhealthy, I know but I was so wrapped up in him, I couldn’t think about me.
And the real kicker was, he’d make his face into the saddest mask you could ever dream up. The epitome of heartbreak. The Oh woe is poor old me! And nothing you might think of to do to try to cheer him up would have even a sliver of a chance of working. That expression would remain tattooed on for the night. It was his nightly night-time face and that’s all she wrote.
There used to be this very famous circus clown in the 1950s and 60s you might have heard of named Emmet Kelly. His signature “character” was the world’s saddest clown, “Weary Willie,” and his face was alwaysSO sad, his audiences would be overcome with a sense of deep sadness even while they giggled at his antics.
I could swear that Gizmo was channeling Emmet Kelly. Yes, his Weary Willie’s face was killing me. And I was at a loss as to what ever to do about it. So that was it. On went his little life. Comedy during the day time. Tragedy during the night.
And time marched on…
Days later, the phone rang again. And yes, it was once again Sandy. So, I was thinking to myself as I picked up the phone, Wow, apparently the end has arrived. I said Hello,” with anxious feelings. Yes, I’d really become so attached to the little fellow but, you know, if he had to go… he’d have to go, right?
But that wasn’t what this call was about. At all.
Sandy, it turned out, was calling to let us know that, unfortunately, she’d just discovered she had been suffering all along from (wait for it) an allergy to Gizmo. While in California, all the hives and breathing problems she’d been tolerating for months had (poof!) just disappeared.
(Can you imagine what was starting to go through my brain at hearing this news?)
She went on. It was impossible therefore, she informed me, for her to keep on keeping the Giz. So therefore…
(Impossible? Again… can you imagine what was starting to go through my brain at hearing this news?)
…she was being forced to consider finding some alternate caretakers to assume the responsibility for not only caring for the little guy, but to also become active partners in the Helping Hands Foundation program, with all that might entail…
(By the way, back in 1989 the expressions OMG and WTF? had yet to be coined.)
… so, she went on, it would seem that the most likely candidates for this responsibility would be our family since Gizmo had so successfully bonded with, and taken such a monkeyshine to, us.
Bing!Freeze-framed!
Say what!? I felt as if somebody had just buried an axe in my already-stove-in chest. But even so, old immature and caught-off-guard me (a guy I just loved to hate),I was actually already asking myself, Should I say No?
(Wait, had I just actually asked,SHOULD I? See? What was I thinking? What was wrong with me?)
Should I say Yes? Should I say Maybe? OK, my world, my life was spinning. And slowly picking up speed.
On the one hand, I of course really loved little Gizmo. Somuch. But on the other hand, there were qualms. Lots of qualms. Tsunami qualms, without even considering the soon-to-come Phyllis Qualms. Oh, inside I knew I wanted to say No, of course not and say it right away. But…
I also somehowsorta wanted to give in and say yes, too. So there I was, standing in the center of a crossroads intersection with heavy traffic was barreling head-on at me from all four lanes.
I really needed to stall, obviously. Be wishy-washy about it, I told myself. The truth was I was honestly feeling awfully damned wishy-washy inside anyway. Plus, damnit, I was cursed as being one of those guys who, for whatever reason, always found it next to impossible to say no to most requests. Never wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings, you know. But meanwhile, my brain was playing ping-pong with Maybethis, maybe that… maybe I might even… really want to do it. I mean…? Agonizing that Jeez though, if WE don’t take him, then who will? Finding another caretaker for my little buddy wouldn’t be very easy, if not impossible. And even so, what would this mean for Gizmo? Getting bounced around again and again? How so unfair would that be?
So I stalled. “Uhmmm… not sure. Hafta talk to Phyl about it. See, I really don’t know, you know?”
Whatever! Damn, why hadn’t Phyllis picked up the stupid phone? I said goodbye and hung up, my stomach one big, churning, gastrointestinal merry-go-round. But at least I hadn’t said yes. At least there was that. But neither had I said no. I’d just bought me a little time is all. But after that call, it was Should I or Shouldn’t I? rolling around in my head. And… could I even sayI maybe even might… actually want to take on Gizmo for two or more years? Which is what the Helping Hands Foundation required.
Surprisingly Phyl did not automatically scream NO! ARE YOU CRAZY!? right in my face when I told her what the call had been about, which is what anybody who knew her would have expected her to do. That, in itself, unnerved me. I mean, what was going on in her mind? Everything would’ve been so simple if she had just put her foot right down then and there.
Then again, she hadn’t exactly said yes either, had she. Nope. It was like she was coming across as, OK, let’s take some time and think about it, me being like…What, really? On such a possibly life-changing decision as THIS? Just, what, up and suddenly increase our family by one more, that one being a hairy little mammal-with-a-tail to boot, and Phyl not even likingany animals one bit (except me, maybe)?
But wait just a minute. Maybe her game was Hey, if I just bide my time a little, the odds are that Tom’ll come around to his senses by time the final bell rings. So sure, let him paint himself into a corner and then, when the stark reality of just how much hard WORK for him a yes vote is going to mean (him being the totally lazy one), and how many drastic changes in his good-old, laid-back lifestyle a yes vote will require (heh heh), HE’ll be the one ending up saying no himself. So then it won’t be on MY conscience: he’ll have made the decision himself, not me.
It’s true, Phyl did have that wily side sometimes…
So much to think about! So hard to decide! Jeez! If I were the type of writer who was into clichés, right now I’d probably be tapping away, “I was between a rock and a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea. I didn’t know whether to fish or cut bait.” Fortunately, I never use clichés, so I’m not going to do that.
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Back to the dilemma. So, I could say No, we can’t keep him and… then what? Poof! Life would simply go back to normal…? Well normal, except for the part where then I’d have to live with this painful hole in my heart and guilty soul for having heartlessly kicked the Giz to the curb. Could I live with that?
And if I said OK, we’ll keep him…? What all would that actually mean?
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That night my guilty feelings doubled when faced with Gizmo’s sad Emmett Kelly face once again. And sure, how much sadder would his face become when I coldly showed him the door? I’d already been staying up later and later with him, but that night I lasted into the near-morning. Me, just inches away, just outside the cage for company; rocking in my rocking chair and reading Stephen King to myself (often aloud so he’d have a hopefully comforting voice); and Giz, rocking his woe-is-me chicken pillow back and forth down there in the basement of his living quarters.
Tom and Gizmo. The odd couple.
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Finally. The hard decision came three days later. It had been a gut-wrenching, eternally long three days. There had been so much discussion pro and con, pro and con, ad infinitum, during which it had become more and more impossible for me to think. And damn, the onus had been placed on me and me alone to make the decision. Meanwhile, I could feel the family holding its collective breath. How nice of them to wait so patiently for me to see the light.
I remember sitting disconsolately on one of the sheet-covered steps one morning, half way up the staircase, and no doubt channeling Rodin’s The Thinker. I made myself take a good look around, all around, at my surroundings. And what did I finally allow myself to see? A home that now resembled the Badlands of the South Dakota hills. A desert of white-sheeted chair-sofa-and-dining-room-table “dunes.” Random monkey-toys spilled helter-skelter over the floors like random sprouting clusters of cacti. A traveler would do well to watch where he stepped. And behind and before me at the top and base of the stairs, my two foolish attempts at monkey barriers fashioned from anything and everything I could lay my hands on (short of barbed wire), both barriers with the same likelihood of keeping Gizmo out of our upstairs bedrooms as Trump ever had of getting the Mexicans to pay for his equally ineffective wall.
As hard as it was for me to admit, I realized I was suffering from Reverse Stockholm Syndrome. I, the captor, had totally and helplessly identified with, and surrendered to, the captive, rather than the other way around. Gizmo had made a monkey out of me! As joyful as it always was to be in exuberant Gizmo’s company, I’d become an exhausted but happy sad-sack. And for one brief, flickering moment, I knew what I needed to do.
And I knew I’d better do it in one hell of a hurry, lest I lose my focus and fail. Which was still somehow a naggingly tempting possibility.
I immediately stood, made my way down the stairs, struggled my way over the comically useless Gizmo barrier and, with a heavy heart, picked up the living room phone…
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Now, I need to explain something about the layout of our house, before I begin moving along in this next memory…
Beside the kitchen’s main-entrance doorway from the outdoors, our rectangular kitchen had two more, one each on opposite ends. Now, these were doorways; that is… doorways without actual doors— I guess you could call them passageways. Anyway both passageways opened into the dining room. This made it possible for anyone to be able to walk in a loop, passing from the dining room into the kitchen through doorway #1 on the right, traversing the kitchen, and then exiting the kitchen back into the dining room through the left doorway. Doorway #2.
Over the years, we’d enjoyed watching our grandchildren furiously pedaling their tricycles in their little Indianapolis 500 around that loop, before zooming back through the rest of the house and then wheeling back around to do the loop again. And Gizmo loved that loop too, as it gave him escape options when running evasive action ahead of me, him usually unreeling one of my prized cassette tapes that he’d cruelly absconded with.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK then. So Phyllis had met Sandy and Brian, finally back from California, at the door and invited them in. Me? I was otherwise temporarily engaged, but it would only be a matter of fifteen seconds or so before they’d witness what I was up to with their own eyes. And I have to say, the scene that welcomed them as they stood in our kitchen, waiting to retrieve their little man, was a bizarre one to say the least.
Before Phyllis and company could get their Hello’s and So how was California’s out of the way, here I came! Barreling recklessly into the kitchen through door #1 (nearly colliding with them), skidding in my stocking feet on the floor as I rounded into a wide turn, then gunning t across the kitchen floor, skidding into yet the second turn, and zip! disappearing out through door #2 in a flash!
I’m sure it must’ve taken them a few moments to reassemble in their brains just what in Sam Hell it was they’d actuallyjust seen.
What they had just seen was me with a long white bedsheet tied around my waist like a belt. The rest of that bedsheet had been dragging out behind me on the floor like the train of a wedding gown. And standing upright on that rear end of the bedsheet, and holding tight to side edges of the sheet in his clutched little fists, was our bold little Gizmo the Surfer, hanging ten, with the wind slightly feathering his hair as he’d beach boy’d past (artistic license here—The Giz didn’t really have long enough hair to feather).
And then before you’d ever have guessed it possible, the Giz and I were back once again, performing yet another skidding-across-the-kitchen-floor looptey-loop! And as we bombed our way back out of the kitchen through door #2, I heard Sandy yelling sarcastically at my back, “Oh, thanks SO very MUCH, Tom! We’re just SODELIGHTEDYOUDIDN’T SPOILHIM while we were gone!”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
You know, Shakespeare was right. “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”
After Brian had loaded The Famous Cage With The Infamous Tail-trap Door into the bed of his pickup and had trucked it off and away… and after Sandy had bundled up her little Gizmo all safe and warm inside the front of her quilted parka (with just his doll-like little head peeking out with those big dark eyes peering back at us… we closed the front door behind them, symbolically closing that door on our wonderful and heart-breaking month-long little odyssey. The little Giz was off to his homecoming. And as we surveyed the left-over hurricane clutter around us that would be taking us a few days to rake back into order, we collapsed in bittersweet “homecoming” that was awaiting us as well.
I was of a heavy heart for days. But as days went by, and the come-back-and-go-away-again heavy heart pangs lessened, the knowledge that I’d done the right thing in letting Gizmo go became so much more obvious. My relationship with the twerp had been way too emotional for me to endure for two more years, and I still can’t imagine to this day what the chaos of our daily lives would have been like. I seriously doubt that I would ever have made it. I mean, I practically had myself a P.T.S.D. flashback after re-reading aloud my entire 1989, 80-paged Gizmo daily journal to Phyllis, only just a few weeks ago. Yes I so wanted the adventure then, and that’s exactly what I’d received.
I can’t imagine now, at 77 years of age, how we ever managed a month of it. Youth is made of sterner stuff. But all in all, I’m happier that I took the adventure on for as long as we did. Better that than kicking myself for having passed it up and then looking back in regret. It remains one of the great little memories of my life.
So we never found out who received the joys of Gizmo’s personality after us. Only that it was some nameless and faceless family in some other county in Southern Maine. I sincerely hope it all went well for our little critter.
In the weeks following his departure, I’d grin bitter sweetly to myself whenever I’d find another one of my missing, unraveled cassette tapes hiding behind or under the chairs and sofas, and that one I found by finally spying just one corner of the thing barely poking out from under the refrigerator…
The Giz came into our lives some thirty-five years ago in 1989. I may have been forty-three years old at the time, but faced with the sudden prospect of getting a chance to spend some quality personal time with the cutest little monkey you could ever imagine…? Hey, Presto! I was a ten-year-old little boy once again.
And it’s no exaggeration to say that Gizmo turned my life (no, our lives) upside-down in oh so many ways.
First of all, during the first six or seven days of his “visit,” it being February school vacation week, finding adequate time to care for the little twerp wasn’t much of an issue. The vacation had been a key factor in our final decision to take Gizmo on in the first place. However it was also clear from the beginning that Gizmo’s stay would crawl “a few days” into the following week as well, meaning then we’d have to make some serious adjustments. I, Phyllis, and Missy had job obligations with specific times for getting to work, etc. and Chris was a student at Foxcroft Academy. I guess we figured we’d just deal with that when the time came.
Secondly our entire household was turned upside down. Every piece of furniture we cared about, which was all of them, was draped in sheets… ours looked like some home where the occupants had gone abroad for a couple of years after covering everything they owned to keep it dust-free until their return. Only we hadn’t gone abroad.
We were all still living there in what now looked like a furniture morgue. Hell, even the stairs were covered in a two or three tacked down sheets, as it turned out that the white paint on the wooden risers was ancient and had begun to chip off here and there; and little ol’ eagle-eye Gizmo (who, like any baby) wanted to put everything including the paint chips he’d break off straight into his little pie-hole.
Thirdly, didn’t Ol’ Giz just love my stacked stereo components: the receiver, the dual tape-deck, the amp, and the turntable. I mentioned earlier his fascination with movable parts, like buttons, knobs, and levers. Several often-recurring stereo-related occurrences included the following two, and more:
(1) Picture a perfect and blessed moment of peaceful, golden silence; Lyford family sprawled upon their sheet-draped sofa and stuffed chairs, soaking up a well-earned rest from all of their exhausting Gizmo-related exertions; Gizmo at the moment nowhere to be seen; the faraway strains of “Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts’ Club Band” suddenly beginning to waft in from the adjacent dining room; all the Lyfords eyebrows simultaneously raised with the immediate understanding that Gizmo has once again just switched on the stereo out there; then, hmmm, a slight increase in the volume and…
(JESUSH. CHRIST!) THE POWER-AMPED VOLUME CRANKING ALL THE WAY UP TO THE MAX… AND ONE SUPER-TERRIFIED CAPUCHIN RUGRAT JUST A-CANNONBALLING THROUGH THE LIVING ROOM FIVE FEET ABOVE THE FLOOR LIKE SOME FLYING SQUIRREL WITH JERICHO-JOSHUA’S BLARING WINDOW- QUAKING TRUMPETS HOT ON THE LITTLE GUY’S TAIL LIKE A FLASH JUNGLE-FIRE! (You’d think he’d learn…)
(2) And secondly… picture this little “Gizmo game”:
Tom, sacked out on the couch, engrossed in Stephen King’s Richard Bachman four-novelette anthology; everything quiet… tooquiet; Gizmo, in his darling little pirate pantaloons, suddenly peering around the living room door; the little twerp then prancing jauntily into the room (skidding to a stop at a safe distance with arms held high to sportingly taunt Tom with the small object he was holding in both hands); Tom, duly eyeballing; Tom then ejecting himself up and off the couch with a roar; Gizmo, now a.k.a. the Looney Toons’ Roadrunner (mbeep mbeep!) having already rocketed off and away with Tom, his personal Wile E. Coyote, lumbering behind in his dust! in cold pursuit!
And that object? What was the precious little object that sent Tom barreling off on his fool’s errand of trying to tackle the little brat? Why, only one of his 500+ collected cassette tapes is all. And the one he’d just pilfered might have been Tom’s most sacred-of-all-time The Best of Leonard Cohen. Or perhaps his equally sacred Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home. It could have been his James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James. But it really didn’t matter if it were his prized Ricky Nelson’s Garden Party, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s Déjà Vu, The Stones’ 12 X 5, Johnny Cash’s 1964 I Walk the Line, 1972’s Doctor Hook, or even Dr. Demento Presents the Greatest Novelty Records of All Time, Volume II. Tom had spent a lifetime up until that week in February, 1989 meticulously collecting each and every one of those damn titles, first on 33 1/3 vinyl LP’s and then all over once again on cassette tapes! It was his damn collection and each one of those cassettes was one of his hard-earned possessions.
All of his cassettes were sacred!
Now you might be saying to yourself, OK, but so what, Lyford? You’d get it back from Gizmo eventually, right?
No. NOT right! What you don’t understand is this: as Gizmo would run away with one of Tom’s tapes, as he did often, he’d deftly pinch up an inch or so of the strip of that shiny brown celluloid tape and start unspooling it! Yes! Imagine that! Just like some crazy cat in the bathroom completely and irritatingly unrolling an entire roll of Charmin off the dispenser for fun! There’s be Gizmo up ahead with the already-long, ever-lengthening loop of tape in his wake as they rounded corners through every downstairs room in the house! And what could Tom do about it?
NOTHING! The Giz was just too fast, too wily! All Tom could do was give up eventually, sit in the living room, and wait for an hour to pass for Giz to grow tired and finally abandon it somewhere. And then later, after Tom finally did retrieve it, you’d find him toiling away at the dining room table with the cassette in his left hand, a #2 pencil in his right, and practically getting carpal tunnel syndrome re-reeling the whole damn tape back inside the plastic cassette once again. And looking as pathetic as some chimpanzee digging ants out of an anthill with only a twig for a tool!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Oh, the things that can happen when you home’s been turned into a monkey house! One of those things I still feel pretty badly about to this day, by the way.
See, Phyl and I have three children: Missy, the oldest; Kathy; and then Chris, the youngest. Kathy hasn’t been mentioned in this little memoir yet, due to the fact that she wasn’t home with us when Gizmo arrived. Instead, she was a student at Colby College in Waterville, Maine which was still in session. She was, however, due to return home nearer the end of Gizmo’s stay.
And me… I’m the idiot who came up with the this great idea:
Let’s not tell her about Gizmo! Let’s let it be a surprise! She’ll be so excited! It’ll be great!
The reason I was so sure it was a great idea is that, surprisingly, Kathy had a real thing about monkeys and gorilla’s already at this point.
When she’d been a lot younger, I’d read aloud the Michael Crichton’s sci-fi novel, CONGO, to all three of our kids. Although it had a very scary, and almost-Indiana-Jones-type plot, the book had a big impact on Kathy. This is because the story’s heroine, one Karen Ross, is a primatologist working with a female mountain gorilla named Amy, who has been trained to communicate with humans using sign language. (Michael Crichton admitted that his Amy was inspired by the famous Gorilla, Koko, who’d actually been trained to do the same thing.) Anyway, the novel was really inspirational for Kathy, leaving her at a very early age looking up to the likes of Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, and even talking about considering a possible career in primatology herself.
That’s why I just knew Kathy would be delighted to experience the wonderful surprise of finding a cute little capuchin monkey in her very own home. Everybody loved Gizmo. Everybody! So Kathy was sure go nuts over him.
Finally the day arrived. Kathy came home to find me (for some reason) grinning like an idiot, I’m sure. (Wait, did I only say like an idiot?) She came shuffling in through the kitchen carrying a little luggage, passed through the dining room, and headed straight for the living room staircase that leads up to our second-floor bedrooms. Unbeknown to our daughter, Gizmo was perched on the stairs above her. I remember him looking like a silly little jailbird up there, peering down upon her through the railings as if through the bars of his jail cell.
I also remember me holding my breath for the big surprise when she’d see him and possible break down in tears of joy, saying something like, “Oh my God, we have a monkey? And look! Why, he’s so cute!” It was a beautiful scene. In my MIND, that is. (My dumb bunny mind.)
Reality? She screamed in terror! Something big and alive had just landed on her head! Probably it felt to her like an 8-pound spider in her hair. Her hands flew to her head! She muckled hard, violently gripped whatever it was, and started trying to yank it free!
Problem? To Gizmo it felt like he was the one under attack! He too was terrified! So he did what animals do when attacked. He sunk his two canines (Dracula fangs) into the back of Kathy’s hand! (Yeah. That’s what he did.) She screamed, of course! He screamed! We all screamed! It was a train wreck! My train wreck.
And when it was over, Kathy was hurt! Infuriated! Livid!Mad as a wet hen! And she immediately crossed Primatology right off her future career dreams list. Just. Like. That. Monkey? Monkey not good! Monkey, bad!Dad? Dad, bad as well. Dad, not good!
So, Iapparently that was day-one of Kathy beginning to switch “majors.” Kathy, no longer the primatologist. Kathy, the future chemist. Dad, in the dog house.
The whole thing made me so sad. And rightfully feeling guilty.
And Gizmo? How did Gizmo feel? Oh, he was pretty much over it in a half a minute. I’m pretty sure that from his point of view, he was like, “Jeez. What’s her problem? I mean, OK, I jumped on her head. What’s the big deal? That’s what I do. That’s how you get around. That’s how you meet people. And heads? They’re like stepping stones for crossing a brook anyway, right? Come on. I mean they’re there, aren’t they. Might as well use’em. And hey, that’s how I met Tom Lyford, right? And look how well that’s turned out. Well, other than him slamming my tail in the door…”
My brother Dennis is a photographer. When he learned we had a monkey, he asked if he could come over and do some videotaping. I said, “Sure. Why not?” So he came over. And while he was getting his video-camera out of its carrying case and set up, I pointed out Gizmo way over in the living room on the floor “wrestling” vigorously with Chris. But by the time Dennis had the cam up on his shoulder and was ready to shoot, Gizmo had spotted him! A stranger in the house! Someone new to get to know! So the little guy had already bounded through the dining room and had launched himself in a leap heading for Dennis’s head. Honestly, Dennis caught him in his lensas a head-on shot of the little Superman incoming, and only microseconds from impact!
The resulting video was hilarious. There’s the split-second HERECOMES GIZMO! and then for six or sevens seconds Dennis, not accustomed to wearing a live monkey hat, instinctively began to spin wildly around, the resulting video becoming a blurred ride on the Tilt-a-Whirl at the County fair! You almost needed a Dramamine to watch it.
But yeah, heads
Heads were the preferred Gizmo way of saying how do ya do?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK. This little piece was supposed to have been the epilogue, but… damnit, apparently it’s not. There was a little too much to cover. So once more I must say, once again, “Gee Whiz, be sure to stay tuned for Chapter Six, The Epilogue, coming soon to the screen on your preferred device!”
(Previously, Chapter Two ended with…) “I pulled myself up onto my feet at last. Gizmo was watching me tentatively. So I leaned slowly down and looked him right in the face.
‘Next time, buddy!’ I growled softly. Which sent him scampering! ‘Yeah! You just wait till next time!’ I called after him.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
What had just happened is (A) I had been taught what I’d all along been doing wrong while trying to diaper Gizmo, and (B) I was justbeginning to learn that the girl I’d married had somehow just crazily “channeled” Jane Goodall, right under my nose! I mean, come on! Not my mousey little Phyllis?
(Ahem. “Mousey” back thenI’m talking, mind you— in 1989!Not the Twenty-first Century I am woman, hear me roar Phyllis of today…)
What, not the mousey little Phyllis who feared cats and dogs and bunny rabbits and chipmunks and lizards and lions and tigers, and bears, oh my!? Not the sweet, unassuming, little lady who, only a few weeks ago, had somehow succumbed to my sleazy used-car salesman’s “charms,” when I’d practically swindled into allowing (against her better judgement) one wild, hairy, tree-swinging, wannabe, nudist Tarzan into our living room and her life? Yes, her. I was flabbergasted!
But why should I have been surprised? Because If I’m honest, our marriage has always played out, and still does to this day, like a reverse variation of the I Love Lucy Show, wherein I’m the Lucy and Phyl is the level-headed Ricky Ricardo. But… whatever. At any rate, it had dawned on me that this no-nonsense Phyllis had stepped up to the monkey-business plate and… I’d been relegated back to the showers.
For instance, a couple of afternoons later, I came home from school and, dreading the answer, asked, “So. How did today go with our little friend today?”
And she answered me in a ho-hum, off-the-cuff voice, “Oh, I dunno. OK, I guess. I had to get groceries at the Shop and Save. Gizmo made quite a stir with all the shoppers…”
“What!? Let me get this straight… you, on your own… took Gizmo… our little Gizmo… out in public? To the grocery store? Onyourown!?”
“Yes.” Hmmm. Only that simple, matter-of-fact, little ‘yes?’
“Well, Jeez! That must have been pretty traumatic for you!”
“Nope.”
Me, with my jaw-dropping incredulity being cruelly teased by these single-syllable responses? “Well…? C’mon, tell me about it! I mean, I know it couldn’t have been easy…!”
“Actually, I just put him on his little leash, poked him into his carrier cage, and… just went!”
“What, that’s it!? That’s all you have to say?”
“Well, no. I mean, we were quite the celebrities, obviously. At least Gizmo was. Just trying to get up and down the aisles was the hard part, that little magnet attracted such a crowd. Everybody ooh-ing and aah-ing, talking to him in, you know, baby talk. I thought we’d never get out of there. So many questions to answer! And he cuddled in my arms most of the time, although a few others did get to hold him a little. But wow. I mean, we’re just doing this for a little over a week, so I can’t even imagine what Sandy and Brian’s lives must be like all the time, you know?”
And that’s the way it had become, you know? Suddenly we had so much company at the house! I mean, all the time! We honestly had to start setting up appointments. So many ‘friends’ were coming out of the woodwork, you’d have thought we’d won the Megabucks! Not that we weren’t enjoying the crazy ride, because we were. It was, however, beginning to become a little exhausting.
Meanwhile, I’d fell totally head over heels in love with the little guy. And he with me, with the exception of a few sporadic flashbacks of that unfortunate tail-in-the-door fiasco.
I really missed him when I was in school all day, though. So of course I suddenly came up with this ‘great idea.’ I went into the main office and asked Howard Ryder, the headmaster, “How about I bring Gizmo into my classroom for a couple of periods, to give the kids some time to meet and enjoy him? Both classes I have in mind are in the middle of our creative writing unit. This would give them something interesting and unusual to journal about afterward.” (Of course the creative writing plug was really just a cover for me to officially get my selfish “Bring Your Little Buddy to Work Day” rubber-stamped as… ‘legitimate.’ So yeah. Let’s make it legal…
Mr. Ryder, being the good guy that he was, readily OK’d the plan. Honestly, he was visually excited to have a little monkey-time himself during his otherwise relatively boring, day-long routines. So it was a go. The kids couldn’t wait. Me either! Phyllis (the really cool wife of the now-really-cool English teacher) dropped him off mid-morning. And what a day we were to have.
First of all, I had arranged the students’ desks in a wide circle, so everybody’d have an equally good chance of watching the Giz. And man, were the kids in both classes excited as they came pouring into the classroom! And of course Gizmo picked right up on that excitement as well. Inside the circle, I began by walking around with Giz in my arms and introduced the little fella to each kid. I gave some info about the Helping Hands program that he was in training for; gave the kids the warning that he was bound to be unpredictable, that he might want to climb up on their shoulders; that as cute as he was, he did have a set of vampire fangs; that I would stay close and vigilant, and be on the ready to remove him and answer any questions that might come up. In the meantime, Gizmo was squirming like a worm on a fish hook, wanting madly to get at this new audience. So eventually… I set him down on a student’s desktop. And let go.
And he was off!
Watching him tearing around that circle of boys and girls, stopping here, stopping there, I was reminded of the little ball on a roulette wheel table. With his speed, he was like a sweet Tazmanian Devil. He picked up and examined anything and everything a kid might have in her/his desktop or breast pocket: a pencil or pen, a paperback textbook, a comb… you name it. The world was his oyster.
Unfortunately for me, the Giz didn’t keep himself confined to just their desks. He leaped onto my bigger one, of course, and sent a blizzard of essays and quizzes waiting to be passed back up into the air, leaving me rushing to retrieve them and squirreling the away into my desk drawers for safe keeping. He was up on top of my file cabinet; he was examining my pencil sharper; he was sitting on a girl’s shoulders, examining her barrette with his little curious fingers; he was peering into my wastebasket! And then back down onto the roulette wheel of student desks he’d land once again, and round and round he goes, where he stops nobody knows…
He was… everywhere! It was wonderful. It was crazy. It was exhausting.
Soon the headmaster and assistant headmaster came in to join in the fun. And they ended up having as much of a good time as any of the kids.
Jim Smith, Asst. Headmaster with Howard Ryder (& the Giz)
Howard Ryder, Headmaster, Foxcroft Academy, 1989
All in all, it was a day to remember. And remember it, I always will.
(Previously, Chapter Two ended with…) “I had no doubts whatsoever that it wouldn’t be me putting the little man to bed tomorrow night. Or perhaps any night. No. I definitely got it that he’d never allow himself to get anywhere near both me and the tail-trap door at the same time any time soon, not even with a ten-foot pole.
And I was damned if I could ever blame him.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I couldn’t get to sleep for a long time that night, I was so guilt ridden. Over and over, my mind continued to harass me with the why’s and the what if’s. What if I’d paid more attention? Why couldn’t he have just obeyed the “Cage” command? Why didn’t I just realize right away that his howls didn’t even sound like separation anxiety? Why couldn’t I have been more careful? I’m always going off half-cocked. What if we had tried to put him to bed a little earlier? I mean, you never know– chances are that maybe it just might not have happened then. Right? Who knows?
Anyway, next morning, I certainly made sure that it was me who let him out of his cage. I wanted to be the one to present him with the gift of his morning-after freedom. At least I was good for that. For something!
And was he ever ready! I mean, he practically flew out and was off to the races! Round and round the house, seemingly as happy as the proverbial clam. That did my heart some good.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I’, including the following from my “Gizmo Chronicles” journal of that morning—
“The problem was now two-fold: (1) beginning to work on somehow regaining his sense of trust and comfort, and (2) getting Gizmo back into his cage before I had to get to work. And sure enough, as time for work drew close, Gizmo was making of quick backtracks at all of our approaches (and who could blame him?) But sheesh! Why hadn’t I gotten my clothes ready the night before? I kept asking myself, noticing the clock had crept to 7:05! I mean, I was seriously beginning to cringe at the prospect of how the headmaster of Foxcroft Academy might respond to a possible very late phone call from me, saying, ‘Hi. Howard? Uhm… uhhh… Hey, surprise. Guess what. I… er… can’t make it to school today. See, I can’t get Gizmo back into his cage.’ Yeah, right!
“So I suggested we trychild psychology. I allowed myself to collapse to the floor, just sitting passively with my back against the wall. And then none of us went after him. We just left him alone.
Gizmo seemed to really appreciate this. He began chattering and squeaking at us fairly conversationally while still running around and inspecting everything. It almost seemed like he’d forgotten about out tip-of-his-tail fiasco, but I didn’t really believe that. And after a while (surprise), he actually landed in my lap. However, I was dead sure that even the slightest hand movement toward him would put him straight into I. E. A. mode (Immediate Evasive Action). Holding my breath though, I tried it. And sure enough, he bolted.
And the clock was ticking…
“So our new strategy came from my having watched several Jungle Jim movies back in my childhood. I had the four of us form a wide-sweeping line, and then we proceeded to ‘beat the bushes’ so to speak, hoping to flush our prey forward toward, and hopefully into, the cage. Good theory, right?
But apparently Gizmo’s P.T.S.D. from the previous night’s rat-trap-door nightmare experienced a flashback that provided us with a too serious psychological obstacle to overcome. And on top of that, Giz was a just too amazing a prodigy of on-the-job escape artistry. However, on the third sweep of our indoor veldt, our prey must have become a little desperate. He decided to strike a bargain with one of his his tormentors. Suddenly he just scampered right up the leg of Chris’s sweat pants and began cuddling in his arms.
“‘Chris!’ I whispered. ‘In the cage! Now!’
“Chris slowly walked him over to it and, wow, Gizmo slipped right in (unfrickingbelievable!), albeit with one quick flashback-mini-shriek just to rub some more salt i’nto the wounds of my guilty heart. He must have been exhausted. Then he just hunkered right down into the cage’s lowest level (there were three levels, or ‘stories’ if you will, divided by platforms), began hugging his Garfield The Security Pillow, and rocking himself back into some sense of comfortable security.
“Before leaving for school, I made it a point to sit and talk softly to the little guy for a while. Finally, I passed the prisoner two pretzels, which he accepted gracefully, and put my face down really close to the cage’s screen. And (yes!) Giz did likewise! So we had ourselves a warm little moment, gazing into each other’s eyes, nose to nose, me apologizing to him from the bottom of my heart and telling him that I loved him.
It seemed too good to be true. But it felt… promising, at least.
“Despite that, suffice it to say that it was pretty much a hollow, emotionally exhausted husk of a man who managed to report to my classroom just barely on time (OK, a little late) on that last Friday morning before February vacation was to begin.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So yes, Giz had to spend some time in is little “apartment” alone in the house. It was unavoidable, but was never for long. We’d scheduled ourselves best we could to his needs. Phyllis would take her lunch at home and sit with him from around 11: 00 to 12:00. Twice a week I had a free period around noon so I’d scoot right home to the dear little critter on those days. Missy came home from work at around 1:00. Chris arrived from school around quarter to three. And finally I’d show up at 3:30 or thereaboutsfor the rest of the day. Meanwhile, we always made it a point to keep the TV going, volume turned down low, so perhaps he’d find at least some comfort in the babble of human voices.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Now. Let me tell you what one of the things coming home usually meant for me during those Gizmo days: the Diaper Ordeal.
OK, “ordeal” would be too strong a term if we’re talking about Phyllis. However, we’re talking about me. “Ordeal” very accurately describes my experience when it came to diapering the Giz. And no, it’s not what you’re probably thinking. I’m not talking about any… mess, or whatever. Honestly, attending to Gizmo’s hygiene wasn’t nearly as much a messy task as you might believe. He was a baby, after all. A tiny little thing. I mean, it wasn’t like we were babysitting a full grown gorilla or anything, thank goodness! Giz made only a few little “problem” messes (most of them confined to his living quarters) and they were likewise tiny. Easy to clean up. So that wasn’t the problem at all, nothing more than just a minor little inconvenience we had to deal with now and then. No, see, the main problem was me.
See, I’ve always been this frickin’ empath. I’m always feeling other people’s pain as if theirs were my own. But with Gizmo, it turned out to be a fullblown curse back then. It’s true. Gizmo brought out the bleeding heart in me big time…
Me:Hi. My name’s Tom, and I’m a bleeding heart.
The Bleeding Hearts Anonymous Crowd: HI, TOM!
But so what! I’ve always said we’re all of us occupying our own personal spots somewhere on the vast expanse of this Great Social, Psychological, Spiritual, Intellectual, and Physical Spectrum. And hey, I’m just here to tell you I’m more than comfortable occupying my personal spot, over here in the Bleeding Hearts’ Neighborhood. Better than serving time over there in the Cold, Spartan, Nazi Precinct at least. Because…
Yeah, I’m that guy who slams on the brakes, stops the car, gets out, and lugs the turtle the rest of the way across the road before some Neanderthal, beer-drinking ass hat purposely veers his goddamn pick-up truck across the road to run over the innocent little guy for“sport!”
I’m that guy who, after the officer finally did show up, late, decided to take the responsibility of releasing future critters back into the wild by myself, it being the more humane thing to do.
But yes… I’m also that guy who accidentally slammed Gizmo’s tail in the door. And I wasn’t about to be getting over it any time soon, apparently.
So how does my bleeding empathic heart relate to my inability to simply change the Giz’s cute little pirate pantaloons diapers? Here’s how…
I was obviously feeling very guilty after our pinched-tail incident. And very nervous. So, when I was lucky enough to finally succeed in coaxing the poor guy to have enough trust in me to actually sit in my lap (which he did allow sometimes after those first couple of days), I was a lot tenser than he was. I mean, I was just so conscious of him probably remembering how I’d hurt him that I just knew he was going to bolt any second! And the truth is, whenever I tried to get those pants on him, I’d find myself actually holding my breath without realizing it! And then my hands would begin to shake! I mean, the whole process so damn awkward! Never a walk in the park for me even under the best of circumstances, me trying to jockey him into those damn pants. It was pretty difficult, threading those squirmy matchstick legs all the way down in through those long pirate’s pant legs, mostly because they were each gathered in a tight pucker at the bottoms! And also because the pantaloons’ legs were so long, they’d end up getting all bunched and twisted up! It was nerve wracking!
I’ve already told you that Gizmo’s super power was sensing fear, even from afar. So I’d always be pretty damn convinced his radar was picking up on every twitch of my mounting frustration as well, and that he’d be wondering, What the hell was taking this dumb human so long? (Told you I’m am an empath. Did I also tell you that I’m a frickin’ mind-reading empath?) It always felt as if Gizmo had a ticking stopwatch timing me! Like I was on that old TV game show, Beat the Clock! The pressure would be crushing me, me fearing that every second he was gonna give up on me and bolt! And guess what: he always would give up on me and bolt!
However, one time I at last did manage to gethis feet finally poked down through the little holes, get the waistband hoisted the up around his tiny waist, and get the little velcro strip thumbed up against the fabric in the back! And I was all, Eureka!I had achieved the impossible! My self-esteem was soaring.
As I gently placed him down onto the floor between my knees, I found him gazing up into my eyes. Was he… what, proud of me? As proud as I was of myself? I wasn’t sure. But probably. Maybe. And then…
He backed away a few short steps, and stopped. I was about to blurt out, “I did it, Gizmo! Can you believe it?” But suddenly, my boy broke into what looked like a crazy combination of a happy little tantrum and the Chubby Checker Twist! And in two secondsflat, his not-so-tightly-whities were lying in a heap on the floor down around his ankles!
And the look in his little eyes? I swear: smug! I mean, way too smug for a tyke his age! And then what did he do? He started capering around the living room floor, dancing sassily right back up in front of me only to snatch up that contentious diaper and fling it into the air above his head! Then he was gone.
He’d scampered off and away, out toward the kitchen… leaving me with gravity, just tugging on me… pulling on me… sliding me down onto the floor. Me, dead weight… settling… seated with my back against the sofa… sitting slumped there, all alone.
And grateful to be alone. The house, silent. Me, still sitting there. Sucker-punched. A little dazed. Done in. And with no plans to be getting back up any time soon, if ever.
But that was OK…
The final score? Gizmo: 1, Tom: nada...
And that was OK…
I didn’t care. It had been an eternally long day and I didn’t have the energy to care anymore. So I just sat there. And continued to sit there. And time went by. Yes time, but no longer the stopwatch. Time was just time, is all… standing still…
And that dark little mote, that rorschach flicker in my eye that resembled a hairy cavorting little nudist pausing intermittently at a safe distance near the broken down trainwreck… the trainwreck that was happy to be me…
It was OK…
Eventually, however, I was aware of the sound of the front door being opened. And then there were… footsteps. Something loomed over me, shading out some of the sunlight gleaming through a window pane. I willed myself to move. I looked up. And there was Phyllis, home from work, looking down.
“Hey. What’s happening?” she said. That question tended to mildly jumpstart my stalled life somewhat.
“You’re lookin’ at it,” I answered.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I failed.”
“At…?”
I nodded over my shoulder toward Gizmo, bounding into the room to check on the voices.
“Oh,” she said. “He’s naked.“
I shrugged. “Yeah. The diaper thing.”
She looked down at my white surrender flag lying on the floor. “So I see. OK.” She was peeling off her coat and heading to the hall closet. “Be right back.”
“Not if you’re smart…” I warned.
She did come back though, plucked up the deflated pantaloons from the floor, sat herself down in the stuffed chair next to the couch, and dropped the diaper at her feet.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now, we wait.”
“Yeah. Right,” I said. “You wait.” Me, the Doubting Thomas.
But waiting was unnecessary. Because, giving me a wide berth, Gizmo sauntered somewhat close to her chair, her not being the threat of someone who had recently rat-trapped his tail.
“Hi, Giz,” she said. “What’s up?”
Being addressed personally drew him a little closer to her. And then…
SHE POUNCED! Had him quick as a spider abducts the fly that’s barely feather-touches its web! Rolled him over her knee as if for a spanking, pinned him there, worked those whitey pant legs up his legs, yanked the waistline up over his hips, and had the little bugger velcroed, done, and dusted before he knew what hit him.
It was amazing! Like watching a rodeo cowpuncher rope and hogtie a calf in record time! Of course with three kids already under her belt, this wasn’t exactly Phyl’s first rodeo.
When she placed him back down on the floor again, the look he gave her was priceless. Pure… chagrin!
He immediately dug his tiny opposable thumbs down under the waistband and started pushing down for all he was worth. They didn’t budge. His puzzlement was a wonder and a joy to see! He danced around, hopping up and down, still trying to force what was stubbornly refusing to get out of the way of his wanting/needing to be au naturel.
It was a losing fight. He slowed down fast.
“How did you do that?” I demanded.
“What do you mean? You watched me, right?”
“Well, yeah, I did. Only… when I did that… and it looked just like what you did… his pants just fell right off him like a ton of bricks. And after the whole thing took all my energy! All my energy for nothing! I don’t get it.”
“Ah!” she replied. “I bet you didn’t properly fasten the velcro strap in the back.”
“But I did. At least, thought I did anyway.”
“So. You attached the velcro strip to the little sticky patch on the back of his pants.”
“What? What little sticky patch?”
“Oh, OK. What’d you, just stick it right on the plain diaper cloth? Just any old where?”
“Maybe. I dunno. I guess. Nobody told me anything about any stupid patch.”
“So it’s no wonder his pants just… fell off then.”
“OK. So…what, you gonna show me where the stupid patch is?”
“Sure. Go get the diaper bag.”
“So there’s a glimmer of hope for me then? Even though I don’t have an ounce of energy left for it?”
She shrugged. “You’ll catch on. It’ll get easier. With practice.”
“Yeah? So why do I feel so doubtful then?”
I pulled myself up onto my feet at last. Gizmo was watching me tentatively. So I leaned slowly down and looked him right in the face.
“Next time, buddy!” I growled softly. Which sent him scampering! “Yeah! You just wait till next time!” I called after him.
(And yes, I know I said last time that Chapter Two was going to be called “Tweeter and the Monkeyman,” but it turns out that MAYBE that’s going to be the title of Chatper Three instead. (Or four?) My apologies.)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
(But previously, Chapter One ended with …) “It seems she had to go to California for a week, and was at a loss as to what she was going to do about Gizmo. So yeah, you can see where this is going. Soon I was running like a 43-yearold little kid to Phyllis, my darling wife, begging her “Please, please, PLEASE! Can I? Come on, huh? I’ll feed’im, I’ll change his diapers, why… you won’t hafta do a thing, I PROMISE!”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK. See, the reason I felt I had to dramatically beg like a little kid to be Gizmo’s babysitter is that Phyllis suffers from a lifelong aversion to animals. Hairy mammals especially. (However, she does strive valiantly to make an exception for me). Cats and dogs were anathema to her. Me, I passionately love cats and dogs. I love pretty much all animals.
Except bears.
So anyway, I instinctively I knew that a hairy baby-monkey-mammal was way too close to being a cat or a dog. So I knew my chances were slim at best. However… my acting like the pathetically hopeful eight-year-old begging for the puppy that had followed him home, or the bunny rabbit, or especially even the pony, might in fact, just might prove to be too overwhelmingly disarming. And if I could just get her to crack a grin, that just might be the chink in her armor I could use to get her flustered and off-guard.
Especially considering it was my plan to purposely perform my little comedy act with Phyllis in front of a random audience of YMCA members standing in the lobby. Who, by the way (yes!) ended up thinking it sufficiently “cute” to begin chanting at her in a chorus of, “Aw, come on, Phyllis,” and “Let the poor kid have his monkey,” etc. (See, I’ve had a lot of practice learning how to manipulate this woman.)
And hah! She did crack a grin (immediately wishing she hadn’t). Peer pressure is a marvelous tool. Her defense momentarily collapsed. I was in!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
SO… a few weeks later, as a way to get Gizmo to feel more familiar with and closer to us, his future one-week monkey-sitters, Phyl and I were invited to a getting-to-know-you-better evening chez Gizmo. Giz was so excited to have company visit. Phyllis positioned herself on the sidelines, wanting to distance herself from the action and just passively watch me having a ball rolling around on the floor with him. I say “wanting to distance herself” because it was impossible for anyone to distance themselves from that frisky little ball of energy.
Gizmo had a super power. He could sense fear from a mile away and he was compelled to hone right in on it. In the future I’d see it time and time again. Those who fearfully tried to avoid the wild little simian were always the very people Gizmo was drawn to the most. Immediately, Phyllis sensed that she was a target, like her lap had the big Gizmo bullseye on it. That’s where he wanted to sit.
And strangely Phyl, who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with any pets of the animal variety, had always turned out to be a frickin’ animal magnet. We’d be in a room with some dog and I’d be calling, “Here, fella!” or “Over here, girl!” and Phyl would end up with the dog at her knees. And cats?Just the same. They’d be rubbing against her ankles all night long. Me? I’d be only too happy to run defense for her. Because I wanted all that attention all for myself.
Looking around, I discovered there was another “monkey house” at their home as well, identical to the one at the Y. And this monstrosity would soon be trucked over to our house when Sandy and her husband, Brian, flew off to the west coast for a week. I couldn’t wait.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Gizmo and his monkey house arrived at our house at 7:30 pm on February 16th, 1989. There were four of us waiting to answer the door: Phyllis and I, plus our daughter, Melissa, and our son, Chris. The temperature outside was +6 degrees Fahrneheit. If you’re wondering how I still know the exact date, time, and temperature, I kept a journal. Here’s a picture of the actual front cover.
Sandy and Gizmo waited in our living room, with Gizmo temporarily jailed in his pet carrier (like some cat on his way to the vet’s) while a couple of men muscled his cumbersome “abode” into our den. It was obvious poor little Gizmo, looking so forlorn, knew what was going on. He’d been through such a scenario at least once before, if not more. Home is where the heart is, yeah, but for the Giz home had to be wherever his little “house” went. And now that little house had just been noisily dragged into our strange one.
With our front door finally closed against the frigid temperature outside, the little guy was finally released from his travel carrier. Immediately he scampered right into Sandy’s lap, where he remained cowering, a little squirrel-size ball with sad little frightened eyes. I’m pretty sure the little fella probably felt he himself the orphan who was being ditched once again. It must’ve been very stressful.
And how did I feel? Also stressed. Both excited and scared. I felt like I had when we’d brought four-days-old Missy, our very first-born child, home from the hospital. We didn’t feel confident at all about knowing how to take care of a baby then. But there she was anyway: a little, helpless life lying there in her crib. Sure, we’d been given lots of pointers from people in general and medics, but thank goodness we had that Dr. Spock manual for child care.
Well, here we were again, another little baby getting thrust into our care. Only this one in no sense of the word was helpless. We’d seen him in action. This guy could walk. This guy could swing from the chandeliers if you didn’t watch him. This baby could saddle up your head and ride it to a standstill like a simian Urban Cowboy. But still, he was just a baby, too. In his own way. And there was no Dr. Spock manual for Gizmo.
With Gizmo nestled safely in Sandy’s lap, we gathered round in the solemn, final, how-to demonstrations, not that we hadn’t gone over a lot of it prior to this. We covered what foods he liked, what foods he didn’t like, what foods he must have, and what treats he favored (pretzels and grapes). We were cautioned again that Giz had a blazing curiosity which, coupled with his safe-cracker’s dexterous little fingers, meant lock up what you didn’t want messed with and anything that might be dangerous for the little fella. Because Gizmo could and would get into anything and everything not nailed down: closed drawers, jewelry boxes, cupboards, things with zippers, you name it. I remember that in the days leading up to our little sleep-over friend’s arrival, we had thoroughly monkey-proofed the house. (At least we thought we had.)
Sandy took out the diaper bag and emptied its contents. Among other things, it had a number of diapers, some with pant legs gathered just above the knees and some… pantaloons basically, with pant legs gathered below the knees. The latter made him look like a jaunty little swashbuckling pirate. So cute.
But finally Gizmo was temporarily locked into his seven-foot tall, toy-laden, security-pillowed monkey penthouse, for safe keeping while his foster parents got busy pulling on their heavy coats and shuffling out of sight, out into the kitchen. And sadly, when I watched Gizmo’s little body slump, and that beautiful little mug of his crumple into soft despair when he heard our front door open, then close, and then at last the whole house become so much more silent, I was so wistfully reminded of Shakespeare’s “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”
Yeah, so sorry little fella, they’re gone, aren’t they. And you’re afraid they aren’t ever coming back. Oh, baby, I know, I get it. But hey, you’ve got us. Right? And the thing is, they really are coming back. Trust us, Sweetie. But you and me? We’re gonna have so much fun! Every single day. It’ll be great.
Sandy had instructed us to wait about fifteen minutes or so before releasing him from his little “apartment,” to give him a some time to begin to get used to his new circumstances. A period of adjustment. Then, we could let him play with us to his and our hearts’ delight, which I could barely wait for. Then, when the Cinderella hour (or whenever it was we wanted to go to bed) finally rolled around, we could put him back in for the night. He’d been thoroughly trained to obey the simple command, “Cage,” she told us. “Say that just once and he’ll scamper his little self right back into it for the night,” she said. It was such a relief and blessing to us to have been given a magic word like that, as I was still feeling almost like we had a real human baby in the house again, and without the assurance of a Dr. Spock monkey manual.
When we opened up his door, we found him rocking back and forth nervously and hugging his cute little Garfield pillow. He looked out at us inquiringly for a moment. And then cautiously he hopped out, still with pillow, and continued watching us to see what we were going to do.
When he’d decided we weren’t going to eat him or anything, he was off! Bounding around the house from room to room, stopping here and there to inspect things, and then moving on. Slowly and non-threateningly trailing him, we found his Garfield abandoned on the kitchen floor.
He was hell on wheels! Practically a blur! He had so much to explore, an entire new world. He hopped up onto my desk and grabbed a pencil out of my pens-and-pencils holding mug. He was in the bathroom examining his own little self in the mirror. He was (yikes!) paused in front of my stacked stereo components, already pushing buttons and twisting knobs! He was examining our own toys that we’d laid out for him in anticipation of his arrival.
Me, I laid down on my back on the living room floor, waiting. It didn’t take long. He landed on my stomach just as I’d planned and boy, we went at it, the first of many fun “wrestling matches” to come that would all turn out to be more fun than (dare I say it?)… a barrel of monkeys. We chased him around. He chased us around. We wore him out. He wore us out. A little kid’s dream: I had a monkey!
It was nearing bed time. But we kept putting it off because, damn, it was just too much fun. Eventually however, common sense had to prevail. We were bushed. So… per instructions… I went to his dwelling, opened the door, looked down upon Gizmo, and spoke the magic word. “Cage.”
Giz looked up at me and blinked a few times. Perhaps I hadn’t said it clearly enough. I said it again. “Cage.” We were still looking at each other. Hmmm. OK, one more time, this time with gusto. “CAGE.”
And Gizmo moved immediately. Oh he understood that command alright. That was obvious. But rather than obey it, the little devil took off in the wrong direction, scampering out toward the kitchen! We followed him. And that monkey? He led us round and round in circles, being careful to stay just far enough ahead of us that we couldn’t lay a hand on him. We were a little parade, with Gizmo leading as the grand little marshall. Stupidly, Phyllis, son Chris, daughter Melissa, and I were bringing up the rear, chanting the now obviously ineffectual “Cage!” over and over in vain, thereby proving the time-worn definition of insanity. It had become a game for him, catch as catch can. And that twerp was so slippery and so evasive, our attempts at “heading him off at the pass” were just exercises in futility.
Eventually though, I was able to snag him. And feeling a little badly for the little critter as he and I approached his bungalow, I repeatedly assured him in a soothing voice, “Hey there little man, everything’s OK. Alright? It’s just that it’s time for bed. You’re worn out. I’m worn out. We’re all worn out. So what’re you gonna do, huh? But just think: tomorrow we’ll have an entire full day together. We’ll let you out and you’ll have the run of the house again. It’ll be great. Just a hoot.” And by the end of this babbling I was standing directly in front of the cage door.
I asked Phyl to open the door for me, so I could keep both hands firmly clamped on the inmate. As she did so, I could feel him tense all up, readying himself to spring for the great escape. I however was determined that that wasn’t about to happen. So I positioned him quite a ways inside, to give me a little wiggle room, because I had a feeling that as soon as I let go of him to close the frickin’ door, he’d bolt. So I held him in place a little longer, all the while reassuring him in soothing baby-talk that everything was OK. And then, on the silent count of three, I let go, backed away, and slammed the door fast!
There! I had him! Finally! But as I was fumbling with the lock, Gizmo let loose with a shrill wail! Oh, the poor little bugger, I thought as I leaned hard against the door to be sure to keep it closed. He misses Sandy and Brian so damn much. And who can blame him? I sure couldn’t. But then the wail increased in volume, becoming a piercing yowl that was honestly quite close to deafening. So I began showering him with earnest promises about what tomorrow would bring us, and how his loved ones honestly would return. Someday soon! But me, always the empath, I could imagine and feel his stark loneliness as clearly as if it were me there in that cage, locked away. But jeez, the heart-rending lamenting still hadn’t stopped! It had, in fact, gone up another notch.
By now my heart had started pounding in my chest.! I was sweating! I could barely even hear any more! And I could barely think straight! I mean, what the heck was wrong? What was I supposed to do? What could do? I hated to admit it, but I’d begun to suspect I had obviously bitten off more than I could chew this time, with this monkey-sitting gig…
“Come on low, little buddy. This’ll all be…”
What? Somebody’s hand was suddenly squeezing and jerking my shoulder from behind. Hard!What the…? Now, that was just one more distraction I didn’t want or need right then. I was busy! I was under duress! So I shrugged the damn hand off me! And…
My God, I was thinking, won’t this guy EVER calm the heck back down, for crying out loud? I mean, what’ve I gotta DO? I was going stir-crazy! Certifiably NUTS!
WHAT damnit it!” I bellowed.
And then, if things weren’t crazy enough, somebody started pounding me in the back with their fist! Equally as hard!WHAT? And amid all THIS? This was a freaking nightmare! I was just about stone deaf! I was at my wit’s end, and I was entering full panic mode for Christ’s sake, if I weren’t there already! So I spun around viciously, ready to start screaming myself and maybe biting somebody’s head off to boot!
Whoa…! There were three wild-eyed faces all gawking at me like I was crazy or something! And I could tell they were talking at me because I could see their lips moving, but in all the racket I couldn’t make out heads or tails of whatever it was they were yelling!
“OK,WHAT!? What the freakin’ heck do you WANT? Can’t you see what I’m…”
Suddenly, I noticed all three were pointing their index fingers, not at me, but at something… downward! They were pointing at something they urgently wanted me to see!
Insanely confused in all this madness by now, all I wanted to do was run away to some place quiet! But no– so with my angriest angry glare I decided to humor them, damnit, and finally look down! Just to get them off my back!
And then…
OH NO…
I saw it.
It was something… something down at the bottom of Gizmo’s door.
A little stub of… shit! Gizmo’s tail, just the tip of it, protruding out from under the door!
Oh. My. God! What had I done?!
Of course what I had done was accidentally slam the door on… poor little Gizmo’s tail!No wonder he…
I couldn’t believe it! I didn’t want to believe it, damn me all to hell!
I immediately yanked the door open a couple of inches. The tip of the tail zipped right inside, out of view. And likewise immediately… the pain-wracked caterwauling mercifully ceased!
I was instantly consumed with shame and self-hatred. It had been done accidentally, of course, but try to explain that to the baby Capuchin with the sore tail!
I looked to him and found his eyes boring two holes into mine. Standing there on two hind legs shoulder-width apart, and holding the tip of the assaulted tail up in his left fist at head height, like one might hold a torch, he was confronting me with the evidence, the evidence of my betrayal. Because surely, that must have been what it had to be feeling like to him.
Oh yes, oh yes oh yes! What in God’s name had I done!? I was having all I could do to keep from collapsing in anguish. I mean, the last thing in the world I’d ever wanted to ever do was…
“Oh Gizmo, I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry!” I blurted out, on the edge of tears. How could I ever make him trust me again?
Yeah. Way to go, Tom. Way to totally destroy an otherwise wonderfully perfect evening. Or week…
I had no doubts whatsoever that it wouldn’t be me putting the little man to bed tomorrow night. Or perhaps any night. No. I definitely got it that he’d never allow himself to get anywhere near both me and the tail-trap door at the same time any time soon, not even with a ten-foot pole.
Throughout my life, I’ve been one of those guys to whom things just seem to… happen. I mean, right out of the blue. Unxpected things. And sometimes even rather outlandish things. Why? Because Life is The Joker, the Grand Comedian. Because Life seems to find it fun, having its way with me. Today, I’m hell-bent on sharing with you a sample of of one of those things…
CHAPTER ONE: WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE
I was still in pretty good shape at 43. Big into push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, running, and even doing a little weight-lifting. This was back in ’89.
(And so man oh man, when and why did I ever let myself go like I have?)
Anyway, ’89 was the year my wife, Phyllis, and I got memberships to the Y and added a daily morning swim to our routines. I remember getting up so damn early, long before breakfast, and doing those laps: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. A somewhat boring regimen, sure, but it did feel great in the long run, pushing the envelope by adding on a couple of extra laps every week or two. Plus, it seemed to be having a pretty positive effect on my attitude and general outlook. And that was great.
Ah, to be young again…
(Oh wait— yeah, now I remember why! I was forgetting about the ‘GETTING OLD’ part. I’m 77 now. It must’ve been somewhere between 43 and 77 that I let it happen. So I guess maybe I can lay at least part of the blame for my slacking off on all the arthritis, surgeries, and all that other geriatric medical yadda yadda yadda.)
But I digress. So anyway, we’d show up at the Y half-asleep, zombie-shuffling in, barely aware of our surroundings. Speaking for myself at least, I know I was pretty much flying on autopilot those mornings, barely alert enough to swap the nominal good-mornings with the friendly staff on our way to the locker rooms. Basically sleep walking. That’s just the way it always was. So yeah, no wonder I was taken totally by surprise when…
wait for it…
A MONKEY literally (notfiguratively) crash-landed down onto my head like a little sandbag?
I mean, who wouldn’t be?! I was like, I dunno, did somebody slip me an LSD mickey when I wasn’t looking? I didn’t have clue-number-one what the hell the thing even was. I mean come on, it was the Y! Not the frickin’ jungle!
So I went a little berserk, didn’t I. And by berserk, I’m talking about emitting one long, not-so-very-macho wail; pirouetting round and round; and all the while, clawing and batting away at the very alive Davy Crockett coonskin cap I thought was trying to burrow into my brain! I mean you know, I had seen Alien with all those creepy giant eggs just waiting to hatch one of those flying face-huggers at you! But a flying monkey?! Shades of The Wizard of Oz!
Mercifully, I was rescued by one of the staff ladies who leapt out of her chair, stopped me mid-spin, and carefully began extricating the four little limbs and long tail of what turned out to be an eight-month-old, baby Capuchin monkey! What the hell was a monkey doing at the Y?
Turns out what the monkey was doing at the Y was this:
The staff lady, Sandy, was keeping him with her during her workdays because reliable monkey-sitters were impossible to find. He, Gizmo, was totally under her care. Not as a pet per se, but as part of the national non-profit foundation, Monkey Helpers for the Disabled, Inc. (now known as Envisioning Access). Their motto: “Meet a monkey. Adopt a monkey.” So Sandy had “adopted” a monkey. Gizmo.
The “adoption” wouldn’t be permanent, however. It would only last for three years, after which he would be returned to the foundation to begin his actual training which would last many years. Sandy’s job, in the meantime, was to give him a home, bring him up from babyhood, and train him to be not only accustomed to people but be safe and people-friendly (think user-friendly).
I hadn’t noticed it at the time but when I came to, there it was, standing tall right there in front of me in the Y office like some huge, wooden, open-faced armoire. But I guess “kennel” would be a more accurate term for it. It was huge and roomy, seven-feet tall and at least five-feet wide— and so much more than just a simple “cage’” even though of course a cage it was. It was obviously Gizmo’s living quarters/play pen. Inside there were roped rings hanging down for swinging on, soft bedding, an assortment of toys, and what I came later to call his soft security pillows, one looking like Garfield and the other looking like a mother hen.
Turned out Gizmo was only seven months old, a baby. And after my fear-induced adrenalin rush had worn off, I began to see him as the cutest little head-hugger I could ever imagine laying eyes on. He was undeniably adorable.
And after a few minutes of getting to ‘know” him, I have to admit it was practically a case of love at first sight for me. (And it wasn’t just me. As I was soon to find out, everybody who came into contact with the little guy fell head over heels in love with him too.) But admit it. What child at some point hasn’t wanted a monkey? They always look like such fun, in the movies and on television. And OK, granted, I was no longer a child. But of course I’d fantasized about having one as a kid.
And isn’t there always a little inner-self kid left over somewhere inside each of us after we’ve aged? So I was a child at heart.
So guess what. I swam a lot fewer laps in the pool that morning. Seems Gizmo had taken to me as much as I had taken to him. And that felt so special. (Of course, Gizmo simply loved people. All of us, in fact. Of course I just preferred to think that what he and I were building was an extra-special relationship. But…)
So yeah, it took me about twenty minutes to pull myself away from him and trudge myself off to the pool.
Next morning went exactly the same way. And ditto for the morning after. Not swimming was suddenly threatening to put a dent in my physical regimen. But as far as I was concerned, who cared? Not me. The joy that I was getting playing with hat little rascal was so addictive.
Then, some mornings I didn’t swim at all. Hell, some mornings I didn’t even bother to bring my swimming trunks. What a loser I was becoming. But what a happy loser. Because just like they appear on TV and in the movies, monkeys really are a lot of fun.
OK. So let’s do the long-story-short thing:
Gizmo’s and my rapport seemed to really be pleasing Sandy. To the point where she took me aside one morning and offered me a proposition that would (temporarily at least) change my life. It seems she had to attend a conference in California for a week, and was at a loss as to what she was going to do about Gizmo.
So yeah, you can probably see where this was going. Soon I was running like a 43-year old little kid to Phyllis, my darling wife, begging “Please, please, PLEASE! Can I? Huh? Come on, huh? I’ll feed’im, I’ll change his diapers… why, you won’t hafta do a thing! I PROMISE!”
(Stay tuned for Chapter 2: “TWEETER AND THE MONKEYMAN”)
Even as a child, Dad was my job agent. I never had to hire him; he worked free-lance. Most of the jobs I worked at, right up through college freshman year, he got me— thank you very much.
So, one sunny, blue-sky, summer afternoon I was channeling Otis Redding. You know, just “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, way-hay’-stin’ time.” Instead of on the dock of the bay, however, I was lazing away my time sittin’ on our front step. Wastin’ time was a main hobby of mine back then. One I took very seriously.
It was summertime, and the livin’ was easy. School was out, so there was none of that annoying high school homework to ruin my day. Life was just the way I liked it: I had no plans. Whatsoever. My day was wide open.
Outta the blue a pick-up truck came wheeling into the driveway. Dad was sitting shotgun with Nelson, his co-worker, at the wheel. Now, what was unexpected about this is Dad was officially “at work.” At only like 1:00 o’clock, he wasn’t due back home until 6:00, or later. Something was up…
He was beckoning me to come over. Which, I can tell you, gave me an ominous queasiness in the pit of my stomach. Against my better judgement, I walked over.
“Had lunch yet?” he wanted to know.
And instinctively, without thinking, I said, “Yeah.” Then kicked myself. I should’ve said, No. Not yet. You should always say no,
“Good. Get in.”
“Get in?Why? Whatta you talkin’ about?”
“C’mon. You’re late for work.”
“Work? What work? I don’t have any work…”
“Hop in. Tell you on the way.”
“Jeez! Now wait just a minute, OK? I was planning on… doing stuff!” Dad scooted over. Reluctantly, with all the alarms going off in my head, I hauled myself up into the passenger seat next to him.
I couldn’t help but notice Nelson was grinning a shitty Cheshire Cat grin. And then we were off, me casting an annoyed look back over my shoulder at the warm spot on the front steps already beginning to cool. I was devastated. I should’ve taken off on my bicycle right after lunch.
“So…?Where we going?” I stifled ‘this time.’”
“Dover Cemetery.”
“WHAT? Dover what? Dover cemetery?!”
“Yeah,” Nelson answered for him. “You’re a professional now.”
“Huh? Professional what?’
“Grave digger!” he said, with an evil grin.
“WHAT!?” Old people loved to needle teenagers.
“Lawn mower,” Dad said.
OK, I wasn’t going to pay any more attention to wise-ass Nelson. “Lawn mower?! What, at Dover Cemetery?”
“You got it.”
“But maybe you can work your way up to grave digger…” Nelson pointed out, but I cut him off.
“I don’t wanna be no… graveyard lawn mower, Dad. I mean, what’re you talking about? I don’t know anything about cemeteries! Isn’t it enough that I mow our lawn? But jeez… come on, a cemetery? I mean, what’ll my friends think!?””
“Oh, I dunno. That you’re gainfully employed, maybe?”
“Well, still though, you could’ve asked me!”
“Hey. You’ll thank me when you get your first pay check.”
“I doubt it.”
“Which goes straight into your bank account, by the way. For college.”
“Oh, of course. See? What’d I just tell you? Yeah, like I’m just dying to slave my summer away just to not have any extra spending money!”
Damn, we were already pulling into one of the graveyard’s many access roads. And oh my God! I could spy a dozen or so old-timers, lost-cause-zombie-skeletons, plodding every which way behind mowers. I mean, come on!Halloween in June?!
“Think of it this way,” Nelson said with a wink to Dad. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
“Just for this summer, Monday through Friday,” Dad said.
“What? Dad, the whole…summer?!”
“And see that guystanding right over there?” he said, pointing a finger. “That guy’s your new boss.”
“I don’t need a new boss.” Everything was happening so fast! It was unbelievable! One minute, I”m free. Next minute I’m being sold to a band of gypsies!
We pulled up next to the new boss-of-me. And when I got out (Dad didn’t even have the common courtesy to get out with me) I saw him wink at the guy when he said, rather callously I thought, “He’s all yours, Bub.”
My heart was pounding. But OK, I knew I had to man-up. So I did, though it was a struggle. And by that I mean I held my breath, bit my tongue, and willed myself not to fall down on my knees begging, “No, please, Dad! PLEASE don’t leave me here with these horrible old people!”
But with a boa-constrictor separation-anxiety squeezing the life out of my heart, I just stood there watching my “Judas agent” drive away. Back into the world that, only minutes ago, was my world.
Bub flopped a beat-up lawnmower down off a flatbed trailer with a bang and said “This one’s yours.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So all afternoon I mowed. I mowed my brains out. And all throughout the afternoon, I felt sick to my stomach. I mean, it was bad enough that I’d been consigned to this chain gang in the first place. But I just couldn’t help dwelling on what my best buds were doing that afternoon while I slaved under a hot sun. Probably hitchhiking out to the lake for a leisurely day at the beach, the lucky bums!
But what was making me really ill on top of that is that I’d been informed (A) we were responsible for mowing a dozen area grave yards throughout the summer, but also (B) at the end of each day we were responsible for taking our lawnmowers apart, cleaning all the parts, putting the damn thing back together again, draining out the old oil, and putting new oil back in! I mean, where the hell was I? And what the hell did I know about lawn mowers, beyond how to gas one up, start it, and how to shut it back down again? Which before… was all I’d ever needed to know. Which was all anybody’d ever need to know, as far as I could see.
But anyway, I had one desperate glimmer of hope I was hanging onto. That being that when the time came to take the damn thing apart, it’d become glaringly obvious that I was totally useless at it. Like, all the king’s horses and all the king’s mencouldn’t put Humpty together again if it was up to me. That hiring me had been a big mistake, and finally I’d get fired on the spot! Yeah! My uselessness was my best hope. And, oh, wouldn’t that just piss Dad off. But hah! Take that, Dad! Take that, Nelson!
Thank God everybody stopped for a ten–minute break at 3:00 o’clock. I puttered my mower over to where everybody’d seated themselves on the grass in the shade of some trees. And, aw jeez, they were all swigging down their ice-cold Moxies, Cokes and root beers, leaving me the only one with nothing to drink. Oh sure, let the new kid collapse with severe dehydration, why don’t you!
I just had to wake up from this nightmare. Somehow.
I hadn’t shut my lawn mower down yet, so I began trying to pop the ignition tab off the spark plug with the toe of my shoe. Keep in mind, this was 1963, back before the automatic shut-off safety assembly became a required installment on mowers. Today as soon as you take your hands off the handlebar, your lawnmower shuts itself right down. But back then if you let go of the handlebar, so what? Nothing happened. The machine would just continue on running until it either ran itself out of gas or you disengaged the spark plug. Which is what I was fumbling around trying to do with my foot.
“Holy mackerel there, son!” one of the geezer squad yelled at me.
“Huh? What?”
“You tryin’ to get yourself killed, or what!” He was shaking his head in disbelief. “Jesus, kids these days! Look son. You’re doin’ it all wrong, OK? Now if that there was your lawnmower. I mean the one you got back home. In your yard? Then OK.”
“Uhmmm… I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I always felt pretty uncomfortable around people of that age if I didn’t know them. And really? All I wanted was to be left alone to wallow in my misery. But weirdly, I became aware that the whole crew suddenly stopped gabbing and oddly seemed to be taking quite an unsettling interest in our conversation. And their expressions had all taken on a tone of serious gravity. Why was that?
“All I’m sayin’ is that piece of equipment you’ve been mowin’ with all afternoon is a commercial machine, not some domestic toy. And that spark plug you’re ticklin’ with your toe’s got at least ten times the wallop on it of any home mower. What, nobody warned you about that when they hired you on?”
I found this as disturbing as it was confusing. “Nobody told me nothing!” I said. “I mean, there wasn’t time. My dad… he just dropped me off. And Bub… or whatever his name is… he just…”
“Oh, Jesus H. Christ!! Wouldn’t our dear old town manager be some pleased with the lawsuit he’d be lookin’ at if… well, never mind. No, son. You wanna shut one of these machines down? You gotta use somethin’ that don’t conduct electricity.”
“What? No, at home all I ever…”
“Hold your horses a minute…” He walked over to a nearby gravestone and began poking around in the weeds surrounding the base of it. Meanwhile my mower kept puttering steadily away.
Somebody offered, “That tall one over to the far right, right by your foot, looks about wide enough, Dave.”
He scowled. “The day I need your help, Pops, I’ll ask for it.” But then he did pluck the very blade of grass Pops had pointed out, and walked it back over to me.
“Yeah, this one’s good enough. Long and wide. Strong. And dry as a bone. Been bakin’ in the hot sun all day, is why. Water conducts electricity.”
What, did he think I was stupid or something?“Uh huh. Yeah.” I was being obviously sarcastic. “Water conducts electricity. Thanks for telling me. Got it.”
“‘Course. I figured you’d know that. But… whatta I know ‘bout what they’re teachin’ in school these days?” He shrugged. “Anyway, here you go.”
Not having a clue as to why, I accepted it.
“OK, son. Now, whatcha gotta do is just poke that very carefully down in behind that there little tab you were tryin’ to nudge off the spark plug. And then with your other hand, grab the low end when she pokes out down below. OK?”
What the hell was I doing listening to this old nursing home buzzard anyway. Why was I even here? “Alright. OK. Yeah. Guess so.”
All righty. Then… you’re gonna yank it right back. Towards yourself. And that’ll pull her right off the spark plug. Safely.”
I thought the move through, and shook my head. “Funny though,” I said. “At home I swear I can always just nudge the damn thing off with the toe of my boot, you know?”
“’Course I know. We all of us got one of’em at home, just like you. I mean, because who can afford one of these souped-up industrial jobbies anyway? Not me, that’s for damn certain. But hey, college kid, nobody’s tellin’you what to do. I ain’t your boss.”
“I’m only in high school.”
“But all I am sayin’ is, it’s your toe. And you wanna try your toe on one of these commercial industrial mowers? Well son, better yours than mine. You’re free to do whatever you want.. It’s a free country. Jus’ tryin’ to offer a bit of friendly advice. You go on right ahead and do as you please. Only jus’ don’t say you wasn’t warned.”
“Hey, I was just sayin’. That’s what works with mine. At home, is all.”
“Well, I’m not sayin’ the shock will kill you. All I’m warnin’ you about is you could burn a couple of toes right off at the knuckles down there, you know? It’s happened before. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“All right, all right.”
So. I bent down and poked that fat blade of grass down in behind the ignition tab. Then I managed fish the lower tip and snag it, so that finally I’d got both the top and bottom tips pinched, thumb-and-finger, with either hand. “Like this?”
“Yeah, that’s it. You got it. But… you gotta hold both ends firm and tight? You don’t wanna let it slip when you pull on it.”
“OK. I guess.”
How the hell did I know? Maybe there was something towhat the old man was babbling on about after all, you know? He was the expert. Not me.
I realized I was my breath. It was quiet. Seemed like the whole crew was holding their collective breaths too. I mean, how crazy was that?
“You ready, son?”
I just wanted to get whatever this was over with, so I said, “Yeah.”
“Then go ahead. Do it, but… be careful.”
So…
I yanked— BZZZZZZZZTTTSSNNAP!!
Ouch-Whoa-JEEZUM! What the…? Wow! Liked to’ve just got my fingers bit by an electric eel! And…
…there was this raucous roaring going on. What was that? I mean, talk about confusion. It took me a full ten seconds to clear my head and figure out just what had actually happened! But by the time I got my bearings, it was so embarrassingly obvious.
And it was awful.
Because you never saw such a damn bunch of knee-slapping, haw-hawing old crows in your life.
“Young pups! Every SINGLE damn time, I kid you not! HAW-HAW!”
“Got’im, you did! HEE HEE HEE!”
Why those… bastards!
I couldn’t look up and face them while they continued to bust a gut at my expense. I was too mortified. But finally the noise was dying down some.
“Well. Time to get back at it. Can’t sit around jawin’ all day. Break’s over! Start’em up, boys!”
And there I was. Amid all the yankings of the pull cords; the clatter of the Black and Decker engines all firing back to life; and the blue, oily exhaust smoke being released all over everywhere: the butt of the friggin’ joke! The red-faced little Dumbo, the high-school-kid baby elephant! And oh, had I just made those old bastards’ day or what!
And boy, hadn’t they’d really yanked my damn cord, damnit!
The last one to leave leered at me. “Best be countin’ your fingers, boy. One or two of’em might be missin.’”
I felt about two inches tall. I was so flummoxed, I couldn’t get my lawnmower started for five minutes!
And lemme tell you something. When you were a boy back then, especially my age, you wanted to be the cool one. You wanted to be the Roy Rogers, not the comical sidekick! Not Gabby Hayes or Jingles! And especially never the fool. Man, I was burning with shame. They’d just crushed me like a stink bug under their stinkin’ boot heels. Enough so that over the next few days I’d be avoiding the bathroom mirror worse than Count Dracula, lest I catch a glimpse of the little fool I’d been reminded I really was.
Damn them all to hell was playing like a broken record in my brain.
You know, I’d never ever really hate Dad, ever. But I sure felt like I hated him right then that day, for willingly collaborating in me getting shanghaied by a crew of old, pot-bellied, toothless, nursing-home pirates like those old crones!
Yeah! Thanks one whole hell of a lot, Dad!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
But I’d learned something about life there, hadn’t I though. There’s something called Initiation. And it’s universal. And I’d just been initiated.
But actually, it hadn’t really been my first experience of the phenomenon. I’d experienced it with little the cliques back in the playground days. I’d experienced it as a freshman at Foxcroft Academy. We all had, us freshmen. It was a tradition, after all.
And though I never would have suspected it at the time, and wouldn’t have wanted to believe it on that embarrassing day, I was fated to undergo yet several more prickly-feeling initiations while I would continue my way-too-long growing up process.
I would get played the fool when I got hired as a common laborer on a summer construction crew during college. Then again, I’d really get taken as a fresh fish when I signed on in the spinning room at the Guilford Woolen Mill the following year (that’s a story for another time).
And sadly, the list wouldn’t end there either.
Turns out, though I hate to admit it… I have been one naïve dude, over the better part of my life.
Oh well, guess I’ll just have to focus on the character-building aspects of my initiations, and on the growth of humility they bring.
Now here is a moment I will never forget as long as I live. Rather than get out, I just opened my door, hung my head and upper torso down off over the edge of the seat, bracing myself with my two hands in the gravel to keep from falling on my head. And took me a look-see. After a moment I pushed myself back up in onto the car seat again. I let out a long sigh. And then I said it.
“What muffler?”
Now please don’t think I didn’t feel a miasma of guilt swamping my panicking heart at the same time both Wayne and I burst into hysterical, snot-nose-giggling laughter. Because I did. Honest. I was seasick with guilt. Made all the worse by my responsible brother, Denny, fuming at us in the back seat. And who could blame him? (Writing this now, I find myself ashamed of my little turd, past self. Again.) But it was just one of those crazy Gene Wilder/Marty Feldman, “What hump?” moments.
“We’re gonna need a new muffler,” Wayne said.
“Right,” I said. Brainlessly.
“Oh yeah and just how the heck we gonna do that!? On a Sunday? And everything closed?” Denny was pissed.
“Whatta we have for money?” asked Wayne.
I dug deep in my jeans. Pocket change! “We’re screwed.”
It was the same with Denny.
“Well, I do have a little bread in my wallet,” said Wayne. “So… I mean, come on, there’s gotta be a junkyard open on a Sunday. Somewhere. Right? Somewhere around here?”
I hadn’t been thinking about junkyards. I’d only been thinking of the closed-on-Sundays auto parts stores. So there was a glimmer of hope. Then I remembered. “There’s one on the Guilford Road. Half way. About five miles or so.”
Wayne looked from me to over his shoulder at Denny. “Whatta ya say?”
Still glaring, all Denny could do was shrug.
Then, “Well, let’s get these wheels turned around.” He twisted the ignition key in its socket. The engine erupted back to life. A constant explosive assault on the eardrums. Fibrillatingour hearts and diaphrams! It was deafening! Inhumane! All those things! I mean, try to imagine you’re standing out on the tarmac with your head just inches below the roaring engine and whirling props of a vintage B-29 bomber! Well, it was worse , I swear. More like having your head embedded inside the engine block itself!
Wayne rolled the big black Plymouth in a wide u-turn, got her pointed back up Mile Hill, and hit the accelerator. Despite my thinking that nothing could increase the hellishness of the volume, it turned out that accelerating could, and did. So. Uphill we roared. And almost simultaneously, two strange and forever unforgettable phenomena occurred.
First, even though you never could’ve expected such a thing possible without somebody consciously willing it so, my ears (on their very own, mind you) activated their Emergency-Self-Protection switch! You know how eardrums will bulge with the thinning air pressure when you’re barreling up a pretty big hill and then just pop when you swallow? Well, my ears never popped.
Instead, it honestly felt like my earlobes autonomically just went right ahead and tucked their own selves up into their respective ear canals! Battening down the hatches, so to speak Plugging the entrances as quick as an endangered armadillo rolling itself up into a protected hard-shell ball. And then, just try to imagine sticking your fingers in your ears to drown out a racket, only you’re wearing a pair of mittens. And then your mittened-fingers somehow get stuck in there and can’t be pulled back out.
Because in other words, I instantly lost a good 75% of my hearing, just like THAT!
Now, you know those hip-hop/rapper “super-bass freaks” that somehow manage to get a pair of 50-gallon-drum-size stereo speakers installed on the rear seats of their tiny little cars? The ones you can hear ka-boom-ka-booming closer and closer to you from a mile or so away? We had that beat. Think three miles away! Which brings us to the second unforgettable phenomenon that was justas, if not more, bizarre as the first.
Our Plymouth was now broadcasting a pulsating Richter-scale impact equal to a 2000-Timpani-drum Drumroll-of-the-Apocalypse, a drumroll accompanied by 76 Farting Trombones of the Hit Parade! And Mile Hill was crowded on both sides of the road by numerous homes and summer cottages, all the way to the top. So as we began our ascent, the shimmer and quaking of everybody’s front cottage window panes flickering off to our sides in the sunlight, courtesy of our now muffler-less exhaust pipe, looked and felt impossibly surreal.
So OK. Here it is. It began with us noticing just a single family of four, simply standing on the roadside way up ahead and gawking down at our uproarious approach. But then, a man and woman across the road from them, scurrying across a lawn to position themselves for an equally commanding view. And after that, of course, other families and individuals, all drawn outside by the growing Joshua-Fit-the-Battle-Jericho ruckus to line up, and crowd the roadsides for our unannounced, one-clown-car “parade.”
They actually kind of closed in on us from both sides at one point as we rumbled through. Adults waving, reaching out, leering and jeering. The little ones clapping their hands over their ears. Almost a carnival atmosphere. Of course, we couldn’t hear even what we were trying to say to each other, let alone hear the voices outside the rattletrap.And it just felt so embarrassing, being such a spectacle and being stared at like that, like we were just some awful joke! We couldn’t get out of there fast enough but, long story short, we made it through without running over anybody.
And then we were barreling our way through the woods and back toward town.
Words can’t adequately explain how insane, crazed, and bizarre it felt– being so handicapped, so claustrophobic, so… well, like our heads were stuffed inside with cotton batting or something. So hard and nerve wracking as time dragged on to have to endure that deafening onslaught entombing us in that nightmare on wheels.
We stuck to side roads on the outskirts of town to avoid garnering too much unwanted attention. And with the clock ticking, we tooled up the Guilford Road.
The junkyard did have a Sunday-closed look about it. Just a little shack of a rundown garage out front, next to a house nestled up to it on the side. We banged on the front door and finally someone opened it. A little old man of around sixty.
As politlely as we could, we apologized for bothering him on a Sunday but explained what a fix we were in. And asked, Did he have and used mufflers for sale? He said he did, and escorted us into the garage. There hanging up on a wall were three. The only one we could afford was something he called a” cherry bomb.” He advised that our dad probably wouldn’t approve of that one though, as it was one very popular with teens that were into… hot rodding. “Kinda makes your car sound like a motorcycle: loud,” is what he said.
So we’d struck out. And not only that, but the half hour Dad had allotted us had already passed about ten minutes earlier, so we were in trouble. It was either go home right now and face the awful music, or try to think up some Plan B. We discussed this and decided that since we were going to face merry-old-hell anyway, what did it matter if we tried another town first. It was worth a shot.
So we buzzed the outskirts of Dover-Foxcroft again like a low-flying crop-duster, and headed for Dexter, fifteen miles away. And once again we all became deaf as posts.
In Dexter we rolled into the first gas station we came across. The owner there got quite a kick out of our tale of woe, which we no longer saw as funny. He took us into the bay area and showed us another three mufflers. Only one would possibly work for us at all, and it was a muffler taken off a 1955 Chevrolet truck. You could tell because he’d painted “55 CHEV TRUCK” on it in white paint.
There was some haggling with Wayne on the price, concerning what “we” could afford, and then finally the guy put our car up on the lift. I can’t tell you how promising that felt, and the sense of relief it gave me.
The place was going to close at 5:00 and it was already right around 4:30. Denny and I paced, while Wayne and the owner worked away with their heads stuck up under the trunk of the car. Then, after ten minutes or so, like some surgeon who’d been striving to save the life of one of your loved ones in the O.R., he joined us in the front office with a very grim look on his face. The kind of look that makes you dread hearing the words, “I’m sorry, but we did everything we possibly could for her.” What he said instead was, “We got a bit of a problem. See, the diameter of your exhaust pipe is just a tad larger than that of the muffler.”
Our hearts sank. Crap! It wasn’t a fit! So we were dead! D-e-a-d, DEAD!
“However… I do have some flex-pipe. For a couple more bucks, I could make that fit…”
We looked to Wayne, and nodded desperately. “OK,” he said. “Do it.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
We pulled into the driveway around 5:30. And damnit, there was Dad sitting on the front steps, waiting. He got up and met us as we tumbled out of the car, gave us a long dark stare, and muttered something like, “I guess punctuality’s not exactly your thing, is it.”
I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was probably some bald-faced little lie like, “Uhmmm, see, we ran outta gas.”
Whatever the actual exchange, I know it helped that Wayne was there. Wayne wasn’t Dad’s son, so he wasn’t about to blow a gasket that included our guest, his nephew. Thank goodness. And honestly? Dad was never the type to blow his gasket anyway. I’ve gotta say, I’d already given Dad so many opportunites and reasons to really read me the riot act over time (some particularly bad ones, in my own estimation). And he always did it calmly, thoughtfully, reasonably, and with much grace.
Dad was a gentleman, and such a gentle man. And on top of that, he was a saint.
So we watched on eggshells as Dad doggedly opened the car door, climbed in behind the wheel, closed the door, started her up, and put her in reverse. He began to back up. But then, suddenly, he stepped on the brake and slowed her to a stop. Shifting her into neutral, tilting his head out the window, and cocking an ear, he stepped lightly on the accelerator a couple of times, revving the engine just a bit, and (oh no!)… listening.
Spooked, the three of us were frozen, surreptitiously eying one another. And maybe their hair was also standing up on the back of their necks. I don’t know. But mine was. I do know I was holding my breath.
“Huh!” he said with furrowed brow. Like he’d come to some conclusion. Then, with a shaking of his head we heard him mutter to himself, “This ol’ crate’s sounding more like a truck every day.”
The three of us did a triple double-take!
And then he backed on out of the driveway and just… went trucking it away up Pleasant Street
“Oh. My. GOD!” somebody said.
“Does he KNOW?” somebody else asked.
“But how COULD he?!”
“I don’t think he does…”
“He couldn’t!”
“But he just MIGHT. Somehow.”
With adults you just never knew. Did you. Most of the time, they knew everything…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So we let about a dozen years slip by before we finally mustered up the courage to tell Dad our whole story. He surprised us by obviously getting a big kick out of it. And although we pressed him about it several times, he swore up and down he’d never had a clue.
Picture this. I’m five. Not only am I five, I’m short for my age. Don’t take up hardly any room.
Me, front seat, middle. No bucket seats back then. Just bench seats, I think they were called. Bench seats and no seat belts. Riding in Uncle Archie’s car. Archie driving. Dad riding shotgun, to my right. Me in the middle. Dad and Archie in steady conversation. Just two low voices. Blah blah blah. Me, not even coming up to their shoulders, the conversation literally and figuratively going right over my head. Nothing to do with me. Me, practically not even here, but I’m used to that.
My world right now is this dashboard in front of me. It’s all I’ve got. Nothing else to look at, not being able to see out the windshield. But it’s on my level, so… yeah, the dashboard. And… the ignition key plugged into it. I’ve been fixated on the ignition key for some time now. And the tiny beaded chain swinging from it. Shiny. Swaying. The only thing moving in my world right now. Like a little fishing lure for bored eyes.
Finally. Dad’s and Uncle Archie’s attention are suddenly focused on something up ahead and off to the left. Some house being built. By some friend or acquaintance of theirs. Whatever. I’d been waiting for something like that.
“Well, that’s coming right along.”
“I’d say so. ‘Bout another month maybe.”
Quick as lightning, I clamp that key in my sweaty little fist, twist it once to the left, then jerk it back to the right, and have my hand lying back in my lap like nothing ever happened as the car coughs, convulses jarringly, and K’POW! farts off a shotgun blast of a backfire before returning to normal.
Dad: “What the hell was that!?”
Uncle Archie: “Damned if I know! She never done that before.”
Fortunately, no one looks down and asks me. Why would they? I’m just a five year old. I’m not even here.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Let me begin with this obvious fact: automobiles are vastly different today than they were in the 1950s. They’ve evolved over time in the same way Man has evolved. On a sliding scale from the simpler to the more complex.
Who knows where each will end up when our sun finally implodes, sucking our solar system down inside the event horizon into its own black hole with it? If that even is what happens. Hell, I’m no physicist. But I do know a thing or two about what cars were like way back in 1950sville.
So many things were different.
All cars had manual transmissions back then. Why? Because there was no alternative, of course. The automatic transmission in cars were not commercially available yet. Meaning when you applied for your driver’s license, you knew you’d be taking your road test on a stick shift. No letter D for Drive, R for Reverse, or P for park. Meaning you’d have to have become intimate with the dreaded clutch pedal. I know. That’s scary. But I did it. In fact, we all did it.
But also meaning that the harder-than-nuclear-physics, manual-gear-shifting diagram was also something you’d have to become intimate with. Which is why you didn’t see Marty McFly jumping into, and driving off in, any 1950s cars in Back to the Future I.
I’ve already mentioned seating in The Prologue. Sports cars had bucket seats, but common cars did not. Plus nobody had seat belts in the 1950s, and nobody wanted those nuisances either, when they finally came out, as Chuck Berry’s song lyrics of “No Particular Place to Go” so aptly expressed years later: “Can you imagine the way I felt? I couldn’t unfasten her safety belt!”
Plus you’ve probably heard about those “suicide doors,” too— doors that opened up in the exact opposite direction than they do today. A leftover from the slower-speed, horse-drawn carriage days, a suicide door was an automobile door that was hinged on the rear-facing side, rather than the front-facing side.
Today if you’re barreling down the highway doing 70 and one of your passengers foolishly tries to open a car door, it’s nearly impossible. The wind’s 70 miles per hour blow-back pressure will fight to keep that door from opening up. In the 50’s however, many car doors (especially back-seat doors) were still designed to open in the opposite direction.
As a child, I was seated one afternoon in the back seat of our suicide-rear-door car while it was tooling down the road, probably at 50. For some reason (curiosity maybe) I grasped the door handle of the door on the driver’s side and began to open it a crack (can’t for the life of me remember why… although being naturally stupid and too curious for my own good immediately come to mind). As soon as I got the door barely inched open, the hurricane blow-back caught my door like a sail and just flung it open, practically catapulting me like a tiny, human, seat-beltless cannonball straight out onto the road in front of oncoming cars! Fortunately for me, my hand strength was practically zero so the door handle was just torn right out of my grip. My fingers got painfully sprained though, but I was still sitting, alive and whole, on the back seat. A hard way to learn a lesson
Ah yes. Life in the good old dangerous days.
But now to my main point. There is one big difference between the cars of the Nifty Fifties and today’s automobiles which I’ve never even thought about until lately, one which pertains to the incident I barely touched on in my prologue. More about that in a bit, right after I tell you a little story by way of introduction. It’s a true story, as all of my stories are. Never had any luck at all at creating literary fiction.
This one occured in 1960… me, thirteen going on fourteen. The year was 1960, but my parents’ car was a big, black, bulky 4-door 1948 Plymouth.
A cousin of ours who was two and a half, maybe three years older than me, lived in Massachusetts. Each year he’d summer at our place for a few weeks. His family was obviously better off than ours, financially anyway, because Wayne always seemed to have the coolest things. Cool clothes. Cool roller skates. Cool transistor radio. Cartons of cigarettes with usually one cancer stick nonchalantly propped up there like a pencil in behind his ear. A wad of twenties in his wallet at all times, and somehow always more where they came from. And fresh from the city streets of Boston, all the latest off-colored jokes to entertain everybody with. And most important, Wayne had just gotten his driver’s license. That was big. Because with him around, sometimes we had wheels. A lot of the popular town guys and all the girls couldn’t wait to see him show up every summer. In our redneck world, it was like having a lesser Elvis (notice how that almost sounded like a lesser evil? {Freudian slip, there}) come and stay at our place. I practically worshipped him (until I didn’t).
Now Dover-Foxcroft is situated only five miles from Maine’s gorgeous Sebec Lake. And that lake was huge in our summer social lives back then. We kids of just about all ages hitch-hiked out there and back almost every day. There was the municipal beach that was always pretty packed with the bathing-suited summer folks from away. The beach had its own concession stand for hamburgers, chips, cigarettes, and sodas, plus the usual male and female changing rooms and rest rooms. There was the marina next door to the beach where the wealthy tourists moored all those luxurious outboard and inboard motor boats.
The marina had a small convenience store too for beer, pastries, some groceries, fishing tackle, live bait, and boat rentals. The wonderful, magic roller rink was right there too (and oh, that makes me go all weak with nostalgia, just thinking about it once again). It was the jewel in the crown, if you ask me. All the beautiful girls from near and far skated there. In short, like the song, the lake was “the magnet and I was the steel.”
One Sunday afternoon, we wanted go back out there to retrieve something we’d left at camp so I, Denny, and Wayne went to dad to beg for the family car. Dad was a TV and radio repairman who did service calls over a pretty large portion of the county back then. Yes, even on Sundays. Here’s how the conversation went down:
Dad: I dunno. I’ve got a service call over in Milo, so I’m gonna need the car.
Us: We just wanna go over and back to pick up something. It won’t take long.
Dad: All right, But I’m going to need it in a half hour then.
Us: Half hour tops, no problem.
So we all piled into the Plymouth, me calling “Shotgun!”
It always felt so adventurous back then to just take off in a car not being driven by an adult. It gave me a new-found, giddy feeling of freedom that I was still just getting accustomed to as I grew a little older. Inside the car it was always just boy talk. Sometimes about girls. Sometimes about places we’d been, more specifically about where Wayne had been, like Quebec City, since he’d traveled all over and we really hadn’t. Sometimes it was about cars. That day it was about cars.
Denny and I didn’t know anything about cars, especially anything technical about them. What was important to me was getting my own license soon and just go off cruising to who knows where. I mean, just imagining what it was going to be like, sitting behind the steering wheel someday and actually driving someplace by myself was so enticing it was all I could think about. That, and the impossible dream of actually buying a car of my very own.
So yeah, we were talking cars that day. And for one reason or another, I brought up the memory I still have of causing such a satisfying backfire in Archie’s car, way back when I was five years old.
Me: And all I had to do was turn the ignition key off and then back on. Ka-bang! It was so cool!
Wayne: Yeah I’ve heard of that. And you know what they say?
Me: No. Whatta they say?
Wayne: That the longer you wait before, you know, switching the ignition key back to ON? The bigger and better the backfire!
Me: No shit!
Wayne: I shit you not.
Me: Well, my backfire was pretty loud, you know.
Wayne: Wanna find out if it’s true though?
Denny: No! We don’t. It’s Dad’s car. Besides, we ain’t got time to…”
Me: Of course we wanna find out!
So, long story short, there is this big hill at the end of Lake Road that rolls you down into Greeley’s Landing, where the roller skating rink, the Marina, the little store, and the Municipal Beach are. Guess what the name of that hill is. Mile Hill. Mile Hill, because you can just roll downhill on it for a certified measured mile.
And only five minutes later we’d reached the crest of that Mile Hill, and had started heading down. Wayne shifted the Plymouth into neutral, and we felt gravity begin to take over, pulling us along. “Here we go,” said I, me in the co-pilot’s seat.
“This is not a good idea,” radioed Denny back there from the tail gunner’s turret.
I twisted the ignition key to the OFF position as we gradually began to build up speed in our silent dive toward the lake below. It was a quiet drive down, nothing but the sizzle of the tires on asphalt. It would take slightly over a full minute to reach the bottom, where the road levels off about a hundred yards before becoming the boat ramp. “God, I wonder what this one’ll be like!” I marveled. Houses and camps and trees were beginning to sail past us on both sides of the road at an accelerating rate. Wayne tapped on the brakes now and then so we didn’t get rolling so fast we’d end up in the lake.
When we could see the blue water up ahead, Wayne said, “OK. We’re pretty much here. Do your key thing.”
‘Roger Wilco,” I responded.
“I still don’t think this is a good idea!” Denny reported from the turret.
But I responded with, “Bombs away!” I twisted the key back to ON.
There was a split-second of held breaths in pure silence.
And then… HIROSHIMA!
The car was rocked by the most devastating detonation I’d ever experienced at that point of my life! And when I say “rocked,” I am not kidding! The car spasmed! And oh man, we’d definitely gotten our backfire alright! The backfire of the gods. The noise of the blast was a deafening assault, and then the continued roaring that followed was unbearable if not injurious. You. Couldn’t. Even. THINK!
Wayne hit the clutch and let the car roll to a stop off the side of the road. Then he put her in gear, and turned the key back to OFF, thank God. The roaring stopped. I suppose that brought silence, but for a minute or three the roaring in my skull still reverberated so loudly, you couldn’t have proved it by me. We just sat there for a while.
Finally, after we’d gotten our breathing under control, if not our heart rates, Wayne looked over at me and said, “Well, you’d better get out and check out how loose the muffler is, OK?”
“OK.”
Now here is a moment I will never forget as long as I live. Rather than get out, I just opened my door, hung my head and upper torso down off over the edge of the seat, bracing myself with my two hands in the gravel to keep from falling on my head. And took me a look-see. After a moment I pushed myself back up in onto the car seat again. I let out a long sigh. And then I said it.
“What muffler?”
Because nothing but jagged, smoking, metal shards dangled hellishly from both of the now-empty ends of the exhaust pipes that had once secured either end of the muffler firmly in its place. So. There was no muffler. Or… what remained OF the muffler lay strewn in a metal debris field spread over forty or fifty yards behind the rear bumper. An explosion of, for us at least, unimaginable force had blasted a steel muffler to smithereens!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Now two things I want to say at this point: (1) I have already admitted that I knew little, next to nothing really, of things automotive, so I had no way myself of technically understanding (let alone explaining) what had just occurred here; and (2) I’m worrying here that you, dear reader, might suspect me of using a little (or way too much) exaggeration in the hopes of over-dramatizing my description of what had just happened beneath Dad’s ’48 Plymouth. To try to make a pretty good story an even better story. I say this because if I were in your shoes, I think you would also find me leaning toward being the Doubting Thomas here about the way I’ve described this… happening.
So. If it please the court, I would like to enter into evidence my Exhibit A:
This incident occurred in, or around, 1960 as I’ve said. Much later (48 years later, to be exact), an essay appeared in a February 24th, 2008 syndicated weekly column of The Bangor Daily News. The column’s name was Click and Clack. Click and Clack were actually two brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, a couple of comics whose other field of expertise lay in their lifetime careers as a couple of automobile mechanics. People seeking automobile and general automotive related advice and answers to questions would write in with their queries to the Click and Clack Brothers. On the date of publication mentioned above, this particular column title jumped right out at me: “HERE’S HOW VEHICLES WITH CARBURETORS CAN MAKE ADOLESCENTS GRIN.” I saw this, and I suspected right away what this was going to be about and, sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed.
See, I’d been wondering off and on over the years just why the three of us experienced SUCH a thunderous explosion that afternoon instead of just a heftier little backfire. By reading this article, my question was answered with a single word: “carburetor.” As they explained, cars these days no longer have carburetors. They’re all fuel-injected now.
And they go on to explain one particular, pertinent fact about carburetors, along with including a funy little story of their own (please do yourself a favor and read it, for a chuckle). “When you turned the ignition key off in an old car, the carburetor would continue to allow gasoline to pour into the cylinders. That gasoline didn’t get combusted, because the spark plugs weren’t firing so it all got pushed out into the exhaust system where it basically just continued to sit there, waiting for something to happen. When you turned the ignition back on, that first spark would ignite not only the fuel in the cylinder, but all of the fuel sitting in the exhaust system, too. And, kaboom!”
So let’s apply that explanation to Dad’s unfortunate 1948 Plymouth’s muffler. OK. I switched off the ignition key. This allowed gasoline to begin pouring into the cylinders and beyond, unabated. Now with my Uncle Archie’s car, back when I was five, I switched the ignition OFF and then right back ON immediately, so whatever little gasoline had dribbled into the exhaust system just made a feisty little kaboom. But in Dad’s Plymouth, unbeknownst to us, we traveled a full frickin’ mile while gasoline was happily filling up the muffler and “waiting for something to happen.” Is it any wonder then that the damn thing blew itself all to hell when I turned the key back to ON? The only wonder is that it didn’t catch the car afire, that the fire didn’t engulf the whole car in an instant ball of flame and melt us like three marshmallows! Wow.
Once again I plead temporary and/or permanent stupidity.
And that just leaves the second part of the fireworks— namely, facing my dad later in the day. Stay tuned.
I know what you’re thinking. But, no, the above is not actually a training video for extraterrestrials on How to Pass As Human Prior to The Great Alien Invasion of Planet Earth. Instead this one is to teach MORONS (us Baby Boomers) How to Use the Telephone!
By the way, there are hundreds of similar, vintage black and white PSAs (public service announcements videos) on YouTube waiting to entertain you. They cover so many very important issues: “Dinner Etiquette”; “What Makes a Girl Popular”; “Your Doctor Is Your Friend”; “Your Kiss of Affection, the Germ of Infection”; “They Don’t Wear Labels: I’ve Got VD ”; “Let Asbestos Protect the Buildings on Your Farm”; “Beware of Homosexuals”; “How Much Affection?”; and “The Trouble With Women, to name a few.At the risk of sounding like some crude scrawl of grafitti on the inside wall of a phone booth (remember phone booths?): For a good time…search YouTube for “vintage PSA’s.”
In 1958, “Telephone Etiquette” was the name of an actual dumbass teaching unit we kids had to endure in junior high. That particular ‘adventure’ lasted for approximately two dumbass weeks— and dedicated dumbassedly to conforming our rambunctious juvenile behaviors around the family telephone to rigid, recognizably Stepford-Wives-like standards, a laughable goal for preadolescents. The unit included intensive emphasis on such rocket-science, hard-to-grasp concept as The Three Magic Phrases: “Please,” “Thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” Fortunately, since we apparently were a class of morons, there was this helpful video:
So… how did we, the rambunctious preadolescent little morons, fare in our unit on telephone etiquette? Not so well, considering the number of after school detentions that ensued, along with the delicious fact that, on one particular day, a police officer was summoned to make an appearance. Of course the number of detentions was pretty much maintaining the status quo throughout the school year with the teacher we had: Mrs. Bernice Sterling, a.k.a, “Bugsy.” The cop being called? That was a one-off.
Bugsy’s reputation spanned decades. For instance, when our school held its annual evening Open House, giving parents the opportunity to drop into the classroom after work and chat with our teachers about our progress or lack thereof, my dad who was a saint by the way, couldn’t muster up the courage to show up. Bugsy’d been one of his teachers way back when, and he was still terrified of her to that day.
Anyway, considering how we boys (not so much the girls) found it next to impossible to take many subjects seriously, this unit didn’t stand the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell. Like most other classes there was reading the assigned pages, taking notes, memorizing the do’s and don’t’s from various charts, and taking quizzes.
But then there was also those stupid ggiggle-worthy “exercises” we had to perform where everybody had to partner up— each couple taking its turn in the pair of empty chairs at the front of the room and each student, in turn, directed to simulate phoning his or her partner to demonstrate proper phone etiquette for a passing grade. Sometimes the play-acting called for you to make a personal call to a friend; sometimes it involved calling a potential employer to ask for a job application and interview, etc. Whatever.
The very process of partnering up had one obviously built-in classroom management problem. It was the teacher who selected who’d couple up with whom, supposedly at random, but invariably, to keep one class-clown from being seated with another class-clown (a sure-fire recipe for classroom havoc), she tended to pair one boy with one girl whenever possible. So just try to imagine the barbed gigglesand whispers and note-passings that this engendered, along with the cruel, Roman Coliseum embarrassment the shyest, non-popular, non-attractive girl or boy had to suffer right along with the future prom king or queen linked with them. The blackboard jungle.
Secondly, and most importantly, we boys honestly knew so much more than old Bugsy would ever know about the real world of telephone use in her lifetime! We were the frickin’ experts! So the very idea of me (or any of my pals) having to demonstrate how to conduct a proper telephone call with a close friend was so beyond laughable it wasn’t even funny.
Up until 3rd or 4th grade, my family didn’t even own a telephone. But my grandmother who lived in an apartment upstairs did. One of those big wooden boxes that looked like a large birdhouse mounted on the living room wall, with what looked like a large pair of bugged-out eyes installed across the top-front of the box. Those were actually a pair of rounded, metal bells that rang whenever a call was received. Then there was that little black cone for speaking into, mounted like some cartoonish puckered mouth below the ‘eyes.’ Also, hanging off the box’s left side, was the large chess-pawn-shaped receiver on a cord. And finally, the little metal crank installed on the right side of the box was used for generating electricity. All very steampunk.
Occasionally I would be allowed, under parental supervision, to make a “magic” call to Stevie Taylor, my main pal who lived down the street. But once I’d got the hang of it, I’d sometimes sneak upstairs by my own self when Nanny was out, give the little crank a few turns, take the receiver off the hook, and secretly listen in on what was supposedly private conversations neighbors of ours were having. See, Nanny’s phone was connected to some of our neighbors on what was then known as a party line. A private phone line was expensive, so most families opted for the cheaper party-line plan. There were at least four or five neighborhood neighbors’ phones sharing the line with Nanny’s. So when a call came in and rang in two ring bursts (ring-ring! pause ring-ring! pause, etc.) then all connected families would hear it and know that that call was for the Smith family; whereas if the call sounded with bursts of five rings (ring-ring-ring-ring-ring! pause) then that might designate the call was for Nanny, etc. And in a perfect world, only someone in the designated family would pick up the receiver. In a perfect world.
Guess what. The world is flawed. The party-line era was infamous for adults sneakily listening in on their neighbors’ phone conversations. I mean, all the time. It was the neighborhood sport of phone-tapping spies. A world of audio voyeurs.
One day while I was listening in on whomever, I accidentally positioned the hand-held receiver a little too close to the speaking cone. Guess what happened! SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Ear-deafening feedback! Thunderstruck, I dropped the receiver! Immediately the screech stopped, thank God! But I could hear tinny little far-away voices from the dangling receiver, one exclaiming, “What the HELL was THAT!?” and another saying, “I have no idea!” I carefully returned the receiver to its cradle, and crept back down the stairs with a guilty heart. Bur EUREKA! Serendipitously, I had discovered the magic of feedback, although I didn’t know the name at that point. Did I ever create telephone feedback again? On purpose? What do you think? Of course I did.
So, back then there was this old crone, Lottie with the whiskery old witch’s chin, who lived right across the street from us— a real ‘Mrs. Dubose’ straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird. And when I was just a toddler playing outside in the rain, she’d spy me standing in a puddle and what’d she do? She’d come a-running out onto her porch screaming like a banshee at me! “You get your shoes right out of that puddle, mister! Your father works hard all day long at keeping you kids in shoes and clothes, and look what you do! Just look at you! You should be ashamed of yourself! You should be beat with a hickory stick, you ungrateful little…!”
Well, I didn’t know what business of hers my shoes or my dad’s income was because… she wasn’t my mother. But I’d retreat sobbing and tracking water back into the fortress of my home anyway .
When I was a little older, she was being bothered by dogs pooping on her lawn and running wild through her flowerbeds. So she came over to our house one day and asked my dad to let her borrow my Red Ryder BB rifle. And damn it, Dad let her take it. And oh, didn’t it irk me to no end to see her riding shotgun over there day after day, slouched in her porch chair with my rifle laid across her lap like some stagecoach guard in a western cowboy movie,and taking occasional potshots at the bandits. And at least a couple of times I caught her taking aim at me while chasing a stray rubber ball that was rolling a little too close to her flowers. She was your basic hard, neighborhood, old bag, a force to be reckoned with, to be feared by little boys, salesmen, and canines. That hag deserved every damned egg teenagers ever pelted her house with over the years.
So anyway, whenever I’d tiptoe up to Nanny’s vacant apartment to while away some time listening to the neighbors gossiping on the party line, I’d give the phone a couple of cranks, quietly lift the receiver out of the cradle, sit back, and just play spy. But… whenever I’d hear that familiar, scratchy, Long John Silver’s voice of Lottie’s, I’d delight in drawing the receiver up to the mouthpiece and… then… SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Nanny finally got herself a rotary-dial telephone. So did everybody else in the neighborhood, including Lottie. So gone were my days of fun of being The Phantom Feedbacker of the Neighborhood Party Line. Because rotary phones cleverly mounted the receiver and transmitter forever apart at opposite ends of the barbell-shaped handset. (The manufacturers had found me out.)
I’d grown tired of listening to boring old ladies exchanging recipes and supposedly juicy gossip anyway. And meanwhile Lottie was maintaining her hard-earned reputation as the number-one, all-time, serial, neighborhood party-line eavesdropper ever. A legend. She’d become that ghostly shadow, always standing off to the side and just behind the lacy curtain that veiled the window in her front door. Sort of like that signature TV pencil sketch of Alfred Hitchcock at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Perpetually the eyes and the ears of the neighborhood. Only with a telephone handset glued to her ear.
So of course when you were speaking to someone/anyone on the phone, you knew you were being monitored, and would choose your words accordingly. However, one afternoon after school, I was on the phone with Steve Taylor and, I don’t know why but I was feeling extra-feisty. And suddenly, mid-conversation, I just blurted right out, “Be careful what you say, Stevie, ‘cause you just know that old bag Lottie across the street is listening to every doggone word we’re saying!”
“WELL I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW I’M DOING NOSUCHTHING!” Lottie blasted haughtily, and then bang! Gone. She’d hung up. Good ol’ Lottie. It made my day!
So anyway, “Feedback” was my first lesson learned in becoming a sophisticated telephone “operator.” But I learned another little phone trick just as serendipitously. I was older at this point, and using the rotary dial had become second nature to me. I was at somebody’s house and had to call home to leave a message for Mom. OK, Nanny’s upstairs phone number was 2197. Just four simple numbers. But being in a hurry, I screwed up, actually only dialing only 297.Quickly realizing my mistake, I hung up to do it again but before I could even pick the handset back up, the phone was ringing right in front of me. I automatically picked up and said, “Hello?” There was no answer. “Hello? Anybody there?” Nope. Just the dial tone. That was odd. But it had happened so instantaneously, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had somehow caused it. On a whim, I dialed 297 intentionally this time, and hung right up. Again, the phone rang. Again, no one there. What a curious thing. But by God, I had stumbled onto something! I tried it again. And yes: I could make my host’s phone ring at will. And already I was wondering, Would this work on another phone? Other… phones? On Nanny’s phone?
So at home I headed upstairs, dialed 297, and hung up. Yes! The phone rang! Nanny came out of the kitchen and lifted the handset to her ear. “Hello?” she said, “…Hello?” and then, “Well, that’s odd. I guess they hung up. Just a dial tone.” I was ecstatic. I really had discovered something! Something deliciously all mine! Something to make life just a little more interesting. And I alone seemed to be the only one in town who knew about it. In no time, I had pranked about a dozen people I knew.
Say I’m at a friend’s house, waiting for my buddy to come downstairs. His mom leaves the room. I get out of my chair, dial 297, hang up, and leap back into the chair again. Ring! Mom hurries back in, picks up the phone, says hello a couple of times, and says, “Well that’s funny. Just a dial tone.” I was controlling people. It gave me a sense of power. I even pulled that stunt on Merrick Square Market a few times. But I kept it just for myself. I didn’t share my… super power with any of my friends. For a long time. Finders, keepers you know. But of course I eventually did spill the beans. And then… phones were ringing all over Dover-Foxcroft, driving the population crazy. heh heh…
Oh, I’ve just gotta tell you this one. This one is rich:
It was December, Christmas time, and J. J. Newberry’s had a little sales gimmick going on that year— a Santa Claus hotline. Their Santa’s phone number was published in their Christmas flyers and advertised on the radio. Little rug rats were encouraged to call the hotline and talk to Santa, telling him what they wanted for Christmas. I, and a friend, saw a fun opportunity in this. We would call the hotline and, using our Academy Award winning babyish voices, mess with Santa’s mind. We were such little dicks. The prototypes of Beavis and Butthead.
But unfortunately for all concerned, there was a very, very similar number to the hotline’s that was getting a lot of calls by accidental misdialing. Word from other Beavis and Butthead prototypes had gotten around. Turned out, it was already widely known to whom that number belonged. It was a woman in town who was socking away a little Christmas money—you know, cash under the table— by entertaining ‘gentlemen callers’ at all hours of the night, if you get my drift. And word was, she was one angry dudette. Well, since we were a couple of the worst kind of little dinks, and due to the fact that there was no such thing as Caller ID, we didn’t have to be told twice.
A woman’s voice answered, “Hello?”
“Can I pweathe talk to ThantaCwauthe,” I said, with a child’s voice and a lisp, “cauthe I wanna tell him wha…”
“Goddamn you little shits all to hell! You got the wrong number. Again! Now this… has to stop, you dig? I can’t take this anymore. This, for your information, is a business phone! Not the Santa Claus number at Newberry’s, for Christ’s sake! And you’re tying up my goddamn line! Now… you just call the right number right now and you tell… your fat-ass Santa Claus… that J. J. Newberry’s is gonna get sued! For harassment! And if you’re stupid enough to call this number one more time, I’ll… track you down! I’ll find you and wring your little neck! You got that!?”
“Well… Mewwy Chwithmuth…” I said, but Bang! She’d hung up. Rather rudely, too. But I mean, holy crap, was that ever fun for two little pains in the ass like us! But, boy, did she ever sound scary. Still more fun than poking a hornet’s nest, though.
However, please don’t get the idea I was the only one being an obnoxious little brat with the telephone games. Because I’m here to tell you no, not by a long shot. So many extra Y-chromosome boys my age were also badass contemporaries in the same field. I mean junior high fellas? Bored and with nothing to do? And there was that telephone just sitting there, a toy waiting to be used and abused? Prank phone calls were a sport back then. A craze. And it wasn’t jjst kids, either. Look up “50’s phone pranks “on Google. You’ll see. Oh, and once again, you have to remember: no Caller ID.
There were some, the more creative ones like myself, who were experts at it; and then there were those mealy-mouthed amateurs, sheep basically, just following the pack and repeating what everybody else had been pranking since the caveman days. For instance, dialing a random convenience store number and asking, “Do you have Prince Albert in the can?” And then, if the answer is, “Why, yes, we do,” the low-life prankster/dilettante would shout, “Well… why don’t you let him out so he doesn’t suffocate?” before hanging up, falling on the floor laughing, and laughing himself sick.
*Prince Albert being the brand name of a popular pipe tobacco sold in either a soft package or a can
That prank, plus this other most common one, were so overused.“Hello. This is General Electric calling. Is your refrigerator running?” and of course the response to a “Yes” would be, “Well, why don’t you run after it and catch it?” Yeah. Two of the most boring tropes of the 50s. I know, sad, right? Audio memes.
My cousin and I preferred the more interactive scenarios like this one, especially effective when you got a little old lady on the line:
Prankee: “Hello?”
Pranker: (In a low, adult-sounding voice) “Good morning, Ma’am. I’m a representative of the Bell Telephone Company.”
Prankee: “Oh? How can I help you?”
Pranker: “Well ma’am. We’re going through the town today, house by customer house, cleaning out all the phone lines. If you happen to have a paper bag handy, that would be a big help.”
Prankee: “Oh. Actually I do believe I have some paper bags in the cupboard. All right. I’ll get one and be right back.”
Pranker: “Thanks, ma’am. I’ll wait right here.”
Prankee: (heavy paper rustling) “I’m back. And I do have a bag. What do I do with it?”
Prankee: Please pull the bag right over your telephone handset, then wrap the bag up tightly and hold it firmly. But be especially sure to look away. We blow the dust out of the lines with our heavy-duty power blower, and we don’t to get dust all over your floor or, especially, in your eyes. Let us know when you’re ready.”
Prankee: (really loud paper rustling) (Prankee’s voice sounding fainter now under the rustling) “OK. I think I’m ready…”
Pranker: “OK. Hang on tight!” (Pranker, making a loud, drawn-out, high-pitched WOOOOOOOWEEEEEeeeee! with puckered mouth.) “OK. Ma’am. We’re done. The Bell Telephone Company thanks you for your cooperation in this matter.”
Prankee: “Okey-dokey!” (loud paper rustling) “Ummmm. There doesn’t seem to be any dust in my bag, though…”
Pranker: “Well done. We commend you on your neat housekeeping, ma’am. And thank you again.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Mostly my cousin and I were really just trying to harmlessly amuse ourselves. One time, for whatever reason, we decided we’d conduct an important-sounding survey by calling 30 or so totally random numbers to find out which opera was Dover-Foxcroft’s favorite. Both of us having been brought up pretty much on Mad Magazines (“What, me worry? I read Mad”), I’m guessing that played a part in our play-acting choices. Neither of us knew anything at all about opera, however, other than “The Barber of Seville” soundtrack that accompanied our favorite Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd cartoon. “The Rabbit of Seville”.
Our survey was conducted over the weekend. We kept stats in a notebook. We were all about the stats. Many contacted, like ourselves, had no real idea about operas. But quite a few took us fairly seriously. All I really remember is that Madame Butterfly took 1st place, and The Barber of Seville got a few mentions, as did The Flower Drum Song.
See, we did things like this when there were no Medusa-like distractions like computers and cell phones to turn us into motionless, dead stone.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK, back to Bugsy’s class unit on Telephone Etiquette…
The two weeks seemed to me such a ridiculous, ho-hum waste of time. However, on the very final day of the unit, things suddenly got pretty tense, and we all found ourselves perking right up. What was happening is that Bugsy had begun to push the class discussion into darker waters. She’d begun shifting the focus to the dire consequences of some very particularimproper uses of the telephone. Namely, the evil little practices by some children (why, not us, of course) misusing the telephone in malicious ways. In fact it turned out that what she was getting at, what she was beginning to poke her nosy old nose into, was none other than the misuse of the telephone by willfully committing the unimaginable and heinous crime of (oh my!) phonepranks!
“Yes, obviously some of you, if not all, have heard about thesee thoughtless telephone pranks, and the harm can cause. The mischievous calling of random numbers, the tricking of innocent victims into believing their caller is someone other than who he really is. Perhaps some of your families have even been the victims of such telephone abuse… or know of someone who has been.”
“Yes!” piped up one of the dumb-bunnyest, most brown-nosing girls in our class. “That happened at our place just last month!” Some of the other girls were nodding vigorously in support. Girls! Jeez!
But yikes. I had hardly expected that particular can of worms to be torn open in this class. And by the most feared teacher on the planet. Here I’d been assuming it was all going to be nothing but the namby-pamby, goody-two-shoes, golden rules we should all follow. But no. Apparently not. Where was she going with this? Did she… Did she know something? I mean, hey…
Like some hardened Alcatraz inmate, I surreptitiously allowed my gaze to secretly travel around the room, gauging the reactions of my fellow miscreants in attendance who, in turn, were surreptitiously gauging mine. Each of us felons had by now assumed the mask, the bland, know-nothing, poker face. You’ve heard of the Cosa Nostra, the Italian phrase that once referred to the Mafia and which translates literally to “our thing?” Meaning “our secret thing.”
“What many of these so-called pranksters don’t realize is that several instances of prank phone calls fall under the auspices of… criminal behavior.” Somebody somewhere at the back of the class giggled. “Punishable criminal behavior at that!” she added. Giggling a high-pitched giggle like some little girl. Only it didn’t quite sound like a girl.
“Yes, Arthur?” asked Mrs. Sterling suddenly in her sternest voice. She was never one who liked being interrupted.
Along with most of the other kids, I cranked my head around for a look-see over my shoulder. And there he was, the fool. Little Artie Buck. Grinning. Squirming in his seat like he had to go to the bathroom. Arm waving high in the air signaling pick me, pick me! Oh, he had something he was just dying to share with the class.
Down went the arm. “OK. So…” he began, almost delirious with remembered joy, “…this one time…? I dialed this number. You know, just for fun?”
What in the world…? The class and Bugsy waited silently while he gathered his witless thoughts. Me thinking, Artie, what the heck do you think you’re DOING!?
“Well, anyway,” he began again, “see, this lady answered.” He was having such a hard time containing himself, overcome as he was by his autonomic giggling system. But oh, he just couldn’t wait to get his wonderful story out of his mouth, so he forged on. “And so I said, ‘Is Frank Walls there?’ And she said, ‘No. I think you have the wrong number.’ ” Then the giggles overtook him once again for a moment before he could go on. But finally: “So I said to her, ‘Then is Pete Walls there?’ And she said, ‘No.’ So then I said, ‘Are there any Walls there at all, then?’ and when she said, ‘No’ to that…” hee-hee-hee “…I asked her…’” and here he really had to contend with one final meltdown of his own hilarity, “ ‘Then… what’s holding up your roof?’ ”
Artie had finished. And he was looking all around the room expectantly. Waiting for the gales of laughter. But the room had gone so electrically silent you could have heard a dust mote touch down softly on the floor! Every student was frozen stock still. How could Artie have done this to himself? we were asking ourselves. From the look of sudden terror that flashed across his face, that’s what he was suddenly wondering as well. How could he have just forgotten where he was? In the dragon’s lair! Was he just stupid? Or mental? Or both?
Bugsy’s lizard eyes had locked onto Artie’s beating, little bunny-rabbit heart like a pair of talons. She cruelly allowed the silence to go on for too long a time while the clock ticked. And then she said it. It was an Hercule Poirot moment!
“So… that was YOU!”
The class gasped as one! No! Oh my word! Just imagine! Oh my! What are the chances of…?
We watched as Bugsy marched the condemned off to the principal’s office by the ear, leaving us jaw-dropped and utterly rocked. And alone. By ourselves for once. Everyone equally shocked. Some of us, of course, were secretly relieved. It hadn’t been US. It had been Artie.
Time went by. We’d obviously been forgotten. We all gathered at the window when the patrol car pulled up outside in the faculty parking lot.
We never did find out exactly what happened to him. He wouldn’t talk about it. Whatever it was, it must’ve been bad.
In retrospect, maybe they’d sat him down in front of a movie screen and made him watch a number of black and white public service announcement films on how… Crime Doesn’t Pay.
THE TELEPHONE PRANK– A GATEWAY DRUG TO OVERDUE BOOKS AND REEFER !!
NEARING THE END OF THE LINE 