My “Come on Baby, Light My Fire ” story took place in 1957. Twenty-three years later, in 1980 and at age 34, I moved back to my hometown of Dover-Foxcroft, and was happy to do so. This little hamlet felt so much safer after where I’d been living over the last eleven years. And upon my return, I was overcome by wonderful waves of nostalgia. I found myself taking several little sentimental journeys on foot, re-visiting all my old childhood haunts: the home I’d grown up in as a child, the playgrounds, the river, the old Indian cave, the municipal beach at the lake, the camp and, of course, the old drug store. It all felt so Ray Bradbury-ish, if you know what I mean.
And of course I was surprised and delighted to find Beryl, pleasant as ever, and still working behind a drug store lunch counter. The catching up we did was so therapeutic for me. She wanted to know all about where I’d been and what I’d been up to all that time. And likewise, I wanted to know about the happenings and whereabouts of her co-workers from way back then, about the town in general, and what had been going on in her life as well.
But of course finally, we came to one thing I was really itching to find out…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“But enough about all that, Beryl. There’s a question I’m dying to ask you.”
“What’s that, Tommy?”
Tommy. Now boy, didn’t that make me grin. I’d been called a lot of things over the last two or three decades, but I know I’m back home again when I get to answer to “Tommy.”
“Something that’s been bugging me for years, actually,” I say. “And as many times as I’ve told and re-told the old story, there’s always that one, nagging, little piece-of-the-puzzle missing. So, here it is.
“Just what, exactly, was… the ‘Hot Shot?’”
She blinks, tips her head to one side. “I’m sorry, Tommy. I guess I don’t know what…”
“Oh, sure you do, Beryl. Of course you do. Just think back now… all of us little boys and girls crowding around the counter for ice cream sodas, cherry Cokes, and root beer fuzzies? Oh, and Zombies? You remember the Zombies don’t you…?”
“Oh. Well sure, of course I remember the Zombies, but…” Then she blinks once again, and I can see that flash of recognition. A frown forms. “Well, I guess I’d almost forgotten all about… those… ‘hot shots.’” Her expression implies that she’d rather not remember. But she can’t help it of course. Now that I’ve gother seat-belted securely into the Wayback Machine, and we’retravelling on our way back to… the “Hot Shot” days of yesteryear…
“OK,” she finally says, “first and foremost, I have to say it was the owner’s idea, definitely not mine. I didn’t like it. At all. But he, and the pharmacist, got really fascinated by how you boys would do practically anything to get attention. Attention from us. Attention from the girls. And they got to talking about just how far you’d all go. Giggling over there behind the pharmacy counter like a couple of little ten year olds themselves. Then they devised their little plan for their own warped entertainment. I’m not sure, but I think there might have been a wager involved. Anyway, I don’t believe they ever expected it to catch on the way it did, though. But Tommy, you need to know I was against it from the start.”
“That’s the way I seem to remember it, Beryl. You, never being too keen on the whole thing. And that I had to practically twist your arm to let me have it. And don’t think I don’t appreciate that in retrospect, Beryl. I do. But wow, it never ever occurred to me that we were being watched by a couple pairs of eyes peeking out from over the pharmacy counter. I mean, all you could ever see of them was just their heads. I never even thought to wonder who came up with it. I’m really surprised. All I knew is, it was just something going on there at the drug store. It was just there. It was part of the scene, and I desperately wanted to be part of That. I was such a brainless little sheep back then.”
“Believe me. You were far from the only one. But mostly it was the high school boys. And that was bad enough. But when you jumped into line… oh, I really didn’t like that one bit. But… there you have it I guess.”
“Well, yes and no. I mean, that only explains the why and the how. What I’m a lot more curious about is the what. Like, you know. I mean, just what the heck was that stuff, anyway? Battery acid? Sterno? I’ve been wondering about that for years. So…?”
“OK. It was a pure distillate of hot chile pepper concentrate.”
“What? What!? Wow! Holy cow! Ouch!”
“Yes, I know.”
“But why in the world would a drug store have something like… hot pepperconcentrate on the shelves??”
“Well, not so much on the shelves. Not back then. It was kept back there, behind the pharmacy counter.”
“OK. But why? What the heck would something like that be used for?”
Pain management. It’s used as a counter irritant.”
“Counter irritant?”
“Yes. something you can rub in over a sore muscle. Or an arthritic joint. You see, the burning sensation on the skin is so intense, it temporarily cancels out the nerve pain going on down beneath it. The actual name for it is capsaicin.”
“Capsaicin. So, that’s like, what, when I’ve got a bad headache or something, and I could just slam my fingers in a door? Which would hurt so bad, wouldn’t feel my headache?”
“Something like that. At least… that’s the general principle, only a lot more complicated.”
“A counter irritant, huh? But that sounds like you’re just temporarily trading one pain for another.”
“Yes, but it’s only for temporary relief. It’s complicated.”
“Well, it wouldn’t end up being so temporary if you slammed your hand in a door.”
“No, it wouldn’t. But I don’t think you’ll find anybody recommending crushing your fingers for pain management, either.”
“Well, couldn’t you just put capsaicin on your fingers afterwards then…? I’m joking.”
“Like I said, only for temporary relief.”
“All right. But wow, even to this day I can’t get over (A) how badly it burned, and (B) for how long the burning lasted. It certainly didn’t strike me as very temporary. But… yeah, time is relative.”
“The mucous membranes are particularly sensitive to it. And they readily absorb the capsaisin, hold onto it, making it last for a longer duration. And it really is especially painful to the mouth, nasal passages, and the eyes. Compared to just being rubbed onto the skin of your arm, say, which is painful enough.”
“I’d say. From what I can remember. Wow. ”
“But you know, it is sold on the general shelves these days. No prescription needed.”
“Well, I didn’t know that. Pain to kill pain. Who’d a-thunk it? Butl yeah. Fighting fire with fire, I guess.”
“Sure. That, yes. And also for self-defense.”
“I’m sorry. I beg your pardon…?”
“In those handy little aerosol cans? Called pepper spray?”
“Omigod!Pepper spray?”
“Yes. I’m sure you know how effective pepper spray can be. At warding off attackers?”
“Wait. So… are you saying…that I… willfully swallowed… pepper spray!?”
“Why do you think you took off flying around the store like a rocket on the Fourth of July?”
“So… oh my God! I always suspected I wasn’t too bright for my age, as a kid. But now you’re telling me… I mean, jeez, what kind of a dummy was I back then? Hey guy, check this out. If you’ll watch me lap up a spoonful of pepper spray, I’ll pay you twenty-five cents for your effort. But thatmuch of a dummy!”
“You only had about four drops of it.”
“Oh, which was enough, it was plenty, I can assure you!”
“And which, don’t forget… it was against my better judgement. Despite all my repeated warnings.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
This is a true story. It really happened. Even the conversation-heavy epilogue above, if not quite word-for-word, is close enough to win a cigar, in my humble opinion. And if youfind the anecdote somewhat shocking and somewhat mean-spirited, then know this: so do I. But only by today’s standards, that is. Because here’s the thing : I didn’t then. I can laugh at it today. Yeah, even if I got one hell of a burned mouth out of it. See, the world that I, and my generation, lived in 65 years ago was another planet. A planet with its own constantly developing standards. Its own level of knowledge. Its own mores. Just like the world we’re living in today.
It’s as simple as this— No matter what year or decade you live in, there you are…
I’ve got this… thing about brains. No, not in the zombie way. But I’m just hung up on the very essence of the phenomenon we call the brain. For me, the human brain is an unimaginable, alluring mystery, totally worthy of pondering. So yeah, I think about the brain. Not all the time, but a lot. I read about the brain off and on.. And I often find myself writing about it. Hell, I’m setting out to write about it right here and now.
But being ‘only an English major’ I’m scientifically handicapped, aren’t I— way over my head in deep waters. No Bill Nye the Science Guy, me. I know that. But still, I just can’t seem to get myself past marveling at how you, I, and Bill Nye the Science Guy are totally reliant, for everything, on what appears to be nothing more than an approximately seven-by-three-by-four-inch “walnut”-shaped lump of Silly Putty nestled in our brain pans like some inert loaf of bread. And… that this lump is universally hailed by the entire civilized modern world to be the best damn Central Processing Unit and hard drive combo in the known universe, bar none. I mean, that just… boggles the brain. Yes, I’m incapable of anything more than writing odes to the human brain, inexpertly philosophizing about it, or asking the for-me-elusive-and-unanswerable cosmic questions about how this organ manages to do what it does. So this little essay is bound to end up just being another essay paying homage to the walnut-shaped lump.
Now wait! Don’t you go walking away telling me that, sure, the brain’s important and everything, but it sure as heck ain’t interesting! Are you kidding me? Interesting? Why, the brain is fascinating six ways from Sunday! And I’m betting I can prove that with just two freakin’ examples.
Example #1: Ever hear of Phineas P. Gage (1823-1860)? The man who did more for the science of brain surgery and neuro-studies than any man alive today?
Now hear me out. He wasn’t any white-coated scientist or doctor. So what was he? I’ll tell you what he was. Phineas was a common laborer who blasted out rail beds with explosives for a living. And I don’t know if he was a loser or not, but he certainly didn’t have enough brains to know you gotta be pretty darn careful when you’re tamping down blasting fuses into black-powder-packed holes with a thirteen pound crowbar! On September 13th (13 being the unlucky number here), 1848, he was working for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad up in Cavendish, Vermont. He was whanging that crowbar into the rocks when a spark launched it like a Chines fireworks rocket right up through the side of his face and out the top of his skull, landing with a clatter on a granite slope some eighty feet away. And after the echoes died away and the smoke cleared, there sat old Phineas, conscious and as aware as any of the crew.
And he could still talk. And the next thing you know, he was walking back to the wagon that would convey him back to his lodgings in town where he would confound a physician brought to examine him. Yes, Phineas Gage who by all accounts should have dropped dead on the spot but instead went stubbornly on about the business of living minute by minute; then hour by hour; eventually a whole day; and after that a day at a time… tor twelve years! Yes, a frontal lobe partially lost and a ghastly fame won, our hapless survivor of “The American Crowbar Case,” as it came to be called, entered into the Annals of Science and Medicine as Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient, the individual who single-handedly contributed more than any other earthly soul to research regarding how specific regions of the human brain control personality and behavior , giving the big green light to decades of experimental lobotomies, all the way up through One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…and beyond.
Example #2: Would you believe me if I told you that there was once a famous case of somebody’s brain being kidnapped? Perhaps you have. If you haven’t, you may think I’m joking, or misinformed. I have to admit it does sound like something right out of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein… if not Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. But no, it’s true. And guess whose brain it was. Albert Einstein’s! It’s true. Einstein’s brain was stolen shortly after the autopsy was performed on his body right after his death in 1955? And you needn’t take my word for it. Just look up “Einstein’s Stolen Brain” on Google and you’ll get many links to articles and documentaries on the subject from a number of immaculately credible sources.
Or… why not simply sit back, relax, and enjoy this 3+ minute tutorial about it I’ve just borrowed from YouTube:
I can’t help but wish I were sufficiently brainy to be part of a scientific medical team that might get the opportunity to scrutinize the leftover fragments of what is allegedly the most ingenious brain in human history. I mean, just try to imagine for a minute all the recorded thoughts, ideas, memories, events, scientific formulae, facts, opinions, experiments, theories, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations that once resided (in biological ones and zeroes) in the brain with the I.Q. that was off the charts.
By contrast, most of us humbly presume that our cranial databases consisting of phone numbers, lottery numbers, computer passwords, favorite memorized song lyrics, movie quotes, baseball stats, family birthdays, and future calendar events that we’ve got socked away “upstairs” don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the Famed Physicist’s. But hold on. Not so fast…
Sure, Einstein’s brain probably is by far the Rolls-Royce of Gray Matter, but on a sliding scale? I contend that mine and yours are nothing less than a pair of shiny, brand-new Cadillac Coupe DeVilles. Because whatever the damn thing is that we’ve got sitting up there under the hood actually is… it’s constantly at work soaking up data like a cosmic sponge from every single thing our eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and fingertips come into contact with. 24/7. From day one (the birthday) until this microsecond. If you ask me, that’s one damn fine, unbelievably busy, multitasking piece of hardware.
And it’s said that under hypnosis, a subject can recall lists of long-forgotten birthday presents she/he received at any age. I mean, how’s that for a universe-class computer?
Mine’s a 1946 model. And like the old Timex watch commercials of the 50s and 60s, it’s taken a licking and kept on ticking. I just did the math, and I find that I’ve been drawing breaths for approximately 42,000,000 minutes give or take, in my lifetime. And that’s only so far. So, I’m getting pretty decent mileage.
And here’s a thought: just imagine hooking up a printer to your brain and commanding it to print out your brain’s entire stored cache from birth. Whattaya think that would look like, hmmm? I’m betting you could tape all the pages together and string’em to the sun and back.
Anyway— in my very first blog post, “Unstuck In time With Billy Pilgrim,” (posted about 24,500 minutes ago) I shared about how so many of my very-long-ago-forgotten childhood memories keep surprising me, just popping up randomly, unbidden and unexpected, into my conscious thoughts. And that’s in stunning detail to boot. The memory I kicked this blog off with was a particular one of when I was four years old, at a family reunion in the early 50’s up in northern Maine. I wonder how many megabytes that little stored event takes up in my skull. I’ll never know. And if I had to guess, I’d speculate that the total data capacity of the human brain is measurable only on yottabytes. Two minutes ago I didn’t know what a yottabyte was. But then I googled “What unit comes after terabyte?” The answer on my screen read “After terabyte comes petabyte. Next is exabyte, then zettabyte and yottabyte.” It turns out that a yottabyte is equal to one septillion, or a 1 followed by 24 zeroes. And honestly, that explanation goes right over my head. I can’t fathom it. A shame we’re not allowed to use the full 100% of our brain’s capacity.
Regardless of that, when I die… there goes my four year old’s family reunion memory.
And there are maybe gigabytes of others. And since I’m wallowing in the plethora of memories that are doomed to die of with my passing, lemme share another sample just for fun, one more specific, little, neural-ones-and-zeroes anecdote that’ll be rolling right along in the hearse with me on the way to the drive-by crematorium someday soon. And perhaps this one will further cause you to reflect on the gems you’ve got stored in that yottabyte treasure chest of yours. Think about all the currently out-of-sight, out-of-mind memories, which are endless, that you’ll be taking with you when your time comes.
So go ahead. Meditate a little. And take yourself a little stroll down your memory lane on a sentimental (and in many cases not so sentimental) journey. And surprise! See what might pop up.
OK. Once upon a time, boys and girls… back in the twentieth century…
OK. See, I have this kid brother. Twelve years younger than me. He’s an engineer. And after high school he enrolled in a Boston engineering college. I know that I, along with the rest of our redneck immediate family, worried needlessly about him leaving our safe, one-horse town environment to venture into the great, who-knows-what of…The City. But he flourished there. And upon graduating with his degree, he was immediately snatched up by a large technological firm and settled down in large housing development in a nearby suburb.
One day shortly thereafter, he telephoned us to relate the shocking news that in his absence someone, or more likely someones, had broken into his new apartment and stolen practically everything but the kitchen sink. Including his trash! (He figured they’d pretended to be transfer station employees and had unnoticeably taken their spoils in trash bags along with them out to the getaway truck.) We were horrified. So immediately my wife and I traveled down to his emptied-out pad to give him some familial love and whatever support we could muster. Late that morning however, we found him in good spirits, taking everything in stride. A lot better than I would have. He assured us that his was, in fact, not a bad or dangerous neighborhood, not really. And we were like… Oh, really?
Anyway, that afternoon we spent some time enjoying the horse races at the old Rockingham Park, dined out that evening, and eventually went to bed. I say bed. Phyllis and I slept comfortably on the living room floor. (Ah, to be young again.) I’m not sure, but I’m thinking The Beagle Boys left my brother his bed. Too large and difficult, probably, to smuggle out in a standard-size trash bag.
But then, sometime in the middle of the night, Phyllis and I were rudely awakened not only by the number of voices muttering just outside the apartment’s front door, but by the disturbing, pulsating, red, blue, and amber lights bleeding through the slats of the picture window’s Venetian blinds. Close Encounters of the Third Kind came immediately to mind. “I’m going out there,” I told Phyllis as I yanked on my jeans. I mean, if there was a ufo landing out there, I’d be damned if I were going to miss out on it.
So I cautiously cracked the door open and slipped out into the coolness of the summer night. There was a large crowd standing stock still on the front lawn, facing away from me and at the three or four strobing police cars, the firetruck, and the ambulance. I sidled in amid the rear of that crowd. I remember looking behind me and spying Phyl’s worried pale face watching me from beneath the lifted blinds.
It took me a few moments to take in all that I was seeing, especially the dreamlike little drama going on at the front end of one particular patrol car. Two cops were down on their knees, flashlights in hand. Curiously, they were peering straight in under the front end of the vehicle. And repeating something over and over. “Come on. Come on out from under there. Now!”
I was thinking, Out from under there? Out from under where? Under what, the patrol car? What would somebody be doing under a frickin’ patrol car? This just didn’t sound good. At all. And talk about eerie. In the frozen, hushed silence, this had all the makings of a bad fever dream.
I began looking around, surveying the lay of the land. The first thing I couldn’t help but notice were the tire tracks in the lawn. A vehicle had obviously come rounding the corner of our building to my left and driven this way, toward the parking lot in front of me, straight across the immaculately mowed lawn. And judging from the six- or seven-inch-deep tire tracks in the grass, and the gouts of mud and grass clumps spun all over the place, this vehicle hadn’t just been going fast, it had been accelerating! My eyes followed the tracks to where they morphed into a pair of black rubber smears on the asphalt of the lot.
“I said… come out of there. NOW!”
Also, a long chain of heavy iron links lay like a rope on that asphalt. Attached to the chain, spaced at intervals, were the uprooted poles that once held the links up as a barrier to vehicles, a fence if you will. Said car had plowed right through said chain link fence, for crying out loud.
“Hey! I’m serious, Mister! Come out!”
I returned my gaze to the tableau before us, as much as I could make out of it between the backs and heads of the witnesses in front. Of course, some of the backs and heads belonged to uniformed police officers. And there were several of them at this scene. I turned to my right and discovered I was standing next to a towering, black, muscled god of a man. I craned my neck up to speak to him and spoke very softly in the silence. “So, uhmmm… what… exactly… happened here?”
He looked down upon my pathetically inquisitive face. “They run him down,” he said. “They. Jus’. Run. Him.Down.”
Now, he didn’t voice that very loudly, but in the solemn quietness it was loud enough that three cops with stern glares immediately snapped their heads back around to see who had just spoken those very accusatory sounding words.
And me? Just like that old Kenny Rogers’ line? You’ve got to “know when to walk away… know when to run.” I executed a smart about-face and scampered back into the apartment with my tail between my legs!
Next morning when my brother, finally awake, stepped out of the bedroom, I hada coffee waiting for him. I’d just purchased the coffee at a convenience store a block away from the apartments, since the coffee maker had gone missing with the stereo, furniture, etc. But the real reason I had gone to the convenience store was to see if I could find out any information as to what had really gone down in the night before.
“So,” I said to my brother, “you like this neighborhood, do you?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Pretty much.”
“You feel safe here.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, I’ll tell you what. take the coffee outside. I gotta show you something.”
Out front in the sunlight now, you couldn’t possibly miss the egregious in-your-face evidence. The lawn was torn up a lot more than I’d been able to notice the night before. It was obvious now that the squad car had been gunning it fast and hard, practically all the way around one side of the whole building complex. Likewise, a much greater length of the uprooted chain fence lay snaked along the edge of the lawn.
According to the convenience store proprietor, the perp had tried unsuccessfully to break into one of the apartments during the day, while the three of us had been spending the afternoon at Rockingham Park. Somebody had caught him in the act, chased him away, and called the police. The cops had apparently decided to keep an eye on the complex and, in fact, had been surveilling the scene of the crime when the perp had actually returned. A chase had ensued, ending up with the perp being apprehended and scoring a free ambulance ride to a local hospital.
Before heading back for home, I asked my brother to send me any more information he could glean about the incident to me because… well, enquiring minds want to know, don’t they. So a week later, this news clipping arrived in the mail:
So. How important is this little incident in the larger scheme of things? Well, despite the fact that I thought it was pretty cool, it’s of no importance whatsoever. Unless you were the perp, of course, whose first name turned out to be Paul. Or some of the cops who ran over and arrested him to the tune of “Bad boys, bad boys. Whatchoo gonna do? Whatchoo gonna do when they come for you?” Oh yeah, and unless you were me, who got a really cool, momentary adrenaline rush from it, something I live for in this otherwise boring world.
But… see, when I die, this little recorded event goes straight down the tubes with me, both of us taking that long Green Mile ride to our local, drive-by crematorium. (Well, except now that I’ve shared it with you.) so for the time being it’s also temporarily nesting like a little egg among your brain cells, too.)
Now, look around. Look at all the people. The people you know. The people you don’t know. The gazillions and gazillions of people you can’t see, those that have lived on this earth since time immemorial and have long since passed. All those brains. Carrying what? Knowledge, that’s what. Valuable experience. Unspoken death-bed confessions. The key to Rebecca. The answer to what’s buried on Oak Island, if anything.
So having pondered what may have gone down the drain with Albert Einstein, whattaya suppose Janis Joplin’s brain took with her? Or Mickey Mantle’s? How about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s? Muhammed Ali’s? Elvis Presley’s? Johnny Carson’s? Leonard Cohen’s? Genghis Kahn’s? Charles Bukowski’s? Your buddy, Joe Six-pack’s? And what other odd jumble of things have you amassed in your hippocampus?
I think of all the zillions of important and unimportant brain records that get flushed down the toilet of death, millions and millions of times every week. How about you? Have you ever had these thoughts about… the brain?
Did I mention that I’m kinda obsessed with the human brain…? I think I did.
In ALTERED STATES I, I described the effects that Percodan (Oxycodone) had on my… “sense of humor,” I guess you could call it. To keep from making a too long story even longer, I’d chosen to skip right over the early morning of that operation. So in this post, I’m backing up the clock to fill in that little gap.
Never having had any surgery other than the tonsillectomy at the time, I was of course nervous beyond nervousness. A day earlier I’d become violently ill while being wheeled down en route to radiology for a myelogram. (Myelogram? Think spinal tap) (no, not Spinal Tap the movie, just spinal tap the needle in the spine.) With no time for even a quick explanation to my gurney pilot, I swung myself down onto the floor and limpingly ran away down the hall. I ended up plunging head first into a ladies bathroom and, already making quite a mess of myself and everything around me, fell onto my knees before the porcelain throne and finished the job, all the while hearing the overhead speakers out in the hall issuing an all-points bulletin for the runaway patient on the first floor.
I turned myself in. And because it was obvious to anyone looking at my soiled johnny that I had blown my lunch, I had nothing to prove. So… I got wheeled back up to the 6th floor, cleaned up, and put back to bed. My doctors were informed that I‘d been diagnosed with a case of the flu, so my procedures would have to be rescheduled for the following day, depending on the state of my health. I was ecstatic. Yes, it was only putting off the inevitable. And yes, I’m such a shallow person I was celebrating my reprieve like Catch-22’s Yossarian when a bombing mission had gotten scrubbed. Anyway, the delay gave me some time to talk to my roomie about what my operation would be like.
He however was hung up and dwelling on is how fast the knock-out anesthesia worked. “It was instantaneous almost! Like that!” he said with a finger-snap. “One minute you see the needle entering skin and then… whoa, lights out. And then suddenly you’re coming to in the recovery room, you know?” I enjoyed hearing about how quickly you’d go unconscious. Even though on the other hand that sounded just a little too much like dying by lethal injection at San Quentin, for my liking.
But on the other hand, it was… interesting, I had to admit that. And my brain had already started started chewing on this information, because I was desperate, wasn’t I. Needing something that would take my conscious mind off what was coming and keep it off, right up until the final moment. The proverbial bullet to clamp between my teeth, anything at all to take my mind off the buzz saw that was waiting for me over at the other end of the lumber mill.
Alright, here comes a silly thing. I had always wanted to be a writer. Not just a writer, but a successful one, a Steinbeck or a Hemingway, you know? And no, it wasn’t the lure of money. It was the great and overwhelming respect and esteem I’ve always felt for the Great Writers. They were my superheroes, just as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry had once been. It was a foolish thing but… see, I hadn’t figured that out yet, had I. And I wanted in, I wanted to belong to that fraternity/sorority. So consequently, I’d been scribbling my life away, jotting down great ideas on everything from diner napkins and to the back of my hand in a fix. And what had I accomplished thus far? Zilch. Absolutely nada. Well, nada and a gigantic pile of used notebook paper and diner napkins.
Why? Because I just couldn’t do it. No matter how I tried. I didn’t have the talent or the stamina it takes. And apparently with my little, small-time, one-horse-town life, I didn’t have anything to write about anyway. But back then, I was still looking. Looking, looking, always looking for inspiration and some usable material. Any material. And listening to my roommate, it occurred to me that I should take really good mental notes when I got the magic injection and went bye-bye. For The Great Book I was sure I was gonna write someday, who knows, I just might need to include a scene of someone getting anesthetized. My own experience would be an invaluable resource. So I began right away, imagining what it might be like, imagining what it might not be like, already preparing my mind to try to stay sharp right up to the end. If nothing more, at least it would be something to keep myself distracted, to keep my fear tamped down inside until this whole operation thing was over and done with.
Next morning, the big moment finally arrived with some guy in scrubs pushing a gurney into our room. I got manipulated onto it and then settled myself down for “the ride” (think The Green Mile, even though that book wouldn’t be getting published for a couple of decades hence). The P.A., or whatever he was, informed me he was going to give me a little muscle relaxant before we embarked. (Probably to keep me from leaping off the gurney if I got sick this time, such being my reputation after the day before.) I was expecting it to be in the form of a muscle relaxant pill but, no, he proceeded to lift the hem of my jonnie and with a syringe, inject me in the hip instead. No biggie. Didn’t hurt that much. Not as much as the Roman Centurion’s spear probably hurt Jesus when he slipped it into his side anyway.
Before leaving, I checked my watch. I wanted to have at least a pretty accurate idea for the record about how long I’d end up being under. “You need to take that watch off,” he told me. I wasn’t too happy about that but then, “Off we go,” he said, and it was off to the elevator with me and down about a mile of first floor hallway with Leonard Cohen’s sepulchral bass intoning “The Sisters of Mercy” in my head the whole way, as I watched the river of ceiling tiles passing overhead. OK, I’ve been told I’m a little overly dramatic at times and that may be true, but I was terrified, you know? And besides that, I honestly wasn’t all that entirely sure I was ever even going to wake up from the ordeal. I mean, I was totally a fresh-fish newbie at this business.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So. The guy parks me in the hall outside the O.R. and leaves…
OK, to my left is a large plate-glass window looking off into the very well-lit operating room. From my low-level position on the gurney, I can make out the gathering of powder-blue-gowned entities surrounding and hunched over what has to be the operating table. I can’t see the patient, but I’m well aware that I’m due to be next on that slab. It’s like waiting for the next available electric chair at San Quentin. I’m in no damn hurry though. Even though I’m praying for this whole hellish thing to get itself over with.
It seems like it’s taking just way too long.
I can tell you one thing. I’m not dressed for the air-conditioning here. This hospital johnny was never built for warmth. And all I have the thinnest blanket you can imagine covering me, and I’m starting to freeze.
Time marches on. Instinctively I glance at my watch, but of course it isn’t there, is it. I really don’t see why I had to leave my watch back in my room. It’s not a huge watch. I can’t imagine how it’d possibly get in the way of them operating on my spine, for crying out loud. I mean, damn, obviously it wouldn’t…
Jesus, how long is it gonna take for them to get done with the current body, and get my body on the slab in there anyway? I mean, come ON, people! It’s freezing out here. Hopefully they’ll at least have the heat turned up in there!
Time continues to march.
Suddenly… footsteps! From behind me in the hall! Somebody coming! Finally! I crane my neck to look, but it ain’t easy, stuck in the dying cockroach position. Ah, but here he is, yes, stethoscope dangling from his neck. He’s…
Wait! Don’t pass right by me! “Uhmmm, excuse me? Doctor?” Jesus, he doesn’t even have the common courtesy to slow down, let alone stop. “Hey. Doctor?” No good. So then, in my high school English teacher voice: “HEY!” And there. He stopped. And turning around, but looking confused, looking around like a guy who knows he just heard something, but…what? “Over here! OK?!” OK, seems like he heard that. God, what do I look like, a goddamn lump of laundry, or what? Or… jeez, I dunno, maybe he’s deaf? OK. He’s coming. Good. And here he is.
“Did you say something?”
Yeah. Deaf alright. “Yes,” I say loudly. “I did. Can you tell me what time it is?”
He leans down, getting a closer look at me. Kinda inspecting me. “What’s that?”
Yep. I was right. Deaf as a post. And me here not knowing sign language. So I try again, loudly and slowly, and enunciating very carefully, “What time is it?”
Now he bends down in even a little closer to my face, his stethoscope bopping into me, him looking a little pained and puzzled. “Sorry? What was that?” he says, shaking his head.
Jesus. “I said, WHAT. TIME. IS. IT?!” I mean, come on, gramps, you got a watch right there on your wrist.
He shrugs his shoulders. Shakes his head with a big, clueless, shit-eating smile. Damn, he’s giving up on me. So he turns, and with an I-give-up shake of the head, just ambles away, back on down the hall!
Where am I, the looney bin for crying out loud?!
More time passes. Guess I must’ve fallen asleep because without warning, I feel my gurney moving forward again. I can’t see the guy pushing me. But man, it’s about time! It’s a wonder I haven’t frozen to death by now. But anyway, we’re off and rolling.
The cart stops. Wow. This O.R. is very dark. Which is odd, considering the other one was all lit up so much more brightly. Well, it’s not pitch black at least, but still… and, surprise surprise, it’s no warmer in here than out in the damn hall, either. Which sucks. It seems my push-cart has disappeared.
Anyway, I tell myself, OK, let’s be ready. It can happen any time at all. Gotta pay very close attention when they put that needle in. And gotta remember all the details, what it’s like, drifting off so quickly into la la land.
But you’d think, though, wouldn’t you, that they’d have started by…
Whoa, somebody’s… crying? Oh yeah. Sobbing, really. What, in here? Right where I’m gonna get operated on?
My eyes are pretty much adjusting to the low light. I look around, take a better look-see. So there’s another gurney right next to mine. With somebody lying on it. And whoever he is, he’s just let out a long, whooping, baleful moan, like he’s trying to howl at the frickin’ moon! I mean c’mon, ladies and germs, let’s get this show on the road. I haven’t got all day! What did they, forget about me?
Actually, there’s more than two gurneys in here. There’s a lot of them. And… they’re not empty, either. Christ, it’s like a parking garage in here.
OK, now somebody somewhere off to my right’s muttering, jabbering like talking in her sleep.
Over and above the powerful clinical antiseptic odors, I smell vomit! Gross. And where the hell are my surgeons? And nurses? OK, I’m starting to panic. Somebody, cries, “Get me the hell outta here!” and it turns … that was me, and because I jumped up a little when I yelled it, a hot, searing pain I swear I can’t even believe goes ripping violently like a chainsaw up my spine. I collapse back, exhausted, promising myself I am never gonna even try to move ever again. Ever. It’s not worth it.
Oh sure, now other voices have joined in, moaning curses and pleas. It’s utter madness… Christ, I’m in a damn zombie movie!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Though I’m a slow study in the best of times, but little by little my re-awakening brain began connecting the dots, and piecing together the confusing but now obvious clues. That doctor in the hall? He wasn’t deaf. It was me. I was unintelligible. My flabby fat lips were connected to a brain-dead brain and were incapable of producing anything more than gobbledeegook. And when the intern, or whatever he was, the one who slipped the injection of “muscle relaxant” into my hip? No shit, Sherlock!. That was it! That was the very thing I’d been waiting for! But, damnit, I wasn’t ready for it! Was I. So yeah, I missed it! I must’ve been knocked the moment he withdrew the damn syringe from my hip. And all of that watching the ceiling tiles on the way down to the O.R.? That’s when I was leaving the O.R., not travelling to it.It was like that Dr. Hook song, “I Got Stoned and Missed it…
So there I was. Lying there, in the recovery room! Post-op. Moaning and mumbling like all of the other post-ops. So, it was all over. All over but the shouting. Me just lying there, waiting the long wait for my ride back up to the sixth floor, where I could commiserate and compare notes with my roomie.
And begin trying my luck at to scoring Percodan from the nurses up there. Chanting the chant: percodan percodan percodan!
At a local hospital back in ‘51, I had my first experience of being put under with ether. My tonsils were to be removed. And little Chicken Little 4-year old me, my sky was falling. I practically had to be hogtied and dragged kicking and screaming, into the operating room. It wasn’t pretty. I didn’t care how sore my sore throat had gotten, I wanted no part of it. There just had to be some other way, any other way. Mostly because this was back in the day when doctors routinely got away with grinning right into your little face and lying through their teeth with impunity. “Now, this isn’t going to hurt one bit, son.” That bullshit lie had been lied to me every time I’d been hogtied and dragged to a doctor’s office before so I was expecting The Big Hurt, but I never expected anything like I was about to experience:
In my memory, this is kinda how it went down:
LITTLE TOMMY’S VERY 1ST BLACKOUT
(let’s play a little “game,” tommy)
my brain still freezing up with
all the new vocabulary:
“tonsillectomy,”
“adenoids,”
“ether”…
(let’s see if you can
count backwards
from a hundred…)
NO. NO!I DON’T WANT TO!
me, 4½, laid out on the table , a little
dissection-tray frog-in-a-johnnie
johnny on the spot box-canyoned in
by a faceless wall of halloween
gowns & masks
onestranger-danger-demon
unstoppering an evil vial of
hospital-fumes concentrate,
terror in a bottle, splashing
a gauze rag with the liquid
(ok, tommy, we start with 100…
right…?
then 99…
so…?
what comes next…?)
the ice-wet invisible-flame rag is
what comes next, slapped over
my mouth & flaring nostrils
and pressed
down
(come on, now… what comes next, tommy?)
stifling my silenced
fire-throated
screechface…
searing my cheeks…
burn-buttoning-up my eyes
what comes nextis that i
become a kicking fighting
rikki tikki tavi clawing the
poison gag off my head and
flinging it splat against the wall
bringing reinforcements
bearing down on me like
towering thunderheads,
one for each limb, one to
clamp my face in a vise
bad-dream people
cooing sweet lies
hell’s pigeons,
overpowering
muscling me
drowning me in betrayal
pinning me down
me struggling down…
succumbing
down…
sinking down
down to the
bottom of a
cellar-dark
sunless
sea…
And right before I completely winked-out in the jet-black ink cloak of death—I saw something!
Bubbles!
At least that’s all I could think to call them. Not like soap bubbles though. You’d never’ve been able to make out bubble-pipe soap bubbles against such a black background. No, these were bright-white rings (not disks), like perfectly round onion rings, only pure electric white. Rising slowly up and out of sight… which is how I knew I was sinking down. Big ones, some small, and some middle-sized. Slowly spooling upward like the music roll in a player piano. And then suddenly floating up into my view as I was sinking my way down, came a definite surprise:
The frogman!
My brain immediately recognized it for what it was because I had a little toy Navy skin diver I’d gotten as a prize out of a box of cereal at home. You’d pack a little plastic compartment in him with baking powder, sink him in your bath water, and he’d bubble for a bit before eventually rise back up, supposedly for air. But the scuba man that I was passing on my way down seemed to be a drawing of one, just like all the little white circles, in that he was basically a pure white outline of a frogman. As if he’d been drawn with a white marker on a page of black construction paper. The vertical cylinder drawn down his back was the “air tank,” and the horizontal oval across his face, the face mask. Just a typical, basic line-drawing picture you might find in a coloring book for toddlers. And he wasn’t animated in any way, didn’t move at all.
And that was that
I woke up minus the tonsils but with an razor-cut sore throat, dried blood on the front of my johnnie (yes, I remember being horrified at discovering that), and the frosty six-pack of cream soda, my reward.
The dream excited me long after. I remember trying to describe it to Mom, Dad, my siblings, and the neighborhood kids, but I really didn’t have much of a command for words back then. “Black,” “frogman,” and “bubbles” didn’t translate all that well. They just thought it was funn. But that experience was really a big deal to me. Kinda magical. I’d never had dreams anything like that one before. And I dwelled on it for weeks thereafter, often trying to sketch that little Navy frogman amid all his bubbles with pencil on paper.
This is what gets me: The brain is such a magical little device. So mysterious, like something you’d expect to find residing in Alice’s Wonderland, like the hookah-smoking caterpillar for instance. But no, this marvel remains alive and kicking right upstairs, embedded just above the shoulders inside that body of yours – your very own little state-of-the-art-PLUS nano-computer, plugging away 24/7 at taking care of your business. It’s just that 99% of the time you’re so busy using the darn thing, you forget it’s even there. Of no conscious concern to you. And why should it be? Who’s got the time to contemplate their navel, let alone their brain all the time, right? I mean, we’d get bogged down in no time if we were continuously pondering all of the lobes and circuits and various functions going on up there. I mean, you’ve got a life to live, haven’t you.. So any philosophical queries about your brain just naturally hafta get put on the back burner, almost totally out of sight, out of mind.
However there are certain times throughout life when your sub-consciousness may get jolted out of its complacency, a time when you end up feeling a rare need to put those workings of that brains-on-board of yours under the microscope. A hospital is a common place for it to happen.
For instance I’ve known of a number of people (but two personally) who sustained temporary brain injuries. In both cases, the injuries seemed to temporarily knock out whatever the little censor-subroutine programmed into our gray matter is… the one that unconsciously keeps us (well, most of anyway) from swearing like jolly Roger pirates all the time in public. (Some of us don’t need a brain injury for that.) One of the patients was a young, fairly saintly Methodist Sunday school teacher, and when her parents came rushing to her side at the hospital, they suffered near deaths from embarrassment when confronted by her barrage of more loud F-bombs than was ever spoken by the cast in the movie The Boondock Saints. How odd, our brain…
Hospital administered prescriptions and anesthesia cantake our brains down paths less traveled, as can high fevers, mental illnesses, abject fear, and even extreme tiredness . Personally, over my relatively long lifetime I’ve personally experienced a fair number of bizarre reactions to hospital-administered anesthesia and medications. They weren’t so much fun when I experienced them, but they’ve become something fun to look back on and talk about in retrospect.
In 1977 I was hospitalized to undergo a laminectomy. Somehow I’d crushed a disc in my lower spine and was in such agonizing pain I could no longer walk or work. surgeon described the procedure I was about to undergo thusly: “Imagine your disc as a little can of crabmeat. When it gets squished , it pops right open, squirting crabmeat every which way. Some of the crabmeat collectson some nearby nerves, hardening there and putting a great deal of unwanted pressure on them. This pressure is what’s causing your extreme pain. A laminectomy is where we go in and scrape away all of that painful crabmeat.
My hospital roommate turned out to be a young Vietnam vet, obviously in much worse pain than I. Our surgical procedures were to be somewhat similar, with his obviously being the more perilous and painful. His injuries were located up along the forward sections of his spine, meaning that the surgeons were going to have to cut their way in from the front, and then push his stomach temporarily out of the way so they could get at his spine. The description made me almost pass out.
After his surgery the next day, he came back reeking of warm antiseptics and moaning ghastly moans in a troubled sleep, especially when they rolled him like a corpse-in-a body-bag back off the gurney and sacked him back onto his bed. I watched as they re-connected him back up to the IV’s and monitors. Then they logged his vitals and swept out of the room. And I, with nothing better to do, settled in for the long watch, waiting for him to come to. A half hour later his longer drawn-out moans started getting mixed with mumbled curses, primarily sighed F-bombs. And at last his eyes, the wild eyes of some crazed, stampeded steer, opened and burned into mine. “Fuck!” It was spat at me like his condition was somehow all my fault.
I said, “Hi.”
Then he jumped the bejeezus out of me by suddenly yelling, “HEY!” at the door to the hallway which had been left open. That volley had stopped a passing nurse in her tracks. She turned, smiled prettily, and said, “Yes?”
“Percodan!” It was spoken like a command, the way someone might say, “Your money or your life!”
Her eyes twinkled as she continued the pretty smile for an overly long moment, sizing him up. “Well, we’ll just have to see what your doctor has to say about that, won’t we.” And away she went on down the hall.
He fired the single word “NO!” after her. I was shocked. But she was gone. So what? The hallway was filled with ambulatory nurses, wasn’t it. And as each one passed, he’d stop moaning long enough to call “Percodan!” at them. They paid him no mind. Apparently he wasn’t unique.
It was both humorous and pathetic. And as time went on, his plea became an auctioneer’s sing-song: “Percodan percodan percodan percodan…” with his hand, held palm up like some legless beggar’s squatting in an alley of a Moroccan bazaar, awaiting alms. “Come on, people! You’ve got it. I know it. You know it. We ALL know it! Eventually, of course, it paid off. When it was time for his meds anyway, of course. A nurse did materialize, dropped the prescribed Percodan into his sweaty little palm, and cooed sweetly, “There. I hope you’re happy now.” He was, thank God. I rolled over onto my back.
A bit later, I noticed it had gotten very quiet. Too quiet, as they say in Hollywood lines. I looked over. And there he was, lying on his side, looking straight back at me, a big grin plastered all over his face. “You’re feeling better,” I observed.
“Oh, you better believe it,” he said. And then he started doing something terrible. He began struggling at pushing himself upward with his elbows and arms! He was trying to… get up!
“Hey! Whatta ya think you’re doing!?”
“Gotta… take… a piss.”
“No no NO! Stop that. Right now! You’ll rip out your damn stitches for Chrissake!”
“I’ll just be a minute.”
“NO!” I clawed the little hospital room buzzer out from under my pillow and laid on it, sounding the alarm, and started yelling, “Nurse! NURSES! HELP!”
He’d actually gotten his legs dangling over the side of the bed before a small phalanx of nurses and doctors rushed in and almost literally tackled him. They got him wrestled down onto his back. In the ensuing struggle, and as they went to work checking his incision, I unfortunately caught just a fleeting glimpse of his wound. And it was awful. A foot or so long, an “smile” cut across the abuse-swollen, pink-salmon abdomen like some Stephen King Halloween grin, all crazy-stitched back together with black surgical threads like the kind Polynesian natives used to sew up the eyes of their infamous shrunken heads back in the nineteenth century . I came close to gagging. Close to fainting. But…
I was also thunderstruck. I had just learned something. I was thinking, Wow. With a few-hours-old serious injury like that, and he was serenely smiling. He was gonna get up on his feet and head to the can. In all that pain. I mean, Jesus, that “percodan’s gotta be pretty powerful and mighty stuff!
Good to know…
The following afternoon it was my turn . I got wheeled back in and dumped like a side of refrigerated beef onto my slab of a bedbed. My roommate, my guru, was sitting up and waiting for me with an opioid grin. The pain got overwhelming. But in no time at all, my coach had me going through the routine by the numbers: Hey! Nurse! C’mon! Percodan percodan percodan… and right away I got to discover first-hand the perk behind what it was that put the perk in Percodan. It was magic. My body was dying in pain and yes, I knew this… but my brain didn’t. It was crazy. Oh sure, there was still a lot of pain, but it was nothing like the dreaded Percodan-less agony, was it. Not only that, I’d also discovered two side effects of The Big Perc that I was going to have to get accustomed to dealing with during my hospital stay.
The first being that Percodan left me drowsy and helplessly prone to drifting off to dreamland without warning several times a day. That wouldn’t be so remarkable if it weren’t for the dreams. I’d be in a car or on a bike that would start rolling, faster and then terrifyingly out-of-control faster and then, all of a sudden WHAM! I’d end up slamming face-first, eyes-wide-open into a brick or concrete wall. Short-lived little dreams, yeah, but they’d jar me awake so violently that I’d almost tear my stitches loose. And man, that was exhausting!
The second effect turned out to be really wild and weird, but didn’t involve dreaming. See, I’d brought along a couple of books to keep me entertained during my stay. One was a paperback anthology of humorous literature. In that one, I began reading one titled “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” a James Thurber short story.” Right from the get-go, I found it myself thinking, Wow, this is pretty cool, so funny! Another page or two into it, it had become outright hilarious, and I was giggling after every paragraph. I couldn’t get over just how damn funny Thurber actually is, you know? And then for some reason, my giggling wouldn’t stop. It was like the babble of a brook, just… on-going. And then…it started getting louder. Sounding more like the low roar of a river than a brook. Shit, man, I was crazy-giggling… I don’t know how else to put it. I mean, yeah, this was one of the funniest stories I’d ever rea in my damn life but somehow I’d gotten stuck in an endless loop. it just wouldn’t stop tickling my funny-bone. I couldn’t stop it. I mean, where were the brakes on this book? I was out-of-control in a world of Can’t-stop-it hilarity!Down-and-out gut-busting, hoo-ha gasping guffaws! Tears-in-my-eyes, snot-running-outta-my-nose, laughing-gas laughter! Sobbing, cackling, wheezing… demented! Help,-somebody-please-come-and-STOP-me… madness!
The two nurse angels of mercy (might have helicoptered down to into my jungle of unreality) began trying to wrench the toxic tome from me, but my iron hands would not be unclamped. I’d become a Charlton Heston. “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!” Momentarily , they were successful at managing to bend one finger back at a time…
They laid me down. They inspected my stitches. They told me to try to calm down. They told me I could have the book back later. “Now, you go to sleep now, alright?” I told them, OK. So they bid me goodnight. And before you could blink,I did fall asleep, totally exhausted. And I was swept right off to La-La-Land where, minutes later, I pedaled myself straight into a brick wall at ninety miles an hour!
On the morning of my final Percodan tablet, taken minutes before, my roommate suggested, “Let’s you and me take us a little walk.” Me being the Cowardly Lion, I cautioned that that probably wouldn’t be such a great idea, it being that we hadn’t been granted permission to stray from our room. By now, however, we were allowed to walking to and fro from the bathroom on our own but, still, I didn’t think…
Well, I wasn’t being paid to think, he countered, and come on, wasn’t I getting sick of being confined to those same lousy four walls too? And of course, I was. We donned bathrobes and hospital slippers. “But not too far,” I cautioned, to which he explained that it was only a matter of a few steps to the elevator. So OK. We stuck our heads out the door, scouted the hallway and, minutes later, pressed the elevator’s “Up” button.
“Let’s go right to the top, the penthouse suites.” And so up we went. And I’m guesstimating the was institution comprised a dozen floors at least. The elevator doors slid open. We peeked out. A low key kind of floor. Less busy than ours. Our kind of floor. We left the lift and shuffled straight across the hallway right into the first room we’d laid eyes on. Unoccupied, yes. Both beds made. Identical to our own downstairs, of course.
The view however, unlike ours, was gorgeous. We were at the top of the world. All sunshine and blue sky. Off to our left lay the shoreline of the beautiful blue Atlantic. Below us, the cityscape. All little streets and side-roads and intersections with toy cars and trucks crawling this way and that, stopping at streetlight intersections and moving on. We were looking for interesting landmarks.
And then we spotted one. The Golden Arches! Mickey D’s! Oh yes! “OK. I’m having the Big Mac meal” he told me. “Want me to pick you up a happy meal?”
“I dunno. Better than the jello and custard we’ve been eating. What toys come with’em this month?”
“Does it matter?”
“Nope. Just hurry back soon? You know I can’t stand the fries when they get col… oh, JESUS!”
Somebody’s loose kite just wafted right up out of nowhere to our window on an updraft of the wind outside, and began hanging there, at a tilt, a matter of inches in front of our very eyes!
“Holy shit!” my roommate added. “That’s a… That’s a… fuckin’ seagull!” And it was, that’s exactly what it was, beady little idiot eyes glaring straight through that window into ours, hooked-beak-to-noses! Hanging airily like a Casper the Flying Ghost balloon on the other side of the glass!
“Oh, wow, man…”
“Yeah.”
“Look at’im! Is he for real?” I mean, somehow, he was remaining just pinned right there in the middle of the air like some fake, yet realistic 3-D display.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I wanna know… like, just how the hell did he even know we were even gonna be up here anyway?”
And it was such a stupid, dumbass, and illogical question that I just laughed right out loud. And my laugh mad him laugh, and… well… that and the fact that I suddenly farted. And Jesus, that’s all it took, it was as simple as that. The giggles began. And the giggles didn’t stop . And oh no, before you could even find the brakes, it was already too late,we were laughing our asses off! Laughing way too loud, both of us, a somehow very strained and muscular laughter but at the same time, the hilarious laughter of little girls at a late night sleepover. And damn, I just knew the Big One was coming, I could feel it, grumbling up there like a winter’s worth of snow starting its grinding, gravitational slide down the roof, wave after wave of it. And then it hit! Both of us this time. Both at once. THE RAPTURE OF THE LAUGHTERS FROM THE RAFTERS! Avalanching down on top of us, burying us alive, smothering, suffocating us! Both of us this time.
Thankfully, a party of three nurses, clucking like a trio of petulant hens, found us. Down on our knees. White-knuckled fingers clamped desperately to the sill, hanging there, sniveling, a pair of snot-nosed, giggle-sobbing bats. Suffering lockjaw from the hard bellowing.
Emergency wheelchairs were rolled in, the “patients” expertly installed into those and then whisked back to the waiting elevator. The “down” button was pressed. (And man, didn’t we need our “down” buttons pressed.) And so down we went. Back down to our shared room, to be put to bed. A couple of naughty little boys. And the contingent of white-coated superiors who summarily “debriefed” them.
Yes, that Percodan was pretty powerful and mighty stuff! I’d never heard of it in the ‘70s until then, and I was surprised, (well, not so surprised, not really) to Google it and find out it is a combination of oxycodone and aspirin. I guess the surprise is that I was doing oxy’s way back then.
The laughter episodes herein can sound pretty funny. But the truth is, there was something very unfunny about it. That being that the uncontrolled, unstoppable laughing was a lot like having a terminal case of the hiccoughs from hell. Percodan, coupled with a innocuously humorous moment, triggered it, but there was the danger of not being able to untrigger it. It became more of an very unfunny seizure, actually. It was an exhausting experience…
So yeah, I find the workings of our brains interesting. Always have. Speaking of which I do, by the way, have a couple more “hospital anecdotes” lined up to add which, I believe, are purely humorous and true. I plan to share in these in “ALTERED STATES II. And if you feel you might be interested, please join me in this next episode of NEARING THE END OF THE LINE, coming out in approximately a week from now.
As a child, I was so spoiled at Christmas time it was embarrassing. See, Mom had grown up in the abject poverty of The Depression. She hadn’t gotten doodly-squat at Christmas when she was a little girl. One of her personal legends was the Christmas when the lone present she received was a coat hanger personally decorated by her older sister. And damn… she’d loved it. Yes, I know. It kind of makes you want to cry, doesn’t it. And it sounds made up, like something right out of the musical, Annie. It wasn’t though, according to my dad who eventually rescued her with a wedding ring. Now, how’s that for a family legend? And he hadn’t had any picnic himself when he’d been a kid, either, but he’d fared a whole lot better than she had.
The sad thing is, she’d gotten somewhat psychologically bent by all that poverty. And as a result, beginning on New Year’s Day (if not earlier) when January had already begun chugging slowly toward the following December, she was once again the volunteer soldier in the lifelong war against poverty-stricken Christmases. Not only for us, her kids, but for all of her nieces and nephews, regardless of what faraway states they lived in, all of whom were living in some degree of poverty themselves. Meanwhile, at home, our Christmas trees were alwaysburied alive in bright holiday-wrapped presents, large and tiny.
So I was lucky, right? Honestly, in retrospect, a little bit too lucky. The bounty of our Christmases wasn’t all that great for my character development, if you must know. Not that I needed any help in that department with the bad genes I’d somehow inherited. I just became more and more all about the getting, getting, getting despite the fact that I was already getting,getting, getting. And I’d get such great gifts. We all did.
For instance, I got a beautiful Lionel train set. I’ll never forget that. It was a dream come true. You’d set it all up on the living room floor and then… you were the engineer. But, and here’s the rub, there were only enough tracks to for a tiny little oval. The beautiful engine and the realistic box cars would go whizzing round and round, over and over. Round and round. Over and over. And you know what? That gets old in a hurry. And why weren’t there more tracks, is what I wanted to know. I wanted a figure-eight railroad. (OK, I probably wanted enough tracks to lay down rails going from room to room all throughout the ground floor of our house.) And then, you had to keep taking it all apart and putting the pieces back in the box again, ‘cause you couldn’t just leave it on the living room floor forever, right? It was a small living room. So that quickly got old as well.
I suppose I should tell you about the cool Lone Ranger ring I got. It was silver and featured a small embossed rendering of the Lone Ranger astride the rearing stallion, Silver. Yes, the very ring under which I brainlessly jammed a pebble between it and my ring finger just above the knuckle, where it got stuck, causing my finger to swell all up. All I can remember now is the horrendous emergency car ride to some old guy’s house, a guy who had some kind of a power saw.
Most Christmas gifts were basically toys and clothing. They didn’t have Amazon gift cards back then. Clothes were just clothes. The toys were appreciated of course, if only for a little while. Why? Because they’re just…things, aren’t they. Days or months later you haul them out of the closet and look them over and you discover they’re the exact same old objects you tired of a long while back. Things. Things that you’d gotten oh so used to, ho-hum. And maybe you’d play with them one more time but…you’d find yourself just going through the motions somewhat.
And yes, I do realize now what a petulant, ungrateful little jerk I was.
As far as gifts go though, I hit the jackpot in 1956 on my tenth birthday. What I got wasn’t a thing. Well, of course it was a thing. It’s just that it was so much more than a thing. A gift that could, and did, keep on giving. Day after day, year after year. It was nothing expensive at all. Small, plain little box— perhaps 10 by 4 by 4 inches. A metallic blue. But I swear, it changed my life. Bent my life like a glass of water bends a ray of light passing through it. And I’m so gratified that it did. Even today.
I got a radio for Christmas that year.
Now when you hear the word radio, you have to keep these things in mind because this was the mid-1950s.
So first of all, to turn it on you first had to plug it into a wall-socket. It wasn’t portable.
Secondly, the broadcast voices and music received were amplified by 3, maybe 4, glass vacuum tubes. So when you turned your radio on, the vacuum tubes would first begin to glow, getting warm and then warmer, till they were radiating an orange glow (which you could never actually see without taking the back of the radio off). The innards of radios were like little ovens back then. Due to the fact that the tubes had to really get red hot in order to amplify the stations’ signals, you always had to wait almost a full minute before the thing would actually start working , unlike today where everything is instantaneous due to the invention of transistors.
Thirdly, almost all radios ran on AM back then, and mine was no exception. With FM, you can listen to your music clearly regardless of the weather; but with AM, any thunder storm 25 miles or so away would be breaking up your programs with unwanted static crashes that could drive you nuts.
And fourthly, with FM you could only pick up stations within about a 30-mile radius, all depending on the height of the stations’ antennae. With AM, especially at night, you can pick up stations thousands of miles away, but with one problem: stations with relatively weak signals would tend to fade in and out, which could also drive you nuts if you were trying to listen to a faraway baseball game.
We had a table-top radio in our kitchen. Mom usually kept that on throughout the day while doing her housework, and I listened too. WABI out of Bangor was always playing the top-40 hits of Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson, Peggy Lee, The Big Bopper, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly. And man, didn’t I just think WABI’s top DJ, Jim Winters, was real-deal cool! He had such a deep voice and he knew everything about the artists. I was gonna grow up and be a DJ myself sometime, for sure. Along with a number of other things.
Funny thing about Jim Winters. He’d host the sock hops over at The Crystal Ballroom, the old renovated church out on South Street. The Crystal was off limits to me because “that’s where the high school crowd hung out.” So who knew what tings might be going on over there? Not me. I didn’t. Not my mom either, but… she could just imagine. But I’d watched a dozen high school rock and roll flicks at Center Theatre, and they were siren songs to me. So one Saturday night, my rug rat buddies and I pedaled our bikes over there and slipped in while Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” was blaring from the loud speakers. So exciting! So forbidden fruit! I know my heart was pounding.
Well, the first thing I noticed was, wow, the great big crystal ball slowly revolving from the ceiling, lighting up the darkness with twirling fireflies of red, green, and blue swimming about the hall. I’d never seen anything like it!
The second thing that hit me was… oh my God, was that him? Yes it was! There he was himself! Jim, the DJ, Winters! But wait, it couldn’t be. What, this was the DJ I’d been putting up on a pedestal all this time?? Holy cow! He looked like some… creepy car salesman. And his head was way too big for his little shoulders. And partly bald? I was aghast.
Thirdly, something stated happening that made me nearly faint from a combination of forbidden-fruit ecstasy and fear. Winters was suddenly announcing over the loudspeaker, “At this time, all the young ladies who’ve signed up for “the Golden Garter Beauty Contest” should now approach the stage.” WHAT? WHAT WAS THAT? And before you could say Sodom and Gomorrah, a line of high school beauties had formed up there amid a raucous roar of hoots and catcalls and wolf-whistles. And holy-moly, didn’t my knees tremble as my eyes followed Young Lady #1 as she marched coyly up to the waiting chair, took a seat, hiked up the hemline of her skirt, and displayed for God and everybody to see… some frilly little lacy elastic encircling her thigh maybe 3 inches or more above her knee! I mean, What would her mother ever think!? And then I thought, Jeez, what would my mother ever think if she knew where I am and what was going on?! Here, a timid little Sunday school voice from my one of my shoulders gasped, “Tommy! You must run home now! This instant!” while the carnival barker voice that lived on my darker shoulder reasoned, “Oh come on, kid. What your mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her… right?No, Stick around. We’ll skedaddle soon, I promise.” Now, I’d heard the word “garter” before, but I had no clue what one actually was until that dizzy night at the Crystal Ballroom!
But I digress. We’re talking about, what… oh yeah, the radio I got as a gift. OK, back to that.
So I imagine you’re probably thinking, OK, you got yourself a radio. What’s the big deal? Because, like, getting a radio today is nothing. But hey, I’m here to tell you that for a ten-year-old in 1956, it was a very big deal. Especially since I was I was transitioning right then from the age of late prepubescence to the age of near puberty. And the songs I was getting interested in were about that mysterious world of guys and girls and… garters and stuff? And sure, we had the kitchen radio. I just couldn’t hear it so well from my bedroom for one thing.
So I plugged my new radio into the wall socket and tucked it away on the floor, right under the head of my bed in easy reach. That way I could just be lying there, reach down, and fiddle with the station dial to my heart’s delight, bringing in the music from the out-of-reach, nearby city stations. But when it got really dark, like when I was supposed to be sound asleep, I found myself reeling in DJs in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and amazingly sometimes as far away as California. I’d never realized what a small-town redneck Jim Winters really was.
But… regardless of all that, I now had… a night life.
When Paul Anka was singing, “I’m Just a Lonely Boy,” then I was that lonely boy. When Elvis was “All Shook Up,” so was I. When the Everly Brothers were frantically trying to “Wake Up, Little Susie,” I was feeling frantic about what I was gonna hafta tell her old man, waiting on us at her front door. And I was getting hip to the ways in which “Love Is a Many Splendid Thing.” But itching to find out what was going on behind “The Green Door,” though I suspected it was probably more of the same (or worse) as what I’d witnessed going on over there at the Crystal Ballroom. And yes, I knew what it was like to be “The Great Pretender,” even though when I listened to Peggy Lee, there was no pretending that I was coming down with “Fever.” Face it, I was in the onset of going batshit girl crazy. But… “what a lovely way to burn…”
Of course the sad thing was, I didn’t have a girlfriend, nor did I have any real clue as to how to get one. I was the shortest kid in my class, after all. And I was deadly shy around girls. One girl I had a crush on stood a foot and a half taller than me. An amazon. So I was doomed. Doomed to be a listener. Just a dime a dozen listener of love songs. And in that capacity, what I did do is get myself a little notebook. Kept it under the bed right next to the radio. Then night after night after night, crawling slowly up and down the dial from 55 to 160 khz, I sampled all radios stations I could find, searching for just the right ones, finding any and all songs that would try to have their way with my bleeding, lonely heart. I’d enter the call signs of the best stations into my log, along with the frequency points on the dial so I could easily find them again, plus each DJ’s name, a listing of the song titles I’d heard and fancied, and the artists’ names. I was becoming quite the bookkeeper. My all-time favorite stations and DJs were WMEX (AM) in Boston with Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsberg at the helm, and “Cousin Brucie” of WINS (AM) New York.
I had a few cronies very much like myself in this regard, and we’d swap our gleaned info next day on the playground. I had it bad. We had it bad. And then, afternoons after school, my notebook and I would stroll down to the neighborhood convenience market where I’d stand in front of the magazine rack, surreptitiously (lest the proprietor catch me) lift one from the display, and hurriedly scrawl as much of the desired song lyrics as I could manage from the two or three pop song magazines that would publish them. I couldn’t afford to buy one on my allowance.
So yeah, I’d become a bookkeeper, a miserable scribe, a lonely hearts chronicler of heartfelt doo wop. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and, sure enough, I was on my way to becoming the hopeless, lifelong romantic I am to this day.
I can clearly remember one particular night of listening when my ears particularly perked right up. The DJ du jour (no, make that DJ de nuit) announced that he was about to play a brand new song, that this would be the song’s exclusive debut, to be performed by a brand new, up and coming group calling themselves The Elegants! Desperately I clawed my little log out and pencil out from among the dust bunnies under the bed. I mean, it was well past midnight and the whole town I languished in was probably sound asleep, so it was like being Superman’s sidekick, Jimmy Olsen, getting a scoop for The Daily Globe! The song title was titled “Little Star,” and opened with the forlorn line, “Where are you, little star…?” It was such a sad song. Another song by some sad and lonely soul like myself. Where was my little star? Next day on the playground, all puffed up with self-importance, I (numero uno, the self-appointed president of our Lonely Hearts Club) altruistically enlightened my sad disciples with the new found data. As it turned out, “Little Star” did reach #1 on the Billboard Charts, stayed there for one week, and spent 19 weeks in the Hot 100. Unfortunately it was doomed to become just a one-hit wonder for The Elegants.
As it is with most people on the planet, I don’t believe I could feel whole without music. Music has become such a major part of my life. It soundtracks me every step of the way. A sad example: when I was a sophomore in high school, my steady girlfriend (yes, it took me that long to finally acquire one of those) gave me my ring back and just flat out and out dumped me. She’d found somebody else, alas. I was devastated. So what did I do? Sat in my room all day pitying myself for a whole month, that’s what. All the while wallowing in my Johnny Cash 45 rpm record collection. There were so many songs to choose from. “Guess Things Happen That way.” “Home of the Blues.” “Cry, Cry, Cry.” “I Still Miss Someone.” “Thanks a Lot” “Walking the Blues.” I mean, oh what an epic pity party that was! But… Johnny helped me pull through, didn’t he. Yes, he did.
Now it’s odd, but in what I call my jukebox brain today, random lyrics get automatically triggered by almost anything anyone says. I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I find it entertaining, personally. Often during conversation among friends, I find myself just coming right out singing a couple of triggered song lines. However I’ve had to learn over time that it’s usually a lot more polite to try to stuff these little outbursts down inside because, understandably, some people can find this Tourette’s-like and, well, just a tad annoying. Just ask my wife.
Now I made the claim earlier that the little radio gift I received bent my life, changed it, and in such a good way. Oh sure, I realize if I hadn’t received my little blue box right then, the music would still have found me, would still be a big part of my life. But it came at a good time. It was something I hadn’t known known I needed, but as soon as it arrived it immediately became an integral part of my emotional life. It definitely filled some gaps.
See, my bedroom was my little fort. Just as the bedrooms of teens today are their fortresses of privacy, their domains. But one of the biggest differences is that my fort didn’t have a smart phone in it. (Hell, it didn’t even a have a phone of any kind in it.) And before 1953 our family didn’t even have a television in the house, let alone one in my bedroom. So I didn’t have some screen to stare down into during every minute of my free time. Those distractions were totally non-existent. Our 1950s “social media” was a physical hang-out, the lunch counter at Lanpher’s Drug Store, right after school got out every afternoon. It was comprised of real face-to-face kids, nothing digital or virtual about it. And for a half hour to forty-five minutes, you’d load up on all the school drama gossip and then head home. Where maybe you had some chores to do first, after which maybe you’d hang out on the family phone for a bit…but you weren’t allowed to live on it. You’d have dinner, maybe do some homework (maybe not, as was often the case with me), but eventually you’d retire to your room.
My bedroom was a quiet, peaceful sanctuary after 9:00 pm or so. I could be alone with my thoughts. Maybe I’d had a rough day and my thinking might’ve gotten hung up on dwelling on what’d happened, so I’d spend some time licking my emotional wounds. Maybe I’d spied some new girl in school that had caught my eye, and I could sorta daydream what she might be like, and what maybe she liked, and OK, wonder if I might ever be one of the things that she could possibly like as well (probably not.) Maybe I’d work on building my model airplanes, or dabble in trying to write out my feelings in a poem or two. But it was my time, me time. We kids had a lot of me time back in the fifties. It was built right in.
And then my radio showed up. AM. Mono, not stereo (stereo wouldn’t be available for a few years, so I didn’t know what I was missing). A plain, homely little thing. But it was a conduit. A conduit to worlds I hadn’t discovered yet. Emotional worlds. It was like a little ride on of the amusements at the carnival, me being the only kid there. I could just strap myself in, and ride any old time. It was a new adventure, one I would never tire of. Rock and roll. Then rock and roll turned to folk songs, which in turn became protest songs, and I was on my way. All because of a little inexpensive AM radio my parents had given me as a gift.
Today, I have Sirius XM. It’s great, it really is. I can stream songs from just about any genre and any time period. So I’ve got it all now. But you know what? It’s great, yes, but it all seems so easy. Too easy. The truth? All these modern-day streaming abilities feel too convenient. It’s a convenience that, I dunno, sucks the serendipity right out of it.
(I’m calling this one “Part One,” not because I have a specific Part Two in mind at all. It’s just that, knowing me, I’ll probably have a couple hundred Parts on this theme. I mean, who knows?)
We begin…
As a 34-year teacher (a career that came to an end over two decades ago), I was forever unearthing priceless little tidbits of poetry from the many literature anthologies I’d inherited in whatever classroom I was assigned. That was one of the big English teacher perks, for me. I collected any and all the ones that touched me in one way or another, and now I carry around a gazillion of them in my iPhone (well, technically they’re warehoused in the cloud). But… anyway, sometimes when I’m languishing in a doctor’s waiting room, manning the circulation desk during the quiet moments at the local library, or riding in the passenger seat while my wife, Phyllis, drives the car, I can simply pull out the phone and alter my mood with a poem, just like that. And I have so many genres: love poems, war poems, protest poems, sci-fi poems, beat poems, horror poems, anger poems, hilarious ones, short ones, endless ones… you name it. Strange little things, smart phones. You never really know who’s packing what.
Sometimes there have been these important-to-me poems in my life that I’ve somehow managed to lose and, consequently, I’ve ended up investing a great deal of my years tracking them back down. Which is next to impossible if they’re ancient and especially if you can’t for the life of you conjure up the title or the poet’s name. But if and when I ever do recapture one of those, there’s a little celebration that goes on down deep inside me that flutters my heart (somewhat like A Fib only more fun). I kid you not.
Here’s a true story. About three or four months ago, a TV commercial was advertising an upcoming boxing match featuring a boxer whose last name was Saavedra. I probably shocked my wife when I leapt up of the sofa and shouted, “That’s IT!THAT’S HIS NAME!” Then of course I had to explain to her what the hell I was yelling about.
Well, a little poem that I’d discovered way, way back when had somehow vanished from my collection. It was just a snippet of a thing, a little love poem only a few lines long. Wouldn’t be deemed important to most of the citizens of our planet but, as I often say, we’re all occupying our own little unique spaces on the social spectrum, aren’t we. And yes, it was a love poem. I’m a sucker for love poems if they’re well-and-creatively written. The main reason I was having no luck recovering this one is because of the hard-to-remember-let-alone-pronounce name of the poet: Guadalupe de Saavedra. Plus wrack my brain as much as I could, the title refused to leave the tip of my tongue. For years! And then…
Bingo! There was some unpoetic dumb-ass boxer named Saavedra going to box some other unpoetic dumbass palooka on TV. And finally (and serendipitously) gifted with the boxer’s name, I only had to seek the help of the Great God Google. Ding! Retrieved it in five minutes!
The poem is titled “If You Hear That a Thousand People Love You.” And today is the perfect day for me to share this love poem here, it being Phyllis’ and my 57th anniversary today (7/30). So that’s got me feeling all warm and fuzzy here. Spoiler alert: I’m such a damn romantic. But now that I’ve talked about it and put it on a pedestal, I imagine you’ll look at this piece off fluff and say, “What the hell does he think is so special about this thing?!” And that’s OK because, right after this poem, I’m going to share two or three poems I’ve written to Phyllis over time and, yeah, sure, they’re bound to be deemed head and shoulders above this one, right?
IF YOU HEAR THAT A THOUSAND PEOPLE LOVE YOU
by Guadalupe de Saavedra
If you hear that a thousand people love you remember… Saavedra is among them.
If you hear that a hundred people love you remember… Saavedra is either in the first or very last row
If you hear that seven people love you remember… Saavedra is among them, like a Wednesday in the middle of the week
If you hear that two people love you remember…one of them is Saavedra
If you hear that only one person loves you remember…he is Saavedra
And when you see no one else around you, and you find out that no one loves you anymore, then you will know for certain that… Saavedra is dead
Yeah, not really such a great poem perhaps. But when I first found it, I was smitten. My favorite line is Saavedra is among them,like a Wednesday in the middle of the week. I dunno. I can identify with a love like that.
Story of my life with Phyllis: since I was a high school junior and she my freshman sweetheart in 1962-63, I went crazy writing poems for her, about her, and about us. I was a rhyming fool, a creator of bad doggerel (poetry written by dogs, I was once told). I don’t know why, but I was madly driven to capture The Adventure of Our Old-fashion Crush with all its ups and downs on reams of notebook paper. Each verse was honestly a sonnet in itself. I get this feeling I might still have a few “chapters” of those maudlin verses lying around somewhere, in a box maybe, but I couldn’t find them. Just as well, I imagine. I’m pretty sure I’d be embarrassed by them today.
Funny, immature me, I’d go to the movies and hear how cool Clark Gable or Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart would speak to women, and then I’d try to model my own ‘lines’ after some of theirs. One time at Phyllis’ home, I was sitting at her kitchen table and watched her making me a cup of coffee. Then, as she brought it over to me, I dunno, the whole scene felt so domestic and she so wifely, that I Abruptly came out with this one: “Hey, you and me? Let’s grow old together.” Now how corny is that?
OK, I’ll tell you how corny it is. It’s laughingly as embarrassing as a Harrison Ford line in the 1973 film, American Grafitti. The year is 1962. Ford plays Bob Falfa, the reckless badass dude driving a hot, souped-up, black ’55 Chevy. Bob wants to prove his car is the fastest car in the valley. So, he’s itching to go up against Paul Le Mat’s character, John Milner, who drives the locally famous yellow 1932 Ford 5-window coupe, the hot rod that had long been the fastest car in the valley. Before the race, however, badass Falfa picks up Laurie (Cindy Williams) who’s virginal, vulnerable, and on the rebound from having just been dumped by her steady, Steve (Ron Howard). Unfortunately she’s about to become the lady-in-distress as Falfa has decided she will accompany him in the ill-advised speed race out on the outskirts of the city. But first, he tries to come on to her, in his way (who wouldn’t) but the way he attempts it is something that is so weird and awkward it caused me to cringe. First he grows all serious, then looks her straight in the eyes, and after a moment (what?) begins ridiculously singing “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific. I know, right?! Don’t believe me? Stream the flick. It’s a wonderful film (with the exception of Ford’s musical come-on). But as awkward as that was, it’s a little bit too similar to my out-of-the-blue “Let’s grow old together” attempt. Oh well, it’s funny now. And of course it’s taken 60+ years, but Phyl and I eventually did succeed in accomplishing just that.
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
you crossed the square heading west on main… we were the yang and the yin
i was the fire & you were the ice, the odds stacked against us had loaded the dice
but we didn’t know that then
i watched you walk with your new friend & talk, unaware i was being reeled in
that was the fateful momentous day in our tinytown lives so mundane
just a fall afternoon with the sun dropping down
autumn leaves underfoot, yelloworange&brown
on the corner of north street and main
i watched you walk with my cousin & talk
(through the drugstore display window pane)
the gambler in me told my heart & my soul: though opposite charges attract
i’d look you in the eye & retain full control…
our fate’s cosmic die rode the crapshooter’s roll
& rolled boxcars— the odds had been stacked
(magnetic north pole & magnetic south)
our futures were processed & packed
the bi-polar pull of our gravities’ force set our orbital paths for collision
inevitable contact… there was no recourse
our hormones alone were our single resource
the dice roll had made its decision
no time for reflection, no room for remorse
the outcome was nuclear fission
when matter and anti-material collide: cataclysmic, the chain reaction
its thunderclap echoes through all space and time
it alters the future’s & past’s paradigm—
twin suns, we were lock-stepped in traction
each destined to fall as the other would climb
the orbital dance of co-action…
you crossed the square heading west on main (we were the yang and the yin
i was the fire & you were the ice
we were starcrossed as soulmates—indelibly spliced
but we didn’t know that then)
i watched you walk with your new friend & talk
aware you were reeling me in
FETCHING
needling your quilt in your lamplight halo
you look over and catch me
your “RCA dog”
gazing into your eyes
my spiritual tail beginning to wag
and me growling some humorous
something or other—
this old dog’s old trick
for fetching me
the biscuit
of your sweet
laughter
THE BIG CHILL
“we got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout”
— johnny & june carter cash
you were the spark
that ignited the fuse
for the
big bang
of my hitherto
relatively uneventful
love life
it flashing incendiary
roman candles & rockets
molotov-cocktail love
flame-thrower love burning
magnesium hot
launching me in a straight trajectory
right over lover’s leap at
e=mc2
but that was in my callow youth
today
like the olympic flame
my love for you
still burns
patient now & serene
fireplace cozy
cup of cocoa hot
electric blanket warm
Happy 57th anniversary to us (7/30 /1966 -7/30/2023)
One of the all-time, proudest little moments of my high school English teaching career was the day I faced-off against a sophomore, all-boy classroom of the junior Exiles Motorcycle Club and announced that we were about to begin the required poetry unit. I’d been dreading the day since they and I first got the chance to look each other over back in September. I was a hell of a lot more intimidated by them than they were of me. Each wore the signature jean jacket with the sleeves torn off, leaving it pretty much a vest, with “EXILES” stenciled in an arc across the shoulder blades.. Despite the lack of the black leather jacket, which I’m guessing was above their pay grade, in my head I was quietly hearing the lyrics of a rousing 1950s song:
He wore black denim trousers and motorcycle boots And a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back He had a hopped-up ‘cicle that took off like a gun That fool was the terror of Highway 101
Well, he never washed his face and he never combed his hair He had axle grease imbedded underneath his fingernails On the muscle of his arm was a red tattoo A picture of a heart saying “Mother, I love you”
He had a pretty girlfriend by the name of Mary Lou But he treated her just like he treated all the rest And everybody pitied her and everybody knew He loved that doggone motorcycle best…
from “Black Denim Trousers” –songwriters: Jerry Leiber / Mike Stoller
I was really nervous. However, by then I’d had a few weeks to better get to know the little badass wannabes as the unique and colorful individuals that in reality they were. And I’d been able to use that time to sweat over preparing possible strategies for this High Noon showdown. I’d come up with only one clever, albeit somewhat iffy, plan. It was a gamble. And if I lost, damn, I’d have to kiss my beloved poetry goodbye. Still, it was pretty clever. In the long run, it had been my jukebox brain that handed me the possible key: music! Because as Google tells us today (Google didn’t exist back then), “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast…” Yes, and one day, somewhere between September and November, the ghost of Harry Chapin had stepped forward to potentially save this English major’s ass.
Now, these dudes dwelled on believing (actually knowing) that they were the ones in charge, regardless of who was being paid to be. And in that they could often be very (gulp!) convincing. So when I unsteadily announced, “OK guys. Starting today we’re diving into poetry for a few weeks…” I wasn’t entirely surprised by the volley of snide laughter that interrupted me mid-sentence, though it left me standing on shaky ground.
After the merriment died down, one of the guys (apparently the leader and spokesperson of this little band) mansplained to me (and yes, I realize that the term “mansplain” wasn’t even coined back there in the 70s but, in retrospect, that’s what it was) that no, we wouldn’t be taking part in any… poetry unit. Whereupon I felt obliged as “their teacher” to mansplain back to them that, yeah, I understood how they felt and all yet, still, it was mandated by the curriculum and all so there was really nothing we could do about it. Another volley of laughter!
(OK. Now before I go on, let me mansplain to you, dear reader, the actual reality at play here. Honestly? The administration couldn’t have actually cared less about what went on in my classroom with those particular yahoos, as long as it didn’t bring down any bad publicity on the school district. In other words, the principal himself knew that even he wouldn’t try teaching theappreciation of poetry to this crowd so… if I‘d wanted to (and as long as no one set fire to the classroom, got killed, and we didn’t get found out), I probably could’ve kept them busy all year doing book reports on Playboy. But the truth is, I love poetry, always have, and what I was feeling was the dire need to do something (anything) to save my own my sanity in that particular classroom! Poetry would do that for me, if I could only pull it off.
“No, guys, I’m serious. We don’t have any choice.”
“OK, fine. Go ahead then. You do it. Just wake us back up when it’s over. Or not. See, we don’t care what you do up there at the front of the room, do we, guys. We won’t pay any attention. But hey, whatever floats your boat, man. Have fun.”
I purposely let our give and take play out for a minute or two longer. I wanted to allow their egos to be wallowing in their little victory over The Man, confident they had easily crushed my frilly little poetry plans like a cigarette butt beneath their collective steel-toed boot. I wanted them in a festive, patting-themselves-on-the-back mood similar to the Trojans, drinking it up to excess as they lay beneath the deadly shadow of the infamous Trojan horse. Hopefully all the better to unload my supposed, and-hopefully-not-a-dud “ace” up my sleeve, heh heh. So I hoped anyway. I dunno, perhaps I’m a student of the art of war.
But finally I laid the ace down on the table before them. “OK, men. Looks like you got me. However, if you’re not too chicken to…gamble, I have a little proposition for you.”
“Gamble? You wanna gamble with us? Sorry, homeboy. I mean come on, dude. Poetry? Get real.” Another volley of laughter.
“C’mon on. Hear me out. I mean, if I’m gonna lose my job thanks to you yahoos, the least you can do is listen.”
“Whatever.”
“So. Tell you what. How about this? You let me try one single poem on you. Alright, it’s actually a song. But the lyrics? Lyrics are poetry. So…”
“What kind of music? Lawrence Welk? No, don’t think so.”
“I can’t stand Lawrence Welk either, so no. Feel better?”
“No. Not really.”
“But here’s the deal. All you hafta do is give me one shot. But the stipulation is… a half-hourshot, a full half hour, because I do want you to wait till I’m finished with it, right? No interruptions. At the end of which I call for a vote. Thumbs up. Thumbs down. Totally up to you guys. And I guarantee I will abide by your decision. Guarantee it. And so think about this. A) By doing this I can, in all good conscience, report back to the principal that yeah, I did poetry with you guys. I just don’t need to mention it was just one poem, eh? So you’re saving my bacon,” I lied, “and I won’t forget that. And… well, this is just between you and me, OK? And B) You get to trade away what might’ve turned out to be a three- or four-week unit of the dreaded poetry for you (yeah, sure, I know, just hearing me do it all by myself at the front of the room, but still…) all for a lousy, stinkin’ thirty freakin’ minutes of it. What a deal, right?”
“Yeah, you say guaranteed and all, but what if it turns out afterwards you’re lyin’?”
“Well, the way I look at it is, you’re the fierce biker gang here, right? I’m the Ichabod Crane.”
“The… what?“
“I mean, if I stiff you on this, you guys’ll probably kill me, so…”
“Oh yeah. There is that.”
“’Course I’m one pretty rugged fella…” Another volley. “But remember, I want your attention throughout this. And considering what you’re likely to gain in the deal, I think that’s a fair trade, don’t you?”
The little man in charge looked over his shoulder. “Guys?” There were a number of silent, cautious, almost imperceptible nods. He swung back around. “All right. We’ll give you a shot. But I’m warning…”
“Thank you. For your vote of confidence.”
“We ain’t voted yet.”
“Fair enough. OK. So here’s how it’s gonna work.”
“What’s it called? This so-called song?”
“Bummer.” They all grinned a little. “Yeah, you were imagining “Clouds” or “Daffodils, right?.” But… here’s how this is gonna work. I’ve printed up copies of the words,” I said, holding up a stapled, two-page, two-sided, single-spaced document.
“Jeez. What’s that? A friggin’ book? It’s long enough! I thought you said a poem.”
“It’s long. Yeah. But I believe you agreed to the stipulation that you hafta pay attention…
“Oh, believe me. I’m paying attention all right.”
“Sarcasm is cool. OK. But this song, “Bummer,” has a fairly long instrumental introduction. Sorry about that. It’s kinda gonna sound like some cop show theme, Starsky and Hutch maybe. I’m gonna let that play for a couple of minutes to set the tone. And meanwhile, I’ll be coming around passing out these lyrics to you. I’m asking you to follow along carefully, word for word, OK?”
And when, a moment later, I dropped the needle into the vinyl groove, I heard somebody mutter “Christ!’
(Bythe way, dear reader, do us both a favor and click on this YouTube link to listen along while you read the lyrics. I’m betting you’ll be impressed by both the content and the very creative arrangement. Hopefully, you’ll feel like one of the Exiles, if you do.) https://youtu.be/mL3eXX-na64
And here are the lyrics:
Bummer
by Harry Chapin from Portrait Gallery
His mama was a midnight woman His daddy was a drifter drummer One night they put it together Nine months later came the little black bummer
He was a laid back lump in the cradle Chewing paint chips that fell from the ceiling Whenever he cried he got a fist in his face So he learned not to show his feelings
He was a pig-tail puller in grammar school Left back twice by the seventh grade Sniffing glue in Junior High And the first one in school to get laid
He was a weed-speed pusher at fifteen He was mainlining skag a year later He’d started pimping when they put him in jail He changed from a junkie to a hater
And just like the man from the precinct said: “Put him away, you better kill him instead. A bummer like that is better off dead Someday they’re gonna have to put a bullet in his head.”
They threw him back on the street, he robbed an A & P He didn’t blink at the buddy that he shafted And just about the time they would have caught him too He had the damn good fortune to get drafted
He was A-one bait for Vietnam You see, they needed more bodies in a hurry He was a cinch to train ‘cause all they had to do Was to figure how to funnel his fury
They put him in a tank near the DMZ To catch the gooks slipping over the border They said his mission was to Search and Destroy And for once he followed and order
One sweat-soaked day in the Yung-Po Valley With the ground still steaming from the rain There was a bloody little battle that didn’t mean nothing Except to the few that remained
You see a couple hundred slants had trapped the other five tanks And had started to pick off the crews When he came on the scene and it really did seem This is why he’d paid those dues
It was something like a butcher going berserk Or a sane man acting like a fool Or the bravest thing that a man had ever done Or a madman blowing his cool
Well he came on through like a knife through butter Or a scythe sweeping through the grass Or to say it like the man would have said it himself: “Just a big black bastard kicking ass!”
And just like the man from the precinct said: “Put him away, you better kill him instead. A bummer like that is better off dead Someday they’re gonna have to put a bullet in his head.”
When it was over and the smoke had cleared There were a lot of VC bodies in the mud And when the medics came over for the very first time They found him smiling as he lay in his blood
They picked up the pieces and they stitched him back together He pulled through though they thought he was a goner And it forced them to give him what they said they would Six purple hearts and the Medal of Honor
Of course he slouched as the Chief White Honkey said: “Service beyond the call of duty” But the first soft thought was passing through his mind “My medal is a Mother of a beauty!”
He got a couple of jobs with the ribbon on his chest And though he tried he really couldn’t do ’em There was only a couple of things that he was really trained for And he found himself drifting back to ’em
Just about the time he was ready to break The VA stopped sending him his checks Just a matter of time ’cause there was no doubt About what he was going to do next
It ended up one night in a grocery store Gun in hand and nine cops at the door And when his last battle was over He lay crumpled and broken on the floor
And just like the man from the precinct said: “Put him away, you better kill him instead. A bummer like that is better off dead Someday they’re gonna have to put a bullet in his head.”
Well he’d breathed his last, but ten minutes past Before they dared to enter the place And when they flipped his riddled body over they found His second smile frozen on his face
They found his gun where he’d thrown it There was something else clenched in his fist They pried his fingers open— found the Medal of Honor And the Sergeant said: “Where in the hell he get this?”
There was a stew about burying him in Arlington So they shipped him in box to Fayette And they kind of stashed him in a grave in the county plot The kind we remember to forget
And just like the man from the precinct said: “Put him away, you better kill him instead. A bummer like that is better off dead Someday they’re gonna have to put a bullet in his head.”
I’ve gotta say, it was fun watching their changing expressions as they pored over the handout, following along, and it was especially a real hoot when Mr. Chapin sang the line, “Sniffing glue in Junior High and the first one in school to get laid.” One kid’s head popped right up looking at me wide-eyed, and he almost gasped in wonder, “Can you say that? In school, I mean?” to which I responded, “I dunno. Probably not.” (Keep in mind this was the early 70s after all, years fifty some ago.) But it also gave me a rush of inner joy to witness my kids, already budding outliers in their world, become emotionally affected, probably the very first time, by something at once both so crude and artistic. It felt kinda like one of those To Sir, With Love moments, you know?
Anyway, that was the day I began to fall in love with this little badass biker class.
So once upon a time I found myself on a jumbo jet headed for something called Basic Training. I say found myself, not because I was just waking up from amnesia. And not because I’d been drafted, either. Nothing as exotic as that. And in case you’re wondering, I was stone cold sober. Oh, I could’ve listed off the steps that had placed me on that plane. It’s just that the Big Decisions in my life never seemed entirely real… until, that is, I’d end up landing on both feet in some rock-hard consequence that I might not be too happy with. That’s just the way most of my life was— always sort of discovering myself somewhere or other, involved in doing something I really hadn’t particularly chosen and didn’t necessarily want. Strange, huh. I was born without foresight.
Something other than me seemed to be the force that determined what I was to become, and when. Consequently, I’ve felt a strong kinship with Juliet’s Romeo when he cried out in anguish, “O, I am fortune’s fool!” (act 3, scene 1). Remember, he’d just accidentally executed Juliet’s favorite cousin Tybalt, something he hadn’t planned on doing at all. In fact, it was the last thing on earth he’d wanted to do. But nonetheless, there he was, stuck with the consequences. That was so me of him. Well, I’ve never killed anybody. Still, I see myself suffering from something close to acute Fortune’s Fool Syndrome.
My parents were loving parents. I know they loved me and my siblings dearly. We were blessed. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was me. See, they made the decisions. All the decisions period. And I guess I didn’t always like that so much. For some reason I’d been born downright contentious and I had a dark side. (I wasn’t all bad. Half of me was good… I swear). But as the black sheep of the family, I never saw much fun in practicing responsible-decision-making. There was just something off about me. Dad tried his darndest to teach me responsibility, but all of his lessons just seemed to drip off me like water off a duck’s feathers. My mind was always elsewhere. I dunno, was it my DNA? I often wondered. I really did.
For instance when Disney’s Pinocchio hit our local theater again, I know I identified with Pinocchio. The movie left me feeling guilty for some reason, and chewing on some probing questions about who and what I was, even at age ten…
ON FIRST WATCHING PINOCCHIO
Did the virgin-pure, see-no-evil hearts
of any of those other little boys in the
fllickery moviedark leap up (like mine?)
at all those all-night carnival-barker
come-ons amid the sparkleworks of
Pleasure Island?
Those free Big Rock Candy Mountain
Cigars, say?
That stained-glass church window just
begging you to pitch a brick through it?
The punch-somebody-in-the-face-&-
get-away-with-it “Rough House”?
And the mugs of free draft beer served at
The Pleasure Island Pool Hall Emporium?
Did the NO MORE CURFEWS concept set
their y-chromosomes a-resonating like
little tuning forks? Did Disney’s Pinocchio
arouse the snakes & snails and
puppy-dog tails in
those guys too?
Or (good lord!)
was I the only
donkey boy
in the
crowd?
Anyway, I know I never liked my parents’ lessons and rules, but it was made clear to me from the beginning that I didn’t have to like them. It just was what it was. I always fought against them, but pretty much all my rebellions were firmly and promptly squashed. Dad was military after all, served as an NCO who, a few years prior, saw extreme combat in World War II. So… obedience, and all.
But Ma’s rules were crazy. Her being a fundamental evangelist, she was always on guard and ready to exorcise the devil in me. Would you believe she once made me swear not to get a girl pregnant, simply because some high school girl right up the street had gotten in the family way? And would you believe I was in third grade at the time; knew ZILCH about how to, or how not to, do that particular thing but swore up and down and crossed my heart anyway that I would never do it? Poor Ma. She also made me pledge that I would never fall in love with a Catholic girl. And then one day, my sophomore biology lab partner (a year older than me) said she’d like to meet me at the hometown basketball game that night. With a fluttery heart, you bet I showed up. We sat with our backs against the wall in the top tier of the bleachers and… before I knew what was going on, I found myself lip-locked in a make-out embrace! I know! I came back home from the game later that evening just in time to hear the tail-end of my older brother squealing on me, “…and she’s Catholic too, Ma!” Yep. That was every bit as shameful as when Jerry Seinfeld’s “parents” found out their son had been spotted making out in the movie theater during Schindler’s List! But what the hell. Later in life, yeah, I married myself a good Catholic girl.
So anyway, I ended up just floating down river of my life through the puberty years and beyond like some youthful Long John Silver on The Good Ship Lollipop. I lived only for the moment, totally oblivious to any real decisions and future planning that I needed to be making. They’d take care of themselves when the time came, right? They always had. Somehow. The only gnawing problem was, as time went by, I began feeling this ominous, not-so-far-off-and-getting-nearer metaphoric roar of Niagara Falls up ahead, that drop-off where I’d someday find myself deep-sixed down in Adultsville and on my own..
Back through fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, our teachers would subject us to The Annual Career Planning Unit. Each year the student must select a career that he/she might possibly to pursue for consideration in her/his possible future. The assignment: a three or four week project wherein an encyclopedia entry on the selected career might be painstakingly copied down verbatim (no computers, no Google back then), a worker in the selected field might be contacted for a personal Q&A interview, informative pamphlets might be sent away for, etc. I was excited about this project. If you’d asked me back then I’d say, “I can tell you exactly what I’m going to be when I grow up.” It was gonna be the same thing I’d always wanted to be since giving up being a singing cowboy movie star like Roy Rogers: a bona fide United States Air Force jet pilot ace. So yeah, I hit the old library encyclopedia, sent for some packets, talked to the flyboy down at the local recruiting office, and presented my report to the class as glowingly as the infamous Ralphie of The Christmas Story movie ever delivered his eloquent plea for his Red Ryder BB rifle. But…right off the bat, I had luckily stumbled upon the two most critical keys to becoming America’s next flying ace: simply a minimum height requirement (I wasn’t there yet, but it was still early), and a vision score of 20/20. Bingo! I already had 20/20 vision! Simply grow a few more inches and I’d be in like flint! So there. I was practically flying my Sabre jet already.
By the time I got to high school I had only another inch to grow, so things were looking up. I loved talking about my future in the wild blue yonder. Actually I talked about it too much because as my junior year rolled around, I was abruptly sat down at the dinner table to have the talk with Ma and Dad. (No, not that talk. I never got that talk, actually.) It was a rather grim family meeting. The topic was that my future beyond high school was not up to me. (What?)It was up to them. ( I said, What?!)And it didn’t involve the service. It involved college. (Wait a minute. As Cool Hand Luke was once informed, What we had there was a failure to communicate.) I didn’t want to go to college, I informed them. It was gonna be the Air Force for me. No, I was informed, it was going to be college for me. “We’ve thought about this, your mom and me, and what we’ve decided is… well… you’re going to be the first one in our family ever to graduate with a college degree.”
I was dumbfounded! “Oh. You’ve thought about it, have you? How nice! Funny, I can’t remember me thinking about it. Now why’s that? Oh yeah, now I ‘member: it’s ‘cause: That’s. Not. What. I.Want. Let somebody else do it!” It was for my own good, I was told. No, I argued, it was for my own bad. It would be a waste of my time. Because maybe they didn’t realize it, but (and oh boy, here came my two aces in the hole!) I had just that year met my height requirement (barely) and plus, I already had 20/20 vision.
“What, you think that’s all it takes to be a pilot. I’ll tell you what it takes. It takes a good solid math background for one thing. And your grades in trigonometry aren’t too stellar right now, are they. Listen, I had to take calculus.” Hell, I didn’t even know what calculus was. Whatever it was, it sounded awful. But anyway, long story short— ever hear that song, “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”? I was destined to lose. It couldn’t have gone any other way. Why? Because my whole little lifetime, I’d been brainwashed into knowing that I was under their thumb. Stockholm Syndrome. Losing was all I knew.
Growing up, Dad was “my agent.” He was always getting me jobs I didn’t want. I remember one beautiful, sunny, summer afternoon. I was just sitting on our front steps staring blissfully up at the clouds, chewing on a stalk of grass. Suddenly, dad’s pick-up stormed into the driveway. He rolled his window down and called out, “Get in.”
I was confused. “What’s going on?”
“You’re gonna be mowing lawns at the local cemeteries this summer.” Hey, I didn’t even like having to mow our lawn, let alone somebody else’s, but cemetery plots? Alas, within minutes I found myself a fresh-fish kidnap-ee among a rag-tag brigade of whiskered old scarecrows trundling behind lawn mowers. Another summer he got me two wretched custodial jobs which I thought way too demeaning for the likes of me, as the last thing I wanted to be known as was a friggin’ toilet-cleaning, garbage-hauling “janitor.” But the topper was that evening he came home from work grinning and told me I was now an employee at the local ESSO station. “What!? Hey, I… no offense but see, I don’t know the first thing about working at a gas station! I’m…not even qualified.” That seemed to tickle his funny bone as he assured me that the proprietor had personally assured him that, not to worry, he’d turn me into a grease monkey in no time flat. “A grease monkey?”
OK. But before I go on here, allow me to pause and come clean about something. Me wanting to be a flyboy ace? That was stupid. An irresponsible childish fantasy, just as stupid as my once wanting to be a singing cowboy movie star. Very likely I would have washed out of flight school in the first day but of course, I couldn’t see that then. A) I was oh so immature, B) a drama queen, C) a spoiled little brat, and D) a wuss to boot. Ma and Dad were right much more often that I was wrong. It’s true. I was the problem. I’m embarrassed right now traveling back there in my mind and witnessing, in retrospect, my childish behavior. All my whining and complaining would’ve fit right into some black and white 1950s sit-com like Father Knows Best or My Three Sons. Shame on me. OK? OK. There. I feel better now. Young Tom, drama queen extraordinaire.
That being said, my immaturity didn’t do me any favors in my actual young adulthood. Sure, I ended up enjoying a 34-year career in education, but how did that happen? Answer: by default. I’ve said that a thousand times. By default. (I’m smiling to myself now because that just reminded me of a comical quote from Homer Simpson: “Dee Fault Dee Fault!! My two favorite words in the English language!”)
And the fact that I became a teacher by default points right back to that very time I was having the spat with my parents about Air Force vs. College.
When I‘d finally caved on the issue (I always caved), and when it was obvious to all three of us that I’d really caved, Ma and Dad were excited. Me? I was left feeling sad, powerless, bruised, and happily wallowing in self-pity. So when the prodding started as to what I might want for a career and where I might like to apply for school… my martyr’s answer: “I don’t care. Why don’t you pick.” And when they started really pushing it, I’d get passively aggressively sarcastic. “Oh I dunno. Brain surgeon? Maybe a rocket scientist? I figure with my grades, I might as well go to Harvard. Or if I can’t get in there, then Yale is a shoo-in.” Then my Guidance Counselor got into the act of course. Pick a card. Any card. So I ended up picking the Joker, the least expensive card in the deck, which just so happened to be a state teachers’ college. Maine residents like myself were gifted with a seriously much reduced cost of tuition at state colleges. Did it matter to me that it was a teachers’ college? Not in the least. Because who cared? What difference did it make? Bring it on. Oh, pity-party me… So the die was cast by default.
So, off to college I went. And you ask, How was college? Great. I loved being off on my own, away from the parents. I loved living in a dorm. I loved making new friends. Hell, along the way I accidentally fell in love with the courses I was taking, not that I meant to. And of course as time went on I also fell in love with learning to drink and being quite utterly irresponsible. Goes with the territory. But when it was over, boy didn’t it ever used to piss me off when I’d catch Ma proudly telling her friends, “Oh, you know I’ll never forget that exact moment when Tommy announced that he had a calling to be a teacher!” Jeez, Ma. Gimme a friggin’ break.
The first two years passed in those ivy-covered halls. And then, on the second week of my junior year, something life-altering happened. During an educational class on Classroom Management, the professor herded us across the street to the local junior high school (think middle school) where we got to sit in the back of a classroom to watch a real live teacher in action. Two things happened to me. A) I was utterly knocked out by the (wow!) unbelievable mastery in action of that teacher, and B) I was (oh shit!) hit over the head with an epiphany that, once again, I’d ‘found’ myself somewhere. Only this time found myself strapped like a saw mill log on a conveyor belt that was barreling me toward the Big Buzz Saw straight ahead : an actual teaching job! An actual life-long career of teaching, oh my! I was suddenly terrified.
You’ll no doubt find it strange that I’d just lived through two whole years taking classes in a four-years teachers’ college and hadn’t realized, what… the obvious? I know. I get it. So do I, I still find it strange, not to mention embarrassing. I dunno, maybe I have ADHD or something. But the truth is, never in my wildest imagination had I consciously comprehended the cold, hard reality of what the academic motions I was robotically going through actually meant. In my mind, I was still in high school and going to nowheresville. Don’t forget, pity-party me had left high school in a real dark zombie funk, and I’d entered that college feeling like nothing more than a wooden pawn in somebody else’s chess game. And then following that, I’d become way too distracted by the joys and opportunities of campus life to even focus on the fact that my non-decisions carried actual responsibilities.
See? Romeo’s Fortune’s Fool Syndrome.
But long story short, sure enough, I became a teacher. Didn’t like it much that first year. Felt I wasn’t cut out for it. So instead of hanging in for a second year, I joined the Army National Guard instead. Why? Because my best friend had just done that. But then BASIC Training sucked so bad, I took the path of least resistance again and sort of allowed myself to fall back into a second teaching job. Which turned out to be a great thing because… well, I fell in love with teaching there. And then I worked very hard at becoming good at it. So many great memories from the various classrooms…
You know, I’ve heard a lot of people repeat the old adage, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” The ironic thing is…they say it like it’s a bad thing.
One of the great perks of being the septuagenarian today is that I get to be that guy who harps on and on ad nauseum about the horrors of growing up way back there in the 1940s and 50s…
However, it requires being able to walk a fine line: teetering on the tightrope between being seen as an interesting and entertaining informer (like a Ted Talk guy), and unwittingly coming across as a throwback to the violent caveman days (especially to you of the much younger and more recent generations). In fact, I could be in grave danger of being judged pariah material in these political correctness years. Because let’s face it, a lot of aspects of life in “the good old days” can’t help butbe perceived as behaviors shamefully barbaric by today’s standards. I mean, (especially speaking as a male), we really were (shudder) the sexist, wolf-whistling, cancer-stick smoking, firetruck-and-ambulance-chasing, no seatbelt kids of the mid-twentieth century.
And what do I have to offer in the way of a defense? Only this pathetic little bouquet of pathetic, wet-limp-noodle, looking-down-at-our-toes-in-shame alibis. Hey you know, we were just kids—not grown-ups! It wasn’t our fault! We didn’t make the rules. It was the times, you dig? And like… when in Rome, daddy-O, do as the Romans do, right? OK, ya jus’… ya jus’ hadda be there, man!
Perhaps it would be a great idea if, before you read my following, autobiographical poem, you’d try looking objectively back on my decades as one might look upon an ancient anthropology museum diorama. And don’t you worry, I do feel dutifully guilty about having been alive during such a Neanderthal past. Hell, I’m still looking back and apologizing for the hip-hugging bell-bottoms and leisure suits of the disco 70s too. But it’s easy to play armchair quarterback after the game is over. Nevertheless, the times just are what they are, and were what they were.
Anyway, moving right along… and without further ado, allow me share with you this little autobiographical piece of creative writing I penned back around 2001.
rhymes with ‘euphoric’
once upon a time
way back there in the 50’s…
the very minute we started teething
the nursery crib became
baby’s first opium den
mom still marvels
how i’d stop crying & drop right off to sleep
just like that!
after she’d massaged a dollop of her favorite
over-the-counter opiate
into the tender & swollen teething sores of my
poor little five-month-old
gummy-gum-gums
paregoric:
the mom’s best friend
a product that really worked for once—
& my brain
(no dummy, even as early as that)
was as eager to learn as any pavlovian dog
& the old messages started flashing in & among
the axons & dendrites:
brain to gums, brain to gums, come in please
roger, brain, this is gums, go ahead
10-4 gums, that last dose was a beaut.
whatever you do, just keep’em coming. you copy?
roger wilco that, brain. Over & out…
yes, message received:
laugh & the world laughs with you
cry & you cry & get stoned
i try to imagine my cunning little self
in my powder-blue security blanket…
jonesing for my next fix—
bet i did a lot of gratuitous ‘crying’…
wonder if i snored like a banshee
as a swaddled little babe coked to the gills…
hell, i’d have cut excess teeth if i’d known how
True story, I swear. An odd one for sure unless, like me, you were born in 1946 into a generation of “considered-very-respectful-moms-and-dads” who happened to believe in the application of that magic, over-the-counter, no-prescription-required opiate known as Paregoric (yeah, think about what you’ve learned about today’s oxycodone) to the sore gums of toddlers in the throes of teething.
It was the conventional thing to do then, and the humane thing to do, right? I mean, it allowed the child to have a much needed respite from the constant pain, didn’t it. And what parent wouldn’t want that? The baby would stop yowling almost immediately. And the big added plus was: it usually knocked the little twerp right off to sleep in some playpen la-la land. And again, what parents don’t love it when their beautiful baby takes a needed nap, especially one they’ll blissfully be very unlikely to wake up from for perhaps an hour or two?
And yet… it was an opiate. Just think: a pre-rugrat, and I was on the receiving end! Who remembers how often?
Take a look at these two illustrations (with a thumb and finger pinch you can zoom in). Read the labels if you dare. These are the same labels our parents gave the cursory glance at when innocently hauling the little bottle out of the medicine cabinet, from its place among the Vicks Vaporub, mercurochrome, aspirin, and the other wonder drugs of the decade. Check the suggested ages. Check the dosages. How powerful were those doses?
Well, I have a memory of six hyperactive little Connecticut cousins of mine arriving in the dead of night after their long, cramped ride up here to Maine for a week-long visit. I was about nine. They ranged from one to eight and were wound tight as drums after being packed like sardines in their station wagon for so long. A wild and joyous scene immediately ensued, with yelling and laughing and wrestling and telling stories. But 45 minutes later their mom lined them up like little soldiers in a row, had each step forward one by one, and spooned (eye-droppered for the baby) Paregoric into each dutifully opened mouth. Fifteen minutes later there was a dead silence. Every last one of them had fallen sound asleep and was being carried off and away to bed.
And… has it affected me? Well, quite obviously it did at the time I was dosed. I mean I was (to borrow the title of one of my Bob Dylan albums) “Knocked Out Loaded.” Yes, but that was the immediate effect. Did it have a long-term effect on my life? My later life?
Well, first of all, I think we’ll all agree that it’s unreasonable to give an opiate to a 6-month old baby, and it’s hard to imagine there would be no long-term changes. Of course we didn’t have Google (let alone computers). If we had, we might have been interested in this assessment from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov: “The risk of addiction to opium smoking appears to be somewhat less than to parenteral use of heroin, but appreciably greater than to alcohol. Even in countries where its use is traditional, opium smoking carries substantial risks of harm to health and social functioning…“ And speaking of alcohol by the way, when I related the story of my 1950s infantile brushes with Paregoric to my high school English classes of the 1970s, they confessed to me that many of their parents had dipped the tip of a rag into a glass of whiskey and allowed them to chew on it for gums relief. But I digress.
Who can say what long-term effects this practice has had on my life? I believe that I can argue very convincingly that there have been some direct long-term effects. But how much of that was brought on by DNA? Nature or nurture?
Let me say this, though: my little poem, “Rhymed with ‘Euphoric,’” is the one I chose to be the introductory piece in the last of five poetry chapbooks:
As a whole, the book pretty much stunk. But there are a few winners within, in my opinion. More about this later perhaps, perhaps not.
“What goes on…in your heart?What goes on…in your mind?” –The Beatles
By first grade, I was pretty convinced that whenever I climbed into bed at night and closed my eyes, whatever I was secretly thinking would appear in a cartoon word balloon right above my forehead for my mom to “read,” just like a Beetle Bailey or Dennis the Menace comic strip. And honestly? Some of my thoughts tended to border on being a tad naughty by definition. Spooky how she seemed to always have a pretty good idea what might be going on in my head. She’d often ambush me in the act of some evil family felony, like pilfering one of Uncle Sherman’s left over cigar butts from the guest ashtray. So when she’d slip into my bedroom to say goodnight, I’d surreptitiously tighten all my muscles, ball up my little fists, and strive for only LOUD Sunday school thoughts until she’d leave. Acute Guilt Paranoia.
I went to college and became a high school English teacher, teaching English and American literature and tons of grammar and composition. However, teaching creative writing was my specialty and my passion. I’ve dabbled at becoming a writer myself and, even though my literary output is “small potatoes,” I get a lot of enjoyment out of the pastime.
In my grades 9-12 short story units, I’d get really pumped when we’d work on characterization. “Invent a character,” I’d begin, “in a single 5-sentence paragraph. But in your paragraph, no including your character’s name, height, weight, eye or hair color because… a preacher, a serial killer, and a rock star could share all of those identical attributes. The idea here is to bring out something that really distinguishes the person. So what can you include? What are some observations that reveal something that those stats don’t?” I’d might get corny and sing a line “Getting to know you, getting to know all about you…” or the chorus of the Beatles “What Goes On?” Then, for a springboard… I’d offer up myself as the artist’s model.
“OK. All of you, look at me. Check me out. Who can pin point something personal about me that reveals something, anything that goes beyond the yadda yadda mugshot stats. Don’t be afraid of offending me. I guarantee immunity.”
I’ll never forget the very first time I started with that prompt. Despite my assurances that that there would be no repercussions, it of course took a while to get a response. Then finally, after a tense silence, a mousey girl who almost never let us hear her voice during class discussions surprised me. She had raised her hand. “Tell me whatcha got. Lay it on me…” I said.
“You… have… a dog.”
Whoa! Did I ever do a double take! Totally flummoxed, it took me a few moments to gather my thoughts. before I could respond. (A) I did not own a dog, (B) I had never owned a dog, so (C) how she’d come up with that out of the blue I couldn’t imagine. But there she sat.. Waiting. Smiling brightly. Smiling hopefully. And I immediately realized something about her. She was a dog person.
“I’m guessing a white dog? Or at least partially white.”
“Uhhhmmmm…wow. I mean, well, see… that’s… that’s pretty interesting. I’m totally… surprised. Never in a million years would I have expected that. So… I really hafta ask. What made you say I have a dog?”
Continuing to beam at me, she bravely replied “All those little hairs on your shoulders. And down the front of your shirt.”
“What?”I automatically eyeballed those areas she had identified. Oh crap! Yep. There they were. Busted. How embarrassing! I could sense the class really getting interested in our dialogue. Apparently this quiet mouse of a girl was turning out to be a little Ms. Sherlock Holmes.
My face must have been showing some consternation because she worriedly asked, “What?”
Humbled, trying not to gag too noticeably on my pride, I had to say something. “Man! Man oh man. First of all… relax. You did really well here at zeroing right in on something… very specific. Perfect in fact. Exactly as I asked. Which, I guess, makes you an A+ student for today. Yeah. And I… have a confession I need to make now. No, make that two confessions. One, no, I don’t own a dog. Never have.” I could see I was confusing her. “And two, I’m a little embarrassed. Because…well, I have to own up what this i…”
“You trimmed your beard this morning!” She was right in her TV-quiz-show-contestant-mode glory.
“Bingo,” I conceded lifelessly. “Yeah. The white hairs. In my beard. So, yeah, it appears… I guess… I’m a little vain, aren’t I. Trying to ward off old age with a pair of scissors. Sheesh. But you know… you, youdid a great job here. Spotting something really telling. About me. More than I expected. Or realized. That was… wonderful really.” Yeah. (heh heh) Right.
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Sometimes, since I had no budget, I would take the kids out to the school parking lot on a “poor man’s field trip.” I’d send us all wandering around, checking out all the cars and pick-ups, both students’ and teachers’. The assignment was to take notes on the automobiles’ little give-aways, things that were revealing about the owners or drivers. Bumper stickers. Vanity license plates. Decals. Rust. The kinds of trash littering the car seats and floors, etc. Any way to tell if they were male or female, old or young, wealthy or not so much. They had a field day with my old rust bucket. But it was a fun assignment, I think. Got us out of the classroom anyway.
Back in the classroom I enjoyed creeping them out a little by having them contemplate the proposition that had intrigued me so much as a kid. “Imagine for a moment that there’s this… way to look into a people’s brains and see everything going on inside them. Everything they’re thinking, or have ever thought. Their hopes and dreams. Their fears. Their pain. Their guilt. Who they have their eye on right now (elbow-elbow, nudge-nudge). Could be a some kind of technology… or just ESP. Or…” And then I would confess to them my early childhood fear of Mom knowing my every single naughty thought or idea, and the crazy little cartoon balloons I imagined filled with give-away readable text appearing above my forehead. They’d get a big kick out of that… until I left my desk and slowly began approaching them, getting up close and personal…
“Imagine for minute if you will that each of us has one of those cartoon balloons floating over our heads right now. No wait, instead of cartoon balloons, let’s make that our own personal little Goodyear Blimps, electronically reading out everything that’s going on in those private little vaults we call our brains, OK? And we have no control over what it’s revealing. It’s spilling our guts, on everything we’re thinking. Every thought hanging right out there, front and center for everyone to see, just like clothes drying on an old clotheslines. Imagine! You can look left, you can look right, turn around and look behind you and guess what: no more secrets! Wouldn’t that be fun?”
And by then I’d be standing right in front of the front row, looking down upon all of them… with the Dreaded (oh no…) Personal (oh no!) Eye-Contact. “So, look around at your neighbors. What are we going to learn about Johnny or Roberta? Hmmm? Or… what are we going to learn about…” and here I’d let my eyes travel around the room like the little silver ball on a spinning roulette wheel “…you, Betty!?” The response would be a terrified spastic jerk, a look of shocked embarrassment, and an ‘Eeek! No way!’ “And how about we all take a look at Fred back there. What’ll we find, Freddy? What are you secretly up to these days, eh? (Fred: ‘Jesus!’) Class laughter. Nervous laughter. All fearing it might be them in the spotlight next). After a bit more of the sweaty palms fun, I would add, “Or what about… me?”
And then I’d end by restating my thesis. “People are interesting, not boring, folks. Every single one of us, every face in the crowd. We’re not cookie-cutter cardboard cut-outs here, are we. Not just height, weight, and hair color. When you create your characters, try to imagine what their Goodyear Blimps are hiding. Have fun with them.
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All right. Enough of this reminiscing bullpucky (“bullpucky” being a much-used Colonel Potter word on the TV sitcom M*A*S*H). Time to get on with my intended purpose in creating this blog (which does, by the way, actually relate to the above ramblings).
Quite a few years ago, I was invited to spend two whole days in a second grade classroom, getting to sport an officious little badge that read, “GUEST.” Having garnered a modest reputation as a local writer who had published a number of poems in different magazines, I was there to entertain the little rugrats who were ankle deep in a creative writing unit. What a challenge for a teacher who had spent 34 years dealing only with teenagers. But what fun it was, a really positive adventure for me. At the end of the second and final day, the regular class teacher assigned her students to each write me a personal note, thanking me for visiting and telling me what they had learned as a result of our time together. What a sweet thing. When I got home, I read them all. They were all nice, as you would expect. However one stood out from all the others. It read, “Dear Mister Lyford, What I learned from your visit is that old people can be interesting.” How about that!?
In my 77 years, I’ve self-published 7 books of poetry, 2 memoirs, and a few episodes of a podcast (and yes, self-published, I know. So, not bragging here.) Basically I’m a long-in-the-tooth story-teller who’s gotten tired of his own stories, all of which have been non-fiction by the way. That’s what I was doing in my podcasts too, telling anecdotal stories of my earlier past. The podcast never went anywhere and I do understand why. Primarily it was just another one of my little “adventures,” or hobbies I’ve dabbled in all my life to ward off boredom. The podcasts comprised stories of my long Charlie Brown life.
With podcast publishing, you receive daily viewership counts. Like a lot of hacks, mine were miniscule. Once again, I’d turned out to be just that same old same old, peculiar, local non-phenomenon. My last podcast episode, however, did surprisingly much better. The reason, I believe, is that I’d said to hell with the stories, and instead tried simply taking a “walk” in my own head, to capitalize on what was going on in there. My mind has forever been a behive of thoughts and conversations buzzing so loudly it’s a wonder I can sleep at night. So for that last podcast, I finally ended up with a piece titled I, Robot, an odd philosophical patchwork inspired by many of my favorite artists from Rod Serling to Cole Porter. I’m somewhat proud of that little effort. It was a lot more of a challenge because I didn’t really have a whole plan to begin with. I only knew I wanted to begin by rehashing the plot of one of my favorite old Twilight Zone episodes. After accomplishing that, I just sort of wandered off into the words looking for my path. It felt adventurous to do it that way.
In this effort right here I’m planning to capitalize on being 77, an age I’m amazed I’ve actually reached. Seems unbelievable. And just as I described in my very first blog post, “Unstuck in Time with Billy Pilgrim,” (this one is number 2) I really am being overrun by mini-flashbacks of my escapades in the time-space continuum. And I’ve been feeling a real need to share what I’m “receiving,” from this freight train overloaded with time travel memories, roaring up the tracks from yesteryear. So I want to dedicate this blog to being that guy with the revealing cartoon word balloons floating up and out of his brain like chimney smoke, that vain guy with the sprinkles of tell-tale beard whiskers down the front of his shirt. I want to tattoo “OPEN HOUSE” on my forehead. “MY BRAIN AND WELCOME TO IT.” As Bob Dylan once quipped, “I got a head full of ideas and it’s driving me insane.”Not so many “stories” with beginnings, middles, and ends this time, but…story bytes. Topics and impressions. Remembrances that reflect my brushes with music, literature, poetry, sports, and visual arts, and how they affected me emotionally and helped me grow. Foods? Personalities? Fears? Superstitions? Danger? Evil? All of the above and more. Who knows? The possibilities are endless. But it’s open house…
NEARING THE END OF THE LINE 