Tag: Characterization

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

NO ONE KNOWS…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARE YOU THE ONE WHO STOLE MY TIARA?

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

…STOLE MY STAPLER… BURN THIS PLACE DOWN…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEAD DITTO

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

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

OK. First, let’s be honest.

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

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

Nick Nolte

JoBeth Williams

Judd Hirsch

Ralph Macchio

Richard Mulligan

William Schallert

Laura Dern

Crispin Glover

Morgan Freeman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All at one table.

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

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

Yeah. I know.

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

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

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

Until that day…

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

And then something happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So we took a vote.”

“Huh!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right,” the gentleman said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Well… thanks. For that.“

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody said, “Aw jeez!“

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

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

“You were saying…?”

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

Coach tensed at the word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ZOO!

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

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

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

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

So anyway…

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

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

Thanks for reading, by the way.

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

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THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN… IN A CROOKED LITTLE HOUSE

1966.

The summer we got married.

At the end of July, the 30th.

I’d just turned 20, Phyllis 18. Just kids really, like a lot of newlyweds. And no, it wasn’t a shotgun wedding. I got married because I was over-the-moon-crazy-in-love with my steady girlfriend of nearly four years. And in love with love itself, of course. Me, the hopeless romantic.

And you know, it’s not like we had any money to speak of. We just didn’t know any better. Phyl had just graduated from high school. And that August I’d be resuming my education as the now-married, man-boy, college junior. But we both had summer part-time jobs.

Her, clerking and soda-jerking over at Lanphers Drug Store and me, still gas-pump-jockeying across the street at Huey Cole’s Esso.


However, I’d also just lucked just out in securing a second additional job that summer, a very competitively-sought-after job in our little town. It was like winning the lottery. The ideal beach bum job.

Running the Municipal Beach Concession for the summer!

Of course when I signed on to that, I had no idea how much of eight-days-a-week work and responsibility it was going to require. Every week re-ordering the Styrofoam cups, paper plates, napkins and paper towels, cigarettes, hotdogs, hamburger, buns, chips and pretzels, sodas, candy bars, ice cream products, pastries, coffee and condiments— you name it. Plus having to show up there at such ungodly early hours some mornings to meet the various delivery trucks in order to get all those ordered goods inside and stored away. To pay the bills. To keep the books. To hire part-time help. And to always be doing those pesky bank runs back into town to keep myself supplied with the necessary stash of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, and long green for making change.

A helluva lotta work. Especially for me, being one of the laziest little louts you’d ever want to meet back then. But guess what. Even if I had fully and completely realized beforehand just how much slaving away would be required, I still would’ve jumped at the chance to get it. Because the job came with one very unique and delicious perk. One of those offers you just can’t refuse.

It came with a quaint little rent-free camp! Right there smack-dab on the frickin’ beach!

And for me, the guy who’d otherwise have remained trapped and living under his parents’ thumbs at home all summer long? And for three whole months! An answer to a prayer!

Oh, I would be so envied.

And ta-DAH! Here she is. Just feast your eyes:

OK, “quaint” as my chosen adjective is a bit if a stretch. Kinda brings out the ‘bum’ in the expression ‘beach bum,’ doesn’t it. And how about those little luxury ‘yachts’ lying right out there in the front yard. Don’t they just have “poor man’s adventure” written all over them (provided I could scrounge up a couple of oars).

But to me? At that time? With my big-little-kid psyche peeking out through the eyes of my young-adult-looking boy-body? Jackpot! It was like I was finally getting that little “No Girls Allowed” clubhouse I’d dreamed of building back as a 10-year-old! I mean, weren’t the old bargain-basement Shangri-La sugar-plums just a-dancing around in my head.

But yes, that beach was mine, ladies and gentlemen! Day and night.

And then there was one other reason for me to feel happy about that job. Somehow my best friend, Neil Mallett, had always managed to skunk me by falling into so much better, and more desirable, summer jobs than I ever had. For instance one summer he landed two primo jobs. If I remember correctly (and I believe I do), during the daytime he was being paid good money for simply sitting in a chair in some underground Civil Defense bunker, just on the slight, off-chance that some major crisis alert might start blaring out over their Conelrad two-way radio, which of course it never did. So… you know, all I could imagine was him snoozing in some chair over there, and reading paperbacks.

But that was nothing compared to his night-owl job: being paid good money just to sleep, damnit! That’s right, you read that correctly. He was employed to sleep nights over at the Lary Funeral Home.

I’m guessing there must’ve been some regulation or other that required a living, breathing human being to be stationed on the premises at all times, maybe to alert the authorities if one of the corpses suddenly sat up, or perhaps it was to ward off the modern-day body snatchers. Whatever.

But just think how that had been leaving me feeling when there I was out there in the hot sun sweating my life away mowing cemetery lawns, or slaving on the 2:00 to 10:00 second shift (me missing out on prime dating time with my steady girl!) in the hellishly hot Guilford Woolen Mill spinning room, eh?

So anyway… you can perhaps see just how vindicating this might feel— me, suddenly emerging as The Cool Hand Luke of the Beach…?

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

So of course I moved right in immediately with all the necessities: sleeping bag, pillow and towels from home, stack of paper plates and cups, plastic ware, and my swimming trunks. And oh yeah: stupidly, with a box full of my college textbooks. Why? Oh, only because there was one rough-single-board shelf spiked to one of the walls, and I thought, Jeez, look. There’s a shelf. Oughtta have some books on that shelf. You know, for decor. For looks. (I mean, I wasn’t actually planning on reading any of them or anything.) Duh!

But turns out, the place obviously hadn’t been built by someone with carpenter skills. My shelf had been crudely nailed a bit crookedly to the crooked wall, so the books would slide off and fall to the floor in a heap every half hour or so (including in the middle of the night!).

Turned out the place did have a bed upstairs at least (Yay!) accessible by some rickety, cramped, and crooked little stairs. Also it turned out the place didn’t even have running water. So… consequently it also turned out the place didn’t have a bathroom either, which meant long nocturnal trudges across the cold midnight sand and up a little rise to the public restrooms in the parking lot. Turned out too the place didn’t have a phone jack, which irritatingly meant that to call somebody back in town I’d hafta dig up some coins and trot over to the lone phone booth located next to the concession building.

But guess what. It turned out the place did have electricity, so it wouldn’t be totally like Thoreau’s Walden Pond after all! Wow. That made all the difference in the world.

So yeah. I went to sleep that first night, a barefoot beach bum in his own little bachelor pad, happy as a hobo in an empty boxcar.

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

I can’t say the job didn’t have its stressful moments (OK, make that hours), but on the whole I was having a very happy summer. It was a social thing for me. I loved gabbing with the customers through the order/take-out windows, many of whom were re-visiting Foxcroft Academy alumni with whom I shared a common past. And then there were the visiting snowbirds from away, many of those with whom I was already acquainted as well. Plus I’d hired a couple of part-time helpers and had developed a good and friendly relationship with them.

But you know what the best thing was? I didn’t have a frickin’ boss! I… was the boss of me! Something I’d never experienced before (and, unfortunately, something I was never to experience again throughout my employable future). Oh yeah, I did currently have a boss at the gas station, but I liked him a lot, as everybody did.

So yeah, my summer of ‘65 was shaping up to be a pretty hunky-dory time. I loved feeling the dead cold sand under my bare feet on a hot night, while checking out the moon reflecting off the water. And my God, the stars! Wow. So unbelievably bright in all that darkness. And then of course there was often the music pumping out across the water from the roller rink off in the distance, soundtracking my halcyon nights. (Of course, I had to be learn to be careful and to watch where I was stepping at night while crossing the beach, as there was often the hazard of disturbing those… night-time lovers out there in the dark. Sitting together on blankets. Lying together on blankets. Not worrying about sunburns.)

And a big plus was having my BFF, Neil Mallett, come out and stay with me some nights. Yes, we’d been buddies since meeting each other for the first time in 9th grade. Alphabetical order had seen to that: Lyford and Mallett. Since we were both taking the same college prep classes and since every single teacher back then lacked the creativity to try seating their kids in any configuration other than alphabetical order, Neil always ended up sitting right behind me in every class.

He and I had had so many experiences together. High school hijinks. Haying with his family on his farm. Playing our guitars. Double-dating, with his girlfriend-at-the-time being my girlfriend’s best friend. So yeah, the walks and talks we enjoyed together out at the lake felt so very comfortable in the days getting closer and closer to my wedding, after which poor Phyllis would have to join me in the ramshackle hovel I was currently calling home.

Something else: you never knew what crazy little ‘adventure’ might just pop up in your life, living out there next to the water among all the wealthy summer folks. I’ll share one with you right now in this post, and re-cap some of the other weird happenings in my upcoming Part II…

OK, one night, very shortly after I’d moved myself in, one of Neil’s-and-my leisurely night-time strolls got totally upended by something really bizarre. And later, it turned out that this particular little happenchance was really just the harbinger for a string of other unusual happenings waiting in the wings of the weeks to come…

So the road leading down to the Municipal Beach is known as Mile Hill. And as late at night as it was that night, close to midnight, there would be little or no traffic on it. Meaning that our world was deafeningly silent— the only exception being the occasional call of a loon.

Suddenly, however, that silence started getting ripped to shreds by some lone, unexpected racket coming from way up at the top of the hill: some vehicle roaring like a banshee with the pedal to the metal on a speed-limit-45 road, just a-barreling down in the dark like Robert Mitchum with his Ballad of Thunder Road’s revenuers hot on his tails. And gauging by the rising Doppler effect, we realized it would likely be on us in half a minute, or less. What the hell was going on?!

Now here’s the thing. Both Mallett and I well knew the geography all about where we were standing, which happened to be right beside the municipal boat ramp that drops straight down into the lake. Moreover, what was now weighing especially and urgently on our minds right then was the fact that Mile Hill completely dead-ends directly at the top the boat ramp. So of course normally drivers slow right down to make the left turn onto the rustic dirt road that accessed all of the many camps populating the waterfront, or simply to ease into one of the few available boat-ramp parking spaces.

But see, this car was a rogue fourth-of-July-rocket wannabe! Incoming fast! I’m talking Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen’s Hot-Rod-Lincoln”-fast!

Now, we’d sidled ourselves right up next to the boat ramp for a good view, and had just begun gawking expectedly up the road when… whoa-Jesus, here it came! Two demonic headlight-eyes looping ’round the bend and flying straight toward us like the proverbial bat outta hell, leaving us just enough time (say three seconds!) for our bodies to autonomically execute our twin-matador sidesteps! Whew!

Jesus H, but what a sight to behold! The car not plowing down our ramp but launching itself airborne right off the top of the it! (Now there’s an image I’ll never shake for the rest of my life!) And then of course The Big KER-SPLOOSH!– it doing its heavy, grille-first nose-dive like some breached killer whale disappearing back down into an ink-black sea! Only in this case (just for the blink of a second or two) bizarrely illuminating a thirty- or forty-foot arc of Sebec Lake’s floor bed with all its rocks and sand and small boulders off to each side… before buoying back up level on the water’s surface.

It was… magnificent!

After splash-down, the car had boated out quite a few yards but was now just sort of lolling in place out there, taking on water fast with both its front doors now opened, and settling down onto that sandy bottom. It wasn’t deep enough out there for it to sink totally out of sight however.

Its two occupants, after climbing out, were standing out there on either side now, armpit-deep and looking pretty confused and disoriented.

“What the hell were you thinking,” I yelled out to them, the two of us now standing atop the ramp, “barreling down here 70 or 80 miles an hour?”

They both gawked at us for a moment, motionless. Then they looked down and studied their egregious, opened-door car with the water up to the top of the steering wheel. And then back at us. “Where the hell are we?” the driver yelled back. A question that got Neil and I to share a frown at each other for a moment.

“You don’t… know?” Neil asked.

To which the response was, “This is the road to Millinocket isn’t it?”

“Uhmmm… no, not even close.” I said.

“This is the Lake Road,” Neil told them, “which is… well, you know, the road to the lake that you’re standing in at the moment.”

“Christ!” said one of them, hard to tell which one in the dark. “Well, I mean, the friggin’ sign said Millinocket. Comin’ through Dover, the signs… both of ’em… definitely both of ’em said Millinocket!”

“Oh, OK. Now I see what you did. You just missed the third sign. The one just before the post office. Would’ve been a right-pointing arrow. With Milo and Millinocket on it. You missed that one. And you were already on the Lake Road to begin with…”

“Yeah, and at your speed, it’d be easy to miss,” Neil said.

“So, you guys just gonna stand there all night?” I asked. “Don’t you wanna come in out of the water or anything?”

They did. They started wading in toward us. “Jesus, we gotta get this car the hell outta here! Hey, can you guys help us? You got a truck? With a chain, maybe?”

“No. But I do have a ‘50 Pontiac. With a straight-eight under the hood and a lot of power. But no chain. All I got’s a nylon rope.”

“That’ll work. Got get it.”

“No. It won’t. Rope’s too thin. It’ll just snap.”

“Better than nuthin’. C’mon, man. We gotta at least try!” They were pretty desperate. “We gotta get these wheels back on the road. Now! Please. You gotta give us a hand!”

I was actually starting to think about it. But by then I’d noticed two things about our guys. The first being that they were obviously drunk, big-time. That was obvious. No surprise. The second, that their faces now oddly seemed to be flickering on-and-off, blue. Took me a second to square that in my mind. But of course it was a patrol car having just cruised ’round the bend and slicing up the whole night with its blue strobes flashing.

So… yeah, this had been one of them high-speed chases you hear about. In a few more seconds, the cops had pulled in right behind us. “Well, I could try.” I said. “But the boys in blue here?”

“Oh… fuck!”

“Yeah. They’ll get your car towed right out of there in a jiffy.”

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

Oh well. It was just one of those odd but unforgettable moments like so many others that have inserted themselves into my life every now and again. Oh yes, my mind has so many such mini-‘adventures’ like this tucked away, little vignettes that have tended to sprinkle a little added spice into my life from time to time.

So Neil and I answered the few questions asked of us by the cops, and then we got to watch our out-of-town ‘visitors’ get handcuffed and escorted to the rear door of the waiting patrol car. But it was really getting late, so we didn’t hang around to wait for the tow truck to show up and haul the vehicle back out and onto dry land. We were tired.

And so off we went, strolling ourselves back across the cold sand in the dark, back toward my recent little home away from home.

It had been an interesting evening. To say the least. We both marveled over what it must have been like, barreling down that long hill shitfaced at such a high speed and then all of a sudden: WHAM!

I mean, try to imagine it! You find yourself unexpectedly diving nose-first while witnessing an inexplicable lake opening itself right up in your headlights like Moses’ parting Red Sea, and giving you a surreal and stunning glass-bottom-boat, freeze-frame flash of an unexpected lake floor!.

What a night. A night to remember. For them and us. But especially them.

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

Looking back on it now, I kinda picture that little happening as the opening scene of some 1960’s beach-party-movie. Or, better and more realistically still, the once Perfect and Proper Ceremonial Christening (like the bottle of champagne shattered across the bow of a new ship) that it was, of the beginning of my new life as the summer beach bum, with that unimaginable string of even more abnormalities that were waiting for me in the wings of the weeks to come…

I mean “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” But can you say ‘the bachelor-party-from-hell?‘ Can you say ‘the mental patient at the door?‘ See you in Part II…?

home

“LOOKIN’ FOR THE OLD BLUE OX…”

You know who I envy in this life? Let me tell you. The Songwriters. And yes, I just capitalized the word Songwriters because I hold them in such high esteem. But at the same time, who I don’t envy so much are the so-called ‘songwriters’ (lower case ‘s‘). I’m talkin’ those ‘songwriters’ who are in it solely (and often soullessly) for the money and quick fame. See, I sorta need to feel the signature of the writers’ souls along with their unique talents in their offerings. Not that I can blame anybody for just wanting to earn a living. You know, live and let live. I just don’t find myself envying anybody who writes crap, even crap that sells big. That’s all.

Take the Beatles. The Beatles began as songwriters (small ‘s‘), not Songwriters. In my humble opinion. Oh, and I’m the first to admit, they became Songwriters Extraordinaire. “Eleanor Rigby.” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” “A Day in the Life.” “Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite.” “In My Life.” Because hey, please know I grew to love the Beatles.

But what an overwhelming disappointment it was when the very the first song I heard by them in November of ’63 was “I Want to Hod Your Hand.” I mean, really, just how creative are these lyrics?

Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something,
I think you’ll understand,
Then I’ll say that something,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand.

Oh please say to me
You’ll let me be your man,
And please say to me,
You’ll let me hold your hand,
Now let me hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand.

And when I touch you
I feel happy inside,
It’s such a feeling
That my love I can’t hide,
I can’t hide, I can’t hide.

Yeah, you got that something,
I think you’ll understand,
When I feel that something,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand.

And when I touch you
I feel happy inside,
It’s such a feeling
That my love I can’t hide,
I can’t hide, I can’t hide.

Yeah, you got that something,
I think you’ll understand,
When I feel that something,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand,
I wanna hold your hand.

“Nuff said.

In my life, (now there’s a real Beatles’ song) I’ve tried my hand at poetry. I was inspired by the so many poets and poems I’d fallen in love with. But, to become a poet, you pretty much have to start out at the bottom, don’t you.

So I was clerking at the local library, when this sweet little old lady began pestering me every other week to join her poetry writers group. And yeah, sure, I’d been struggling with… ‘my poetry’ for a long while, but only privately. I had no self-confidence. I had never shared any of it. The thought of sharing felt… risky.

But one day I just threw in the towel, gave in to her persistence, and said “OK, OK OK!” I showed up with a very humble poem. But a safe (for me) poem. And by safe, I mean I felt it was a somewhat fairly clever little thing I’d concocted… but mostly because it rhymed. Because I just for some reason assumed that all these oldsters would exclusively be into the rhyming poems. OK me, I’d moved pretty much exclusively into free verse by then, but… I mean,hey, I didn’t know who the hell these old buzzards were, circled around the library table like a séance. And I definitely didn’t want to risk having one I really cared about getting shot down.

And then, finally: it was my turn to read. So OK, I cleared my throat three or four times; took, and held, the required deep breath; and then nervously proceded headlong to read what I’d brought.

When done, I looked up. Everyone was silently looking at me, and some were nodding, which made me sigh in relief. But then that little old poetry mistress who ran the group locked onto me with her suddenly mischievous, beady little eyes and said, “Why, that’s… doggerel,” followed by “and doggerel is poetry written by dogs!“

To my chagrin and terror, everybody burst out laughing!

Turned out, this lady had pulled the same stunt on everybody who ever joined the group. It was sort of a first-day initiation of hers. And (who woulda thunk it?) after a little period of adjustment, it turned out that this lady and I were destined to become a great lifelong friends. I even dedicated my first full-length memoir to Anne Kucera.

But she was right, wasn’t she. So much so-called ‘poetry’ really is doggerel. And if I had known this poetry-written-by-dogs expression back in 1963, that’s exactly how I would’ve assessed the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” And yes, sure, I got it that that particular little ditty sounded pretty lively and all, and I noted that sure, all the girls were doing the Elvis thing, screaming and fainting, so they were definitely a phenom, but… I mean, just look at those pathetic lyrics. I’m sorry, but the Beatles began as doggerel songwriters (lower case s). Case closed.

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

Now… here we go. And OK… I admit it. I’m still on my juke box kick. So here comes a song. Hey, I can’t help it. I’m really just very passionate about the special singer/songwriter music I’ve meticulously collected over my lifetime because… well, because of the effects that music has had, and still has, on me. So I’m not going to apologize for wanting, actually needing, to share some of the best of it.

And right now, please trust me– I have a songwriter, and a song of his, in mind that I want to share with you, hoping you’ll be willing to give it a shot. But first, allow me to refer you back to the song, “Christmas in the Trenches,” featured in one of my recent posts titled “A Single Song for All Humanity.” The lyrics of that song tell of something big and important, something unusual and truthful and heartfelt… something well worth experiencing. Which is what I look for in the music I collect. And I’d be willing to bet real money that those of you who did listen to “Christmas in the Trenches” were also pretty powerfully moved. As I was. Because lyrics like those in that piece are a humane and generous gift… to you, to all of us, from a real bona fide (capital ‘S‘) Songwriter. A rare gift.

However, today’s gift isn’t about some big and important 3-day event that has established its place in the annals of world history. Rather it’s about a seemingly small five-minute encounter. And it’s not really about the encounter per se as much as it is about what this little, universal encounter reveals.

Today’s gift is a unique, poignant piece, composed by one of the more talented singer/songwriters catalogued in my vast juke box: the international singer/songwriter David Mallett from Sebec, Maine. Dave’s compositions have been recorded by a number of famous recording artists from John Denver, Kathy Mattea, Emmylou Harris, to Arlo Guthrie. You’ll likely know him from his signature song, “The Garden Song,” (a.k.a. “Inch by Inch”) popularized and sung (in a number of languages) throughout the world.

But he’s composed so many other long-time perrenial favorites as well, such as “Fire,” commemorating the Mallett family’s long ago loss of their homestead in a calamitous conflagration; and then of course “The Ballad of the Saint Anne’s Reel,” which has been happily adopted as the official folk anthem of Prince Edward Island and the surrounding Maritimes provinces of Canada.

Famous American singer/songwriter David Mallett

Now, I gotta admit this one comes with a title that’s a little bit unexpected, one that might raise the eyebrows of someone scanning the playlist of songs on Dave’s The Artist in Me CD for the first time. It’s titled “The Old Blue Ox.” However (much needed spoiler alert here) the title is definitely not referencing the famous, fictional tall tale of Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Big Blue Ox, which is more than likely the only “blue ox” most Americans would be familiar with. And like me, you may never have realized that there really is such a thing as a ‘blue ox.’ I mean, I had to look it up for myself: “Blue Ox: a blue brindle cow or ox which is usually the result of a roan Shorthorn which is bred to a black and white Holstein.”

OK. Yeah. I mean, Who knew?

Well, the apparent answer to that is… farmers (and alas, no farmer, me). But yes, farmers are very likely to know of this breed.

The Blue Ox

OK: time to relax. So breathe… and now lean back to get comfy in your chair and try to imagine you’ve just been puttering about your house for the afternoon, a house situated in a rural part of Maine’s farmlands, when suddenly there comes a knock at your door. You open it to find… on your doorstep… one sad, confused, little old gentleman leaning on his cane…

"THE OLD BLUE OX"

"Good afternoon, I'm lookin' for
the old blue ox," he said,

And he said, "I don't believe it,
but I heard my father's dead.

And just where is the Curtis place?
My God how things have changed!"

He was a little ol' man, he was almost blind,
and he was walkin' with a cane.
 
"Now I know this is the place,
because I climbed the Severance Hill,

I'd know that hill in a hundred years,
and how her rule and will."

"Earl Parkman moved away," I said, 
"Will Green, he died you know,

And Willis Pratt has grown a man,
and gone on years ago."
 
Now our conversation was quite short,
five minutes at the most,

But he stood before me like a boy,
and conjured up the ghosts

Of friends and kin folk from an older,
and a slower time,

How fifty years, disappeared 
like minutes in his mind.
 
"The blue ox was gone the day I left,
been gone a week or so,

And I've come around to fetch him home,
cause I always did you know.

Pa will be glad." He started off,
and I stood and watched him go,

Down the way to yesterday 
lookin' hard and lookin' slow.
 
Now apple trees just wither,
and barns grow old and fall,

And ancient lady's sit in rockin'
chairs, wrapped in their shawls.

But this old fella does the things,
the things he has to do,

He's lookin' for his past,
he might stop and talk to you.

"Good afternoon, I'm lookin' for
the old blue ox," he said,

He said, "I don't believe it,
but I heard my father's dead.

And just where is the Curtis place?
My God how things have changed."

He was a little ol' man he was almost blind
and he was walkin' with a cane.

What this song does is deliver a bittersweet little punch to my heart, leaving me with a warm and kind of teary-eyed smile every time I listen to it. So no, it’s not exactly a happy song, although the vocals and the jaunty instrumental accompaniment combine to nearly disguise it as such. But yeah… I really love this one.

I love the artful way it’s written. Because in no more than a handful of lyrics, it hands us such an easy-to-grasp foreshadowing of a reality that very likely awaits us, but one we seldom consciously imagine will ever touch us: that some time in the near or far future, maybe right in the middle of us just happily going about our lives, with everything moving pretty much right along all hunky-dory… it’ll eventually come. Very much like a sudden and unexpected knock at the door:

Somebody we know and probably care about, and maybe even love and depend on, will have just been diagnosed with the reality of dementia. Because shit happens…

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

Our extended family has owned a lake-front cottage since the 1940’s, the ownership of which has been passed down within the family from generation to generation. One sunny, blue-sky, summer afternoon back fifteen years or so, a number of us were lounging out on the cottage’s porch that overlooks the lake. And all of a sudden my mom said something that didn’t seem very logical at all. “What a beautiful lake this is. It must have a name. So, what’s the name of this lake?”

Suddenly that had us all sitting up a little straighter in our chairs. And after a short pause, someone said the obvious. “Why… Sebec Lake, of course. You know that, Violet. Sebec Lake.”

My mom thought about that and then simply said, “Oh.” But then, after a lengthy pause, she spoke again. “And this is such a nice camp.”

“Yes. It is,” we all agreed.

“So… whose camp is this? Who owns it?”

That question brought a much longer and more uncomfortable silence to the porch gathering, as we all looked to one another in… well, astonishment. Then Dad, flummoxed and nervous, looked her right in the eye and said sternly, “Why, you do, Violet. This is your camp. You own it!”

“What… me?” she laughed in disbelief. “Me? I own it…? Oh no, I don’t think so. How could that be?”

And that was that. Our ‘knock at the door.’ And it was unnerving. Frightful. Oh I mean, sure, looking back, there’d been signs. Of course there had. Road bumps had been coming up in conversations quite a lot with her actually, which we’d find frustrating, but... still… we’d just pooh-pooh them into the background, log them under the category of ‘just natural aging,’ just a little forgetfulness here and there which can be expected.

But… that was our knock at the door. The end of any more hopeful denial.

It took years for her dementia to play out in our lives. Years to go from that first cottage-porch incident to the point of her often confusing our dad, her husband, with her long-dead father. To the point of her packing up her little suitcase at home most nights, parking it right by the front door, and continually asking us when was somebody, anybody, ever going to get around to taking her home, to ‘her house’ so she could go to bed? But once in a while there’d be little periods of time when the old, real Violet would just pop right back in among us. Of course this was all devastating, long past the time we finally had to move her into the local nursing home and right up until the day passed.

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

Now I swear I certainly did not decide to write about this topic to depress anybody, and I sincerely hope I haven’t done that. It’s simply that I treasure my collection of unique and creative singer/songwriter recordings so much that I’m kinda driven to share them, because to me they’ve always been such an important lifeline to my inner peace, comfort, sanity, and even knowledge. Because my God, they cover just about all genres. Humor and comedy. Tragedy. Romance. Novelty. Philosophy. Nostalgia. Politics. Protest. Spoken word. History. You name it. And I can’t help feeling that the experience of them is just way too valuable a commodity for me alone to greedily keep, them just languishing here on the dusty CD shelves in my little apartment and in my PC’s digital ‘jukebox vaults.’ They need to be shared. And I feel a real need to put them out there for you, too, to discover.

Yeah. I know. How very Don Quixote of me, right?

But I find the talent and craft of these songwriters irresistable. I mean, just take another look at this one, “The Old Blue Ox.” Look at the dialogue between the little old man and the narrator:

“Now our conversation was quite short,
five minutes at the most,
But he stood before me like a boy,
and conjured up the ghosts
Of friends and kin folk from an older,
and a slower time,
How fifty years, disappeared
like minutes in his mind.”

Yes, clinically it’s just one man conversing with some unfortunate old fella locked in the grip of his dementia, but the tiny encounter is painted within these lyrics with an almost paranormal feel about it. Like one of them is a ghost… or… like they’re both two time-travelers, each ensconsed in his own time-period-‘reality,’ but somehow briefly communicating with one another straight through a… wormhole maybe that has suddenly pierced the nexus of their two worlds?

How spooky is that! And how intriguing…

But that’s what it was like sometimes, talking to my mom. I soon came to understand very well that she was speaking to me from a long-dead world of sepia-toned, black-and-white photographs and the living ghosts of her brothers and sister. And I was speaking to her from a magical science-ficton world of cell phones, iPads, and remote controls lying around all over the living room furniture. How amazing.

But hey, I’m guess beginning to sound like the cursed old seafarer in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” aren’t I. (Can’t shut up.) So let me just sum up with a single statement regarding not only all of the (in my opinion) crème de la crème lyricists I keep in my collection, but especially this particular Dave Mallett’s song, “The Old Blue Ox”:

This song transcends the simple term ‘song’; what it is, actually, is a slice of pure Literature suitable for inclusion in any American literary anthology.

So that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it!

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

And now I’ll end with some scribbling I penned years ago, having been inspired by “The Old Blue Ox.” Thanks for reading.

“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”

You took it for granted…

just assumed Memory Lane

would forever remain

your Yellow Brick Road…

overlooking, way back then,

those sleepy seeds borne

on the winds of time

sewing themselves

between the cobblestones, and then

all those little spearheads–

the crabgrass, unsheathing itself

underfoot… choking the undergrowth of

Memory Lane in an overgrowth primeval–

and now you’ve gone missing in the outback

of your own hardening cerebral arteries…  

all your Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs

disappearing like hourglass-sand

down the little rabbit holes,

leaving you needing a damn macheté

to hack your way in circles

through the foliage of

your own life’s back pages…

unable to find the forest

hiding in your trees

home

ON PEGGY LEE, ONE OLD SONG, & ME

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

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

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

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

So… I got a crush on sex symbol instead.

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

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

And there she was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know a cat named Way Out Willie…

Got a cool little chick named Rocking Millie…

He can walk and stroll and Susie-Q

And do that crazy hand-jive too…

Hand jive! Hand jive! Hand jive…

Doin’ that crazy hand jive!”

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

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

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

But you can see what I was up against…

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

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

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

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

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

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

(I really kinda hoped I would.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yep.

That’s it.

That’s all there is.

home

DUDS: BOMB THREATS THAT BOMBED   —PART THE LAST

Mexico High School— Mexico, Maine… mid-1970’s

Author’s note: OK, dear reader, hang on— I’m going to tell you a true story which, when you read it, you’ll very likely doubt the veracity of it. It does read like fiction, I know. But it IS a true story. And since it happened in the late-70’s (pretty sure it happened right around 1977 or ‘78), that means that there are probably a couple hundred or so ex-students left out there who lived it, right along with me. Perhaps they will remember it with slight differences and from different points of view. But please, if you are one of them, please jump on board in the comments section to (a) verify it, and (b) make any corrections you find that need to be made. Thank you    — Mr. L

Remember me?

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

Catching Up— As a result of the latest bomb threat at the high school students had been told, via the intercom, that the gymnasium had been cleared and that each classroom would be called down to the gym, one at a time, in order to allow their particular classroom to be cleared. “Leave all coats, textbooks, and backpacks at your desks. Once your classroom has been cleared, you will be returned to your classroom, and then the next classroom will be called down.”

However, when I finally got to shepherd my homeroom kids to the gym’s entrance, my stewardship of them was abruptly commandeered from me by a handful of police officers who lined my kids up for a frisking, ostensibly looking for “bombs” but so much more likely looking for drugs. I was told to move on into the gymnasium by myself, and when I did that… there were three-quarters of our student body, sullen and nearly silent, all seated and languishing there in the bleachers. So… nobody but nobody had been returned to their classrooms after all!

And that statement that one of my boys had uttered back in the classroom, just after the first announcement had been made? “There ain’t been any bomb scare!” Well, he’d been right! This was something else entirely.

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

You know what stung? The fact that I, a teacher who had been working hand in hand with the cops all along, hadn’t been told anything about the plan to use a bomb scare as an excuse to pull off a major drug bust. It rankled, to be honest. But my position in the whole scheme of things was nothing more than that of a little a cog in the machine, was it. So yeah, it wasn’t up to me. And of course the rationale of their whole plan was this: IF (while in the process of responding to a bomb threat, and searching for a bomb or bomb-making materials) we just happen to stumble onto some illicit contraband concealed on one person, then we have probable cause.

So guess what. The cops netted lots of pot that morning. Lots of it! And put a lot of kids in a world of hurt with their little sting op— you know, having to wait for their parents to be informed, and waiting to find out the legal consequences were going to end up being.

Actually though, they missed a ton of pot, too. I don’t know how, whether a lot of the kids on the walk-up toward the gym saw the little trap awaiting them and quickly stuffed their stashes into their underwear or shoes or whatever, but… the custodians who had to sweep the gym floor later that day claimed it must have been raining nickel bags under the bleachers, for all the weed they found after pushing the collapsible bleachers back in place.

Wonder if any of them pocketed a little of it for themselves…

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

OK, let’s just take a minute and sum up what had happened here, and what had been happening. Let’s break it down. Here we had this high school which seemed… no, which had been, a sort of normal institution when the school year began. All classes going as normal. Activities like cheerleading, sports, school plays, band concerts and the like. All pretty normal. A typical school.

And then someone calls in a bomb threat as a prank, most likely one of the kids. A way to get out of school for a day, perhaps. It happens. Most schools experience them from time to time. More then, than now however, because back then they didn’t have a way to trace all phone calls in the entire world.

But then, just to wow his buddies and show what a daring smart ass he was, he pulls the same stunt again. The. Very. Next. Day.  I mean, how cool was that, eh? Pretty ballsy cool! Only that second prank, unbeknownst to him, was actually a domino. A domino that got pushed and fell against another domino which, in turn, fell against the next domino like dominoes do, inadvertently triggering (what else?)… the “Domino Effect.” And then the metaphorical dominoes continued tumbling, one day by one day, one after the other, nickel and diming the days into four weeks, leaving the students and teachers of the school positioned in the middle of the whole thing like some ping-pong-table net in a tournament between the perp(s) and the administration.

Class time was missing big time. Homework was hard to take seriously anymore because the students’ minds, hell even the teachers’ minds, were now so firmly fixed on The Daily Question: ‘When will the bomb threat come today?’ And before you knew it, the Domino Effect had morphed into a virtual addiction. So the school had fallen ill. With a nightmare fever dream where everything had become way too chaotic and unmanageable for practically anything to get done. With everybody growing edgier and edgier, the edginess building and building until… eventually… something  had to give!

And then something did!

BANG!  

Everything was blown sky high in the volcanic eruption of a drug bust.

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

The student body was left shell-shocked the rest of that morning. Like the walking wounded. We had just weathered a high-end Richter-scale “earthquake” and no one, except maybe the cops and the administration, had a reliable tally on the extent of the damages just yet. But rumors were flying. And the last thing the building felt like by the way, from my point of view at least, was a freakin’ school. It was Crazy Town, with the dust constantly settling all around us.

But on the other hand, the drug bust was cathartic at the same time. Because at least SOMETHING had finally happened! Painful as it was, it did sort of feel like somebody had just lanced a months-long-festering boil. Somehow it seemed possible that everything, the whole damn shootin’ match, might just finally be over, because how could anybody really muster up the will and the energy to call in another one, after all this?

Or was that just wishful thinking?

And then it turned out that yes, it was wishful thinking. Because it’ ain’t’s never over till it’s over. Not that somebody called in another bomb threat. No, but that madness had just taken a new and unexpected turn.

Once the reading-the-riot-act assembly in the gym had finally come to a close, we were all dismissed to go back to our homerooms to await the announcement for how the normal schedule for that day would turn out to be amended. (Normal?  Did I actually use the word ‘normal?’) However, nobody really felt a pressing need to proceed in any real hurry. So the big lobby filled up with kids and teachers and a cop or two, all of us just milling around like zombies. Time and Schedule just didn’t seem to be real anymore. It was so weird. That point of the morning seemed to feel like the end of some movie where all of the action had finally wound up, but the final credits were continuing to roll on and on.

And one of the possible items in those credits might have included the following:

Score— Bomb Threatener: 300+. Administration: 1000

And then, as unlikely as it could possibly seem… believe it or not, something ELSE happened…

There was one young man in the student body who held the distinct reputation of being your basic high school drug dealer. Kind of a scary little outlaw, he was. And whenever it had come to all the Mickey Mouse school rules— one of which was, of course, always getting to school on time— this kid had managed to sneer his way around that one from seventh grade through senior year, because rules like those? They applied to the sheep, never to him. So everyone had, more or less, gotten used to him being perpetually tardy.

And this day was no exception.

After all the insanity of the last couple of hours, a car pulled up and parked outside next to the curb. It was visible to any of us who happened to be looking out through the lobby’s tall glass panels that fronted the entrance. But it’s not like we actually noticed it so much. It’s like a couple of the cops did. And didn’t they just go a-charging out through those entry doors to get at him!

His mom was just dropping him off per usual, and he’d barely managed to get one foot out the car door and onto the pavement before… they’d grabbed him! In mere moments he was frisked, divested of his illegal contraband (baggies of pot), and taken into custody.

Now, this was a biggie for the cops! They’d wanted him for a while , but they’d always had to wait. Because they needed to do it right if they were going to have an arrest that would stand up in court. With evidence. Now… thanks to their little bomb scare cum drug bust scheme, they had achieved “probable cause,” hadn’t they!  So as far as they were concerned, it would be Celebration Time at the police station that night. Whoopee!

Only guess what!

They.   Didn’t.   Have.   Probable.   Cause.

In their excitement and enthusiasm to nab their known dealer, the one they’d been wanting to pounce on for so long, they had inadvertently jumped the gun. If only they had waited until our young man had placed one foot inside our building, then their police-station-celebration wouldn’t have to be turned inside-out into a wake. Then their rationale would have passed muster, their rationale being ‘Hey, see, we got this bomb threat for the high school so we have to search everywhere and everyone inside said high school for said bomb. And if, and only if, in so doing, we just happen to find incidental contraband on one of said persons, well we then have legal “probable cause” to detain and charge said persons.’

But of course, they hadn’t realized that yet. And it would take some time to sink in. Basically right up until the moment the top brass at the station got contacted by the boy’s brand new lawyers, which didn’t take all that long at all. And guess who his new lawyers were. SURPRISE! The American Civil Liberties Union! Yes, those lawyers, those… nobody-expects-the-Spanish-Inquisition lawyers. Those guys.

And now the inevitable question was ‘So… why is it you felt you were within your legal rights to search an individual who (a) not only wasn’t in the building at the time of the search, but more so (b) hasn’t even managed to walk himself inside said building yet? So both the police and the school administration were finding themselves dancing lightly on eggshells and feeling a little vulnerable to becoming seriously entangled in the snarl of an unwanted legal court battle (i.e., can you say ‘law suit’?).

And then on top of that, finally someone had to go and bring up the issue of the veracity, the believability, of the ‘alleged’ phone threat that had started the whole morning— i.e., was there really a bomb threat called in this time, or was it just a some fabricated ploy to try to finally and conveiently squash all the bomb-scare madness?

Yes, once you’ve got the ACLU afoot, step lightly! Like the Incredible Hulk, you won’t like the ACLU when it’s angry…

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

THE AFTERMATH

OK. It had to seem that our little epidemic must have run its course by then. Well, as far as anyone having the will or energy to phone in another bomb threat, yes, that certainly wasn’t going to happen again for a long, long while.

Yet a dark cloud of anger and exhaustion had settled over the school and, for that matter, the whole community. The academic kids weren’t happy with the toll the entire disaster had taken on their education and consequently, on their postgraduate ambitions. The stoners were definitely pissed off, of course. A lot of the parents of the stoners and, hey, even a lot of parents of the non-stoners, were pissed off as well. The community at large was none too pleased at the way the school up there on the hill had failed in handling the ‘pandemic.’ The administration was pissed off at the cops for botching the best laid plans of mice and men and bringing the ACLU down on their heads. The cops were pissed off at the ACLU.And both the administration and the cops were pissed off at the still unknown ‘Unaphoner’ who had started the whole the whole domino shipwreck and apparently had gotten away scot free.

So yeah, there was still a very bitter taste left in everyone’s mouth. And a day or two later everyone would find out what all this would lead to.

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

Once again it was during that same damn early morning homeroom period before classes were to begin, the period that was apparently cursed that year. As I looked out over my homeroom, it was impossible not to notice something was wrong. Only five kids were seated before me. Five seemingly nervous kids.

“So… where is everybody?” I asked.

The kids exchanged nervous glances. Then one of them said, “In the cafeteria.” As if that response answered the question.

I waited a moment, and then said, “OK. I give up. Why?”

One of them said, “Because they’re not coming.”

I let that sink in. “OK. Let’s try that again. Does anyone want to try to tell me why they’re not coming? And, you know, like, feel free to include a few specific details so I can get it?”

It took a long moment. “Because they’re mad. They ain’t going to classes today.”

One of them added, “Go look for yourself.” Jeez. I really didn’t like the sound of that.

“Be right back,” I told them. As soon as I opened the door into the hallway, I immediately became aware of a low, faraway roar of voices. I walked down the hall past the few classroom doors, turned right at the ramp, stopped, and looked down it. It was much louder now. And Christ, I could see thirty kids just milling around in the lobby down there, which was located right between the principal’s office on the left and the cafeteria on the right. Not only were they milling, but what they weren’t doing was making any effort whatsoever to be quiet down there, which seemed pretty daring considering they were basically right in front of the main office.

They were all obviously very agitated. There was anger and belligerence down there. This was not good. As I watched, I saw some of these kids drifting out of sight off into the café, while others from the café were joining the crowd in the lobby. So that was it then. Practically the whole student body was down there, apparently a lot of them crammed into the café.

I returned to my classroom. The bell to go to first period was chiming as I stepped back in, for all the good that was going to do. I mean, it was obvious. There wasn’t gonna be any first period that day. But just what the hell would there be? That was the question.

The principal came on the intercom. “The first period bell just rang. We expect all students to report to their first period classes at this time.” Listen to him, trying to make it sound like it was just a normal day. Even with my door to the hallway only open just a crack, we could hear the roar down below reach a momentary crescendo as an answer! Yeah. Well… expect and be damned, Mister Principal.

Five minutes passed. Nothing, not a thing changed. And then the principal’s voice came back on the intercom. Only this time his voice wasn’t broadcasting from within the relative quietude of the main office. This time his voice was embedded in the over-riding din and angry clamor inside the cafeteria. He was carrying a hot mic, i imagine for the benefit of the entire school, i.e. to keep the cooks and custodians and office personnel and we teachers holed up with our little bastions of mousey goody-two-shoes in the know. It was actually a little difficult to pick out his words because they were being pretty much drowned out by the rowdy crowd noise. “Listen to me! Please! Hear me out. OK? It’s obvious we need to talk. So that’s what I’m here for, OK? Let’s talk. I’m here to listen…”

His plea was met by another crescendo, now up much closer and personal. Only this time, due to the mic, you could so much more easily make out the f-bombs popping like popcorn in that wall of noise. “No, I’m serious here! Let’s…” But he never got to finish what he had started to say.

After an indistinct shuffling noise of the mic being roughly handled, one loud male voice much louder and clearer than anyone else in the cafeteria had suddenly taken over, yammering about how it was too late to talk, and the roar of voices then amplified sharply in a frightening assent. It was like listening to a live-action news report from some banana republic being overthrown! That’s when I bolted out of the room once again and down the hall to the top of the ramp.

I got there just in time to witness our principal forcefully threading his way back through the lobby crowd, and then storming his way into the main office. At least physically he didn’t look any worse for the wear. Within twenty seconds he‘d turned off the power to the intercom, and the mic went dead.

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

OK. This is the hard part for me. Bringing this story to a conclusion.  Why? Because it’s easy, remembering all the wild and crazy outlandish things that happened. Those kinds of bizarre things are much more likely to engrave themselves indelibly in the mind. But I’m hard put to remember now how it all specifically came to an end. Because in my mind… it had all just petered out.

I do know the rest of that particular morning seemed long. It seems like for a couple of hours at least the students just continued to hang out, milling around angry and lost in the lobby and cafeteria. Probably not though. I know that I, and a lot of other teachers as well, joined them for a good part of the time, mostly to keep an eye on them. Funny, I can’t recall if lunch was served in the café, but it must have been, right? (I probably would’ve remembered if it hadn’t been.) And obviously the buses had to have run on time to take the kids home, since they would’ve had to pick up the junior high and primary school kids at the other locations. Although I have no memory of that either.

I can however remember one thing. And in telling it, it’s going to feel like I’m going off track and digressing, but have faith— I promise you, this story will dovetail right back into the saga of the of the Bummer Bomb Threat days’ demise.

So it just so happens that S.A.D. #43 was right in the midst of another, parallel, nightmare unfortunately coinciding with the bomb scare pandemic. Contract negotiations between the school board and the teachers’ union had long since broken down, and cosequently we’d been working without a contract for well over a year. It had become a nasty war, one which found us teachers, often with our families in tow, protesting en masse outside school board meetings and sometimes even downtown, waving our crudely made ‘UNFAIR!’ signs. The war (and yes, ‘war’ is an apt word) had been going on for far too long. The teachers and the board members had both employed various strategies of warfare.

(Sometime long after this particular day, the war would find us teachers actually going on strike, despite that fact that it was illegal for us to do so. But that’s a story for another day.)

One of the strategies used by the board ended up setting the bar at an unbelievably all-time low. Our previous superintendent had retired the year before. And when it came to hiring a replacement, we discovered that the selection committee had narrowed the open position down to three candidates. Two of the candidates were showing various strengths befitting a potential superintendent. One however stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. His name was Smith, and he came with the reputation as a one-year hired gun. One look at his credentials and you’d have to ask, Why is it that this Mr. Smith has a record of serving as superintendent in various districts for a single year only before moving on to the next? You couldn’t help but ask that question, you know?

So anyway, guess whom they’d hired.

Superintndent “Snuffy” Smith

Now it turned out I had a source of special inside knowledge as to what this Mr. Smith was like as a so-called “superintendent.” In a previous single year of employment mind you, he’d served (using the term’ served’ loosely here) as the super at S.A.D. #68, aka Dover-Foxcroft’s school district (D-F being my hometown). That year, when Smith left the #68 school district behind in his rearview mirror, he also left the schools in a shambles. So on recon missions, I was able to learn a lot from teachers I knew there.

However, the knowledge I was able to garner turned out to be superfluous.  One week to the day after Smith had been hired at Mexico, a mysterious parcel in a plain brown wrapper arrived at our school addressed only “To the teachers of S.A.D. #43’s Teachers Union.” There was no return address.

When opened, we found written on a note at the top of what appeared to be a cornucopia of paperwork, “This is a HOW TO GET RID OF SUPERINTENDENT SMITH KIT.” We couldn’t believe our eyes!

This ‘kit’ was comprised of several newspaper clippings detailing unbelievably horrific things this man had been caught doing in SAD #68: (midnight harassing phone calls, blatant sexual harassment of female teachers, stalking, you name it) and lists of how-to suggestions to combat these behaviors, like “Work with the police (we did),” and “When you find out which teacher is getting the majority of late night/early morning harassment calls, have the police put a’ lock’ on that teacher’s phone line. (WE did that, too…)” and “Whenever Smith calls a female staff person into his office, that female staff person must insist on being accompanied by another staff person,” etc.

  • Funny thing: after leaving Mexico High  a year or so later to sign on to S.A.D. #68, specifically at Foxcroft Academy, I was fortunate to be befriended by one Peter Caruso, one of the Academy teachers there who had actually participated in assembling the generous Get-Rid-Of kit sent to us when we needed it most. And I must say, the two of us have since enjoyed a few decades of chuckles and laughs at how cartoonish a villain Smith was, and how happy we both had  been to escort him to the nearest exit of our respective schools.

Anyway, guess what. It uurned out that several of us teachers, most of us teachers actually (me included) had already been receiving such annoying anonymous phone calls for a week! So it had already begun, a week before we’d gotten the info. We hadn’t an inkling that the new ‘superintendent’ could ever be involved. Why would we?

And the very first time a female teacher was called into his office for a conference, and she arrived with an accompanying teacher, he angrily ordered the uninvited one out. And when that teacher said (and as a movie buff I like to think of it as reminiscent of the computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey), “I’m sorry… I can’t do that…” he summarily kicked them both out, threatening to put a note detailing their disobedient behavior into their permanent records.

So, yeah, in good ol’ S.A.D. #43, all told, things were already going to hell in a handbasket long before the bomb scare weeks.

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

So finally, back to the Infamous Day the Kids Took Over the School! (OK, they didn’t really take it over, exactly.)

So of course it’s protocol in all S.A.D.’s that when an emergency occurs at one of their schools, the superintendent must be informed. I know a lot of the teachers (and even the principal) would have preferred not to have him called but, alas, he was summoned. And… he came. I need to say that by then he’d lost the respect of the entire body of teachers and principals and even the students, whatever the piddling amount of respect he’d ever begun with, that is. And you might be doubting the truth of my claim that even the principals were happily in (and rowing) the same boat as we teachers were. But that’s because back in the late ‘70’s, the principals and vice principals were on the same side of the contract bargaining table as the teachers. Our salaries were tied together as one unit during salary negotiations.

Here’s an interesting little tidbit: our principal actually enjoyed entertaining us teachers with a hilarious little Charlie-Chaplin-with-cane routine that specifically made fun of “Snuffy” Smith behind his back.

Oh OK.Want another? When later, as the school year was nearing its end and the school board was getting antsy about not having been given even a glimpse yet of the superintendent’s next-year’s proposed budget, they laid down the law and demanded he present said budget at an open town meeting. So a little later in front of a gathering of the interested tax payer citizens of Mexico, they asked him to hand it over for their perusal. This he promptly did. So the board members hunched themselves down over the pages for a minute or two. And what followed was amazing. One of them looked up abruptly and with a perplexed frown exclaimed, “Wait just a minute here! This is last year’s budget!”

To which Superintendent Smith, feigning surprise, countered with, “Oh my! OK, I get it. You see I was comparing the two budgets together on my desk at home. Why, I must have mistakenly picked up the wrong one! OK, I’ll be sure to bring my proposed budget to the very next meeting.”

But that didn’t fly. They were onto him like flies on horse puckey, just as S.A.D. 68’s board had gotten onto him back in Dover-Foxcroft. So no, they wanted to see the proposal right away. A demand to which he readily agreed. Only problem was, when they tried to get in touch with Mr. Smith the following day, the best they could do was get in touch with his lawyer. He was nowhere around. Believe it or not.

So anyway there the kids were, still angrily milling and muttering all around the cafeteria and lobby under the watchful eye of a number of us teachers. One of the students suddenly called out, “Oh great. Look who’s here!” A lot of us looked. And here came old Charlie Chaplin, aka Superintendent “Snuffy” Smith huffing and puffing toward us on a mission, hobbling up the walk with his signature cane. I figured he’d just hobble right on in, only it turned out the front doors were locked. He peered in through the glass and caught the eye of two of the closest kids.

“You two!” he barked. “Open this door now!” But all they did was sneer at him for a moment, and then just blew him off’. Turned on their heels and let themselves get swallowed back up in the crowd. Oh was he ever pissed! I was so proud of them.

So then he began rapping his cane, really hard, against glass. And to any of the fifty kids he could make out before him, he started yelling, “I want this door opened! Open this door now!” Strangely there were no takers.

My fellow teacher and I suddenly realizing that we were close enough to the glass doors that he could easily spot us, casually slipped our hands in our pockets, turned toward each other (leaving only our cold shoulders facing the doors), and launched into a make-believe ‘conversation’ meant to appear so all-consuming that it was small wonder we were failing to hear his outbursts, so out of sight and out of mind was he. Man, he went mad as a hornet. It’s a wonder his cane didn’t break the glass, while our faux conversation went on unabated.Finally the clatter ended.

We looked over our shoulders and there he went, his back to us now, hobbling off around a corner to circle the gymnasium. It would be a mighty long hobble to limp all the way around that building to come in through the one of the back doors, poor fella. But about fifteen minutes later he did show up in the midst of the cafeteria hubbub, barking orders.

I didn’t know to whom he was speaking at first (as I was purposely looking askance), but I heard him saying, “Well, I’ll tell YOU what! I’m in charge here and I’m going to end this mess right now! Iwant you, you, you, you, and…  you! You five! You’re coming with me! And in the next hour, we’re going to get to the bottom of this and solve the whole damn fiasco right now! Come on. Let’s go!”

I watched the six of them lurching away toward the conference room, The Shanghaied Five looking oh-so-absolutely-mortified! By picking his negotiations panel straight from the hip, all willy-nilly like that? From an entire cafeteria bursting at the seams with Mexico High’s angry little Abbie Hoffmans and Patty Hearsts, he had just managed to form an ad hoc posse of… the Dungeons and Dragons dorks! All personally hand-picked to be the spokespersons for the stoners. Poor kids. Just innocent bystanders. Wrong place, wrong time. Tourists, really.

But we don’t DO drugs, Superintendend Smith…

But like I said. See, that’s really the last specific thing I remember. Or remember clearly. Like I suggested earlier, it’s mostly the really bizarre events that burn themselves permanently into the memory. So how things finally ended, the winding-down details of MHS’s gradual return to normal, or whatever passed for that year’s ‘normal’? It all seems like a fuzzy dream-ending now. I guess I just probably stopped paying attention after all the rigmarole that had been going on for so long. I think that’s when I started putting my focus on updating my resumé, and losing myself in researching any English teaching positions opening up across the state.

One job opening was in my hometown of Dover-Foxcroft.

But I am pretty sure that our infamous little high school drug-dealer was eventually able to wiggle off the hook with the help of the ACLU. And as part of the blow-back from that, I think the other kids who had also been compromised in that drug bust ended up making out fine as well. I believe everything was just dropped in the end. It was the adults who ended up with the proverbial egg on their collective face.

Oh yeah. And come to think of it, I don’t remember our ‘Una-phoner’ ever getting identified either.

I made those call, heh heh…

So… the end of the story? The whole thing just seemed to fizzle, and then just dissolve dissolve away with time. And the school year limped on, following the school calendar to the end.

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

“This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper“

—from “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot

home

DUDS: BOMB THREATS THAT BOMBED   —PART TWO “The Cold War”

(Third story) (the really interesting one)

PFFFFFT!!

Mexico High School— Mexico, Maine, mid-1970’s

The very first time it happens, you’re caught off guard. You might be knee-deep in a discussion of the Biblical allusions in The Grapes of Wrath or demonstrating the difference between phrases and clauses.Then, suddenly, the intercom crackles to life; you’re being informed that the main office has just received its first bomb threat of the year and all students and staff are being instructed to exit their classrooms in an orderly manner and prepare to board the buses that will be awaiting them.

You glance out your classroom window and yes, here they come, the long, yellow line of school buses snaking up the hill to cocoon your high schoolers in safety at a safe distance. And you think to yourself, Oh well. It happens. It’s a pain in the ass, but it happens. So… let’s get it over with and get back on with our lives.

And that’s what you do. Sure. An hour, maybe two, is lost. The class schedule for the remainder of the day is re-adjusted to compensate for the glitch. Eventually the bell rings in normalcy once again. A different class files into your classroom all a-buzz about the ‘adventure,’ The Grapes of Wrath just a fading memory until tomorrow.

And surprise, surprise—there was no bomb. So it goes.

But when the very next day, amid your demonstration of The Dynamic Elements of Good Character Sketches, gets interrupted by a second bomb threat in a row… you’re a little more than just a little irritated this time. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” or a bomb scare two days in a row. But damn it, I swear it happened. On the other hand, OK… admit it— you’re also a bit impressed by just how ballsy the little bastard(s) must be, chancing another one right on the heels of yesterday’s. I mean, don’t they realize they’re just asking for it. That the cops’ll track’em down and that’ll be the end of it. Just a matter of time.

OK, after that rare ordeal was over with and everybody was safely ensconced back in their little classroom desks once again, the principal, needing to rip someone a new one, if he only knew whom, came over the intercom with, “This stupidity will stop right here and NOW! Once was bad enough but it’s become a serious crime now, costing the taxpayers unexpected, untold money—compensating the bus drivers, the town having to compensate the police department—money that your parents, your very own families, will have to dish out because of this reckless and senseless act. What some airhead among you thinks is a game. But I can promise you that when the perpetrator or perpetrators are caught (and mark my words they will be caught), we are prepared to press charges to the fullest extent of the law!”

There. He had appealed to their common sense, common logic. So it was over and done with. And thank God for that.

But it wasn’t. There was another one. And believe it or not, another one after that! Quite a slap in the face to the principal.

Something had to be done. But what? OK. A plan emerged. It was kind of a desperate plan, and could even be seen as possibly irresponsible. But it went like this: From this point forward, whenever the office secretary answers the office phone and hears the beginnings of a bomb threat, she will hang up immediately. That plan was put into action. And it worked. Yes, the phone did ring, and of course the voice on the other end began, “There’s a bomb in the…”

Hah! Take that, Mister! Touché!­ And oh, I’m sure the office staff did some gloating and high-fiving after that, especially after the second follow-up call came in and was likewise thwarted. Can you imagine how pissed off the bomb-scare caller must have been? But the school administration’s plan had  worked. Just like Nancy Reagan saying, “Just say NO to drugs.” Simple as that. Case closed. We could get on with… education, believe it or not.

But the flaw in the ointment was… see, Ms. Reagan didn’t know diddly. And this is where my (true story, I swear!!) anecdote here gets really surreal. Because in the afternoon of the day after the two squelched phone calls, out my window I suddenly happened to spy the long ghostly line of yellow school buses doggedly crawling back up over the hill to MHS once again!

And I thought, What the hell are they doing? They can’t be heading here. I mean, we don’t answer the frickin’ phone anymore! But sure enough, twenty minutes later, the evacuation orders were being given once again over the intercom.

What in the world had happened? Well, according to the cops, a bomb threat (for the school, mind you) had been phoned in to the little convenience store down at the bottom of the hill. The store owner had no knowledge of the trusted just-say-NO-and-hang-up strategy, so of course like any good citizen, he’d taken the call, had taken it seriously, and had reported it to the police immediately.

OK then— Bomb Threatener: 5 or 6,  Administration: 0

So you can see what was happening here, right? A duel, of sorts. Like a game of chess. Unfortunately, personal pride had gotten into the mix, each side feeling the need for upping the ante. But… one side had the advantage: that of knowing exactly who its opponent was. But at this point the school’s administration had no clue who it was they were locking horns with. Interesting conflict.

So, it being the school’s turn raise the stakes: “From this point on, until the perpetrator ceases this senseless attack, school will be held in session on Saturdays. Every Saturday until it stops. We very much need to recoup the lost time we’ve been experiencing. And attendance will be taken!”

Hah! Take that! So you see? We were basically a precursor to the later 1985 film, The Breakfast Club!  

How the administration imagined Saturday make-up days…

But just try, for a moment, try to imagine how well this ploy worked out: (a) half the student body simply opted to skip school that first Saturday. (And what a Breakfast Club detention list that would have made, had anybody complied. But they hadn’t.) Plus, with such a very large percentage of your students missing from the mandatory Saturday classes, making up for lost time and progress proved impossible. And it just felt so spooky-weird, looking out over your classroom desk and finding only six kids in a class of twenty, dutifully sitting there and staring back at you. Plus (b) for those who did show up, a bomb threat was called in that Saturday morning anyway. Seriously. And like, who didn’t see that coming?

Score— Bomb Threatener: 50  Administration: 0

Strange days indeed! So the ball was back in our court once again. And us no closer to discovering the identity of our nemesis. And by now, actually the conflict was beginning to lean just a tad toward something that smacked a bit of myth or legend. I mean, who was this guy? Or guys? Or even gals? Some kind of… Unabomber-Caller?

THE UNAPHONER…

Of course after that loss, our principal called an emergency meeting in the library, which was then being referred to as ‘The War Room.’ Instead of just admitting defeat and cancelling school for the rest of the year (my prayer), he really wanted to play hard ball now. So we had to brainstorm. And we brainstormed! Brainstormed our brains out! And would you believe it? We finally came up with something! A plan so devious and dark, it boggled the mind.

Here it is: First we department heads were instructed to delve into the musty old book depository and dig up sets of twenty-five or so old retired texts within our disciplines: i.e., Math, English, Science, etc. That we did. And hah! There were a ton of Warriner’s English Language and Compositions in there collecting dust.

The Students’ #1 Favorite Book…

Secondly, each department’s teachers were instructed to design and produce one ad hoc general lesson plan that would rely on the use of these old books. Then the printed out lesson plans were placed in a temporary file for later use. They were allegedly ones that any teacher could just glance at, quickly get the gist of, and know what to do— pass out the books to kids, and have at it.  

Thirdly, these book sets were then covertly loaded into the back of somebody’s pickup truck and then transported across town to… (you’ll never believe this!)… The Maine State Army National Guard Armory! Yes, I know!

See, somehow, we’d got the Maine Army National Guard Armory’s commanding officers to allow us to use their facility on any week day that we received a bomb threat. The armory was always a secure and locked facility. If by chance our bomb caller decided to try to call in a threat to the armory, they could just be told to buzz-off and go pound sand. The armory would provide just the very safe and secure haven for the students we needed, and… (here’s the kicker) …for the remainder of the entire school day! It would be like they’d be drafted for the day!

So, of course it didn’t take long for the next awaited phone call to come in. And then the plan went off without a hitch. The buses pulled into the school parking lot. The smirking kids boarded the safety buses as per usual. But this time a number of teacher volunteers boarded the buses with them as well, which raised some eyebrows of some of the kids.

I wasn’t one of those volunteers. No, for the very first time in my life I joined the cops as a bomb squad volunteer. But I made sure I was still out there in the parking when the bus doors slammed shut on those kids and the buses started to roll. In the past bomb scares, the kids would just remain seated on the buses— safe, warm, and dry, and usually with the bus door left leisurely open, just waiting until the cops had cleared the building. However, this time they were suddenly on the move. And the surprise of that, and the fact that they didn’t know where the hell TO, was written all over the bug-eyed, precious expressions on the faces pressed up against the windows as they were being hauled off and away.

And what a nice day that was for me! Virtually a holiday. It took a couple hours to comb the building, but that wasn’t hard. Plus, I got to socialize with the police officers, some of whom I already knew. And then, back to my empty classroom for the entire day. Unbelievable. Luxurious. A big change from my usual workday. I remember frivolously imagining that hey, maybe I should change careers from teaching to professional ‘bomb-squadding.’ But all good things must come to an end. “Nothing gold can stay.” —Robert Frost and Ponyboy Curtis

Around 2:20, the yellow bus-caravan finally rolled back into the parking lot. Again, I was standing out there in the lot, eagerly awaiting the reports on how well our anti-bomb-threat plan had worked . And as soon as the bus doors flopped open… Something didn’t  feel right. Something was very wrong.

As they stepped down off the bus, everybody looked… so… disheveled. So… under a strain. Especially the teachers, who appeared weak to the point of just having  to allow gravity to do the job of dropping them back down onto terra firma. Even the kids. Honestly, all the passengers had the look of the survivors of a plane hijacking, where the hijackers had kept their hostages sweating in their passenger seats out on the tarmac for twenty-four hours. Everybody was beat. When my English teacher colleague, Burt, got off I said to him, “Really? It was really that bad?” he just looked at me with an irritable, prickly glower and hissed, “Fuck you!” Comments from other departing staff included “Never again!” and “Just lemme at the bastard who came up with this plan!”

Later that afternoon, it all came out in ‘The War Room.’ By the way, I was curious to see that a couple of officers from law enforcement were sitting in on the debriefing. “Do you have any idea how many rabbit holes there are in that armory for 300-plus kids to hide-out!?” “One or more of our little shits broke the lock to the supply room! Fortunately the firearms weren’t stored there, or I’d hate to think…!” “These kids got on the buses with no idea they were going anywhere, so naturally they didn’t come prepared with anything! And yes, I know you sent us off with a big supply of pencils, but somehow they went missing!” “Lemme tell you something! That supply room had practically a friggin’ library of Field Manuals in there, at least two of which were labled Explosives and Demolitions!” “Jeez, those stupid so-called lesson plans weren’t realistic at all! Not that it really mattered since the kids wouldn’t stay put for more than five minutes!” “Try finding some kid hiding out down there in the motor pool!” “Such a zoo, and it’s pretty likely somebody got pregnant on our watch, from what I hear.” “You know what? Just… please! Don’t ever do something like that to us ever again, OK?”

Score— Bomb Threatener: 300+,   Administration: 0

We, the foot soldiers in this war, were now more than a little discouraged and felt ready to throw in the towel and just hand the school over to the terrorists. But our principal? No. He seemed oddly very pensive and calm while listening to the rants of his underlings, but somehow not discouraged. And as badly as we felt, I’m sure none of us would’ve wanted to trade places with him and be in his shoes. Anyway, he adjourned the meeting fairly pleasantly, thanking the volunteers for their valiant efforts and saying we’d be revisiting the issue soon.

I left feeling guilty about having enjoyed what my volunteer-colleagues might have seen as a siesta in the shade compared to what they’d gone through.  Well… let’s say a little guilty. And a whole lot more lucky, than guilty.

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

It was odd. Nothing happened over the next few days. And lemme tell ya, nobody saw that coming. It was nice, yeah. However, I know we were all waiting on pins and needles for the next shoe to drop, me even fixed on continually scouting out the road outside my classroom window every chance I got. The waiting was like we were in a Cold War.

But… who knew? Maybe when our nemesis had seen and personally experienced the level of retribution the administration had been willing to go to last time (namely, the Armory fiasco), he or she or they (like ourselves) were seriously a little scarred by how badly things had already gotten out of hand. Maybe the ‘bad guys’ were actually a little gun-shy too, wondering just how far the administration might be willing to go at upping the ante next time.

But Time marched on. Until the other shoe did drop. And when it did, it came in the form of a very strange announcement over the intercom. The school was still in early homeroom period, just waiting on the passing bell for the first class of the day. “We have just recently received a bomb threat.” You could actually hear the school inhale its collective gasp up and down the hallways. Here we go again! And how far will it go THIS time? “The threat indicated that the explosive device is located in the gymnasium. So since the gym wasn’t being used this morning, and is located far at the other end of the school, far from our closest classrooms, the police and firefighters went right to work there and have cleared that area. However, to be on the safe side, now we are going to clear the entire building one classroom at a time.”

Now me, at that early stage of my career, I was a naïve little male English-teacher-Pollyanna.  Yes, I realized that what we’d just heard was a little odd… but hey, I still had faith in the in the wisdom of the police in situations involving our safety. If that is what they were saying needed to be done then OK, that’s what needed to be done. I’m good. My only concern was wow, one classroom at a time? Man, that was going to take a long time.

“So, at this time, all students in room 103 will please report to the gym, accompanied by your teacher. Please leave all coats, textbooks, and backpacks at your desks. Once your classroom has been cleared, you will be returned to your classroom, and then the next classroom will be called down.”

So I was all OK, if that’s what we’re being told to do then hey, let’s do it and get back on with our lives. At least we weren’t being asked to board the school buses on another hell-ride headed for the Armory this time, right? But… I was totally surprised at the reaction of three of my boys to the announcement. They looked totally pissed off. One of them just blurted out, “There ain’t been any bomb scare!”

I answered, “What? How can you say that. I mean, come on—look how many bomb scares we’ve had over the past month! How can you be surprised we’re getting one more?” This kid wasn’t even bothering to look at me, let alone answer me. He was too busy just glaring along with his buddies, all three of whom were all shaking their heads seemingly in disbelief and anger. I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on in their heads, not that it mattered much to me. I just put it down as some kind of extreme conspiracy theory they must have bought into. I was like… Whatever!

Anyway, the time we spent waiting for our room to be called to the gym was really awkward. If it had been an English class, at least I’d have some class work to keep the kids busy with, something to keep their minds somewhat off what was going down. But no. I just declared a ‘study hall,’ without really expecting anybody to study anything, such was the tension in the room.

It was just a really long wait and it was getting on everyone’s nerves, including mine. But finally our classroom was called down.

My room, if I remember correctly, was 206… or maybe 201. Anyway, the ‘2’ in 206 simply meant, of course, that we were located on the second “floor.” Although… there really was no second floor, per se. See, our school was built on a fairly steep slope of land. And what I just referred to as the second floor was actually just a single-story wing of classrooms built up on the higher end of the sloping grounds. And there was no stairway to reach the 200-numbered classrooms, only an ascending, low-pitched, walk-up/ walk-down ramp. The classrooms’ hallway up there was built at a right angle to this ramp, so the hallway forked in the shape of a T. When we got called down to the gym, we made our way down the hall and took a right-angle turn at the top of the ramp. And so… as you’d start to head down the ramp, ahead of you you’d have a view straight down to the lobby with the principal’s office situated off to the left and the cafeteria off to the right. To get to the gymnasium’s entrance, you’d pass straight through that lobby and eventually come to a very small ramp, at the top of which were the gym’s doors. (By the way, the reason I’m giving you this description at this point is not only you can better picture the lay-out now, but more importantly because the lay-out will be an important factor in the exciting, DON’T-MISS-IT! conclusion to this ‘Cold War’ in Part III.)

OK. So… a ‘funny’ thing happened at the end of our little ‘journey.’ Odd– funny, not funny-funny. Lost in my own little air-head thoughts, mostly about how glad I’d be when we’d get this whole rigmarole over and done with, I’d led my class down the ramp and, as the point-man, and was just about to lead us up the…

“OK, that’s it. Stop right there!”

I stopped. And looked up to see who was there. What the hell? I found a uniformed cop standing there in front of me blocking my way. “Who… me?”

“Actually, you can keep going. Just go on right up into the gym.”

“Oh. OK.” I turned to look over my shoulder for my kids. “Let’s go…”

“No. Just you, Mr. Lyford.”

“Excuse me?” I looked around. Amazingly, there were four police officers. At least. That I could see. One of whom was a female. I looked back at my kids. They were being formed into a single line by one of the cops.

“Just you. Now, go on up to the gym, and you can help out.” This just didn’t feel right. Had I missed a memo? Or what?

One of my girls was at the head of the line. The female officer positioned over to the right addressed her. “Let’s go. You’re coming with me.”

“What? Whtta you mean? Where to?”

“Just around the corner. It’ll only take a minute.”

“Well, suppose I don’t want to come with you? What then?”

“Then I doubt you’re going to be very happy with the alternative.”

That was a threat. I was stunned. A cop who had just positioned himself onto the left side of the ramp said pretty much the same thing to the boy who was next in line. Apparently this was a two-officer gauntlet. Male and female. What were they planning to do? A strip search?

“Go ahead now, Mr. Lyford,” I was once again prompted.

Confused, shaking my head, trying to take it all in, I plodded up the ramp as I was told to, pulled open one of the four heavy doors, and stepped inside.

Jesus! There was three-quarters of our student body, sullenly and nearly silent seated up there in the bleachers.

So… nobody but nobody had been returned to their classrooms at all! What the hell was going on?!

I recalled that statement one of my boys back in the classroom had uttered, just after the announcement had been made: “There ain’t been any bomb scare!” 

He’d been right! This was something else entirely.

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

OK, so there will be a Part III that will take you the The Hot War and The Final Retaliation. So… STAY TUNED FOR THE FINAL ROUND….

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DUDS: BOMB THREATS THAT BOMBED —PART ONE

As I pointed out at the beginning of my 44th blog post, “Just Say No to Streaking,” a teacher’s professional life is comprised of so much more than just the academic subjects she/he teaches. The other fifty per cent of the teacher’s actual classroom existence is spent frittering away on such Mickey Mouse nuts and bolts as the following: lunch duty, hall duty, lobby duty, bus duty, detention duty, prom duty, bullying duty, graduation duty, bomb scare duty, steaking duty, school dance chaperoning, winter carnival chaperoning, study hall monitoring, being a class advisor, being a student club and activity advisor, being a  coach of what-have-you, being a vandalism detective, not to mention the breaker-upper of the fights and the smoking in the boys’/girls’ room, and a warrior in the war on drugs in general, etc. And see… I strongly feel that the general population needs to be reminded of this fact from time to time.

So no, I didn’t spend my career only wallowing in adverbial clauses, split infinitives, and Romeo and Juliet. The following three anecdotes, arranged in ascending order from least to most complicated ( i.e., least to the most unbelievable and entertaining),  illustrate my experiences with Bomb Scare Duty…

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(First Story) (the least complicated and least entertaining one)

Of the many, the very last time I worked a “bomb squad” detail (please notice the quotation marks, and accept my assurance that I choose the term with a metaphorical tongue in cheek), I was moving left to right, locker by locker, down the third floor hallway of Foxcroft Academy. This was approximately sometime between 1999 and 2001. There had been a one of those ‘bomb in the building’ phone calls to the main office, which was a little odd because it was the day before the very last day of the school year. I mean, what was the point? The seniors had graduated and vacated the premises days before, and the only thing left on the school calendar were the last few of the Final Exams.

So why was I on the so-called bomb squad? Boredom. I had a choice. I could allow myself to get stuck standing outside there in the hot and humid school parking lot chaperoning a good 300 rowdy juniors, sophomores, and freshmen (and oh they were wild and wound up) OR… I could simply raise my hand and shout “Pick me, pick me!” when the police asked for a couple of volunteers. I’d volunteered.

OK, you GOT me. This is not really me. It’s George Santos.

But don’t get me wrong— no hero, me. Everybody (me, the cops, the teachers, and the kids included) knew there was no bomb. So basically it was just a matter of me getting myself in out of the sun and humidity to enjoy some leisurely peace and quiet. And it was quiet up there on the third floor.

I was working the senior locker area. Most of them had been emptied out. A few had still had a few textbook sand some homework papers left in them, stuff some seniors had been too lazy to turn in; and those, we were just tossing out onto the hallway floor to be sorted through later.  

But anyway, there I am, looking down at two or three textbooks piled at the bottom of some kid’s locker, and when I pick them up and toss them out onto the floor, I spy something else down there. A bomb? No. There are no bombs. What it is… is actually just a little sandwich baggie stuffed fat with green stuff inside. No surprise to me. (Well, surprised that any kid would leave such an expensive little  stash behind.) So I call out, “Got something over here, guys. Not a bomb. Just something… that you might smoke in a bong maybe.”

“Oh yeah…” one of the two officers I’m accompanying says, bending down to retrieve it. On closer inspection, it’s immediately obvious that the Ziploc bag is swollen, as if with some kind of what… gas? The officer unzips it and, pffft! air escapes from it like from a poked balloon. “Jesus!” says the cop, with a wrinkled nose.

“That smell!” exclaims the other.

I smell it too. “What the hell! What kind of pot is that?”

“GAH!” The officer turns and tosses the baggie across the hall, plunk, right into one of the large trash cans on wheels we’ve been using for the paper junk. “Oh, just the very moldy, many-months-old , PB&J  sandwich kind,” he says. “Phew!”

So yes, there you have it. My very last “bomb squad” experience turned out to be… a green, moldy, old nothing burger. So it goes. And I warned you not to expect much.   

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(Second Story) (a ‘You can’t make this stuff up! kind of story)

So my very first bomb scare experience occurred in Belfast, Maine back in the winter of 1969, the craziest year of my entire professional life. I was a first-year English teacher at the high school and as a first year teacher, I was finding that whole Ohmigod-I’m-a-freakin’-TEACHER-now! experience quite terrifying. I already expressed this in an earlier blog episode titled “Poet…? Peacenik…? Pugilist…? Part Three.” But for those of you who missed out by not reading this great story yet, here is a little excerpt:

The fearful Ichabod Crane in me…

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

“On top of that, they’d given me classes for which there weren’t enough books! They’d forced me to take the Dramatics Coach job when I’d never even been in a play in my LIFE! They’d dumped most of the worst classes on me (a common dirty trick school districts  play on the unsuspecting new hires). And one of my two Speech classes was filled with “students,” not a single one of whom was willing to even stand up and tell me his/her name.”

So anyway, during a faculty meeting shortly after New Year’s Day, 1969, our superintendent (who, by the way, I’d learned on day-one was considered a buffoon by the teachers and department heads alike) brought up the unexpected topic of bomb scares. He shared with us that a number of other area schools were recently having to deal with bomb threats, so it was likely it was only a matter of time before we experienced one as well. Then he proudly let us know that he had hatched just the plan to catch the miscreants whenever it happened to us. I didn’t find out till later that Superintendent King was known for his cockamamie ‘just-the-plan’ plans. You wouldn’t believe it.

EXcellent. I’ve hatched just the plan to catch the miscreants…

The plan was this: “Whenever a bomb threat is phoned in to one of our schools, I’ve instructed all the respective principals go to the intercom microphone and simply say (all calm, cool, and collected, mind you) ‘Cole Alert.’ Now, when you hear ‘Cole Alert,’ you will know that a bomb threat has been received. But the kids? Hah! They won’t have a clue as to what that expression means. How could they? So, while they’re left in the dark— you, with your advantage over them, will be watching your classroom students like a hawk in that two- or three-minutes interim leading up to the actual School Evacuation Order. And in so doing, one of you will be in the position to witness, say, one student possibly winking at one of his buddies, or maybe grinning knowingly or, you know, perhaps elbowing somebody else meaningfully. So you will record their names, and see that I receive them at once! Then later we’ll have the police call them in for questioning, and together they and I will sweat them down into a confession.”

One of my colleagues whispered in my ear, “His favorite show is Hawaii Five-O. He sees himself as a Jack Lord. You know, Detective McGarrett.

Superintendent King

A week went by. And then it happened!

Moments before the bell for the first class of the day was about to ring, I was monitoring my early homeroom period. Suddenly the distraught voice of the principal started barking over the intercom, “COLE ALERT! COLE ALERT! COLE ALERT!” with the same urgency of a World War II B-17 tail gunner yelling, “BANDIT AT THREE O’CLOCK!” Think Major Burns. From M*A*S*H. 

I immediately (but surreptitiously, of course) began surveying my students, watching for, anticipating the telltale wink, the elbow, or the knowing grin. Ready to pounce. But all thirty-plus kids erupted simultaneously, every one of them asking similar versions of the same question to one another. “What the hell is this? A bomb scare?” “And who the hell is Cole?” But there were just so many of them, and it was all happening so fast, I just couldn’t see how I was supposed to be watching all of them at once! And I never caught a single wink, grin, or an elbow! I was a failure.

And then, of course, they all turned on me, their wise all-knowing ‘educator’ at the front of the room. “Is that what this is, Mr. Lyford? A bomb scare?” And loser me, wanting to be the ultimate professional, I quickly pasted on my best poker face and feigned ignorance. “Well, gosh… I have… no idea what this is all about…” at which point the entire classroom busted out in a volley of laughter at the flagrant silliness of my attempted white lie. And before the laughter had time to totally die down, the intercom crackled to life once again and began issuing the evacuation instructions.

Now… that was only the beginning of what was about to turn into the longest, most drawn-out days.

First of all, it was still early morning, around 8:00, far too early for a school building to suddenly flush its entire student body and faculty, ready or not, right out of the building and into a winter wonderland with its air temperature down around zero degrees. But suddenly there we all were, populating the sidewalk like a colony of National Geographic penguins on an ice floe. And secondly, our “super intelligent” superintendent had apparently planned his crafty Here’s-How-We’ll-Thwart-the-Malicious-Bomb-Scarer-Plot not one stinking millimeter further than just coming up with the cool-sounding, 007-ish code name, “COLE ALERT!” And that meant we were all left out there freezing on the sidewalk with nobody having any idea what to do with us!

A half-hour passed, while we watched the police cars and fire trucks pull up and park in the big school parking lot. Some kids hadn’t had time to grab their coats. I ended up lending my coat to one of them. Meanwhile, my toes were so numb it felt like they had disappeared.

Then down the line came our assistant principal with news of the superintendent’s emergency ad hoc Plan B (actually Plan A, if you think about it). Having phoned around town for some/any place to temporarily house our little army, a deal had been struck with the owner of the local movie theater. Suddenly we had a destination. We could go there. They would have room for all of us. A place to sit and warm up. So. We got our marching orders and off we marched. The theater was about three quarters of a mile away.

When we finally arrived en masse at the theater, it turned out the doors of the theater were still locked! Once again we had to assume the portrayal of a penguin colony, while the assistant principal went across the street to a pastry shop to use their telephone. Yeah. 1969. No cell phones back then.

After the proprietor finally showed up, in we went. And guess what. Now it turned out that the thermostat was still set at 55 degrees! And we were told that it would take a very long while to warm the place up. So we sat, watching our exhaled breath forming little mini-clouds before our faces with every breath we took. But hey, at least 55 degrees was like… plus yardage, metaphorically. Better than 5 degrees above zero anyway.

It was also very dark in that dingy theater. And I’m sure that you can understand that the kids were getting more restless and obstreperous by the minute from utter boredom, and who could blame them? Some were racing up and down the aisles, some singing songs, some just whooping it up, and a couple of the kids managed to get into a fight and had to be forcefully separated. Meanwhile, we teachers had formed ourselves in a line blocking the exits, so kids wouldn’t escape.

Man, we were there for such a long time.

But by the way, it just so happened that Belfast Area High School had earlier arranged for a school assembly that very morning. The assembly was to feature classical music performed by a visiting string quartet— two violinists, a violist, and a cellist. So our stable genius of a superintendent came up with the great idea of having that quartet appear and perform on the frigid movie theater stage to entertain us! Because you know, “Musick hath charms to soothe a savage breast.”

Somebody found and dragged four chairs up onto the stage. And then, voila! The musicians were trotted out onto the stage witho no introduction whatsoever. Or perhaps someone did introduce them but it was just too loud and chaotic there, that I simply missed it. I dunno. But watching the absurdity of the members of that doomed quartet sitting out there all swaddled up in overcoats and scarves and boots, diligently sawing their bows back and forth on the strings, their frozen breaths forming little empty cartoon balloons above their heads, and starting with their dainty sonata and hoping in vain to work their way toward the minuet…? Let’s just say… it didn’t go well. A loud boom-box blasting Bob Dylan or The Stones might’ve worked.

Ironically, the ill-timed concerto only exacerbated the savagery in the beasts’ breasts. Hoots and hollers and catcalls and loud boos! The stamping of feet! Everything was getting out of control fast, though we tried to shush them and weed out the worst of our little villains, but the anonymity in the darkness made thjat difficult!

Our musicians had found themselves playing with all the distractions of the band on the deck of the sinking Titanic.

What stopped it all dead in its tracks was the sudden, militaristic arrival of the superintendent and his henchmen! Yes, it seems that whenever and wherever he arrived, our ‘commandant’ always showed up with between four and six of his trench-coated tough guys (school board members no doubt, but definite mafia wannabes). They took the stage. The quintet-ers were summarily dismissed and immediately scampered off and away with their strings and bows and music stands in tow. Someone turned up the house lights way up while Superintendent King dramatically faced down the rabble with His terrible-swift-sword wrath… “WE’LL HAVE IT QUIET!”

And lo, suddenly it was quiet. And verily He saw the silence. And He saw that it was good!

He took the few steps from center stage to downstage, all the better to confront His adversaries with His odd mixture of disgust and pity. And He stood there with his feet shoulder-width apart during nearly a full minute of dramatic silence, just daring anyone to make a peep… and then, finally, He spaketh.

“This morning… somebody with a very sick and demented mind, phoned the high school principal’s office and informed them that forty sticks of dynamite were planted up in one of our classroom ceilings. Yes, that’s right. Can you imagine that, ladies and gentlemen? Can you imagine how diseased and twisted the pea-sized brain of this… this Neanderthal has to be? To do something as insane as that? No, you can’t. Because it goes beyond imagination, doesn’t it.

And we have reason to believe… and I’m sorry to have to inform you of this… that it was one of you… one of your classmates, perhaps the one sitting right next to you at this very moment, who made that that deranged call. As hard as that is to believe. Yes. I know. You see, a psycho did this. A sadly sick psycho made that call… and as a result, the rest is history. You were his victims. You are the ones that this psychopath sent out into the freezing cold and left you out there for more than an hour! This… mental patient…”

[Now of course I obviously can’t remember the exact words that Commandant King spaketh to us, because this was back in 1969, some 55 years ago. But I assure you this is very much approximately the speech he made, marked by the vitriol and political incorrectness that citizens of this decade would be shocked to have heard. But… it was just this vitriolic speech that led to the even more unbelievable… next thing.]

I swear, as I was standing there at the back of the theater listening to his words… (and you’re going to find this practically impossible to believe because… hey, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there) I heard, and a bunch of us teachers heard, a ‘noise,’ a low muttering, an ongoing muttering voice that was basically just a bare buzz under the thunder of the superintendent’s diatribe. Now we, the teachers, had no idea where the voice was coming from so, instinctively, like good soldiers, we all spread out, stealthily moving around the seats in order to home in on whatever the source of it was, because by now you could make out some of the words. And the words I was hearing? I‘d begun to find them more than a little disturbing.

But then suddenly, we no longer had to search for the source. Because a few kids in the middle section all at once just jack-in-the-boxed right up out of their seats and began jockeying themselves frantically, both to the left and right, away from a single, still-seated young man they’d been sitting near to. And what this fellow was saying was essentially this, only in lots more words: “And what, he’s calling ME sick? Hah! HE’S the PSYCHO!”

Of course the boy was quickly apprehended by a trio of phys ed. teachers (no, not by the likes of little ol’ me). The police were called to the lobby where, just before he was transferred into their custody, this young man (an obviously disturbed, solid, heavyweight of a Korean boy) managed for the first time ever to zip the lip of our officious, yammering, Superintendent King (of the Five-O) by delivering an iron-fisted gut-punch to his breadbasket, leaving him entirely at a loss for words as well as the ability to breathe temporarily.

The two immediate outcomes of that little altercation were (a) by the next day, our boy the ‘bomb-scarer’ seems to have been quietly… ‘disappeared,’ never to be seen or heard from again (as far as I know anyway), and (b) as a result, many of the faculty felt compelled to gather that night (as was their wont every night anyway) at Jed’s Tavern, to happily raise their mugs of grog in a toast to… (well, nobody really knew the Korean boy or his name, as it turned out, so…) to the young “Unknown Bombadier” who’d made, for their morning’s amusement, the utimate sacrifice.

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Now dear reader, if you found this I-swear-on-a-stack-of-Bibles- it’s-all-true remembrance of mine hard to believe (as I did myself while it was all unfolding around me as an innocent and unsuspecting first-year teacher) I can only warn you to fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, for… DUDS: BOMB THREATS THAT BOMBED —PART TWO (coming soon)

PFFFFFFT!

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SATURDAY NIGHT IN DOVER-FOXCROFT: REC CENTER, 1961

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

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

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

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

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

Though love is blind, make up your mind

I’ve got to know

Should I hang up, or will you tell him

He’ll have to go?

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

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

The kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol

When the do the Bristol Stomp!

Really somethin’ when they join in jumpin’

When they do the Bristol Stomp!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problem is… it’s just never that day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What? A whole hour?”

“Yeah. Afraid so. 8:30 to 9:30.”

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

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

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

“Thanks, Tommy. You’re a good man.”

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

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

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

And then it hits me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Right.

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

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

(yawn) This job is so boring.

Until it isn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Or Be. Invited,” I manage to add.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nod.

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

I nod.

“Then… please… say it.”

I am so ashamed. “I… invite you.” 

“Aw gee, thank you so very…”

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

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

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

And Officer Fair has left the door wide open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God bless the U.S. cavalry.

Jesus, breathe, Tommy!

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

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

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

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

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

He frowns. “Uhmmm… OK?”

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

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

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

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

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POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST?

PROLOGUE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She says, “The boxer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You remind myself to just say no to paranoia.

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

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

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

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

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

But it is.

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

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THUNDER ROAD

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ON THE DEAD-SERIOUS IMPORTANCE OF TELEPHONE ETIQUETTE

I know what you’re thinking. But, no, the above is not actually a training video for extraterrestrials on How to Pass As Human Prior to The Great Alien Invasion of Planet Earth. Instead this one is to teach MORONS (us Baby Boomers) How to Use the Telephone!

By the way, there are hundreds of similar, vintage black and white PSAs (public service announcements videos) on YouTube waiting to entertain you. They cover so many very important issues: “Dinner Etiquette”; “What Makes a Girl Popular”; “Your Doctor Is Your Friend”; “Your Kiss of Affection, the Germ of Infection”; “They Don’t Wear Labels: I’ve Got VD ”; “Let Asbestos Protect the Buildings on Your Farm”; “Beware of Homosexuals”; “How Much Affection?”; and “The Trouble With Women, to name a few.At the risk of sounding like some crude scrawl of grafitti on the inside wall of a phone booth (remember phone booths?): For a good time… search YouTube for “vintage PSA’s.”

In 1958, “Telephone Etiquette” was the name of an actual dumbass teaching unit we kids had to endure in junior high. That particular ‘adventure’ lasted for approximately two dumbass weeks— and dedicated dumbassedly to conforming our rambunctious juvenile behaviors around the family telephone to rigid, recognizably Stepford-Wives-like standards, a laughable goal for preadolescents. The unit included intensive emphasis on such rocket-science, hard-to-grasp concept as The Three Magic Phrases: “Please,” “Thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” Fortunately, since we apparently were a class of morons, there was this helpful video:

So… how did we, the rambunctious preadolescent little morons, fare in our unit on telephone etiquette? Not so well, considering the number of after school detentions that ensued, along with the delicious fact that, on one particular day, a police officer was summoned to make an appearance. Of course the number of detentions was pretty much maintaining the status quo throughout the school year with the teacher we had: Mrs. Bernice Sterling, a.k.a, “Bugsy.” The cop being called? That was a one-off.

Bugsy’s reputation spanned decades. For instance, when our school held its annual evening Open House, giving parents the opportunity to drop into the classroom after work and chat with our teachers about our progress or lack thereof, my dad who was a saint by the way, couldn’t muster up the courage to show up. Bugsy’d been one of his teachers way back when, and he was still terrified of her to that day.

Anyway, considering how we boys (not so much the girls) found it next to impossible to take many subjects seriously, this unit didn’t stand the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell. Like most other classes there was reading the assigned pages, taking notes, memorizing the do’s and don’t’s from various charts, and taking quizzes.

But then there was also those stupid ggiggle-worthy “exercises” we had to perform where everybody had to partner up— each couple taking its turn in the pair of empty chairs at the front of the room and each student, in turn, directed to simulate phoning his or her partner to demonstrate proper phone etiquette for a passing grade. Sometimes the play-acting called for you to make a personal call to a friend; sometimes it involved calling a potential employer to ask for a job application and interview, etc. Whatever.

The very process of partnering up had one obviously built-in classroom management problem. It was the teacher who selected who’d couple up with whom, supposedly at random, but invariably, to keep one class-clown from being seated with another class-clown (a sure-fire recipe for classroom havoc), she tended to pair one boy with one girl whenever possible. So just try to imagine the barbed gigglesand whispers and note-passings that this engendered, along with the cruel, Roman Coliseum embarrassment the shyest, non-popular, non-attractive girl or boy had to suffer right along with the future prom king or queen linked with them. The blackboard jungle.

Secondly, and most importantly, we boys honestly knew so much more than old Bugsy would ever know about the real world of telephone use in her lifetime! We were the frickin’ experts! So the very idea of me (or any of my pals) having to demonstrate how to conduct a proper telephone call with a close friend was so beyond laughable it wasn’t even funny.

Up until 3rd or 4th grade, my family didn’t even own a telephone. But my grandmother who lived in an apartment upstairs did. One of those big wooden boxes that looked like a large birdhouse mounted on the living room wall, with what looked like a large pair of bugged-out eyes installed across the top-front of the box. Those were actually a pair of rounded, metal bells that rang whenever a call was received. Then there was that little black cone for speaking into, mounted like some cartoonish puckered mouth below the ‘eyes.’ Also, hanging off the box’s left side, was the large chess-pawn-shaped receiver on a cord. And finally, the little metal crank installed on the right side of the box was used for generating electricity. All very steampunk.

Occasionally I would be allowed, under parental supervision, to make a “magic” call to Stevie Taylor, my main pal who lived down the street. But once I’d got the hang of it, I’d sometimes sneak upstairs by my own self when Nanny was out, give the little crank a few turns, take the receiver off the hook, and secretly listen in on what was supposedly private conversations neighbors of ours were having. See, Nanny’s phone was connected to some of our neighbors on what was then known as a party line.  A private phone line was expensive, so most families opted for the cheaper party-line plan. There were at least four or five neighborhood neighbors’ phones sharing the line with Nanny’s. So when a call came in and rang in two ring bursts (ring-ring! pause ring-ring! pause, etc.) then all connected families would hear it and know that that call was for the Smith family; whereas if the call sounded with bursts of five rings (ring-ring-ring-ring-ring! pause) then that might designate the call was for Nanny, etc. And in a perfect world, only someone in the designated family would pick up the receiver. In a perfect world.

Guess what.  The world is flawed. The party-line era was infamous for adults sneakily listening in on their neighbors’ phone conversations. I mean, all the time. It was the neighborhood sport of phone-tapping spies. A world of audio voyeurs.

One day while I was listening in on whomever, I accidentally positioned the hand-held receiver a little too close to the speaking cone. Guess what happened! SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Ear-deafening feedback! Thunderstruck, I dropped the receiver! Immediately the screech stopped, thank God! But I could hear tinny little far-away voices from the dangling receiver, one exclaiming, “What the HELL was THAT!?” and another saying, “I have no idea!” I carefully returned the receiver to its cradle, and crept back down the stairs with a guilty heart. Bur EUREKA! Serendipitously, I had discovered the magic of feedback, although I didn’t know the name at that point. Did I ever create telephone feedback again? On purpose? What do you think? Of course I did.

So, back then there was this old crone, Lottie with the whiskery old witch’s chin, who lived right across the street from us— a real ‘Mrs. Dubose’ straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird. And when I was just a toddler playing outside in the rain, she’d spy me standing in a puddle and what’d she do? She’d come a-running out onto her porch screaming like a banshee at me! “You get your shoes right out of that puddle, mister! Your father works hard all day long at keeping you kids in shoes and clothes, and look what you do! Just look at you! You should be ashamed of yourself! You should be beat with a hickory stick, you ungrateful little…!”

Well, I didn’t know what business of hers my shoes or my dad’s income was because… she wasn’t my mother. But I’d retreat sobbing and tracking water back into the fortress of my home anyway .

When I was a little older, she was being bothered by dogs pooping on her lawn and running wild through her flowerbeds. So she came over to our house one day and asked my dad to let her borrow my Red Ryder BB rifle. And damn it, Dad let her take it. And oh, didn’t it irk me to no end to see her riding shotgun over there day after day, slouched in her porch chair with my rifle laid across her lap like some stagecoach guard in a western cowboy movie,and taking occasional potshots at the bandits. And at least a couple of times I caught her taking aim at me while chasing a stray rubber ball that was rolling a little too close to her flowers. She was your basic hard, neighborhood, old bag, a force to be reckoned with, to be feared by little boys, salesmen, and canines. That hag deserved every damned egg teenagers ever pelted her house with over the years.

So anyway, whenever I’d tiptoe up to Nanny’s vacant apartment to while away some time listening to the neighbors gossiping on the party line, I’d give the phone a couple of cranks, quietly lift  the receiver out of the cradle, sit back, and just play spy. But… whenever I’d hear that familiar, scratchy, Long John Silver’s voice of Lottie’s, I’d delight in drawing the receiver up to the mouthpiece and… then… SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

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

Nanny finally got herself a rotary-dial telephone. So did everybody else in the neighborhood, including Lottie. So gone were my days of fun of being The Phantom Feedbacker of the Neighborhood Party Line. Because rotary phones cleverly mounted the receiver and transmitter forever apart at opposite ends of the barbell-shaped handset. (The manufacturers had found me out.)

I’d grown tired of listening to boring old ladies exchanging recipes and supposedly juicy gossip anyway. And meanwhile Lottie was maintaining her hard-earned reputation as the number-one, all-time, serial, neighborhood party-line eavesdropper ever. A legend. She’d become that ghostly shadow, always standing off to the side and just behind the lacy curtain that veiled the window in her front door. Sort of like that signature TV pencil sketch of Alfred Hitchcock at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Perpetually the eyes and the ears of the neighborhood. Only with a telephone handset glued to her ear.

So of course when you were speaking to someone/anyone on the phone, you knew you were being monitored, and would choose your words accordingly. However, one afternoon after school, I was on the phone with Steve Taylor and, I don’t know why but I was feeling extra-feisty. And suddenly, mid-conversation, I just blurted right out, “Be careful what you say, Stevie, ‘cause you just know that old bag Lottie across the street is listening to every doggone word we’re saying!”

“WELL I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW I’M DOING NO SUCH THING!” Lottie blasted haughtily, and then bang! Gone. She’d hung up. Good ol’ Lottie. It made my day!

So anyway, “Feedback” was my first lesson learned in becoming a sophisticated telephone “operator.”  But I learned another little phone trick just as serendipitously. I was older at this point, and using the rotary dial had become second nature to me. I was at somebody’s house and had to call home to leave a message for Mom. OK, Nanny’s upstairs phone number was 2197. Just four simple numbers. But being in a hurry, I screwed up, actually only dialing only 297.Quickly realizing my mistake, I hung up to do it again but before I could even pick the handset back up, the phone was ringing right in front of me. I automatically picked up and said, “Hello?” There was no answer. “Hello? Anybody there?” Nope.  Just the dial tone. That was odd. But it had happened so instantaneously, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had somehow caused it. On a whim, I dialed 297 intentionally this time, and hung right up. Again, the phone rang. Again, no one there. What a curious thing. But by God, I had stumbled onto something! I tried it again. And yes: I could make my host’s phone ring at will. And already I was wondering, Would this work on another phone? Other… phones? On Nanny’s phone?

So at home I headed upstairs, dialed 297, and hung up. Yes! The phone rang! Nanny came out of the kitchen and lifted the handset to her ear. “Hello?” she said, “…Hello?” and then, “Well, that’s odd. I guess they hung up. Just a dial tone.” I was ecstatic. I really had discovered something! Something deliciously all mine! Something to make life just a little more interesting. And I alone seemed to be the only one in town who knew about it. In no time, I had pranked about a dozen people I knew.

Say I’m at a friend’s house, waiting for my buddy to come downstairs. His mom leaves the room. I get out of my chair, dial 297, hang up, and leap back into the chair again. Ring! Mom hurries back in, picks up the phone, says hello a couple of times, and says, “Well that’s funny. Just a dial tone.” I was controlling people. It gave me a sense of power. I even pulled that stunt on Merrick Square Market a few times. But I kept it just for myself. I didn’t share my… super power with any of my friends. For a long time. Finders, keepers you know. But of course I eventually did spill the beans. And then… phones were ringing all over Dover-Foxcroft, driving the population crazy. heh heh…

Oh, I’ve just gotta tell you this one. This one is rich:

It was December, Christmas time, and J. J. Newberry’s had a little sales gimmick going on that year— a Santa Claus hotline. Their Santa’s phone number was published in their Christmas flyers and advertised on the radio. Little rug rats were encouraged to call the hotline and talk to Santa, telling him what they wanted for Christmas. I, and a friend, saw a fun opportunity in this. We would call the hotline and, using our Academy Award winning babyish voices, mess with Santa’s mind. We were such little dicks. The prototypes of Beavis and Butthead.

But unfortunately for all concerned, there was a very, very similar number to the hotline’s that was getting a lot of calls by accidental misdialing. Word from other Beavis and Butthead prototypes had gotten around. Turned out, it was already widely known to whom that number belonged. It was a woman in town who was socking away a little Christmas money—you know, cash under the table— by entertaining ‘gentlemen callers’ at all hours of the night, if you get my drift. And word was, she was one angry dudette. Well, since we were a couple of the worst kind of little dinks, and due to the fact that there was no such thing as Caller ID, we didn’t have to be told twice.

A woman’s voice answered, “Hello?”

“Can I pweathe talk to Thanta Cwauthe,” I said, with a child’s voice and a lisp, “cauthe I wanna tell him wha…”

“Goddamn you little shits all to hell! You got the wrong number. Again! Now this… has to stop, you dig? I can’t take this anymore. This, for your information, is a business phone! Not the Santa Claus number at Newberry’s, for Christ’s sake! And you’re tying up my goddamn line! Now… you just call the right number right now and you tell… your fat-ass Santa Claus… that J. J. Newberry’s is gonna get sued! For harassment! And if you’re stupid enough to call this number one more time, I’ll… track you down! I’ll find you and wring your little neck! You got that!?”

“Well… Mewwy Chwithmuth…” I said, but Bang! She’d hung up. Rather rudely, too. But I mean, holy crap, was that ever fun for two little pains in the ass like us! But, boy, did she ever sound scary. Still more fun than poking a hornet’s nest, though.

However, please don’t get the idea I was the only one being an obnoxious little brat with the telephone games. Because I’m here to tell you no, not by a long shot. So many extra Y-chromosome boys my age were also badass contemporaries in the same field. I mean junior high fellas? Bored and with nothing to do? And there was that telephone just sitting there, a toy waiting to be used and abused? Prank phone calls were a sport back then. A craze. And it wasn’t jjst kids, either. Look up “50’s phone pranks “on Google. You’ll see. Oh, and once again, you have to remember: no Caller ID.

There were some, the more creative ones like myself, who were experts at it; and then there were those mealy-mouthed amateurs, sheep basically, just following the pack and repeating what everybody else had been pranking since the caveman days. For instance, dialing a random convenience store number and asking, “Do you have Prince Albert in the can?” And then, if the answer is, “Why, yes, we do,” the low-life prankster/dilettante would shout, “Well… why don’t you let him out so he doesn’t suffocate?” before hanging up, falling on the floor laughing, and laughing himself sick.                      

*Prince Albert being the brand name of a popular pipe tobacco sold in either a soft package or a can

That prank, plus this other most common one, were so overused.“Hello. This is General Electric calling. Is your refrigerator running?” and of course the response to a “Yes” would be, “Well, why don’t you run after it and catch it?” Yeah. Two of the most boring tropes of the 50s. I know, sad, right? Audio memes.

My cousin and I preferred the more interactive scenarios like this one, especially effective when you got a little old lady on the line:

Prankee: “Hello?”

Pranker: (In a low, adult-sounding voice) “Good morning, Ma’am. I’m a representative of the Bell Telephone Company.”

Prankee: “Oh? How can I help you?”

Pranker: “Well ma’am. We’re going through the town today, house by customer house, cleaning out all the phone lines. If you happen to have a paper bag handy, that would be a big help.”

Prankee: “Oh. Actually I do believe I have some paper bags in the cupboard. All right.  I’ll get one and be right back.”

Pranker: “Thanks, ma’am. I’ll wait right here.”

Prankee: (heavy paper rustling) “I’m back. And I do have a bag. What do I do with it?”

Prankee: Please pull the bag right over your telephone handset, then wrap the bag up tightly and hold it firmly. But be especially sure to look away. We blow the dust out of the lines with our heavy-duty power blower, and we don’t to get dust all over your floor or, especially, in your eyes. Let us know when you’re ready.”

Prankee: (really loud paper rustling) (Prankee’s voice sounding fainter now under the rustling) “OK. I think I’m ready…”

Pranker: “OK. Hang on tight!” (Pranker, making a loud, drawn-out, high-pitched WOOOOOOOWEEEEEeeeee! with puckered mouth.) “OK. Ma’am. We’re done. The Bell Telephone Company thanks you for your cooperation in this matter.”

Prankee: “Okey-dokey!” (loud paper rustling) “Ummmm.  There doesn’t seem to be any dust in my bag, though…”

Pranker: “Well done. We commend you on your neat housekeeping, ma’am. And thank you again.”

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

Mostly my cousin and I were really just trying to harmlessly amuse ourselves. One time, for whatever reason, we decided we’d conduct an important-sounding survey by calling 30 or so totally random numbers to find out which opera was Dover-Foxcroft’s favorite. Both of us having been brought up pretty much on Mad Magazines (“What, me worry? I read Mad”), I’m guessing that played a part in our play-acting choices. Neither of us knew anything at all about opera, however, other than “The Barber of Seville” soundtrack that accompanied our favorite Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd cartoon. “The Rabbit of Seville”.

Our survey was conducted over the weekend. We kept stats in a notebook. We were all about the stats. Many contacted, like ourselves, had no real idea about operas. But quite a few took us fairly seriously. All I really remember is that Madame Butterfly took 1st place, and The Barber of Seville got a few mentions, as did The Flower Drum Song.

See, we did things like this when there were no Medusa-like distractions like computers and cell phones to turn us into motionless, dead stone.

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

OK, back to Bugsy’s class unit on Telephone Etiquette…

The two weeks seemed to me such a ridiculous, ho-hum waste of time. However, on the very final day of the unit, things suddenly got pretty tense, and we all found ourselves perking right up. What was happening is that Bugsy had begun to push the class discussion into darker waters. She’d begun shifting the focus to the dire consequences of some very particular improper uses of the telephone. Namely, the evil little practices by some children (why, not us, of course) misusing the telephone in malicious ways. In fact it turned out that what she was getting at, what she was beginning to poke her nosy old nose into, was none other than the misuse of the telephone by willfully committing the unimaginable and heinous  crime of (oh my!) phone pranks!

“Yes, obviously some of you, if not all, have heard about thesee thoughtless telephone pranks, and the harm can cause. The mischievous calling of random numbers, the tricking of innocent victims into believing their caller is someone other than who he really is. Perhaps some of your families have even been the victims of such telephone abuse… or know of someone who has been.”

“Yes!” piped up one of the dumb-bunnyest, most brown-nosing girls in our class. “That happened at our place just last month!” Some of the other girls were nodding vigorously in support. Girls! Jeez!

But yikes. I had hardly expected that particular can of worms to be torn open in this class. And by the most feared teacher on the planet. Here I’d been assuming it was all going to be nothing but the namby-pamby, goody-two-shoes, golden rules we should all follow. But no. Apparently not. Where was she going with this? Did she… Did she know something? I mean, hey…  

Like some hardened Alcatraz inmate, I surreptitiously allowed my gaze to secretly travel around the room, gauging the reactions of my fellow miscreants in attendance who, in turn, were surreptitiously gauging mine. Each of us felons had by now assumed the mask, the bland, know-nothing, poker face. You’ve heard of the Cosa Nostra, the Italian phrase that once referred to the Mafia and which translates literally to “our thing?” Meaning “our secret thing.”

“What many of these so-called pranksters don’t realize is that several instances of prank phone calls fall under the auspices of… criminal behavior.” Somebody somewhere at the back of the class giggled. “Punishable criminal behavior at that!” she added.  Giggling a high-pitched giggle like some little girl. Only it didn’t quite sound like a girl.

“Yes, Arthur?” asked Mrs. Sterling suddenly in her sternest voice. She was never one who liked being interrupted.

 Along with most of the other kids, I cranked my head around for a look-see over my shoulder. And there he was, the fool. Little Artie Buck. Grinning. Squirming in his seat like he had to go to the bathroom. Arm waving high in the air signaling pick me, pick me! Oh, he had something he was just dying to share with the class.

Down went the arm. “OK. So…” he began, almost delirious with remembered joy, “…this one time…? I dialed this number. You know, just for fun?”

What in the world…? The class and Bugsy waited silently while he gathered his witless thoughts. Me thinking, Artie, what the heck do you think you’re DOING!?

“Well, anyway,” he began again, “see, this lady answered.” He was having such a hard time containing himself, overcome as he was by his autonomic giggling system. But oh, he just couldn’t wait to get his wonderful story out of his mouth, so he forged on. “And so I said, ‘Is Frank Walls there?’ And she said, ‘No. I think you have the wrong number.’ ” Then the giggles overtook him once again for a moment before he could go on. But finally: “So I said to her, ‘Then is Pete Walls there?’ And she said, ‘No.’ So then I said, ‘Are there any Walls there at all, then?’ and when she said, ‘No’ to that…” hee-hee-hee “…I asked her…’” and here he really had to contend with one final meltdown of his own hilarity, “ ‘Then… what’s holding up your roof?’ ”

Artie had finished. And he was looking all around the room expectantly. Waiting for the gales of laughter. But the room had gone so electrically silent you could have heard a dust mote touch down softly on the floor!  Every student was frozen stock still. How could Artie have done this to himself? we were asking ourselves. From the look of sudden terror that flashed across his face, that’s what he was suddenly wondering as well. How could he have just forgotten where he was? In the dragon’s lair! Was he just stupid? Or mental? Or both?

Bugsy’s lizard eyes had locked onto Artie’s beating, little bunny-rabbit heart like a pair of talons. She cruelly allowed the silence to go on for too long a time while the clock ticked. And then she said it. It was an Hercule Poirot moment!

“So… that was YOU!”

The class gasped as one! No! Oh my word! Just imagine! Oh my! What are the chances of…?

We watched as Bugsy marched the condemned off to the principal’s office by the ear, leaving us jaw-dropped and utterly rocked. And alone. By ourselves for once. Everyone equally shocked. Some of us, of course,  were secretly relieved. It hadn’t been US. It had been Artie.

Time went by. We’d obviously been forgotten. We all gathered at the window when the patrol car pulled up outside in the faculty parking lot.

We never did find out exactly what happened to him. He wouldn’t talk about it. Whatever it was, it must’ve been bad.

In retrospect, maybe they’d sat him down in front of a movie screen and made him watch a number of black and white public service announcement films on how… Crime Doesn’t Pay.

THE TELEPHONE PRANK– A GATEWAY DRUG TO OVERDUE BOOKS AND REEFER !!
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WITNESS PROTECTION COUNTY BLUES

(And now for something completely different)

WITNESS PROTECTION COUNTY BLUES     by Tom Lyford 

From the south and the west, they head northeast
born-again zombies, officially ‘deceased’
they come from Nowhere, just any old place
their backtracks, vanished – they’ve left no trace
followin’ the drinkin’ gourd’s cold north star
raisin’ your hackles like an old film noir
raisin’ your hackles like an old film noir

Got a fresh driver’s license, an accent urbane
they land up here in the backwoods of Maine
lookin’ like lost ones just been found
nervous shifty eyes just a-glancin’ all around
got a mortgage on a house sittin’ just up the hill
got a job makin’ fabric up at Guilford Woolen Mill
got a job makin’ fabric up at Guilford Woolen Mill

Buy their frozen pizzas at the local Shop ‘n Save
their kids go to school and they never misbehave
they never go to church and they never join a club
and never hang out at the local grille & pub…
man seems content with his nondescript life
woman kinda acts like a Stepford wife
yeah the woman kinda acts like a Stepford wife

Ask him his name and he’ll smile real polite
but he’s radiatin’ nervousness—he’s real uptight
and you know he’ll be a ‘Jones’ or a ‘Johnson’ or a ‘Smith’
he’s just lip-synchin’ recent memorized myth
and his first name’s ‘Tom,’ ‘Dick,’ or ‘Harry,’ ‘Ed,’ or ‘John’
not a name to call attention, just a name to make you yawn
not a name to call attention, just a name to make you yawn

You wonder what they’re doin’ here and what they did
are they some sorta modern-day Billy the Kid?
were they some kinda Godfather once in the news
makin’ too many offers that you couldn’t just refuse?
did they ever run guns for the CIA?
did they turn state’s evidence in court to get away?
did they turn state’s evidence in court to get away?

From the south and the west, they head northeast
born-again ‘zombies,’ officially ‘deceased’
they come from Nowhere, just any old place
their backtracks, vanished – they’ve left no trace
followin’ the drinkin’ gourd’s cold North Star
they arrive in droves—beneath the radar
got a whole new life and a new used car…

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OPEN HOUSE

My Brain, and Welcome to It

“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.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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…

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