Humor – Page 3 – NEARING THE END OF THE LINE

THE GIZMO CHRONICLES, 1989 — Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO: THE PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT

(And yes, I know I said last time that Chapter Two was going to be called “Tweeter and the Monkeyman,” but it turns out that MAYBE that’s going to be the title of Chatper Three instead. (Or four?) My apologies.)

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

(But previously, Chapter One ended with …) “It seems she had to go to California for a week, and was at a loss as to what she was going to do about Gizmo. So yeah, you can see where this is going. Soon I was running like a 43-yearold little kid to Phyllis, my darling wife, begging her “Please, please, PLEASE! Can I? Come on, huh? I’ll feed’im, I’ll change his diapers, why… you won’t hafta do a thing, I PROMISE!”

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

OK. See, the reason I felt I had to dramatically beg like a little kid to be Gizmo’s babysitter is that Phyllis suffers from a lifelong aversion to animals. Hairy mammals especially. (However, she does strive valiantly to make an exception for me). Cats and dogs were anathema to her. Me, I passionately love cats and dogs. I love pretty much all animals.

Except bears.

So anyway, I instinctively I knew that a hairy baby-monkey-mammal was way too close to being a cat or a dog. So I knew my chances were slim at best. However… my acting like the pathetically hopeful eight-year-old begging for the puppy that had followed him home, or the bunny rabbit, or especially even the pony, might in fact, just might prove to be too overwhelmingly disarming. And if I could just get her to crack a grin, that just might be the chink in her armor I could use to get her flustered and off-guard.

Especially considering it was my plan to purposely perform my little comedy act with Phyllis in front of a random audience of YMCA members standing in the lobby. Who, by the way (yes!) ended up thinking it sufficiently “cute” to begin chanting at her in a chorus of, “Aw, come on, Phyllis,” and “Let the poor kid have his monkey,” etc. (See, I’ve had a lot of practice learning how to manipulate this woman.)

And hah! She did crack a grin (immediately wishing she hadn’t). Peer pressure is a marvelous tool. Her defense momentarily collapsed. I was in!

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

SO… a few weeks later, as a way to get Gizmo to feel more familiar with and closer to us, his future one-week monkey-sitters, Phyl and I were invited to a getting-to-know-you-better evening chez Gizmo. Giz was so excited to have company visit. Phyllis positioned herself on the sidelines, wanting to distance herself from the action and just passively watch me having a ball rolling around on the floor with him. I say “wanting to distance herself” because it was impossible for anyone to distance themselves from that frisky little ball of energy.

Gizmo had a super power. He could sense fear from a mile away and he was compelled to hone right in on it. In the future I’d see it time and time again. Those who fearfully tried to avoid the wild little simian were always the very people Gizmo was drawn to the most. Immediately, Phyllis sensed that she was a target, like her lap had the big Gizmo bullseye on it. That’s where he wanted to sit.

And strangely Phyl, who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with any pets of the animal variety, had always turned out to be a frickin’ animal magnet. We’d be in a room with some dog and I’d be calling, “Here, fella!” or “Over here, girl!” and Phyl would end up with the dog at her knees. And cats? Just the same. They’d be rubbing against her ankles all night long. Me? I’d be only too happy to run defense for her. Because I wanted all that attention all for myself.

Looking around, I discovered there was another “monkey house” at their home as well, identical to the one at the Y. And this monstrosity would soon be trucked over to our house when Sandy and her husband, Brian, flew off to the west coast for a week. I couldn’t wait.

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

Gizmo and his monkey house arrived at our house at 7:30 pm on February 16^th, 1989. There were four of us waiting to answer the door: Phyllis and I, plus our daughter, Melissa, and our son, Chris. The temperature outside was +6 degrees Fahrneheit. If you’re wondering how I still know the exact date, time, and temperature, I kept a journal. Here’s a picture of the actual front cover.

Sandy and Gizmo waited in our living room, with Gizmo temporarily jailed in his pet carrier (like some cat on his way to the vet’s) while a couple of men muscled his cumbersome “abode” into our den. It was obvious poor little Gizmo, looking so forlorn, knew what was going on. He’d been through such a scenario at least once before, if not more. Home is where the heart is, yeah, but for the Giz home had to be wherever his little “house” went. And now that little house had just been noisily dragged into our strange one.

With our front door finally closed against the frigid temperature outside, the little guy was finally released from his travel carrier. Immediately he scampered right into Sandy’s lap, where he remained cowering, a little squirrel-size ball with sad little frightened eyes. I’m pretty sure the little fella probably felt he himself the orphan who was being ditched once again. It must’ve been very stressful.

And how did I feel? Also stressed. Both excited and scared. I felt like I had when we’d brought four-days-old Missy, our very first-born child, home from the hospital. We didn’t feel confident at all about knowing how to take care of a baby then. But there she was anyway: a little, helpless life lying there in her crib. Sure, we’d been given lots of pointers from people in general and medics, but thank goodness we had that Dr. Spock manual for child care.

Well, here we were again, another little baby getting thrust into our care. Only this one in no sense of the word was helpless. We’d seen him in action. This guy could walk. This guy could swing from the chandeliers if you didn’t watch him. This baby could saddle up your head and ride it to a standstill like a simian Urban Cowboy. But still, he was just a baby, too. In his own way. And there was no Dr. Spock manual for Gizmo.

With Gizmo nestled safely in Sandy’s lap, we gathered round in the solemn, final, how-to demonstrations, not that we hadn’t gone over a lot of it prior to this. We covered what foods he liked, what foods he didn’t like, what foods he must have, and what treats he favored (pretzels and grapes). We were cautioned again that Giz had a blazing curiosity which, coupled with his safe-cracker’s dexterous little fingers, meant lock up what you didn’t want messed with and anything that might be dangerous for the little fella. Because Gizmo could and would get into anything and everything not nailed down: closed drawers, jewelry boxes, cupboards, things with zippers, you name it. I remember that in the days leading up to our little sleep-over friend’s arrival, we had thoroughly monkey-proofed the house. (At least we thought we had.)

Sandy took out the diaper bag and emptied its contents. Among other things, it had a number of diapers, some with pant legs gathered just above the knees and some… pantaloons basically, with pant legs gathered below the knees. The latter made him look like a jaunty little swashbuckling pirate. So cute.

But finally Gizmo was temporarily locked into his seven-foot tall, toy-laden, security-pillowed monkey penthouse, for safe keeping while his foster parents got busy pulling on their heavy coats and shuffling out of sight, out into the kitchen. And sadly, when I watched Gizmo’s little body slump, and that beautiful little mug of his crumple into soft despair when he heard our front door open, then close, and then at last the whole house become so much more silent, I was so wistfully reminded of Shakespeare’s “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

Yeah, so sorry little fella, they’re gone, aren’t they. And you’re afraid they aren’t ever coming back. Oh, baby, I know, I get it. But hey, you’ve got us. Right? And the thing is, they really are coming back. Trust us, Sweetie. But you and me? We’re gonna have so much fun! Every single day. It’ll be great.

Sandy had instructed us to wait about fifteen minutes or so before releasing him from his little “apartment,” to give him a some time to begin to get used to his new circumstances. A period of adjustment. Then, we could let him play with us to his and our hearts’ delight, which I could barely wait for. Then, when the Cinderella hour (or whenever it was we wanted to go to bed) finally rolled around, we could put him back in for the night. He’d been thoroughly trained to obey the simple command, “Cage,” she told us. “Say that just once and he’ll scamper his little self right back into it for the night,” she said. It was such a relief and blessing to us to have been given a magic word like that, as I was still feeling almost like we had a real human baby in the house again, and without the assurance of a Dr. Spock monkey manual.

When we opened up his door, we found him rocking back and forth nervously and hugging his cute little Garfield pillow. He looked out at us inquiringly for a moment. And then cautiously he hopped out, still with pillow, and continued watching us to see what we were going to do.

When he’d decided we weren’t going to eat him or anything, he was off! Bounding around the house from room to room, stopping here and there to inspect things, and then moving on. Slowly and non-threateningly trailing him, we found his Garfield abandoned on the kitchen floor.

He was hell on wheels! Practically a blur! He had so much to explore, an entire new world. He hopped up onto my desk and grabbed a pencil out of my pens-and-pencils holding mug. He was in the bathroom examining his own little self in the mirror. He was (yikes!) paused in front of my stacked stereo components, already pushing buttons and twisting knobs! He was examining our own toys that we’d laid out for him in anticipation of his arrival.

Me, I laid down on my back on the living room floor, waiting. It didn’t take long. He landed on my stomach just as I’d planned and boy, we went at it, the first of many fun “wrestling matches” to come that would all turn out to be more fun than (dare I say it?)… a barrel of monkeys. We chased him around. He chased us around. We wore him out. He wore us out. A little kid’s dream: I had a monkey!

It was nearing bed time. But we kept putting it off because, damn, it was just too much fun. Eventually however, common sense had to prevail. We were bushed. So… per instructions… I went to his dwelling, opened the door, looked down upon Gizmo, and spoke the magic word. “Cage.”

Giz looked up at me and blinked a few times. Perhaps I hadn’t said it clearly enough. I said it again. “Cage.” We were still looking at each other. Hmmm. OK, one more time, this time with gusto. “CAGE.”

And Gizmo moved immediately. Oh he understood that command alright. That was obvious. But rather than obey it, the little devil took off in the wrong direction, scampering out toward the kitchen! We followed him. And that monkey? He led us round and round in circles, being careful to stay just far enough ahead of us that we couldn’t lay a hand on him. We were a little parade, with Gizmo leading as the grand little marshall. Stupidly, Phyllis, son Chris, daughter Melissa, and I were bringing up the rear, chanting the now obviously ineffectual “Cage!” over and over in vain, thereby proving the time-worn definition of insanity. It had become a game for him, catch as catch can. And that twerp was so slippery and so evasive, our attempts at “heading him off at the pass” were just exercises in futility.

Eventually though, I was able to snag him. And feeling a little badly for the little critter as he and I approached his bungalow, I repeatedly assured him in a soothing voice, “Hey there little man, everything’s OK. Alright? It’s just that it’s time for bed. You’re worn out. I’m worn out. We’re all worn out. So what’re you gonna do, huh? But just think: tomorrow we’ll have an entire full day together. We’ll let you out and you’ll have the run of the house again. It’ll be great. Just a hoot.” And by the end of this babbling I was standing directly in front of the cage door.

I asked Phyl to open the door for me, so I could keep both hands firmly clamped on the inmate. As she did so, I could feel him tense all up, readying himself to spring for the great escape. I however was determined that that wasn’t about to happen. So I positioned him quite a ways inside, to give me a little wiggle room, because I had a feeling that as soon as I let go of him to close the frickin’ door, he’d bolt. So I held him in place a little longer, all the while reassuring him in soothing baby-talk that everything was OK. And then, on the silent count of three, I let go, backed away, and slammed the door fast!

There! I had him! Finally! But as I was fumbling with the lock, Gizmo let loose with a shrill wail! Oh, the poor little bugger, I thought as I leaned hard against the door to be sure to keep it closed. He misses Sandy and Brian so damn much. And who can blame him? I sure couldn’t. But then the wail increased in volume, becoming a piercing yowl that was honestly quite close to deafening. So I began showering him with earnest promises about what tomorrow would bring us, and how his loved ones honestly would return. Someday soon! But me, always the empath, I could imagine and feel his stark loneliness as clearly as if it were me there in that cage, locked away. But jeez, the heart-rending lamenting still hadn’t stopped! It had, in fact, gone up another notch.

By now my heart had started pounding in my chest.! I was sweating! I could barely even hear any more! And I could barely think straight! I mean, what the heck was wrong? What was I supposed to do? What could do? I hated to admit it, but I’d begun to suspect I had obviously bitten off more than I could chew this time, with this monkey-sitting gig…

“Come on low, little buddy. This’ll all be…”

What? Somebody’s hand was suddenly squeezing and jerking my shoulder from behind. Hard! What the…? Now, that was just one more distraction I didn’t want or need right then. I was busy! I was under duress! So I shrugged the damn hand off me! And…

My God, I was thinking, won’t this guy EVER calm the heck back down, for crying out loud? I mean, what’ve I gotta DO? I was going stir-crazy! Certifiably NUTS!

WHAT damnit it!” I bellowed.

And then, if things weren’t crazy enough, somebody started pounding me in the back with their fist! Equally as hard! WHAT? And amid all THIS? This was a freaking nightmare! I was just about stone deaf! I was at my wit’s end, and I was entering full panic mode for Christ’s sake, if I weren’t there already! So I spun around viciously, ready to start screaming myself and maybe biting somebody’s head off to boot!

Whoa…! There were three wild-eyed faces all gawking at me like I was crazy or something! And I could tell they were talking at me because I could see their lips moving, but in all the racket I couldn’t make out heads or tails of whatever it was they were yelling!

“OK, WHAT!? What the freakin’ heck do you WANT? Can’t you see what I’m…”

Suddenly, I noticed all three were pointing their index fingers, not at me, but at something… downward! They were pointing at something they urgently wanted me to see!

Insanely confused in all this madness by now, all I wanted to do was run away to some place quiet! But no– so with my angriest angry glare I decided to humor them, damnit, and finally look down! Just to get them off my back!

And then…

OH NO…

I saw it.

It was something… something down at the bottom of Gizmo’s door.

A little stub of… shit! Gizmo’s tail, just the tip of it, protruding out from under the door!

Oh. My. God! What had I done?!

Of course what I had done was accidentally slam the door on… poor little Gizmo’s tail! No wonder he…

I couldn’t believe it! I didn’t want to believe it, damn me all to hell!

I immediately yanked the door open a couple of inches. The tip of the tail zipped right inside, out of view. And likewise immediately… the pain-wracked caterwauling mercifully ceased!

I was instantly consumed with shame and self-hatred. It had been done accidentally, of course, but try to explain that to the baby Capuchin with the sore tail!

I looked to him and found his eyes boring two holes into mine. Standing there on two hind legs shoulder-width apart, and holding the tip of the assaulted tail up in his left fist at head height, like one might hold a torch, he was confronting me with the evidence, the evidence of my betrayal. Because surely, that must have been what it had to be feeling like to him.

Oh yes, oh yes oh yes! What in God’s name had I done!? I was having all I could do to keep from collapsing in anguish. I mean, the last thing in the world I’d ever wanted to ever do was…

“Oh Gizmo, I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry!” I blurted out, on the edge of tears. How could I ever make him trust me again?

Yeah. Way to go, Tom. Way to totally destroy an otherwise wonderfully perfect evening. Or week…

I had no doubts whatsoever that it wouldn’t be me putting the little man to bed tomorrow night. Or perhaps any night. No. I definitely got it that he’d never allow himself to get anywhere near both me and the tail-trap door at the same time any time soon, not even with a ten-foot pole.

And I was damned if I could ever blame him.

home

THE GIZMO CHRONICLES, 1989

Throughout my life, I’ve been one of those guys to whom things just seem to… happen. I mean, right out of the blue. Unxpected things. And sometimes even rather outlandish things. Why? Because Life is The Joker, the Grand Comedian. Because Life seems to find it fun, having its way with me. Today, I’m hell-bent on sharing with you a sample of of one of those things…

CHAPTER ONE: WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE

I was still in pretty good shape at 43. Big into push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, running, and even doing a little weight-lifting. This was back in ’89.

(And so man oh man, when and why did I ever let myself go like I have?)

Anyway, ’89 was the year my wife, Phyllis, and I got memberships to the Y and added a daily morning swim to our routines. I remember getting up so damn early, long before breakfast, and doing those laps: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. A somewhat boring regimen, sure, but it did feel great in the long run, pushing the envelope by adding on a couple of extra laps every week or two. Plus, it seemed to be having a pretty positive effect on my attitude and general outlook. And that was great.

Ah, to be young again…

(Oh wait— yeah, now I remember why! I was forgetting about the ‘GETTING OLD’ part. I’m 77 now. It must’ve been somewhere between 43 and 77 that I let it happen. So I guess maybe I can lay at least part of the blame for my slacking off on all the arthritis, surgeries, and all that other geriatric medical yadda yadda yadda.)

But I digress. So anyway, we’d show up at the Y half-asleep, zombie-shuffling in, barely aware of our surroundings. Speaking for myself at least, I know I was pretty much flying on autopilot those mornings, barely alert enough to swap the nominal good-mornings with the friendly staff on our way to the locker rooms. Basically sleep walking. That’s just the way it always was. So yeah, no wonder I was taken totally by surprise when…

wait for it…

A MONKEY literally (not figuratively) crash-landed down onto my head like a little sandbag?

I mean, who wouldn’t be?! I was like, I dunno, did somebody slip me an LSD mickey when I wasn’t looking? I didn’t have clue-number-one what the hell the thing even was. I mean come on, it was the Y! Not the frickin’ jungle!

So I went a little berserk, didn’t I. And by berserk, I’m talking about emitting one long, not-so-very-macho wail; pirouetting round and round; and all the while, clawing and batting away at the very alive Davy Crockett coonskin cap I thought was trying to burrow into my brain! I mean you know, I had seen Alien with all those creepy giant eggs just waiting to hatch one of those flying face-huggers at you! But a flying monkey?! Shades of The Wizard of Oz!

Mercifully, I was rescued by one of the staff ladies who leapt out of her chair, stopped me mid-spin, and carefully began extricating the four little limbs and long tail of what turned out to be an eight-month-old, baby Capuchin monkey! What the hell was a monkey doing at the Y?

Turns out what the monkey was doing at the Y was this:

The staff lady, Sandy, was keeping him with her during her workdays because reliable monkey-sitters were impossible to find. He, Gizmo, was totally under her care. Not as a pet per se, but as part of the national non-profit foundation, Monkey Helpers for the Disabled, Inc. (now known as Envisioning Access). Their motto: “Meet a monkey. Adopt a monkey.” So Sandy had “adopted” a monkey. Gizmo.

The “adoption” wouldn’t be permanent, however. It would only last for three years, after which he would be returned to the foundation to begin his actual training which would last many years. Sandy’s job, in the meantime, was to give him a home, bring him up from babyhood, and train him to be not only accustomed to people but be safe and people-friendly (think user-friendly).

I hadn’t noticed it at the time but when I came to, there it was, standing tall right there in front of me in the Y office like some huge, wooden, open-faced armoire. But I guess “kennel” would be a more accurate term for it. It was huge and roomy, seven-feet tall and at least five-feet wide— and so much more than just a simple “cage’” even though of course a cage it was. It was obviously Gizmo’s living quarters/play pen. Inside there were roped rings hanging down for swinging on, soft bedding, an assortment of toys, and what I came later to call his soft security pillows, one looking like Garfield and the other looking like a mother hen.

Turned out Gizmo was only seven months old, a baby. And after my fear-induced adrenalin rush had worn off, I began to see him as the cutest little head-hugger I could ever imagine laying eyes on. He was undeniably adorable.

And after a few minutes of getting to ‘know” him, I have to admit it was practically a case of love at first sight for me. (And it wasn’t just me. As I was soon to find out, everybody who came into contact with the little guy fell head over heels in love with him too.) But admit it. What child at some point hasn’t wanted a monkey? They always look like such fun, in the movies and on television. And OK, granted, I was no longer a child. But of course I’d fantasized about having one as a kid.

And isn’t there always a little inner-self kid left over somewhere inside each of us after we’ve aged? So I was a child at heart.

So guess what. I swam a lot fewer laps in the pool that morning. Seems Gizmo had taken to me as much as I had taken to him. And that felt so special. (Of course, Gizmo simply loved people. All of us, in fact. Of course I just preferred to think that what he and I were building was an extra-special relationship. But…)

So yeah, it took me about twenty minutes to pull myself away from him and trudge myself off to the pool.

Next morning went exactly the same way. And ditto for the morning after. Not swimming was suddenly threatening to put a dent in my physical regimen. But as far as I was concerned, who cared? Not me. The joy that I was getting playing with hat little rascal was so addictive.

Then, some mornings I didn’t swim at all. Hell, some mornings I didn’t even bother to bring my swimming trunks. What a loser I was becoming. But what a happy loser. Because just like they appear on TV and in the movies, monkeys really are a lot of fun.

OK. So let’s do the long-story-short thing:

Gizmo’s and my rapport seemed to really be pleasing Sandy. To the point where she took me aside one morning and offered me a proposition that would (temporarily at least) change my life. It seems she had to attend a conference in California for a week, and was at a loss as to what she was going to do about Gizmo.

So yeah, you can probably see where this was going. Soon I was running like a 43-year old little kid to Phyllis, my darling wife, begging “Please, please, PLEASE! Can I? Huh? Come on, huh? I’ll feed’im, I’ll change his diapers… why, you won’t hafta do a thing! I PROMISE!”

(Stay tuned for Chapter 2: “TWEETER AND THE MONKEYMAN”)

HOME

THE LAWNS OF THE DEAD…

Even as a child, Dad was my job agent. I never had to hire him; he worked free-lance. Most of the jobs I worked at, right up through college freshman year, he got me— thank you very much.

So, one sunny, blue-sky, summer afternoon I was channeling Otis Redding. You know, just “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, way-hay’-stin’ time.” Instead of on the dock of the bay, however, I was lazing away my time sittin’ on our front step. Wastin’ time was a main hobby of mine back then. One I took very seriously.

It was summertime, and the livin’ was easy. School was out, so there was none of that annoying high school homework to ruin my day. Life was just the way I liked it: I had no plans. Whatsoever. My day was wide open.

Outta the blue a pick-up truck came wheeling into the driveway. Dad was sitting shotgun with Nelson, his co-worker, at the wheel. Now, what was unexpected about this is Dad was officially “at work.” At only like 1:00 o’clock, he wasn’t due back home until 6:00, or later. Something was up…

He was beckoning me to come over. Which, I can tell you, gave me an ominous queasiness in the pit of my stomach. Against my better judgement, I walked over.

“Had lunch yet?” he wanted to know.

And instinctively, without thinking, I said, “Yeah.” Then kicked myself. I should’ve said, No. Not yet. You should always say no,

“Good. Get in.”

“Get in? Why? Whatta you talkin’ about?”

“C’mon. You’re late for work.”

“Work? What work? I don’t have any work…”

“Hop in. Tell you on the way.”

“Jeez! Now wait just a minute, OK? I was planning on… doing stuff!” Dad scooted over. Reluctantly, with all the alarms going off in my head, I hauled myself up into the passenger seat next to him.

I couldn’t help but notice Nelson was grinning a shitty Cheshire Cat grin. And then we were off, me casting an annoyed look back over my shoulder at the warm spot on the front steps already beginning to cool. I was devastated. I should’ve taken off on my bicycle right after lunch.

“So…? Where we going?” I stifled ‘this time.’”

“Dover Cemetery.”

“WHAT? Dover what? Dover cemetery?!”

“Yeah,” Nelson answered for him. “You’re a professional now.”

“Huh? Professional what?’

“Grave digger!” he said, with an evil grin.

“WHAT!?” Old people loved to needle teenagers.

“Lawn mower,” Dad said.

OK, I wasn’t going to pay any more attention to wise-ass Nelson. “Lawn mower?! What, at Dover Cemetery?”

“You got it.”

“But maybe you can work your way up to grave digger…” Nelson pointed out, but I cut him off.

“I don’t wanna be no… graveyard lawn mower, Dad. I mean, what’re you talking about? I don’t know anything about cemeteries! Isn’t it enough that I mow our lawn? But jeez… come on, a cemetery? I mean, what’ll my friends think!?””

“Oh, I dunno. That you’re gainfully employed, maybe?”

“Well, still though, you could’ve asked me!”

“Hey. You’ll thank me when you get your first pay check.”

“I doubt it.”

“Which goes straight into your bank account, by the way. For college.”

“Oh, of course. See? What’d I just tell you? Yeah, like I’m just dying to slave my summer away just to not have any extra spending money!”

Damn, we were already pulling into one of the graveyard’s many access roads. And oh my God! I could spy a dozen or so old-timers, lost-cause-zombie-skeletons, plodding every which way behind mowers. I mean, come on! Halloween in June?!

“Think of it this way,” Nelson said with a wink to Dad. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

“Just for this summer, Monday through Friday,” Dad said.

“What? Dad, the whole…summer?!”

“And see that guystanding right over there?” he said, pointing a finger. “That guy’s your new boss.”

“I don’t need a new boss.” Everything was happening so fast! It was unbelievable! One minute, I”m free. Next minute I’m being sold to a band of gypsies!

We pulled up next to the new boss-of-me. And when I got out (Dad didn’t even have the common courtesy to get out with me) I saw him wink at the guy when he said, rather callously I thought, “He’s all yours, Bub.”

My heart was pounding. But OK, I knew I had to man-up. So I did, though it was a struggle. And by that I mean I held my breath, bit my tongue, and willed myself not to fall down on my knees begging, “No, please, Dad! PLEASE don’t leave me here with these horrible old people!”

But with a boa-constrictor separation-anxiety squeezing the life out of my heart, I just stood there watching my “Judas agent” drive away. Back into the world that, only minutes ago, was my world.

Bub flopped a beat-up lawnmower down off a flatbed trailer with a bang and said “This one’s yours.”

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

So all afternoon I mowed. I mowed my brains out. And all throughout the afternoon, I felt sick to my stomach. I mean, it was bad enough that I’d been consigned to this chain gang in the first place. But I just couldn’t help dwelling on what my best buds were doing that afternoon while I slaved under a hot sun. Probably hitchhiking out to the lake for a leisurely day at the beach, the lucky bums!

But what was making me really ill on top of that is that I’d been informed (A) we were responsible for mowing a dozen area grave yards throughout the summer, but also (B) at the end of each day we were responsible for taking our lawnmowers apart, cleaning all the parts, putting the damn thing back together again, draining out the old oil, and putting new oil back in! I mean, where the hell was I? And what the hell did I know about lawn mowers, beyond how to gas one up, start it, and how to shut it back down again? Which before… was all I’d ever needed to know. Which was all anybody’d ever need to know, as far as I could see.

But anyway, I had one desperate glimmer of hope I was hanging onto. That being that when the time came to take the damn thing apart, it’d become glaringly obvious that I was totally useless at it. Like, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again if it was up to me. That hiring me had been a big mistake, and finally I’d get fired on the spot! Yeah! My uselessness was my best hope. And, oh, wouldn’t that just piss Dad off. But hah! Take that, Dad! Take that, Nelson!

Thank God everybody stopped for a ten–minute break at 3:00 o’clock. I puttered my mower over to where everybody’d seated themselves on the grass in the shade of some trees. And, aw jeez, they were all swigging down their ice-cold Moxies, Cokes and root beers, leaving me the only one with nothing to drink. Oh sure, let the new kid collapse with severe dehydration, why don’t you!

I just had to wake up from this nightmare. Somehow.

I hadn’t shut my lawn mower down yet, so I began trying to pop the ignition tab off the spark plug with the toe of my shoe. Keep in mind, this was 1963, back before the automatic shut-off safety assembly became a required installment on mowers. Today as soon as you take your hands off the handlebar, your lawnmower shuts itself right down. But back then if you let go of the handlebar, so what? Nothing happened. The machine would just continue on running until it either ran itself out of gas or you disengaged the spark plug. Which is what I was fumbling around trying to do with my foot.

“Holy mackerel there, son!” one of the geezer squad yelled at me.

“Huh? What?”

“You tryin’ to get yourself killed, or what!” He was shaking his head in disbelief. “Jesus, kids these days! Look son. You’re doin’ it all wrong, OK? Now if that there was your lawnmower. I mean the one you got back home. In your yard? Then OK.”

“Uhmmm… I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I always felt pretty uncomfortable around people of that age if I didn’t know them. And really? All I wanted was to be left alone to wallow in my misery. But weirdly, I became aware that the whole crew suddenly stopped gabbing and oddly seemed to be taking quite an unsettling interest in our conversation. And their expressions had all taken on a tone of serious gravity. Why was that?

“All I’m sayin’ is that piece of equipment you’ve been mowin’ with all afternoon is a commercial machine, not some domestic toy. And that spark plug you’re ticklin’ with your toe’s got at least ten times the wallop on it of any home mower. What, nobody warned you about that when they hired you on?”

I found this as disturbing as it was confusing. “Nobody told me nothing!” I said. “I mean, there wasn’t time. My dad… he just dropped me off. And Bub… or whatever his name is… he just…”

“Oh, Jesus H. Christ!! Wouldn’t our dear old town manager be some pleased with the lawsuit he’d be lookin’ at if… well, never mind. No, son. You wanna shut one of these machines down? You gotta use somethin’ that don’t conduct electricity.”

“What? No, at home all I ever…”

“Hold your horses a minute…” He walked over to a nearby gravestone and began poking around in the weeds surrounding the base of it. Meanwhile my mower kept puttering steadily away.

Somebody offered, “That tall one over to the far right, right by your foot, looks about wide enough, Dave.”

He scowled. “The day I need your help, Pops, I’ll ask for it.” But then he did pluck the very blade of grass Pops had pointed out, and walked it back over to me.

“Yeah, this one’s good enough. Long and wide. Strong. And dry as a bone. Been bakin’ in the hot sun all day, is why. Water conducts electricity.”

What, did he think I was stupid or something?“Uh huh. Yeah.” I was being obviously sarcastic. “Water conducts electricity. Thanks for telling me. Got it.”

“‘Course. I figured you’d know that. But… whatta I know ‘bout what they’re teachin’ in school these days?” He shrugged. “Anyway, here you go.”

Not having a clue as to why, I accepted it.

“OK, son. Now, whatcha gotta do is just poke that very carefully down in behind that there little tab you were tryin’ to nudge off the spark plug. And then with your other hand, grab the low end when she pokes out down below. OK?”

What the hell was I doing listening to this old nursing home buzzard anyway. Why was I even here? “Alright. OK. Yeah. Guess so.”

All righty. Then… you’re gonna yank it right back. Towards yourself. And that’ll pull her right off the spark plug. Safely.”

I thought the move through, and shook my head. “Funny though,” I said. “At home I swear I can always just nudge the damn thing off with the toe of my boot, you know?”

“’Course I know. We all of us got one of’em at home, just like you. I mean, because who can afford one of these souped-up industrial jobbies anyway? Not me, that’s for damn certain. But hey, college kid, nobody’s tellin’ you what to do. I ain’t your boss.”

“I’m only in high school.”

“But all I am sayin’ is, it’s your toe. And you wanna try your toe on one of these commercial industrial mowers? Well son, better yours than mine. You’re free to do whatever you want.. It’s a free country. Jus’ tryin’ to offer a bit of friendly advice. You go on right ahead and do as you please. Only jus’ don’t say you wasn’t warned.”

“Hey, I was just sayin’. That’s what works with mine. At home, is all.”

“Well, I’m not sayin’ the shock will kill you. All I’m warnin’ you about is you could burn a couple of toes right off at the knuckles down there, you know? It’s happened before. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“All right, all right.”

So. I bent down and poked that fat blade of grass down in behind the ignition tab. Then I managed fish the lower tip and snag it, so that finally I’d got both the top and bottom tips pinched, thumb-and-finger, with either hand. “Like this?”

“Yeah, that’s it. You got it. But… you gotta hold both ends firm and tight? You don’t wanna let it slip when you pull on it.”

“OK. I guess.”

How the hell did I know? Maybe there was something to what the old man was babbling on about after all, you know? He was the expert. Not me.

I realized I was my breath. It was quiet. Seemed like the whole crew was holding their collective breaths too. I mean, how crazy was that?

“You ready, son?”

I just wanted to get whatever this was over with, so I said, “Yeah.”

“Then go ahead. Do it, but… be careful.”

So…

I yanked— BZZZZZZZZTTTSSNNAP!!

Ouch-Whoa-JEEZUM! What the…? Wow! Liked to’ve just got my fingers bit by an electric eel! And…

…there was this raucous roaring going on. What was that? I mean, talk about confusion. It took me a full ten seconds to clear my head and figure out just what had actually happened! But by the time I got my bearings, it was so embarrassingly obvious.

And it was awful.

Because you never saw such a damn bunch of knee-slapping, haw-hawing old crows in your life.

“Young pups! Every SINGLE damn time, I kid you not! HAW-HAW!”

“Got’im, you did! HEE HEE HEE!”

Why those… bastards!

I couldn’t look up and face them while they continued to bust a gut at my expense. I was too mortified. But finally the noise was dying down some.

“Well. Time to get back at it. Can’t sit around jawin’ all day. Break’s over! Start’em up, boys!”

And there I was. Amid all the yankings of the pull cords; the clatter of the Black and Decker engines all firing back to life; and the blue, oily exhaust smoke being released all over everywhere: the butt of the friggin’ joke! The red-faced little Dumbo, the high-school-kid baby elephant! And oh, had I just made those old bastards’ day or what!

And boy, hadn’t they’d really yanked my damn cord, damnit!

The last one to leave leered at me. “Best be countin’ your fingers, boy. One or two of’em might be missin.’”

I felt about two inches tall. I was so flummoxed, I couldn’t get my lawnmower started for five minutes!

And lemme tell you something. When you were a boy back then, especially my age, you wanted to be the cool one. You wanted to be the Roy Rogers, not the comical sidekick! Not Gabby Hayes or Jingles! And especially never the fool. Man, I was burning with shame. They’d just crushed me like a stink bug under their stinkin’ boot heels. Enough so that over the next few days I’d be avoiding the bathroom mirror worse than Count Dracula, lest I catch a glimpse of the little fool I’d been reminded I really was.

Damn them all to hell was playing like a broken record in my brain.

You know, I’d never ever really hate Dad, ever. But I sure felt like I hated him right then that day, for willingly collaborating in me getting shanghaied by a crew of old, pot-bellied, toothless, nursing-home pirates like those old crones!

Yeah! Thanks one whole hell of a lot, Dad!

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

But I’d learned something about life there, hadn’t I though. There’s something called Initiation. And it’s universal. And I’d just been initiated.

But actually, it hadn’t really been my first experience of the phenomenon. I’d experienced it with little the cliques back in the playground days. I’d experienced it as a freshman at Foxcroft Academy. We all had, us freshmen. It was a tradition, after all.

And though I never would have suspected it at the time, and wouldn’t have wanted to believe it on that embarrassing day, I was fated to undergo yet several more prickly-feeling initiations while I would continue my way-too-long growing up process.

I would get played the fool when I got hired as a common laborer on a summer construction crew during college. Then again, I’d really get taken as a fresh fish when I signed on in the spinning room at the Guilford Woolen Mill the following year (that’s a story for another time).

And sadly, the list wouldn’t end there either.

Turns out, though I hate to admit it… I have been one naïve dude, over the better part of my life.

Oh well, guess I’ll just have to focus on the character-building aspects of my initiations, and on the growth of humility they bring.

Yeah. Right. Keep telling yourself, Tommy boy.

And hey, maybe it’s not so bad.

Being the comical sidekick.

Rather than the Roy Rogers.

Home

TWO-HEADED MAN RUNS FOR MAYOR . . . AGAINST HIMSELF! AND LOSES…

Will Smith : “These” (tabloids) “are ‘the hot sheets’?”
Tommy Lee Jones: “Best investigative reporting on the planet. But go ahead, read the New York Times if you want.They get lucky sometimes.” —Men In Black

Yea, blessed are the supermarket tabloids for lo,

they shall deliver us down checkout grocery galleries

of cough drops & candy bars,

past the horoscopes & tv guides—

And blessed are you and I with our

free, life-long subscriptions to the

SUPERMARKET CHECKOUT HEADLINES

that exercise our otherwise atrophying

14-items-or-less express-lane brains—

for tabloid headlines wear so many hats:

—they champion successes of the handicapped:

GIRL WITH 14 FINGERS WINS TYPING CONTEST!

MUTE DRIVER HONKS OUT ROAD RAGE IN MORSE CODE!

BLIND SEX CREEP BUSTED AS ‘HEARING TOM’!

—they boggle the mind with life’s unexpected ironies:

STARVING CAMPER MAULS GRIZZLY!

CHAMPION BULLFIGHTER KILLED BY BULLDOZER!

CANNIBALS ORDER PIZZA — THEN EAT DELIVERYMAN!

—they clarify generalities:

RESEARCHER CALCULATES A SNOWBALL’S CHANCE IN HELL TO BE .000000000134%!

—they ease environmental anxiety:

SCIENTIST PROVES… EARTH IS GOING THROUGH MENOPAUSE: Global warming is Earth’s hot flashes!

—they showcase consequences of failing to make sober decisions:

DRUNKS FALL OFF ROOF AFTER BARTENDER DECLARES DRINKS ARE ON THE HOUSE!

—they provide educational updates:

CATHOLIC SCHOOL SISTERS TRADE IN WOODEN RULERS FOR

ULTIMATE DISCIPLINARY TOOL… NUN CHUCKS!

—they comfort those maxed-out on credit cards:

ANGRY BILL COLLECTORS SAY BUSH WON’T RETURN CALLS ON NATIONAL DEBT!

—they reveal the truth behind the proverbs:

SURVEY REVEALS BEST THINGS IN LIFE COST AT LEAST $5,000!

NEW STUDY SAYS ‘STITCH IN TIME’ SAVES ONLY 8!

HONESTY FALLS TO THIRD AS ‘BEST POLICY’!

—and finally, sometimes just make us think:

BEER CANS AND OLD MATTRESS FOUND ON MARS! hmmmm…

So… just like Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong I think to myself…

“What a wonderful world…”

VAMPIRE ELVIS IS ON THE PROWL, SAY COPS!

“FANG YOU, FANG YOU VERY MUCH!”

home

BIG BANG THEORY II: THE EPILOGUE

(continued from BIG BANG THEORY I...)

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

“What muffler?”

Now please don’t think I didn’t feel a miasma of guilt swamping my panicking heart at the same time both Wayne and I burst into hysterical, snot-nose-giggling laughter. Because I did. Honest. I was seasick with guilt. Made all the worse by my responsible brother, Denny, fuming at us in the back seat. And who could blame him? (Writing this now, I find myself ashamed of my little turd, past self. Again.) But it was just one of those crazy Gene Wilder/Marty Feldman, “What hump?” moments.

“We’re gonna need a new muffler,” Wayne said.

“Right,” I said. Brainlessly.

“Oh yeah and just how the heck we gonna do that!? On a Sunday? And everything closed?” Denny was pissed.

“Whatta we have for money?” asked Wayne.

I dug deep in my jeans. Pocket change! “We’re screwed.”

It was the same with Denny.

“Well, I do have a little bread in my wallet,” said Wayne. “So… I mean, come on, there’s gotta be a junkyard open on a Sunday. Somewhere. Right? Somewhere around here?”

I hadn’t been thinking about junkyards. I’d only been thinking of the closed-on-Sundays auto parts stores. So there was a glimmer of hope. Then I remembered. “There’s one on the Guilford Road. Half way. About five miles or so.”

Wayne looked from me to over his shoulder at Denny. “Whatta ya say?”

Still glaring, all Denny could do was shrug.

Then, “Well, let’s get these wheels turned around.” He twisted the ignition key in its socket. The engine erupted back to life. A constant explosive assault on the eardrums. Fibrillating our hearts and diaphrams! It was deafening! Inhumane! All those things! I mean, try to imagine you’re standing out on the tarmac with your head just inches below the roaring engine and whirling props of a vintage B-29 bomber! Well, it was worse , I swear. More like having your head embedded inside the engine block itself!

Wayne rolled the big black Plymouth in a wide u-turn, got her pointed back up Mile Hill, and hit the accelerator. Despite my thinking that nothing could increase the hellishness of the volume, it turned out that accelerating could, and did. So. Uphill we roared. And almost simultaneously, two strange and forever unforgettable phenomena occurred.

First, even though you never could’ve expected such a thing possible without somebody consciously willing it so, my ears (on their very own, mind you) activated their Emergency-Self-Protection switch! You know how eardrums will bulge with the thinning air pressure when you’re barreling up a pretty big hill and then just pop when you swallow? Well, my ears never popped.

Instead, it honestly felt like my earlobes autonomically just went right ahead and tucked their own selves up into their respective ear canals! Battening down the hatches, so to speak Plugging the entrances as quick as an endangered armadillo rolling itself up into a protected hard-shell ball. And then, just try to imagine sticking your fingers in your ears to drown out a racket, only you’re wearing a pair of mittens. And then your mittened-fingers somehow get stuck in there and can’t be pulled back out.

Because in other words, I instantly lost a good 75% of my hearing, just like THAT!

Now, you know those hip-hop/rapper “super-bass freaks” that somehow manage to get a pair of 50-gallon-drum-size stereo speakers installed on the rear seats of their tiny little cars? The ones you can hear ka-boom-ka-booming closer and closer to you from a mile or so away? We had that beat. Think three miles away! Which brings us to the second unforgettable phenomenon that was just as, if not more, bizarre as the first.

Our Plymouth was now broadcasting a pulsating Richter-scale impact equal to a 2000-Timpani-drum Drumroll-of-the-Apocalypse, a drumroll accompanied by 76 Farting Trombones of the Hit Parade! And Mile Hill was crowded on both sides of the road by numerous homes and summer cottages, all the way to the top. So as we began our ascent, the shimmer and quaking of everybody’s front cottage window panes flickering off to our sides in the sunlight, courtesy of our now muffler-less exhaust pipe, looked and felt impossibly surreal.

So OK. Here it is. It began with us noticing just a single family of four, simply standing on the roadside way up ahead and gawking down at our uproarious approach. But then, a man and woman across the road from them, scurrying across a lawn to position themselves for an equally commanding view. And after that, of course, other families and individuals, all drawn outside by the growing Joshua-Fit-the-Battle-Jericho ruckus to line up, and crowd the roadsides for our unannounced, one-clown-car “parade.”

They actually kind of closed in on us from both sides at one point as we rumbled through. Adults waving, reaching out, leering and jeering. The little ones clapping their hands over their ears. Almost a carnival atmosphere. Of course, we couldn’t hear even what we were trying to say to each other, let alone hear the voices outside the rattletrap.And it just felt so embarrassing, being such a spectacle and being stared at like that, like we were just some awful joke! We couldn’t get out of there fast enough but, long story short, we made it through without running over anybody.

And then we were barreling our way through the woods and back toward town.

Words can’t adequately explain how insane, crazed, and bizarre it felt– being so handicapped, so claustrophobic, so… well, like our heads were stuffed inside with cotton batting or something. So hard and nerve wracking as time dragged on to have to endure that deafening onslaught entombing us in that nightmare on wheels.

We stuck to side roads on the outskirts of town to avoid garnering too much unwanted attention. And with the clock ticking, we tooled up the Guilford Road.

The junkyard did have a Sunday-closed look about it. Just a little shack of a rundown garage out front, next to a house nestled up to it on the side. We banged on the front door and finally someone opened it. A little old man of around sixty.

As politlely as we could, we apologized for bothering him on a Sunday but explained what a fix we were in. And asked, Did he have and used mufflers for sale? He said he did, and escorted us into the garage. There hanging up on a wall were three. The only one we could afford was something he called a” cherry bomb.” He advised that our dad probably wouldn’t approve of that one though, as it was one very popular with teens that were into… hot rodding. “Kinda makes your car sound like a motorcycle: loud,” is what he said.

So we’d struck out. And not only that, but the half hour Dad had allotted us had already passed about ten minutes earlier, so we were in trouble. It was either go home right now and face the awful music, or try to think up some Plan B. We discussed this and decided that since we were going to face merry-old-hell anyway, what did it matter if we tried another town first. It was worth a shot.

So we buzzed the outskirts of Dover-Foxcroft again like a low-flying crop-duster, and headed for Dexter, fifteen miles away. And once again we all became deaf as posts.

In Dexter we rolled into the first gas station we came across. The owner there got quite a kick out of our tale of woe, which we no longer saw as funny. He took us into the bay area and showed us another three mufflers. Only one would possibly work for us at all, and it was a muffler taken off a 1955 Chevrolet truck. You could tell because he’d painted “55 CHEV TRUCK” on it in white paint.

There was some haggling with Wayne on the price, concerning what “we” could afford, and then finally the guy put our car up on the lift. I can’t tell you how promising that felt, and the sense of relief it gave me.

The place was going to close at 5:00 and it was already right around 4:30. Denny and I paced, while Wayne and the owner worked away with their heads stuck up under the trunk of the car. Then, after ten minutes or so, like some surgeon who’d been striving to save the life of one of your loved ones in the O.R., he joined us in the front office with a very grim look on his face. The kind of look that makes you dread hearing the words, “I’m sorry, but we did everything we possibly could for her.” What he said instead was, “We got a bit of a problem. See, the diameter of your exhaust pipe is just a tad larger than that of the muffler.”

Our hearts sank. Crap! It wasn’t a fit! So we were dead! D-e-a-d, DEAD!

“However… I do have some flex-pipe. For a couple more bucks, I could make that fit…”

We looked to Wayne, and nodded desperately. “OK,” he said. “Do it.”

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

We pulled into the driveway around 5:30. And damnit, there was Dad sitting on the front steps, waiting. He got up and met us as we tumbled out of the car, gave us a long dark stare, and muttered something like, “I guess punctuality’s not exactly your thing, is it.”

I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was probably some bald-faced little lie like, “Uhmmm, see, we ran outta gas.”

Whatever the actual exchange, I know it helped that Wayne was there. Wayne wasn’t Dad’s son, so he wasn’t about to blow a gasket that included our guest, his nephew. Thank goodness. And honestly? Dad was never the type to blow his gasket anyway. I’ve gotta say, I’d already given Dad so many opportunites and reasons to really read me the riot act over time (some particularly bad ones, in my own estimation). And he always did it calmly, thoughtfully, reasonably, and with much grace.

Dad was a gentleman, and such a gentle man. And on top of that, he was a saint.

So we watched on eggshells as Dad doggedly opened the car door, climbed in behind the wheel, closed the door, started her up, and put her in reverse. He began to back up. But then, suddenly, he stepped on the brake and slowed her to a stop. Shifting her into neutral, tilting his head out the window, and cocking an ear, he stepped lightly on the accelerator a couple of times, revving the engine just a bit, and (oh no!)… listening.

Spooked, the three of us were frozen, surreptitiously eying one another. And maybe their hair was also standing up on the back of their necks. I don’t know. But mine was. I do know I was holding my breath.

“Huh!” he said with furrowed brow. Like he’d come to some conclusion. Then, with a shaking of his head we heard him mutter to himself, “This ol’ crate’s sounding more like a truck every day.”

The three of us did a triple double-take!

And then he backed on out of the driveway and just… went trucking it away up Pleasant Street

“Oh. My. GOD!” somebody said.

“Does he KNOW?” somebody else asked.

“But how COULD he?!”

“I don’t think he does…”

“He couldn’t!”

“But he just MIGHT. Somehow.”

With adults you just never knew. Did you. Most of the time, they knew everything…

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

So we let about a dozen years slip by before we finally mustered up the courage to tell Dad our whole story. He surprised us by obviously getting a big kick out of it. And although we pressed him about it several times, he swore up and down he’d never had a clue.

Anyway. Finally. It was over.

Home

SHE’S INTO NUMBERS

by Tom Lyford 5/12/04

She’s into numbers

I’m into words

Numbers (just to please her)

parade goose-stepping

all spit&polish

columnrank&file to her

drum-major-baton cadence

under the Big Top of her

the 3-ring-binder, 3-ring circus

of her bookkeeper’s spreadsheet mind…

& to her sharp whistle, the digits wheel,

group & regroup smartly into the Good Ol’

Red & Black half-time extravaganza

(rah! rah!),

vault with spectacular precision,

somersault through numeric hoops,

dance on their hind legs

(tails all wagging as 1),

fly the arithmetic trapeze, & with

the greatest of ease, perform the boring

high-wire ledger-balancing “accts.” &

other acts of legerdemain to the polite

applause of all…

Now… put numbers under my command

& in no time they will deteriorate into

a rag-tag band of undisciplined

smoke’em-if-you-got’em goldbricks

forever whining to take 5 —

an unwilling occupational force in a country

of rebel resistance to numbers.

She’s into numbers… but me?

I don’t really care for numbers…

at all. No no, I’m into words…

I’m prejudiced. See…

I don’ need no steenkin’ nombres!

I’m an anti-numerite. I mean, what’s to like?

they’re all the same, they all look alike

You can’t tell’em apart

You seen one 1? Then you seen’em all

(all the 1’s are alike— little letter “i”

wannabes)

“1 is the loneliest number you can ever do…

2 can be as bad as 1: it’s the loneliest

number since the number 1”

& get this: there are just too many

negative numbers, know what I’m sayin’?

Numbers like… minus ten, right?

How’d you like to be a negative 10?

On, say, a scale of 1 to 10?

Oh, and…ever notice how “cosecant“

sounds a lot like “ ’course he can’t ” ?

Makes me wanna shout out, “Why,

of course he can” every time…

Plus… it’s not like there are really any

hot little numbers, you know? (Well,

except maybe 110 degrees in the shade

or Fahrenheit 451

but even those numbers are relative

to the words that must accompany

them… Yes, numbers are just

pathetic little word-wannabes)

But worse, numbers are the Nazis, so

military & rigid, precise & absolute

autocratic, and so class-conscious:

all that emphasis on… greater than

or… less than or equal to !

I’m much too democratic for numbers.

She’s into numbers—I’m into words.

I mean come on! Words have more fun.

Words are the blondes of symbols

(but intelligent blondes) always doing

something creative and different !!!

But with numbers it’s always

same ol’ same ol’S.S.D.D.,

been-there-done that-got-the T-shirt.

Surprise: 2 + 2’s never gonna = 13

& what else are numbers gonna do

besides add …subtract …divide????

Oh, numbers can multiply but they

can’t be fruitful & multiply…

and for stodgy numbers… there’s

no sex, no drugs, no rock’n roll,

Numbers can’t get drunk or buzzed:

(Hey 30, whattaya say we get

factored right ff our asses tonight!)

Jeez, numbers can’t even swear

because there are no dirty numbers

(well, OK, doing #1 #2, but…)

so that’s how boring numbers are

& there’s only 10 of them altogether

10 insubstantial little hen-scratches

count’em— 0 through 9…

3 times more repetitive than the

much more versatile 26 letters of the

superior alphabet from whence cometh

our world of lush and sexy words…

She’s into numbers…I’m into words.

Gotta be a left brain/right brain thing.

Hey, wanna kow something I do? OK.

I actually look up words! In dictionaries!

Hell no, even more: i read dictionaries !

For her, looking up words is like…

cleaning the oven… cleaning the toilet…

I love puns & palindromes;

she loves sales ledgers & sums.

I do onomatopoeia; she does audits.

Me? Metaphors & meter; her? Money matters

Poetry & prose for me;

principal & interest for her.

I can’t help looking upon integers

& interest with extreme dis-interest,

and I am just so nonplussed with

plusses & minuses.

So yeah. She’s into numbers…

Long ago, the numbers body-snatched

her soul, leaving behind her

look-alike pod, hatching integers

like spiders to protect

& to serve her, their Queen

their Numero Uno

All the evil little numbers…

millions of minions to do

her darkest bidding…

home

THE BIG BANG THEORY

Prologue: 1951

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

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

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

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

“Well, that’s coming right along.”

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

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

Dad: “What the hell was that!?”

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

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

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

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

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

So many things were different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah yes. Life in the good old dangerous days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Us: Half hour tops, no problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me: No. Whatta they say?

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

Me: No shit!

Wayne: I shit you not.

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

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

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

Me: Of course we wanna find out!

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

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

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

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

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

‘Roger Wilco,” I responded.

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

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

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

And then… HIROSHIMA!

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

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

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

“OK.”

“What muffler?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once again I plead temporary and/or permanent stupidity.

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

home

THUNDER ROAD

home

BRAINS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I said… come out of there. NOW!”

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

“Hey! I’m serious, Mister! Come out!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You feel safe here.”

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOME

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…

home

THE SAPSICLE KID, 1956

on my faithful steed

that answers to the name of trigger

i cowboy up pleasant street at a gallop

the green & cream columbia 1-speed

on one of those early-spring late afternoons

the temperature sundowning

south of freezing

the icy wind chill feathering my hair

my bare knuckles & ears white

with impending frostbite

& my spring jacket snapping

unzipped like a vest in the breeze

(you never see roy rogers riding

all buttoned up to the neck in three layers

or wearing mittens for his mom)

to whoa-up under the low naked limbs

of the playground maples

inching to a dead stop

feet still on the pedals

upright… balanced…

(trick rider that i am)

easy, fella

& slowly… eversoslightly

cranking myself uprightward & standing

poised precariously in the stirrups

the rodeo crowd applauding as one!

reaching up to pluck

the first of the finger fruit

a long, sap-sweetened icicle

flecked with bits of black bark

& clamp it in my teeth

like a longbranch cheroot

my tongue delighting itself

over the maple-swishersweet surface…

a big forerunner of

the marlboro man

HOME

ALTERED STATES II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time continues to march.

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

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

“Did you say something?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

home

ALTERED STATES Part I

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

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

LITTLE TOMMY’S VERY 1ST BLACKOUT

(let’s play a little “game,” tommy)

my brain still freezing up with

all the new vocabulary:

“tonsillectomy,”

“adenoids,”

“ether”…

(let’s see if you can

count backwards

from a hundred…)

NO. NO! I DON’T WANT TO!

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

dissection-tray frog-in-a-johnnie

johnny on the spot box-canyoned in

by a faceless wall of halloween

gowns & masks

onestranger-danger-demon

unstoppering an evil vial of

hospital-fumes concentrate,

terror in a bottle, splashing

a gauze rag with the liquid

(ok, tommy, we start with 100…

right…?

then 99…

so…?

what comes next…?)

the ice-wet invisible-flame rag is

what comes next, slapped over

my mouth & flaring nostrils

and pressed

down

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

stifling my silenced

fire-throated

screechface…

searing my cheeks…

burn-buttoning-up my eyes

what comes next is that i

become a kicking fighting

rikki tikki tavi clawing the

poison gag off my head and

flinging it splat against the wall

bringing reinforcements

bearing down on me like

towering thunderheads,

one for each limb, one to

clamp my face in a vise

bad-dream people

cooing sweet lies

hell’s pigeons,

overpowering

muscling me

drowning me in betrayal

pinning me down

me struggling down…

succumbing

down…

sinking down

down to the

bottom of a

cellar-dark

sunless

sea…

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

Bubbles!

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

The frogman!

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

And that was that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said, “Hi.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey! Whatta ya think you’re doing!?”

“Gotta… take… a piss.”

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

“I’ll just be a minute.”

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

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

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

Good to know…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does it matter?”

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

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

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

“Oh, wow, man…”

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

home

LYFORD ON LOVE

PART ONE

(I’m calling this one “Part One,” not because I have a specific Part Two in mind at all. It’s just that, knowing me, I’ll probably have a couple hundred Parts on this theme. I mean, who knows?)

We begin…

As a 34-year teacher (a career that came to an end over two decades ago), I was forever unearthing priceless little tidbits of poetry from the many literature anthologies I’d inherited in whatever classroom I was assigned. That was one of the big English teacher perks, for me. I collected any and all the ones that touched me in one way or another, and now I carry around a gazillion of them in my iPhone (well, technically they’re warehoused in the cloud). But… anyway, sometimes when I’m languishing in a doctor’s waiting room, manning the circulation desk during the quiet moments at the local library, or riding in the passenger seat while my wife, Phyllis, drives the car, I can simply pull out the phone and alter my mood with a poem, just like that. And I have so many genres: love poems, war poems, protest poems, sci-fi poems, beat poems, horror poems, anger poems, hilarious ones, short ones, endless ones… you name it. Strange little things, smart phones. You never really know who’s packing what.

Sometimes there have been these important-to-me poems in my life that I’ve somehow managed to lose and, consequently, I’ve ended up investing a great deal of my years tracking them back down. Which is next to impossible if they’re ancient and especially if you can’t for the life of you conjure up the title or the poet’s name. But if and when I ever do recapture one of those, there’s a little celebration that goes on down deep inside me that flutters my heart (somewhat like A Fib only more fun). I kid you not.

Here’s a true story. About three or four months ago, a TV commercial was advertising an upcoming boxing match featuring a boxer whose last name was Saavedra. I probably shocked my wife when I leapt up of the sofa and shouted, “That’s IT! THAT’S HIS NAME!” Then of course I had to explain to her what the hell I was yelling about.

Well, a little poem that I’d discovered way, way back when had somehow vanished from my collection. It was just a snippet of a thing, a little love poem only a few lines long. Wouldn’t be deemed important to most of the citizens of our planet but, as I often say, we’re all occupying our own little unique spaces on the social spectrum, aren’t we. And yes, it was a love poem. I’m a sucker for love poems if they’re well-and-creatively written. The main reason I was having no luck recovering this one is because of the hard-to-remember-let-alone-pronounce name of the poet: Guadalupe de Saavedra. Plus wrack my brain as much as I could, the title refused to leave the tip of my tongue. For years! And then…

Bingo! There was some unpoetic dumb-ass boxer named Saavedra going to box some other unpoetic dumbass palooka on TV. And finally (and serendipitously) gifted with the boxer’s name, I only had to seek the help of the Great God Google. Ding! Retrieved it in five minutes!

The poem is titled “If You Hear That a Thousand People Love You.” And today is the perfect day for me to share this love poem here, it being Phyllis’ and my 57^th anniversary today (7/30). So that’s got me feeling all warm and fuzzy here. Spoiler alert: I’m such a damn romantic. But now that I’ve talked about it and put it on a pedestal, I imagine you’ll look at this piece off fluff and say, “What the hell does he think is so special about this thing?!” And that’s OK because, right after this poem, I’m going to share two or three poems I’ve written to Phyllis over time and, yeah, sure, they’re bound to be deemed head and shoulders above this one, right?

IF YOU HEAR THAT A THOUSAND PEOPLE LOVE YOU

by Guadalupe de Saavedra

If you hear that a thousand people love you
remember… Saavedra is among them.

If you hear that a hundred people love you
remember… Saavedra is either in the first
or very last row

If you hear that seven people love you
remember… Saavedra is among them,
like a Wednesday in the middle of the week

If you hear that two people love you
remember…one of them is Saavedra

If you hear that only one person loves you
remember…he is Saavedra

And when you see no one else around you,
and you find out
that no one loves you anymore,
then you will know for certain
that… Saavedra is dead

Yeah, not really such a great poem perhaps. But when I first found it, I was smitten. My favorite line is Saavedra is among them, like a Wednesday in the middle of the week. I dunno. I can identify with a love like that.

Story of my life with Phyllis: since I was a high school junior and she my freshman sweetheart in 1962-63, I went crazy writing poems for her, about her, and about us. I was a rhyming fool, a creator of bad doggerel (poetry written by dogs, I was once told). I don’t know why, but I was madly driven to capture The Adventure of Our Old-fashion Crush with all its ups and downs on reams of notebook paper. Each verse was honestly a sonnet in itself. I get this feeling I might still have a few “chapters” of those maudlin verses lying around somewhere, in a box maybe, but I couldn’t find them. Just as well, I imagine. I’m pretty sure I’d be embarrassed by them today.

Funny, immature me, I’d go to the movies and hear how cool Clark Gable or Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart would speak to women, and then I’d try to model my own ‘lines’ after some of theirs. One time at Phyllis’ home, I was sitting at her kitchen table and watched her making me a cup of coffee. Then, as she brought it over to me, I dunno, the whole scene felt so domestic and she so wifely, that I Abruptly came out with this one: “Hey, you and me? Let’s grow old together.” Now how corny is that?

OK, I’ll tell you how corny it is. It’s laughingly as embarrassing as a Harrison Ford line in the 1973 film, American Grafitti. The year is 1962. Ford plays Bob Falfa, the reckless badass dude driving a hot, souped-up, black ’55 Chevy. Bob wants to prove his car is the fastest car in the valley. So, he’s itching to go up against Paul Le Mat’s character, John Milner, who drives the locally famous yellow 1932 Ford 5-window coupe, the hot rod that had long been the fastest car in the valley. Before the race, however, badass Falfa picks up Laurie (Cindy Williams) who’s virginal, vulnerable, and on the rebound from having just been dumped by her steady, Steve (Ron Howard). Unfortunately she’s about to become the lady-in-distress as Falfa has decided she will accompany him in the ill-advised speed race out on the outskirts of the city. But first, he tries to come on to her, in his way (who wouldn’t) but the way he attempts it is something that is so weird and awkward it caused me to cringe. First he grows all serious, then looks her straight in the eyes, and after a moment (what?) begins ridiculously singing “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific. I know, right?! Don’t believe me? Stream the flick. It’s a wonderful film (with the exception of Ford’s musical come-on). But as awkward as that was, it’s a little bit too similar to my out-of-the-blue “Let’s grow old together” attempt. Oh well, it’s funny now. And of course it’s taken 60+ years, but Phyl and I eventually did succeed in accomplishing just that.

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

you crossed the square heading west on main… we were the yang and the yin

i was the fire & you were the ice, the odds stacked against us had loaded the dice

but we didn’t know that then

i watched you walk with your new friend & talk, unaware i was being reeled in

that was the fateful momentous day in our tinytown lives so mundane

just a fall afternoon with the sun dropping down

autumn leaves underfoot, yelloworange&brown

on the corner of north street and main

i watched you walk with my cousin & talk

(through the drugstore display window pane)

the gambler in me told my heart & my soul: though opposite charges attract

i’d look you in the eye & retain full control…

our fate’s cosmic die rode the crapshooter’s roll

& rolled boxcars— the odds had been stacked

(magnetic north pole & magnetic south)

our futures were processed & packed

the bi-polar pull of our gravities’ force set our orbital paths for collision

inevitable contact… there was no recourse

our hormones alone were our single resource

the dice roll had made its decision

no time for reflection, no room for remorse

the outcome was nuclear fission

when matter and anti-material collide: cataclysmic, the chain reaction

its thunderclap echoes through all space and time

it alters the future’s & past’s paradigm—

twin suns, we were lock-stepped in traction

each destined to fall as the other would climb

the orbital dance of co-action…

you crossed the square heading west on main (we were the yang and the yin

i was the fire & you were the ice

we were starcrossed as soulmates—indelibly spliced

but we didn’t know that then)

i watched you walk with your new friend & talk

aware you were reeling me in

FETCHING

needling your quilt in your lamplight halo

you look over and catch me

your “RCA dog”

gazing into your eyes

my spiritual tail beginning to wag

and me growling some humorous

something or other—

this old dog’s old trick

for fetching me

the biscuit

of your sweet

laughter

THE BIG CHILL

“we got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout”

— johnny & june carter cash

you were the spark

that ignited the fuse

for the

big bang

of my hitherto

relatively uneventful

love life

it flashing incendiary

roman candles & rockets

molotov-cocktail love

flame-thrower love burning

magnesium hot

launching me in a straight trajectory

right over lover’s leap at

e=mc²

but that was in my callow youth

today

like the olympic flame

my love for you

still burns

patient now & serene

fireplace cozy

cup of cocoa hot

electric blanket warm

Happy 57th anniversary to us (7/30 /1966 -7/30/2023)

home

URBAN LEGENDS BLUES

“i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed

by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging

themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix…”

— howl, by allen ginsberg

it was almost practically an honest-to-god fact …

(all the older cool guys confirmed it)

& we could all recite all those well-known anecdotes

seething with that rebel-without-a-cause wildness,

the same walk-on-the-wild-side jazz we’d seek out in

the breathless teen-angst movies like

joy ride… & party crashers:

“a single aspirin swigged down

with a mouthful of coca-cola

will render you staggeringly,

knocked-on-your-ass drunk”

one medicine show demonstration: a normally

“sober” & “respectable” older kid rapidly developing

outrageously slurred speech patterns & flopping with

histrionic helplessness on the playground lawn

where he was reduced to a giggling,

gravity-pinned, dying cockroach

impaled on its back: proof-positive!

so later, in the sanctuary of my room,

after surreptitiously gulping down the

deliciously-illicit white pill with a glass of Coke

(which, as anyone could tell you, can completely

dissolve a steel spike left in it over night!)

& waiting over an hour for the magic…

nothing… happened!

boy, was i ever pissed! it was just like that time

I swallowed the chokecherries & drank the

glass of milk, which everybody swore

would kill you… but it never did.

it just tasted bad.

i didn’t even get sick!

I thought, face it:

there’s no magic in this world—

only lies

back