Now here is a moment I will never forget as long as I live. Rather than get out, I just opened my door, hung my head and upper torso down off over the edge of the seat, bracing myself with my two hands in the gravel to keep from falling on my head. And took me a look-see. After a moment I pushed myself back up in onto the car seat again. I let out a long sigh. And then I said it.
“What muffler?”
Now please don’t think I didn’t feel a miasma of guilt swamping my panicking heart at the same time both Wayne and I burst into hysterical, snot-nose-giggling laughter. Because I did. Honest. I was seasick with guilt. Made all the worse by my responsible brother, Denny, fuming at us in the back seat. And who could blame him? (Writing this now, I find myself ashamed of my little turd, past self. Again.) But it was just one of those crazy Gene Wilder/Marty Feldman, “What hump?” moments.
“We’re gonna need a new muffler,” Wayne said.
“Right,” I said. Brainlessly.
“Oh yeah and just how the heck we gonna do that!? On a Sunday? And everything closed?” Denny was pissed.
“Whatta we have for money?” asked Wayne.
I dug deep in my jeans. Pocket change! “We’re screwed.”
It was the same with Denny.
“Well, I do have a little bread in my wallet,” said Wayne. “So… I mean, come on, there’s gotta be a junkyard open on a Sunday. Somewhere. Right? Somewhere around here?”
I hadn’t been thinking about junkyards. I’d only been thinking of the closed-on-Sundays auto parts stores. So there was a glimmer of hope. Then I remembered. “There’s one on the Guilford Road. Half way. About five miles or so.”
Wayne looked from me to over his shoulder at Denny. “Whatta ya say?”
Still glaring, all Denny could do was shrug.
Then, “Well, let’s get these wheels turned around.” He twisted the ignition key in its socket. The engine erupted back to life. A constant explosive assault on the eardrums. Fibrillatingour hearts and diaphrams! It was deafening! Inhumane! All those things! I mean, try to imagine you’re standing out on the tarmac with your head just inches below the roaring engine and whirling props of a vintage B-29 bomber! Well, it was worse , I swear. More like having your head embedded inside the engine block itself!
Wayne rolled the big black Plymouth in a wide u-turn, got her pointed back up Mile Hill, and hit the accelerator. Despite my thinking that nothing could increase the hellishness of the volume, it turned out that accelerating could, and did. So. Uphill we roared. And almost simultaneously, two strange and forever unforgettable phenomena occurred.
First, even though you never could’ve expected such a thing possible without somebody consciously willing it so, my ears (on their very own, mind you) activated their Emergency-Self-Protection switch! You know how eardrums will bulge with the thinning air pressure when you’re barreling up a pretty big hill and then just pop when you swallow? Well, my ears never popped.
Instead, it honestly felt like my earlobes autonomically just went right ahead and tucked their own selves up into their respective ear canals! Battening down the hatches, so to speak Plugging the entrances as quick as an endangered armadillo rolling itself up into a protected hard-shell ball. And then, just try to imagine sticking your fingers in your ears to drown out a racket, only you’re wearing a pair of mittens. And then your mittened-fingers somehow get stuck in there and can’t be pulled back out.
Because in other words, I instantly lost a good 75% of my hearing, just like THAT!
Now, you know those hip-hop/rapper “super-bass freaks” that somehow manage to get a pair of 50-gallon-drum-size stereo speakers installed on the rear seats of their tiny little cars? The ones you can hear ka-boom-ka-booming closer and closer to you from a mile or so away? We had that beat. Think three miles away! Which brings us to the second unforgettable phenomenon that was justas, if not more, bizarre as the first.
Our Plymouth was now broadcasting a pulsating Richter-scale impact equal to a 2000-Timpani-drum Drumroll-of-the-Apocalypse, a drumroll accompanied by 76 Farting Trombones of the Hit Parade! And Mile Hill was crowded on both sides of the road by numerous homes and summer cottages, all the way to the top. So as we began our ascent, the shimmer and quaking of everybody’s front cottage window panes flickering off to our sides in the sunlight, courtesy of our now muffler-less exhaust pipe, looked and felt impossibly surreal.
So OK. Here it is. It began with us noticing just a single family of four, simply standing on the roadside way up ahead and gawking down at our uproarious approach. But then, a man and woman across the road from them, scurrying across a lawn to position themselves for an equally commanding view. And after that, of course, other families and individuals, all drawn outside by the growing Joshua-Fit-the-Battle-Jericho ruckus to line up, and crowd the roadsides for our unannounced, one-clown-car “parade.”
They actually kind of closed in on us from both sides at one point as we rumbled through. Adults waving, reaching out, leering and jeering. The little ones clapping their hands over their ears. Almost a carnival atmosphere. Of course, we couldn’t hear even what we were trying to say to each other, let alone hear the voices outside the rattletrap.And it just felt so embarrassing, being such a spectacle and being stared at like that, like we were just some awful joke! We couldn’t get out of there fast enough but, long story short, we made it through without running over anybody.
And then we were barreling our way through the woods and back toward town.
Words can’t adequately explain how insane, crazed, and bizarre it felt– being so handicapped, so claustrophobic, so… well, like our heads were stuffed inside with cotton batting or something. So hard and nerve wracking as time dragged on to have to endure that deafening onslaught entombing us in that nightmare on wheels.
We stuck to side roads on the outskirts of town to avoid garnering too much unwanted attention. And with the clock ticking, we tooled up the Guilford Road.
The junkyard did have a Sunday-closed look about it. Just a little shack of a rundown garage out front, next to a house nestled up to it on the side. We banged on the front door and finally someone opened it. A little old man of around sixty.
As politlely as we could, we apologized for bothering him on a Sunday but explained what a fix we were in. And asked, Did he have and used mufflers for sale? He said he did, and escorted us into the garage. There hanging up on a wall were three. The only one we could afford was something he called a” cherry bomb.” He advised that our dad probably wouldn’t approve of that one though, as it was one very popular with teens that were into… hot rodding. “Kinda makes your car sound like a motorcycle: loud,” is what he said.
So we’d struck out. And not only that, but the half hour Dad had allotted us had already passed about ten minutes earlier, so we were in trouble. It was either go home right now and face the awful music, or try to think up some Plan B. We discussed this and decided that since we were going to face merry-old-hell anyway, what did it matter if we tried another town first. It was worth a shot.
So we buzzed the outskirts of Dover-Foxcroft again like a low-flying crop-duster, and headed for Dexter, fifteen miles away. And once again we all became deaf as posts.
In Dexter we rolled into the first gas station we came across. The owner there got quite a kick out of our tale of woe, which we no longer saw as funny. He took us into the bay area and showed us another three mufflers. Only one would possibly work for us at all, and it was a muffler taken off a 1955 Chevrolet truck. You could tell because he’d painted “55 CHEV TRUCK” on it in white paint.
There was some haggling with Wayne on the price, concerning what “we” could afford, and then finally the guy put our car up on the lift. I can’t tell you how promising that felt, and the sense of relief it gave me.
The place was going to close at 5:00 and it was already right around 4:30. Denny and I paced, while Wayne and the owner worked away with their heads stuck up under the trunk of the car. Then, after ten minutes or so, like some surgeon who’d been striving to save the life of one of your loved ones in the O.R., he joined us in the front office with a very grim look on his face. The kind of look that makes you dread hearing the words, “I’m sorry, but we did everything we possibly could for her.” What he said instead was, “We got a bit of a problem. See, the diameter of your exhaust pipe is just a tad larger than that of the muffler.”
Our hearts sank. Crap! It wasn’t a fit! So we were dead! D-e-a-d, DEAD!
“However… I do have some flex-pipe. For a couple more bucks, I could make that fit…”
We looked to Wayne, and nodded desperately. “OK,” he said. “Do it.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
We pulled into the driveway around 5:30. And damnit, there was Dad sitting on the front steps, waiting. He got up and met us as we tumbled out of the car, gave us a long dark stare, and muttered something like, “I guess punctuality’s not exactly your thing, is it.”
I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was probably some bald-faced little lie like, “Uhmmm, see, we ran outta gas.”
Whatever the actual exchange, I know it helped that Wayne was there. Wayne wasn’t Dad’s son, so he wasn’t about to blow a gasket that included our guest, his nephew. Thank goodness. And honestly? Dad was never the type to blow his gasket anyway. I’ve gotta say, I’d already given Dad so many opportunites and reasons to really read me the riot act over time (some particularly bad ones, in my own estimation). And he always did it calmly, thoughtfully, reasonably, and with much grace.
Dad was a gentleman, and such a gentle man. And on top of that, he was a saint.
So we watched on eggshells as Dad doggedly opened the car door, climbed in behind the wheel, closed the door, started her up, and put her in reverse. He began to back up. But then, suddenly, he stepped on the brake and slowed her to a stop. Shifting her into neutral, tilting his head out the window, and cocking an ear, he stepped lightly on the accelerator a couple of times, revving the engine just a bit, and (oh no!)… listening.
Spooked, the three of us were frozen, surreptitiously eying one another. And maybe their hair was also standing up on the back of their necks. I don’t know. But mine was. I do know I was holding my breath.
“Huh!” he said with furrowed brow. Like he’d come to some conclusion. Then, with a shaking of his head we heard him mutter to himself, “This ol’ crate’s sounding more like a truck every day.”
The three of us did a triple double-take!
And then he backed on out of the driveway and just… went trucking it away up Pleasant Street
“Oh. My. GOD!” somebody said.
“Does he KNOW?” somebody else asked.
“But how COULD he?!”
“I don’t think he does…”
“He couldn’t!”
“But he just MIGHT. Somehow.”
With adults you just never knew. Did you. Most of the time, they knew everything…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So we let about a dozen years slip by before we finally mustered up the courage to tell Dad our whole story. He surprised us by obviously getting a big kick out of it. And although we pressed him about it several times, he swore up and down he’d never had a clue.
Picture this. I’m five. Not only am I five, I’m short for my age. Don’t take up hardly any room.
Me, front seat, middle. No bucket seats back then. Just bench seats, I think they were called. Bench seats and no seat belts. Riding in Uncle Archie’s car. Archie driving. Dad riding shotgun, to my right. Me in the middle. Dad and Archie in steady conversation. Just two low voices. Blah blah blah. Me, not even coming up to their shoulders, the conversation literally and figuratively going right over my head. Nothing to do with me. Me, practically not even here, but I’m used to that.
My world right now is this dashboard in front of me. It’s all I’ve got. Nothing else to look at, not being able to see out the windshield. But it’s on my level, so… yeah, the dashboard. And… the ignition key plugged into it. I’ve been fixated on the ignition key for some time now. And the tiny beaded chain swinging from it. Shiny. Swaying. The only thing moving in my world right now. Like a little fishing lure for bored eyes.
Finally. Dad’s and Uncle Archie’s attention are suddenly focused on something up ahead and off to the left. Some house being built. By some friend or acquaintance of theirs. Whatever. I’d been waiting for something like that.
“Well, that’s coming right along.”
“I’d say so. ‘Bout another month maybe.”
Quick as lightning, I clamp that key in my sweaty little fist, twist it once to the left, then jerk it back to the right, and have my hand lying back in my lap like nothing ever happened as the car coughs, convulses jarringly, and K’POW! farts off a shotgun blast of a backfire before returning to normal.
Dad: “What the hell was that!?”
Uncle Archie: “Damned if I know! She never done that before.”
Fortunately, no one looks down and asks me. Why would they? I’m just a five year old. I’m not even here.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Let me begin with this obvious fact: automobiles are vastly different today than they were in the 1950s. They’ve evolved over time in the same way Man has evolved. On a sliding scale from the simpler to the more complex.
Who knows where each will end up when our sun finally implodes, sucking our solar system down inside the event horizon into its own black hole with it? If that even is what happens. Hell, I’m no physicist. But I do know a thing or two about what cars were like way back in 1950sville.
So many things were different.
All cars had manual transmissions back then. Why? Because there was no alternative, of course. The automatic transmission in cars were not commercially available yet. Meaning when you applied for your driver’s license, you knew you’d be taking your road test on a stick shift. No letter D for Drive, R for Reverse, or P for park. Meaning you’d have to have become intimate with the dreaded clutch pedal. I know. That’s scary. But I did it. In fact, we all did it.
But also meaning that the harder-than-nuclear-physics, manual-gear-shifting diagram was also something you’d have to become intimate with. Which is why you didn’t see Marty McFly jumping into, and driving off in, any 1950s cars in Back to the Future I.
I’ve already mentioned seating in The Prologue. Sports cars had bucket seats, but common cars did not. Plus nobody had seat belts in the 1950s, and nobody wanted those nuisances either, when they finally came out, as Chuck Berry’s song lyrics of “No Particular Place to Go” so aptly expressed years later: “Can you imagine the way I felt? I couldn’t unfasten her safety belt!”
Plus you’ve probably heard about those “suicide doors,” too— doors that opened up in the exact opposite direction than they do today. A leftover from the slower-speed, horse-drawn carriage days, a suicide door was an automobile door that was hinged on the rear-facing side, rather than the front-facing side.
Today if you’re barreling down the highway doing 70 and one of your passengers foolishly tries to open a car door, it’s nearly impossible. The wind’s 70 miles per hour blow-back pressure will fight to keep that door from opening up. In the 50’s however, many car doors (especially back-seat doors) were still designed to open in the opposite direction.
As a child, I was seated one afternoon in the back seat of our suicide-rear-door car while it was tooling down the road, probably at 50. For some reason (curiosity maybe) I grasped the door handle of the door on the driver’s side and began to open it a crack (can’t for the life of me remember why… although being naturally stupid and too curious for my own good immediately come to mind). As soon as I got the door barely inched open, the hurricane blow-back caught my door like a sail and just flung it open, practically catapulting me like a tiny, human, seat-beltless cannonball straight out onto the road in front of oncoming cars! Fortunately for me, my hand strength was practically zero so the door handle was just torn right out of my grip. My fingers got painfully sprained though, but I was still sitting, alive and whole, on the back seat. A hard way to learn a lesson
Ah yes. Life in the good old dangerous days.
But now to my main point. There is one big difference between the cars of the Nifty Fifties and today’s automobiles which I’ve never even thought about until lately, one which pertains to the incident I barely touched on in my prologue. More about that in a bit, right after I tell you a little story by way of introduction. It’s a true story, as all of my stories are. Never had any luck at all at creating literary fiction.
This one occured in 1960… me, thirteen going on fourteen. The year was 1960, but my parents’ car was a big, black, bulky 4-door 1948 Plymouth.
A cousin of ours who was two and a half, maybe three years older than me, lived in Massachusetts. Each year he’d summer at our place for a few weeks. His family was obviously better off than ours, financially anyway, because Wayne always seemed to have the coolest things. Cool clothes. Cool roller skates. Cool transistor radio. Cartons of cigarettes with usually one cancer stick nonchalantly propped up there like a pencil in behind his ear. A wad of twenties in his wallet at all times, and somehow always more where they came from. And fresh from the city streets of Boston, all the latest off-colored jokes to entertain everybody with. And most important, Wayne had just gotten his driver’s license. That was big. Because with him around, sometimes we had wheels. A lot of the popular town guys and all the girls couldn’t wait to see him show up every summer. In our redneck world, it was like having a lesser Elvis (notice how that almost sounded like a lesser evil? {Freudian slip, there}) come and stay at our place. I practically worshipped him (until I didn’t).
Now Dover-Foxcroft is situated only five miles from Maine’s gorgeous Sebec Lake. And that lake was huge in our summer social lives back then. We kids of just about all ages hitch-hiked out there and back almost every day. There was the municipal beach that was always pretty packed with the bathing-suited summer folks from away. The beach had its own concession stand for hamburgers, chips, cigarettes, and sodas, plus the usual male and female changing rooms and rest rooms. There was the marina next door to the beach where the wealthy tourists moored all those luxurious outboard and inboard motor boats.
The marina had a small convenience store too for beer, pastries, some groceries, fishing tackle, live bait, and boat rentals. The wonderful, magic roller rink was right there too (and oh, that makes me go all weak with nostalgia, just thinking about it once again). It was the jewel in the crown, if you ask me. All the beautiful girls from near and far skated there. In short, like the song, the lake was “the magnet and I was the steel.”
One Sunday afternoon, we wanted go back out there to retrieve something we’d left at camp so I, Denny, and Wayne went to dad to beg for the family car. Dad was a TV and radio repairman who did service calls over a pretty large portion of the county back then. Yes, even on Sundays. Here’s how the conversation went down:
Dad: I dunno. I’ve got a service call over in Milo, so I’m gonna need the car.
Us: We just wanna go over and back to pick up something. It won’t take long.
Dad: All right, But I’m going to need it in a half hour then.
Us: Half hour tops, no problem.
So we all piled into the Plymouth, me calling “Shotgun!”
It always felt so adventurous back then to just take off in a car not being driven by an adult. It gave me a new-found, giddy feeling of freedom that I was still just getting accustomed to as I grew a little older. Inside the car it was always just boy talk. Sometimes about girls. Sometimes about places we’d been, more specifically about where Wayne had been, like Quebec City, since he’d traveled all over and we really hadn’t. Sometimes it was about cars. That day it was about cars.
Denny and I didn’t know anything about cars, especially anything technical about them. What was important to me was getting my own license soon and just go off cruising to who knows where. I mean, just imagining what it was going to be like, sitting behind the steering wheel someday and actually driving someplace by myself was so enticing it was all I could think about. That, and the impossible dream of actually buying a car of my very own.
So yeah, we were talking cars that day. And for one reason or another, I brought up the memory I still have of causing such a satisfying backfire in Archie’s car, way back when I was five years old.
Me: And all I had to do was turn the ignition key off and then back on. Ka-bang! It was so cool!
Wayne: Yeah I’ve heard of that. And you know what they say?
Me: No. Whatta they say?
Wayne: That the longer you wait before, you know, switching the ignition key back to ON? The bigger and better the backfire!
Me: No shit!
Wayne: I shit you not.
Me: Well, my backfire was pretty loud, you know.
Wayne: Wanna find out if it’s true though?
Denny: No! We don’t. It’s Dad’s car. Besides, we ain’t got time to…”
Me: Of course we wanna find out!
So, long story short, there is this big hill at the end of Lake Road that rolls you down into Greeley’s Landing, where the roller skating rink, the Marina, the little store, and the Municipal Beach are. Guess what the name of that hill is. Mile Hill. Mile Hill, because you can just roll downhill on it for a certified measured mile.
And only five minutes later we’d reached the crest of that Mile Hill, and had started heading down. Wayne shifted the Plymouth into neutral, and we felt gravity begin to take over, pulling us along. “Here we go,” said I, me in the co-pilot’s seat.
“This is not a good idea,” radioed Denny back there from the tail gunner’s turret.
I twisted the ignition key to the OFF position as we gradually began to build up speed in our silent dive toward the lake below. It was a quiet drive down, nothing but the sizzle of the tires on asphalt. It would take slightly over a full minute to reach the bottom, where the road levels off about a hundred yards before becoming the boat ramp. “God, I wonder what this one’ll be like!” I marveled. Houses and camps and trees were beginning to sail past us on both sides of the road at an accelerating rate. Wayne tapped on the brakes now and then so we didn’t get rolling so fast we’d end up in the lake.
When we could see the blue water up ahead, Wayne said, “OK. We’re pretty much here. Do your key thing.”
‘Roger Wilco,” I responded.
“I still don’t think this is a good idea!” Denny reported from the turret.
But I responded with, “Bombs away!” I twisted the key back to ON.
There was a split-second of held breaths in pure silence.
And then… HIROSHIMA!
The car was rocked by the most devastating detonation I’d ever experienced at that point of my life! And when I say “rocked,” I am not kidding! The car spasmed! And oh man, we’d definitely gotten our backfire alright! The backfire of the gods. The noise of the blast was a deafening assault, and then the continued roaring that followed was unbearable if not injurious. You. Couldn’t. Even. THINK!
Wayne hit the clutch and let the car roll to a stop off the side of the road. Then he put her in gear, and turned the key back to OFF, thank God. The roaring stopped. I suppose that brought silence, but for a minute or three the roaring in my skull still reverberated so loudly, you couldn’t have proved it by me. We just sat there for a while.
Finally, after we’d gotten our breathing under control, if not our heart rates, Wayne looked over at me and said, “Well, you’d better get out and check out how loose the muffler is, OK?”
“OK.”
Now here is a moment I will never forget as long as I live. Rather than get out, I just opened my door, hung my head and upper torso down off over the edge of the seat, bracing myself with my two hands in the gravel to keep from falling on my head. And took me a look-see. After a moment I pushed myself back up in onto the car seat again. I let out a long sigh. And then I said it.
“What muffler?”
Because nothing but jagged, smoking, metal shards dangled hellishly from both of the now-empty ends of the exhaust pipes that had once secured either end of the muffler firmly in its place. So. There was no muffler. Or… what remained OF the muffler lay strewn in a metal debris field spread over forty or fifty yards behind the rear bumper. An explosion of, for us at least, unimaginable force had blasted a steel muffler to smithereens!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Now two things I want to say at this point: (1) I have already admitted that I knew little, next to nothing really, of things automotive, so I had no way myself of technically understanding (let alone explaining) what had just occurred here; and (2) I’m worrying here that you, dear reader, might suspect me of using a little (or way too much) exaggeration in the hopes of over-dramatizing my description of what had just happened beneath Dad’s ’48 Plymouth. To try to make a pretty good story an even better story. I say this because if I were in your shoes, I think you would also find me leaning toward being the Doubting Thomas here about the way I’ve described this… happening.
So. If it please the court, I would like to enter into evidence my Exhibit A:
This incident occurred in, or around, 1960 as I’ve said. Much later (48 years later, to be exact), an essay appeared in a February 24th, 2008 syndicated weekly column of The Bangor Daily News. The column’s name was Click and Clack. Click and Clack were actually two brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, a couple of comics whose other field of expertise lay in their lifetime careers as a couple of automobile mechanics. People seeking automobile and general automotive related advice and answers to questions would write in with their queries to the Click and Clack Brothers. On the date of publication mentioned above, this particular column title jumped right out at me: “HERE’S HOW VEHICLES WITH CARBURETORS CAN MAKE ADOLESCENTS GRIN.” I saw this, and I suspected right away what this was going to be about and, sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed.
See, I’d been wondering off and on over the years just why the three of us experienced SUCH a thunderous explosion that afternoon instead of just a heftier little backfire. By reading this article, my question was answered with a single word: “carburetor.” As they explained, cars these days no longer have carburetors. They’re all fuel-injected now.
And they go on to explain one particular, pertinent fact about carburetors, along with including a funy little story of their own (please do yourself a favor and read it, for a chuckle). “When you turned the ignition key off in an old car, the carburetor would continue to allow gasoline to pour into the cylinders. That gasoline didn’t get combusted, because the spark plugs weren’t firing so it all got pushed out into the exhaust system where it basically just continued to sit there, waiting for something to happen. When you turned the ignition back on, that first spark would ignite not only the fuel in the cylinder, but all of the fuel sitting in the exhaust system, too. And, kaboom!”
So let’s apply that explanation to Dad’s unfortunate 1948 Plymouth’s muffler. OK. I switched off the ignition key. This allowed gasoline to begin pouring into the cylinders and beyond, unabated. Now with my Uncle Archie’s car, back when I was five, I switched the ignition OFF and then right back ON immediately, so whatever little gasoline had dribbled into the exhaust system just made a feisty little kaboom. But in Dad’s Plymouth, unbeknownst to us, we traveled a full frickin’ mile while gasoline was happily filling up the muffler and “waiting for something to happen.” Is it any wonder then that the damn thing blew itself all to hell when I turned the key back to ON? The only wonder is that it didn’t catch the car afire, that the fire didn’t engulf the whole car in an instant ball of flame and melt us like three marshmallows! Wow.
Once again I plead temporary and/or permanent stupidity.
And that just leaves the second part of the fireworks— namely, facing my dad later in the day. Stay tuned.
I know what you’re thinking. But, no, the above is not actually a training video for extraterrestrials on How to Pass As Human Prior to The Great Alien Invasion of Planet Earth. Instead this one is to teach MORONS (us Baby Boomers) How to Use the Telephone!
By the way, there are hundreds of similar, vintage black and white PSAs (public service announcements videos) on YouTube waiting to entertain you. They cover so many very important issues: “Dinner Etiquette”; “What Makes a Girl Popular”; “Your Doctor Is Your Friend”; “Your Kiss of Affection, the Germ of Infection”; “They Don’t Wear Labels: I’ve Got VD ”; “Let Asbestos Protect the Buildings on Your Farm”; “Beware of Homosexuals”; “How Much Affection?”; and “The Trouble With Women, to name a few.At the risk of sounding like some crude scrawl of grafitti on the inside wall of a phone booth (remember phone booths?): For a good time…search YouTube for “vintage PSA’s.”
In 1958, “Telephone Etiquette” was the name of an actual dumbass teaching unit we kids had to endure in junior high. That particular ‘adventure’ lasted for approximately two dumbass weeks— and dedicated dumbassedly to conforming our rambunctious juvenile behaviors around the family telephone to rigid, recognizably Stepford-Wives-like standards, a laughable goal for preadolescents. The unit included intensive emphasis on such rocket-science, hard-to-grasp concept as The Three Magic Phrases: “Please,” “Thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” Fortunately, since we apparently were a class of morons, there was this helpful video:
So… how did we, the rambunctious preadolescent little morons, fare in our unit on telephone etiquette? Not so well, considering the number of after school detentions that ensued, along with the delicious fact that, on one particular day, a police officer was summoned to make an appearance. Of course the number of detentions was pretty much maintaining the status quo throughout the school year with the teacher we had: Mrs. Bernice Sterling, a.k.a, “Bugsy.” The cop being called? That was a one-off.
Bugsy’s reputation spanned decades. For instance, when our school held its annual evening Open House, giving parents the opportunity to drop into the classroom after work and chat with our teachers about our progress or lack thereof, my dad who was a saint by the way, couldn’t muster up the courage to show up. Bugsy’d been one of his teachers way back when, and he was still terrified of her to that day.
Anyway, considering how we boys (not so much the girls) found it next to impossible to take many subjects seriously, this unit didn’t stand the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell. Like most other classes there was reading the assigned pages, taking notes, memorizing the do’s and don’t’s from various charts, and taking quizzes.
But then there was also those stupid ggiggle-worthy “exercises” we had to perform where everybody had to partner up— each couple taking its turn in the pair of empty chairs at the front of the room and each student, in turn, directed to simulate phoning his or her partner to demonstrate proper phone etiquette for a passing grade. Sometimes the play-acting called for you to make a personal call to a friend; sometimes it involved calling a potential employer to ask for a job application and interview, etc. Whatever.
The very process of partnering up had one obviously built-in classroom management problem. It was the teacher who selected who’d couple up with whom, supposedly at random, but invariably, to keep one class-clown from being seated with another class-clown (a sure-fire recipe for classroom havoc), she tended to pair one boy with one girl whenever possible. So just try to imagine the barbed gigglesand whispers and note-passings that this engendered, along with the cruel, Roman Coliseum embarrassment the shyest, non-popular, non-attractive girl or boy had to suffer right along with the future prom king or queen linked with them. The blackboard jungle.
Secondly, and most importantly, we boys honestly knew so much more than old Bugsy would ever know about the real world of telephone use in her lifetime! We were the frickin’ experts! So the very idea of me (or any of my pals) having to demonstrate how to conduct a proper telephone call with a close friend was so beyond laughable it wasn’t even funny.
Up until 3rd or 4th grade, my family didn’t even own a telephone. But my grandmother who lived in an apartment upstairs did. One of those big wooden boxes that looked like a large birdhouse mounted on the living room wall, with what looked like a large pair of bugged-out eyes installed across the top-front of the box. Those were actually a pair of rounded, metal bells that rang whenever a call was received. Then there was that little black cone for speaking into, mounted like some cartoonish puckered mouth below the ‘eyes.’ Also, hanging off the box’s left side, was the large chess-pawn-shaped receiver on a cord. And finally, the little metal crank installed on the right side of the box was used for generating electricity. All very steampunk.
Occasionally I would be allowed, under parental supervision, to make a “magic” call to Stevie Taylor, my main pal who lived down the street. But once I’d got the hang of it, I’d sometimes sneak upstairs by my own self when Nanny was out, give the little crank a few turns, take the receiver off the hook, and secretly listen in on what was supposedly private conversations neighbors of ours were having. See, Nanny’s phone was connected to some of our neighbors on what was then known as a party line. A private phone line was expensive, so most families opted for the cheaper party-line plan. There were at least four or five neighborhood neighbors’ phones sharing the line with Nanny’s. So when a call came in and rang in two ring bursts (ring-ring! pause ring-ring! pause, etc.) then all connected families would hear it and know that that call was for the Smith family; whereas if the call sounded with bursts of five rings (ring-ring-ring-ring-ring! pause) then that might designate the call was for Nanny, etc. And in a perfect world, only someone in the designated family would pick up the receiver. In a perfect world.
Guess what. The world is flawed. The party-line era was infamous for adults sneakily listening in on their neighbors’ phone conversations. I mean, all the time. It was the neighborhood sport of phone-tapping spies. A world of audio voyeurs.
One day while I was listening in on whomever, I accidentally positioned the hand-held receiver a little too close to the speaking cone. Guess what happened! SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Ear-deafening feedback! Thunderstruck, I dropped the receiver! Immediately the screech stopped, thank God! But I could hear tinny little far-away voices from the dangling receiver, one exclaiming, “What the HELL was THAT!?” and another saying, “I have no idea!” I carefully returned the receiver to its cradle, and crept back down the stairs with a guilty heart. Bur EUREKA! Serendipitously, I had discovered the magic of feedback, although I didn’t know the name at that point. Did I ever create telephone feedback again? On purpose? What do you think? Of course I did.
So, back then there was this old crone, Lottie with the whiskery old witch’s chin, who lived right across the street from us— a real ‘Mrs. Dubose’ straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird. And when I was just a toddler playing outside in the rain, she’d spy me standing in a puddle and what’d she do? She’d come a-running out onto her porch screaming like a banshee at me! “You get your shoes right out of that puddle, mister! Your father works hard all day long at keeping you kids in shoes and clothes, and look what you do! Just look at you! You should be ashamed of yourself! You should be beat with a hickory stick, you ungrateful little…!”
Well, I didn’t know what business of hers my shoes or my dad’s income was because… she wasn’t my mother. But I’d retreat sobbing and tracking water back into the fortress of my home anyway .
When I was a little older, she was being bothered by dogs pooping on her lawn and running wild through her flowerbeds. So she came over to our house one day and asked my dad to let her borrow my Red Ryder BB rifle. And damn it, Dad let her take it. And oh, didn’t it irk me to no end to see her riding shotgun over there day after day, slouched in her porch chair with my rifle laid across her lap like some stagecoach guard in a western cowboy movie,and taking occasional potshots at the bandits. And at least a couple of times I caught her taking aim at me while chasing a stray rubber ball that was rolling a little too close to her flowers. She was your basic hard, neighborhood, old bag, a force to be reckoned with, to be feared by little boys, salesmen, and canines. That hag deserved every damned egg teenagers ever pelted her house with over the years.
So anyway, whenever I’d tiptoe up to Nanny’s vacant apartment to while away some time listening to the neighbors gossiping on the party line, I’d give the phone a couple of cranks, quietly lift the receiver out of the cradle, sit back, and just play spy. But… whenever I’d hear that familiar, scratchy, Long John Silver’s voice of Lottie’s, I’d delight in drawing the receiver up to the mouthpiece and… then… SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Nanny finally got herself a rotary-dial telephone. So did everybody else in the neighborhood, including Lottie. So gone were my days of fun of being The Phantom Feedbacker of the Neighborhood Party Line. Because rotary phones cleverly mounted the receiver and transmitter forever apart at opposite ends of the barbell-shaped handset. (The manufacturers had found me out.)
I’d grown tired of listening to boring old ladies exchanging recipes and supposedly juicy gossip anyway. And meanwhile Lottie was maintaining her hard-earned reputation as the number-one, all-time, serial, neighborhood party-line eavesdropper ever. A legend. She’d become that ghostly shadow, always standing off to the side and just behind the lacy curtain that veiled the window in her front door. Sort of like that signature TV pencil sketch of Alfred Hitchcock at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Perpetually the eyes and the ears of the neighborhood. Only with a telephone handset glued to her ear.
So of course when you were speaking to someone/anyone on the phone, you knew you were being monitored, and would choose your words accordingly. However, one afternoon after school, I was on the phone with Steve Taylor and, I don’t know why but I was feeling extra-feisty. And suddenly, mid-conversation, I just blurted right out, “Be careful what you say, Stevie, ‘cause you just know that old bag Lottie across the street is listening to every doggone word we’re saying!”
“WELL I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW I’M DOING NOSUCHTHING!” Lottie blasted haughtily, and then bang! Gone. She’d hung up. Good ol’ Lottie. It made my day!
So anyway, “Feedback” was my first lesson learned in becoming a sophisticated telephone “operator.” But I learned another little phone trick just as serendipitously. I was older at this point, and using the rotary dial had become second nature to me. I was at somebody’s house and had to call home to leave a message for Mom. OK, Nanny’s upstairs phone number was 2197. Just four simple numbers. But being in a hurry, I screwed up, actually only dialing only 297.Quickly realizing my mistake, I hung up to do it again but before I could even pick the handset back up, the phone was ringing right in front of me. I automatically picked up and said, “Hello?” There was no answer. “Hello? Anybody there?” Nope. Just the dial tone. That was odd. But it had happened so instantaneously, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had somehow caused it. On a whim, I dialed 297 intentionally this time, and hung right up. Again, the phone rang. Again, no one there. What a curious thing. But by God, I had stumbled onto something! I tried it again. And yes: I could make my host’s phone ring at will. And already I was wondering, Would this work on another phone? Other… phones? On Nanny’s phone?
So at home I headed upstairs, dialed 297, and hung up. Yes! The phone rang! Nanny came out of the kitchen and lifted the handset to her ear. “Hello?” she said, “…Hello?” and then, “Well, that’s odd. I guess they hung up. Just a dial tone.” I was ecstatic. I really had discovered something! Something deliciously all mine! Something to make life just a little more interesting. And I alone seemed to be the only one in town who knew about it. In no time, I had pranked about a dozen people I knew.
Say I’m at a friend’s house, waiting for my buddy to come downstairs. His mom leaves the room. I get out of my chair, dial 297, hang up, and leap back into the chair again. Ring! Mom hurries back in, picks up the phone, says hello a couple of times, and says, “Well that’s funny. Just a dial tone.” I was controlling people. It gave me a sense of power. I even pulled that stunt on Merrick Square Market a few times. But I kept it just for myself. I didn’t share my… super power with any of my friends. For a long time. Finders, keepers you know. But of course I eventually did spill the beans. And then… phones were ringing all over Dover-Foxcroft, driving the population crazy. heh heh…
Oh, I’ve just gotta tell you this one. This one is rich:
It was December, Christmas time, and J. J. Newberry’s had a little sales gimmick going on that year— a Santa Claus hotline. Their Santa’s phone number was published in their Christmas flyers and advertised on the radio. Little rug rats were encouraged to call the hotline and talk to Santa, telling him what they wanted for Christmas. I, and a friend, saw a fun opportunity in this. We would call the hotline and, using our Academy Award winning babyish voices, mess with Santa’s mind. We were such little dicks. The prototypes of Beavis and Butthead.
But unfortunately for all concerned, there was a very, very similar number to the hotline’s that was getting a lot of calls by accidental misdialing. Word from other Beavis and Butthead prototypes had gotten around. Turned out, it was already widely known to whom that number belonged. It was a woman in town who was socking away a little Christmas money—you know, cash under the table— by entertaining ‘gentlemen callers’ at all hours of the night, if you get my drift. And word was, she was one angry dudette. Well, since we were a couple of the worst kind of little dinks, and due to the fact that there was no such thing as Caller ID, we didn’t have to be told twice.
A woman’s voice answered, “Hello?”
“Can I pweathe talk to ThantaCwauthe,” I said, with a child’s voice and a lisp, “cauthe I wanna tell him wha…”
“Goddamn you little shits all to hell! You got the wrong number. Again! Now this… has to stop, you dig? I can’t take this anymore. This, for your information, is a business phone! Not the Santa Claus number at Newberry’s, for Christ’s sake! And you’re tying up my goddamn line! Now… you just call the right number right now and you tell… your fat-ass Santa Claus… that J. J. Newberry’s is gonna get sued! For harassment! And if you’re stupid enough to call this number one more time, I’ll… track you down! I’ll find you and wring your little neck! You got that!?”
“Well… Mewwy Chwithmuth…” I said, but Bang! She’d hung up. Rather rudely, too. But I mean, holy crap, was that ever fun for two little pains in the ass like us! But, boy, did she ever sound scary. Still more fun than poking a hornet’s nest, though.
However, please don’t get the idea I was the only one being an obnoxious little brat with the telephone games. Because I’m here to tell you no, not by a long shot. So many extra Y-chromosome boys my age were also badass contemporaries in the same field. I mean junior high fellas? Bored and with nothing to do? And there was that telephone just sitting there, a toy waiting to be used and abused? Prank phone calls were a sport back then. A craze. And it wasn’t jjst kids, either. Look up “50’s phone pranks “on Google. You’ll see. Oh, and once again, you have to remember: no Caller ID.
There were some, the more creative ones like myself, who were experts at it; and then there were those mealy-mouthed amateurs, sheep basically, just following the pack and repeating what everybody else had been pranking since the caveman days. For instance, dialing a random convenience store number and asking, “Do you have Prince Albert in the can?” And then, if the answer is, “Why, yes, we do,” the low-life prankster/dilettante would shout, “Well… why don’t you let him out so he doesn’t suffocate?” before hanging up, falling on the floor laughing, and laughing himself sick.
*Prince Albert being the brand name of a popular pipe tobacco sold in either a soft package or a can
That prank, plus this other most common one, were so overused.“Hello. This is General Electric calling. Is your refrigerator running?” and of course the response to a “Yes” would be, “Well, why don’t you run after it and catch it?” Yeah. Two of the most boring tropes of the 50s. I know, sad, right? Audio memes.
My cousin and I preferred the more interactive scenarios like this one, especially effective when you got a little old lady on the line:
Prankee: “Hello?”
Pranker: (In a low, adult-sounding voice) “Good morning, Ma’am. I’m a representative of the Bell Telephone Company.”
Prankee: “Oh? How can I help you?”
Pranker: “Well ma’am. We’re going through the town today, house by customer house, cleaning out all the phone lines. If you happen to have a paper bag handy, that would be a big help.”
Prankee: “Oh. Actually I do believe I have some paper bags in the cupboard. All right. I’ll get one and be right back.”
Pranker: “Thanks, ma’am. I’ll wait right here.”
Prankee: (heavy paper rustling) “I’m back. And I do have a bag. What do I do with it?”
Prankee: Please pull the bag right over your telephone handset, then wrap the bag up tightly and hold it firmly. But be especially sure to look away. We blow the dust out of the lines with our heavy-duty power blower, and we don’t to get dust all over your floor or, especially, in your eyes. Let us know when you’re ready.”
Prankee: (really loud paper rustling) (Prankee’s voice sounding fainter now under the rustling) “OK. I think I’m ready…”
Pranker: “OK. Hang on tight!” (Pranker, making a loud, drawn-out, high-pitched WOOOOOOOWEEEEEeeeee! with puckered mouth.) “OK. Ma’am. We’re done. The Bell Telephone Company thanks you for your cooperation in this matter.”
Prankee: “Okey-dokey!” (loud paper rustling) “Ummmm. There doesn’t seem to be any dust in my bag, though…”
Pranker: “Well done. We commend you on your neat housekeeping, ma’am. And thank you again.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Mostly my cousin and I were really just trying to harmlessly amuse ourselves. One time, for whatever reason, we decided we’d conduct an important-sounding survey by calling 30 or so totally random numbers to find out which opera was Dover-Foxcroft’s favorite. Both of us having been brought up pretty much on Mad Magazines (“What, me worry? I read Mad”), I’m guessing that played a part in our play-acting choices. Neither of us knew anything at all about opera, however, other than “The Barber of Seville” soundtrack that accompanied our favorite Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd cartoon. “The Rabbit of Seville”.
Our survey was conducted over the weekend. We kept stats in a notebook. We were all about the stats. Many contacted, like ourselves, had no real idea about operas. But quite a few took us fairly seriously. All I really remember is that Madame Butterfly took 1st place, and The Barber of Seville got a few mentions, as did The Flower Drum Song.
See, we did things like this when there were no Medusa-like distractions like computers and cell phones to turn us into motionless, dead stone.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK, back to Bugsy’s class unit on Telephone Etiquette…
The two weeks seemed to me such a ridiculous, ho-hum waste of time. However, on the very final day of the unit, things suddenly got pretty tense, and we all found ourselves perking right up. What was happening is that Bugsy had begun to push the class discussion into darker waters. She’d begun shifting the focus to the dire consequences of some very particularimproper uses of the telephone. Namely, the evil little practices by some children (why, not us, of course) misusing the telephone in malicious ways. In fact it turned out that what she was getting at, what she was beginning to poke her nosy old nose into, was none other than the misuse of the telephone by willfully committing the unimaginable and heinous crime of (oh my!) phonepranks!
“Yes, obviously some of you, if not all, have heard about thesee thoughtless telephone pranks, and the harm can cause. The mischievous calling of random numbers, the tricking of innocent victims into believing their caller is someone other than who he really is. Perhaps some of your families have even been the victims of such telephone abuse… or know of someone who has been.”
“Yes!” piped up one of the dumb-bunnyest, most brown-nosing girls in our class. “That happened at our place just last month!” Some of the other girls were nodding vigorously in support. Girls! Jeez!
But yikes. I had hardly expected that particular can of worms to be torn open in this class. And by the most feared teacher on the planet. Here I’d been assuming it was all going to be nothing but the namby-pamby, goody-two-shoes, golden rules we should all follow. But no. Apparently not. Where was she going with this? Did she… Did she know something? I mean, hey…
Like some hardened Alcatraz inmate, I surreptitiously allowed my gaze to secretly travel around the room, gauging the reactions of my fellow miscreants in attendance who, in turn, were surreptitiously gauging mine. Each of us felons had by now assumed the mask, the bland, know-nothing, poker face. You’ve heard of the Cosa Nostra, the Italian phrase that once referred to the Mafia and which translates literally to “our thing?” Meaning “our secret thing.”
“What many of these so-called pranksters don’t realize is that several instances of prank phone calls fall under the auspices of… criminal behavior.” Somebody somewhere at the back of the class giggled. “Punishable criminal behavior at that!” she added. Giggling a high-pitched giggle like some little girl. Only it didn’t quite sound like a girl.
“Yes, Arthur?” asked Mrs. Sterling suddenly in her sternest voice. She was never one who liked being interrupted.
Along with most of the other kids, I cranked my head around for a look-see over my shoulder. And there he was, the fool. Little Artie Buck. Grinning. Squirming in his seat like he had to go to the bathroom. Arm waving high in the air signaling pick me, pick me! Oh, he had something he was just dying to share with the class.
Down went the arm. “OK. So…” he began, almost delirious with remembered joy, “…this one time…? I dialed this number. You know, just for fun?”
What in the world…? The class and Bugsy waited silently while he gathered his witless thoughts. Me thinking, Artie, what the heck do you think you’re DOING!?
“Well, anyway,” he began again, “see, this lady answered.” He was having such a hard time containing himself, overcome as he was by his autonomic giggling system. But oh, he just couldn’t wait to get his wonderful story out of his mouth, so he forged on. “And so I said, ‘Is Frank Walls there?’ And she said, ‘No. I think you have the wrong number.’ ” Then the giggles overtook him once again for a moment before he could go on. But finally: “So I said to her, ‘Then is Pete Walls there?’ And she said, ‘No.’ So then I said, ‘Are there any Walls there at all, then?’ and when she said, ‘No’ to that…” hee-hee-hee “…I asked her…’” and here he really had to contend with one final meltdown of his own hilarity, “ ‘Then… what’s holding up your roof?’ ”
Artie had finished. And he was looking all around the room expectantly. Waiting for the gales of laughter. But the room had gone so electrically silent you could have heard a dust mote touch down softly on the floor! Every student was frozen stock still. How could Artie have done this to himself? we were asking ourselves. From the look of sudden terror that flashed across his face, that’s what he was suddenly wondering as well. How could he have just forgotten where he was? In the dragon’s lair! Was he just stupid? Or mental? Or both?
Bugsy’s lizard eyes had locked onto Artie’s beating, little bunny-rabbit heart like a pair of talons. She cruelly allowed the silence to go on for too long a time while the clock ticked. And then she said it. It was an Hercule Poirot moment!
“So… that was YOU!”
The class gasped as one! No! Oh my word! Just imagine! Oh my! What are the chances of…?
We watched as Bugsy marched the condemned off to the principal’s office by the ear, leaving us jaw-dropped and utterly rocked. And alone. By ourselves for once. Everyone equally shocked. Some of us, of course, were secretly relieved. It hadn’t been US. It had been Artie.
Time went by. We’d obviously been forgotten. We all gathered at the window when the patrol car pulled up outside in the faculty parking lot.
We never did find out exactly what happened to him. He wouldn’t talk about it. Whatever it was, it must’ve been bad.
In retrospect, maybe they’d sat him down in front of a movie screen and made him watch a number of black and white public service announcement films on how… Crime Doesn’t Pay.
THE TELEPHONE PRANK– A GATEWAY DRUG TO OVERDUE BOOKS AND REEFER !!
My “Come on Baby, Light My Fire ” story took place in 1957. Twenty-three years later, in 1980 and at age 34, I moved back to my hometown of Dover-Foxcroft, and was happy to do so. This little hamlet felt so much safer after where I’d been living over the last eleven years. And upon my return, I was overcome by wonderful waves of nostalgia. I found myself taking several little sentimental journeys on foot, re-visiting all my old childhood haunts: the home I’d grown up in as a child, the playgrounds, the river, the old Indian cave, the municipal beach at the lake, the camp and, of course, the old drug store. It all felt so Ray Bradbury-ish, if you know what I mean.
And of course I was surprised and delighted to find Beryl, pleasant as ever, and still working behind a drug store lunch counter. The catching up we did was so therapeutic for me. She wanted to know all about where I’d been and what I’d been up to all that time. And likewise, I wanted to know about the happenings and whereabouts of her co-workers from way back then, about the town in general, and what had been going on in her life as well.
But of course finally, we came to one thing I was really itching to find out…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“But enough about all that, Beryl. There’s a question I’m dying to ask you.”
“What’s that, Tommy?”
Tommy. Now boy, didn’t that make me grin. I’d been called a lot of things over the last two or three decades, but I know I’m back home again when I get to answer to “Tommy.”
“Something that’s been bugging me for years, actually,” I say. “And as many times as I’ve told and re-told the old story, there’s always that one, nagging, little piece-of-the-puzzle missing. So, here it is.
“Just what, exactly, was… the ‘Hot Shot?’”
She blinks, tips her head to one side. “I’m sorry, Tommy. I guess I don’t know what…”
“Oh, sure you do, Beryl. Of course you do. Just think back now… all of us little boys and girls crowding around the counter for ice cream sodas, cherry Cokes, and root beer fuzzies? Oh, and Zombies? You remember the Zombies don’t you…?”
“Oh. Well sure, of course I remember the Zombies, but…” Then she blinks once again, and I can see that flash of recognition. A frown forms. “Well, I guess I’d almost forgotten all about… those… ‘hot shots.’” Her expression implies that she’d rather not remember. But she can’t help it of course. Now that I’ve gother seat-belted securely into the Wayback Machine, and we’retravelling on our way back to… the “Hot Shot” days of yesteryear…
“OK,” she finally says, “first and foremost, I have to say it was the owner’s idea, definitely not mine. I didn’t like it. At all. But he, and the pharmacist, got really fascinated by how you boys would do practically anything to get attention. Attention from us. Attention from the girls. And they got to talking about just how far you’d all go. Giggling over there behind the pharmacy counter like a couple of little ten year olds themselves. Then they devised their little plan for their own warped entertainment. I’m not sure, but I think there might have been a wager involved. Anyway, I don’t believe they ever expected it to catch on the way it did, though. But Tommy, you need to know I was against it from the start.”
“That’s the way I seem to remember it, Beryl. You, never being too keen on the whole thing. And that I had to practically twist your arm to let me have it. And don’t think I don’t appreciate that in retrospect, Beryl. I do. But wow, it never ever occurred to me that we were being watched by a couple pairs of eyes peeking out from over the pharmacy counter. I mean, all you could ever see of them was just their heads. I never even thought to wonder who came up with it. I’m really surprised. All I knew is, it was just something going on there at the drug store. It was just there. It was part of the scene, and I desperately wanted to be part of That. I was such a brainless little sheep back then.”
“Believe me. You were far from the only one. But mostly it was the high school boys. And that was bad enough. But when you jumped into line… oh, I really didn’t like that one bit. But… there you have it I guess.”
“Well, yes and no. I mean, that only explains the why and the how. What I’m a lot more curious about is the what. Like, you know. I mean, just what the heck was that stuff, anyway? Battery acid? Sterno? I’ve been wondering about that for years. So…?”
“OK. It was a pure distillate of hot chile pepper concentrate.”
“What? What!? Wow! Holy cow! Ouch!”
“Yes, I know.”
“But why in the world would a drug store have something like… hot pepperconcentrate on the shelves??”
“Well, not so much on the shelves. Not back then. It was kept back there, behind the pharmacy counter.”
“OK. But why? What the heck would something like that be used for?”
Pain management. It’s used as a counter irritant.”
“Counter irritant?”
“Yes. something you can rub in over a sore muscle. Or an arthritic joint. You see, the burning sensation on the skin is so intense, it temporarily cancels out the nerve pain going on down beneath it. The actual name for it is capsaicin.”
“Capsaicin. So, that’s like, what, when I’ve got a bad headache or something, and I could just slam my fingers in a door? Which would hurt so bad, wouldn’t feel my headache?”
“Something like that. At least… that’s the general principle, only a lot more complicated.”
“A counter irritant, huh? But that sounds like you’re just temporarily trading one pain for another.”
“Yes, but it’s only for temporary relief. It’s complicated.”
“Well, it wouldn’t end up being so temporary if you slammed your hand in a door.”
“No, it wouldn’t. But I don’t think you’ll find anybody recommending crushing your fingers for pain management, either.”
“Well, couldn’t you just put capsaicin on your fingers afterwards then…? I’m joking.”
“Like I said, only for temporary relief.”
“All right. But wow, even to this day I can’t get over (A) how badly it burned, and (B) for how long the burning lasted. It certainly didn’t strike me as very temporary. But… yeah, time is relative.”
“The mucous membranes are particularly sensitive to it. And they readily absorb the capsaisin, hold onto it, making it last for a longer duration. And it really is especially painful to the mouth, nasal passages, and the eyes. Compared to just being rubbed onto the skin of your arm, say, which is painful enough.”
“I’d say. From what I can remember. Wow. ”
“But you know, it is sold on the general shelves these days. No prescription needed.”
“Well, I didn’t know that. Pain to kill pain. Who’d a-thunk it? Butl yeah. Fighting fire with fire, I guess.”
“Sure. That, yes. And also for self-defense.”
“I’m sorry. I beg your pardon…?”
“In those handy little aerosol cans? Called pepper spray?”
“Omigod!Pepper spray?”
“Yes. I’m sure you know how effective pepper spray can be. At warding off attackers?”
“Wait. So… are you saying…that I… willfully swallowed… pepper spray!?”
“Why do you think you took off flying around the store like a rocket on the Fourth of July?”
“So… oh my God! I always suspected I wasn’t too bright for my age, as a kid. But now you’re telling me… I mean, jeez, what kind of a dummy was I back then? Hey guy, check this out. If you’ll watch me lap up a spoonful of pepper spray, I’ll pay you twenty-five cents for your effort. But thatmuch of a dummy!”
“You only had about four drops of it.”
“Oh, which was enough, it was plenty, I can assure you!”
“And which, don’t forget… it was against my better judgement. Despite all my repeated warnings.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
This is a true story. It really happened. Even the conversation-heavy epilogue above, if not quite word-for-word, is close enough to win a cigar, in my humble opinion. And if youfind the anecdote somewhat shocking and somewhat mean-spirited, then know this: so do I. But only by today’s standards, that is. Because here’s the thing : I didn’t then. I can laugh at it today. Yeah, even if I got one hell of a burned mouth out of it. See, the world that I, and my generation, lived in 65 years ago was another planet. A planet with its own constantly developing standards. Its own level of knowledge. Its own mores. Just like the world we’re living in today.
It’s as simple as this— No matter what year or decade you live in, there you are…
I’ve got this… thing about brains. No, not in the zombie way. But I’m just hung up on the very essence of the phenomenon we call the brain. For me, the human brain is an unimaginable, alluring mystery, totally worthy of pondering. So yeah, I think about the brain. Not all the time, but a lot. I read about the brain off and on.. And I often find myself writing about it. Hell, I’m setting out to write about it right here and now.
But being ‘only an English major’ I’m scientifically handicapped, aren’t I— way over my head in deep waters. No Bill Nye the Science Guy, me. I know that. But still, I just can’t seem to get myself past marveling at how you, I, and Bill Nye the Science Guy are totally reliant, for everything, on what appears to be nothing more than an approximately seven-by-three-by-four-inch “walnut”-shaped lump of Silly Putty nestled in our brain pans like some inert loaf of bread. And… that this lump is universally hailed by the entire civilized modern world to be the best damn Central Processing Unit and hard drive combo in the known universe, bar none. I mean, that just… boggles the brain. Yes, I’m incapable of anything more than writing odes to the human brain, inexpertly philosophizing about it, or asking the for-me-elusive-and-unanswerable cosmic questions about how this organ manages to do what it does. So this little essay is bound to end up just being another essay paying homage to the walnut-shaped lump.
Now wait! Don’t you go walking away telling me that, sure, the brain’s important and everything, but it sure as heck ain’t interesting! Are you kidding me? Interesting? Why, the brain is fascinating six ways from Sunday! And I’m betting I can prove that with just two freakin’ examples.
Example #1: Ever hear of Phineas P. Gage (1823-1860)? The man who did more for the science of brain surgery and neuro-studies than any man alive today?
Now hear me out. He wasn’t any white-coated scientist or doctor. So what was he? I’ll tell you what he was. Phineas was a common laborer who blasted out rail beds with explosives for a living. And I don’t know if he was a loser or not, but he certainly didn’t have enough brains to know you gotta be pretty darn careful when you’re tamping down blasting fuses into black-powder-packed holes with a thirteen pound crowbar! On September 13th (13 being the unlucky number here), 1848, he was working for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad up in Cavendish, Vermont. He was whanging that crowbar into the rocks when a spark launched it like a Chines fireworks rocket right up through the side of his face and out the top of his skull, landing with a clatter on a granite slope some eighty feet away. And after the echoes died away and the smoke cleared, there sat old Phineas, conscious and as aware as any of the crew.
And he could still talk. And the next thing you know, he was walking back to the wagon that would convey him back to his lodgings in town where he would confound a physician brought to examine him. Yes, Phineas Gage who by all accounts should have dropped dead on the spot but instead went stubbornly on about the business of living minute by minute; then hour by hour; eventually a whole day; and after that a day at a time… tor twelve years! Yes, a frontal lobe partially lost and a ghastly fame won, our hapless survivor of “The American Crowbar Case,” as it came to be called, entered into the Annals of Science and Medicine as Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient, the individual who single-handedly contributed more than any other earthly soul to research regarding how specific regions of the human brain control personality and behavior , giving the big green light to decades of experimental lobotomies, all the way up through One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…and beyond.
Example #2: Would you believe me if I told you that there was once a famous case of somebody’s brain being kidnapped? Perhaps you have. If you haven’t, you may think I’m joking, or misinformed. I have to admit it does sound like something right out of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein… if not Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. But no, it’s true. And guess whose brain it was. Albert Einstein’s! It’s true. Einstein’s brain was stolen shortly after the autopsy was performed on his body right after his death in 1955? And you needn’t take my word for it. Just look up “Einstein’s Stolen Brain” on Google and you’ll get many links to articles and documentaries on the subject from a number of immaculately credible sources.
Or… why not simply sit back, relax, and enjoy this 3+ minute tutorial about it I’ve just borrowed from YouTube:
I can’t help but wish I were sufficiently brainy to be part of a scientific medical team that might get the opportunity to scrutinize the leftover fragments of what is allegedly the most ingenious brain in human history. I mean, just try to imagine for a minute all the recorded thoughts, ideas, memories, events, scientific formulae, facts, opinions, experiments, theories, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations that once resided (in biological ones and zeroes) in the brain with the I.Q. that was off the charts.
By contrast, most of us humbly presume that our cranial databases consisting of phone numbers, lottery numbers, computer passwords, favorite memorized song lyrics, movie quotes, baseball stats, family birthdays, and future calendar events that we’ve got socked away “upstairs” don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the Famed Physicist’s. But hold on. Not so fast…
Sure, Einstein’s brain probably is by far the Rolls-Royce of Gray Matter, but on a sliding scale? I contend that mine and yours are nothing less than a pair of shiny, brand-new Cadillac Coupe DeVilles. Because whatever the damn thing is that we’ve got sitting up there under the hood actually is… it’s constantly at work soaking up data like a cosmic sponge from every single thing our eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and fingertips come into contact with. 24/7. From day one (the birthday) until this microsecond. If you ask me, that’s one damn fine, unbelievably busy, multitasking piece of hardware.
And it’s said that under hypnosis, a subject can recall lists of long-forgotten birthday presents she/he received at any age. I mean, how’s that for a universe-class computer?
Mine’s a 1946 model. And like the old Timex watch commercials of the 50s and 60s, it’s taken a licking and kept on ticking. I just did the math, and I find that I’ve been drawing breaths for approximately 42,000,000 minutes give or take, in my lifetime. And that’s only so far. So, I’m getting pretty decent mileage.
And here’s a thought: just imagine hooking up a printer to your brain and commanding it to print out your brain’s entire stored cache from birth. Whattaya think that would look like, hmmm? I’m betting you could tape all the pages together and string’em to the sun and back.
Anyway— in my very first blog post, “Unstuck In time With Billy Pilgrim,” (posted about 24,500 minutes ago) I shared about how so many of my very-long-ago-forgotten childhood memories keep surprising me, just popping up randomly, unbidden and unexpected, into my conscious thoughts. And that’s in stunning detail to boot. The memory I kicked this blog off with was a particular one of when I was four years old, at a family reunion in the early 50’s up in northern Maine. I wonder how many megabytes that little stored event takes up in my skull. I’ll never know. And if I had to guess, I’d speculate that the total data capacity of the human brain is measurable only on yottabytes. Two minutes ago I didn’t know what a yottabyte was. But then I googled “What unit comes after terabyte?” The answer on my screen read “After terabyte comes petabyte. Next is exabyte, then zettabyte and yottabyte.” It turns out that a yottabyte is equal to one septillion, or a 1 followed by 24 zeroes. And honestly, that explanation goes right over my head. I can’t fathom it. A shame we’re not allowed to use the full 100% of our brain’s capacity.
Regardless of that, when I die… there goes my four year old’s family reunion memory.
And there are maybe gigabytes of others. And since I’m wallowing in the plethora of memories that are doomed to die of with my passing, lemme share another sample just for fun, one more specific, little, neural-ones-and-zeroes anecdote that’ll be rolling right along in the hearse with me on the way to the drive-by crematorium someday soon. And perhaps this one will further cause you to reflect on the gems you’ve got stored in that yottabyte treasure chest of yours. Think about all the currently out-of-sight, out-of-mind memories, which are endless, that you’ll be taking with you when your time comes.
So go ahead. Meditate a little. And take yourself a little stroll down your memory lane on a sentimental (and in many cases not so sentimental) journey. And surprise! See what might pop up.
OK. Once upon a time, boys and girls… back in the twentieth century…
OK. See, I have this kid brother. Twelve years younger than me. He’s an engineer. And after high school he enrolled in a Boston engineering college. I know that I, along with the rest of our redneck immediate family, worried needlessly about him leaving our safe, one-horse town environment to venture into the great, who-knows-what of…The City. But he flourished there. And upon graduating with his degree, he was immediately snatched up by a large technological firm and settled down in large housing development in a nearby suburb.
One day shortly thereafter, he telephoned us to relate the shocking news that in his absence someone, or more likely someones, had broken into his new apartment and stolen practically everything but the kitchen sink. Including his trash! (He figured they’d pretended to be transfer station employees and had unnoticeably taken their spoils in trash bags along with them out to the getaway truck.) We were horrified. So immediately my wife and I traveled down to his emptied-out pad to give him some familial love and whatever support we could muster. Late that morning however, we found him in good spirits, taking everything in stride. A lot better than I would have. He assured us that his was, in fact, not a bad or dangerous neighborhood, not really. And we were like… Oh, really?
Anyway, that afternoon we spent some time enjoying the horse races at the old Rockingham Park, dined out that evening, and eventually went to bed. I say bed. Phyllis and I slept comfortably on the living room floor. (Ah, to be young again.) I’m not sure, but I’m thinking The Beagle Boys left my brother his bed. Too large and difficult, probably, to smuggle out in a standard-size trash bag.
But then, sometime in the middle of the night, Phyllis and I were rudely awakened not only by the number of voices muttering just outside the apartment’s front door, but by the disturbing, pulsating, red, blue, and amber lights bleeding through the slats of the picture window’s Venetian blinds. Close Encounters of the Third Kind came immediately to mind. “I’m going out there,” I told Phyllis as I yanked on my jeans. I mean, if there was a ufo landing out there, I’d be damned if I were going to miss out on it.
So I cautiously cracked the door open and slipped out into the coolness of the summer night. There was a large crowd standing stock still on the front lawn, facing away from me and at the three or four strobing police cars, the firetruck, and the ambulance. I sidled in amid the rear of that crowd. I remember looking behind me and spying Phyl’s worried pale face watching me from beneath the lifted blinds.
It took me a few moments to take in all that I was seeing, especially the dreamlike little drama going on at the front end of one particular patrol car. Two cops were down on their knees, flashlights in hand. Curiously, they were peering straight in under the front end of the vehicle. And repeating something over and over. “Come on. Come on out from under there. Now!”
I was thinking, Out from under there? Out from under where? Under what, the patrol car? What would somebody be doing under a frickin’ patrol car? This just didn’t sound good. At all. And talk about eerie. In the frozen, hushed silence, this had all the makings of a bad fever dream.
I began looking around, surveying the lay of the land. The first thing I couldn’t help but notice were the tire tracks in the lawn. A vehicle had obviously come rounding the corner of our building to my left and driven this way, toward the parking lot in front of me, straight across the immaculately mowed lawn. And judging from the six- or seven-inch-deep tire tracks in the grass, and the gouts of mud and grass clumps spun all over the place, this vehicle hadn’t just been going fast, it had been accelerating! My eyes followed the tracks to where they morphed into a pair of black rubber smears on the asphalt of the lot.
“I said… come out of there. NOW!”
Also, a long chain of heavy iron links lay like a rope on that asphalt. Attached to the chain, spaced at intervals, were the uprooted poles that once held the links up as a barrier to vehicles, a fence if you will. Said car had plowed right through said chain link fence, for crying out loud.
“Hey! I’m serious, Mister! Come out!”
I returned my gaze to the tableau before us, as much as I could make out of it between the backs and heads of the witnesses in front. Of course, some of the backs and heads belonged to uniformed police officers. And there were several of them at this scene. I turned to my right and discovered I was standing next to a towering, black, muscled god of a man. I craned my neck up to speak to him and spoke very softly in the silence. “So, uhmmm… what… exactly… happened here?”
He looked down upon my pathetically inquisitive face. “They run him down,” he said. “They. Jus’. Run. Him.Down.”
Now, he didn’t voice that very loudly, but in the solemn quietness it was loud enough that three cops with stern glares immediately snapped their heads back around to see who had just spoken those very accusatory sounding words.
And me? Just like that old Kenny Rogers’ line? You’ve got to “know when to walk away… know when to run.” I executed a smart about-face and scampered back into the apartment with my tail between my legs!
Next morning when my brother, finally awake, stepped out of the bedroom, I hada coffee waiting for him. I’d just purchased the coffee at a convenience store a block away from the apartments, since the coffee maker had gone missing with the stereo, furniture, etc. But the real reason I had gone to the convenience store was to see if I could find out any information as to what had really gone down in the night before.
“So,” I said to my brother, “you like this neighborhood, do you?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Pretty much.”
“You feel safe here.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, I’ll tell you what. take the coffee outside. I gotta show you something.”
Out front in the sunlight now, you couldn’t possibly miss the egregious in-your-face evidence. The lawn was torn up a lot more than I’d been able to notice the night before. It was obvious now that the squad car had been gunning it fast and hard, practically all the way around one side of the whole building complex. Likewise, a much greater length of the uprooted chain fence lay snaked along the edge of the lawn.
According to the convenience store proprietor, the perp had tried unsuccessfully to break into one of the apartments during the day, while the three of us had been spending the afternoon at Rockingham Park. Somebody had caught him in the act, chased him away, and called the police. The cops had apparently decided to keep an eye on the complex and, in fact, had been surveilling the scene of the crime when the perp had actually returned. A chase had ensued, ending up with the perp being apprehended and scoring a free ambulance ride to a local hospital.
Before heading back for home, I asked my brother to send me any more information he could glean about the incident to me because… well, enquiring minds want to know, don’t they. So a week later, this news clipping arrived in the mail:
So. How important is this little incident in the larger scheme of things? Well, despite the fact that I thought it was pretty cool, it’s of no importance whatsoever. Unless you were the perp, of course, whose first name turned out to be Paul. Or some of the cops who ran over and arrested him to the tune of “Bad boys, bad boys. Whatchoo gonna do? Whatchoo gonna do when they come for you?” Oh yeah, and unless you were me, who got a really cool, momentary adrenaline rush from it, something I live for in this otherwise boring world.
But… see, when I die, this little recorded event goes straight down the tubes with me, both of us taking that long Green Mile ride to our local, drive-by crematorium. (Well, except now that I’ve shared it with you.) so for the time being it’s also temporarily nesting like a little egg among your brain cells, too.)
Now, look around. Look at all the people. The people you know. The people you don’t know. The gazillions and gazillions of people you can’t see, those that have lived on this earth since time immemorial and have long since passed. All those brains. Carrying what? Knowledge, that’s what. Valuable experience. Unspoken death-bed confessions. The key to Rebecca. The answer to what’s buried on Oak Island, if anything.
So having pondered what may have gone down the drain with Albert Einstein, whattaya suppose Janis Joplin’s brain took with her? Or Mickey Mantle’s? How about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s? Muhammed Ali’s? Elvis Presley’s? Johnny Carson’s? Leonard Cohen’s? Genghis Kahn’s? Charles Bukowski’s? Your buddy, Joe Six-pack’s? And what other odd jumble of things have you amassed in your hippocampus?
I think of all the zillions of important and unimportant brain records that get flushed down the toilet of death, millions and millions of times every week. How about you? Have you ever had these thoughts about… the brain?
Did I mention that I’m kinda obsessed with the human brain…? I think I did.
At a local hospital back in ‘51, I had my first experience of being put under with ether. My tonsils were to be removed. And little Chicken Little 4-year old me, my sky was falling. I practically had to be hogtied and dragged kicking and screaming, into the operating room. It wasn’t pretty. I didn’t care how sore my sore throat had gotten, I wanted no part of it. There just had to be some other way, any other way. Mostly because this was back in the day when doctors routinely got away with grinning right into your little face and lying through their teeth with impunity. “Now, this isn’t going to hurt one bit, son.” That bullshit lie had been lied to me every time I’d been hogtied and dragged to a doctor’s office before so I was expecting The Big Hurt, but I never expected anything like I was about to experience:
In my memory, this is kinda how it went down:
LITTLE TOMMY’S VERY 1ST BLACKOUT
(let’s play a little “game,” tommy)
my brain still freezing up with
all the new vocabulary:
“tonsillectomy,”
“adenoids,”
“ether”…
(let’s see if you can
count backwards
from a hundred…)
NO. NO!I DON’T WANT TO!
me, 4½, laid out on the table , a little
dissection-tray frog-in-a-johnnie
johnny on the spot box-canyoned in
by a faceless wall of halloween
gowns & masks
onestranger-danger-demon
unstoppering an evil vial of
hospital-fumes concentrate,
terror in a bottle, splashing
a gauze rag with the liquid
(ok, tommy, we start with 100…
right…?
then 99…
so…?
what comes next…?)
the ice-wet invisible-flame rag is
what comes next, slapped over
my mouth & flaring nostrils
and pressed
down
(come on, now… what comes next, tommy?)
stifling my silenced
fire-throated
screechface…
searing my cheeks…
burn-buttoning-up my eyes
what comes nextis that i
become a kicking fighting
rikki tikki tavi clawing the
poison gag off my head and
flinging it splat against the wall
bringing reinforcements
bearing down on me like
towering thunderheads,
one for each limb, one to
clamp my face in a vise
bad-dream people
cooing sweet lies
hell’s pigeons,
overpowering
muscling me
drowning me in betrayal
pinning me down
me struggling down…
succumbing
down…
sinking down
down to the
bottom of a
cellar-dark
sunless
sea…
And right before I completely winked-out in the jet-black ink cloak of death—I saw something!
Bubbles!
At least that’s all I could think to call them. Not like soap bubbles though. You’d never’ve been able to make out bubble-pipe soap bubbles against such a black background. No, these were bright-white rings (not disks), like perfectly round onion rings, only pure electric white. Rising slowly up and out of sight… which is how I knew I was sinking down. Big ones, some small, and some middle-sized. Slowly spooling upward like the music roll in a player piano. And then suddenly floating up into my view as I was sinking my way down, came a definite surprise:
The frogman!
My brain immediately recognized it for what it was because I had a little toy Navy skin diver I’d gotten as a prize out of a box of cereal at home. You’d pack a little plastic compartment in him with baking powder, sink him in your bath water, and he’d bubble for a bit before eventually rise back up, supposedly for air. But the scuba man that I was passing on my way down seemed to be a drawing of one, just like all the little white circles, in that he was basically a pure white outline of a frogman. As if he’d been drawn with a white marker on a page of black construction paper. The vertical cylinder drawn down his back was the “air tank,” and the horizontal oval across his face, the face mask. Just a typical, basic line-drawing picture you might find in a coloring book for toddlers. And he wasn’t animated in any way, didn’t move at all.
And that was that
I woke up minus the tonsils but with an razor-cut sore throat, dried blood on the front of my johnnie (yes, I remember being horrified at discovering that), and the frosty six-pack of cream soda, my reward.
The dream excited me long after. I remember trying to describe it to Mom, Dad, my siblings, and the neighborhood kids, but I really didn’t have much of a command for words back then. “Black,” “frogman,” and “bubbles” didn’t translate all that well. They just thought it was funn. But that experience was really a big deal to me. Kinda magical. I’d never had dreams anything like that one before. And I dwelled on it for weeks thereafter, often trying to sketch that little Navy frogman amid all his bubbles with pencil on paper.
This is what gets me: The brain is such a magical little device. So mysterious, like something you’d expect to find residing in Alice’s Wonderland, like the hookah-smoking caterpillar for instance. But no, this marvel remains alive and kicking right upstairs, embedded just above the shoulders inside that body of yours – your very own little state-of-the-art-PLUS nano-computer, plugging away 24/7 at taking care of your business. It’s just that 99% of the time you’re so busy using the darn thing, you forget it’s even there. Of no conscious concern to you. And why should it be? Who’s got the time to contemplate their navel, let alone their brain all the time, right? I mean, we’d get bogged down in no time if we were continuously pondering all of the lobes and circuits and various functions going on up there. I mean, you’ve got a life to live, haven’t you.. So any philosophical queries about your brain just naturally hafta get put on the back burner, almost totally out of sight, out of mind.
However there are certain times throughout life when your sub-consciousness may get jolted out of its complacency, a time when you end up feeling a rare need to put those workings of that brains-on-board of yours under the microscope. A hospital is a common place for it to happen.
For instance I’ve known of a number of people (but two personally) who sustained temporary brain injuries. In both cases, the injuries seemed to temporarily knock out whatever the little censor-subroutine programmed into our gray matter is… the one that unconsciously keeps us (well, most of anyway) from swearing like jolly Roger pirates all the time in public. (Some of us don’t need a brain injury for that.) One of the patients was a young, fairly saintly Methodist Sunday school teacher, and when her parents came rushing to her side at the hospital, they suffered near deaths from embarrassment when confronted by her barrage of more loud F-bombs than was ever spoken by the cast in the movie The Boondock Saints. How odd, our brain…
Hospital administered prescriptions and anesthesia cantake our brains down paths less traveled, as can high fevers, mental illnesses, abject fear, and even extreme tiredness . Personally, over my relatively long lifetime I’ve personally experienced a fair number of bizarre reactions to hospital-administered anesthesia and medications. They weren’t so much fun when I experienced them, but they’ve become something fun to look back on and talk about in retrospect.
In 1977 I was hospitalized to undergo a laminectomy. Somehow I’d crushed a disc in my lower spine and was in such agonizing pain I could no longer walk or work. surgeon described the procedure I was about to undergo thusly: “Imagine your disc as a little can of crabmeat. When it gets squished , it pops right open, squirting crabmeat every which way. Some of the crabmeat collectson some nearby nerves, hardening there and putting a great deal of unwanted pressure on them. This pressure is what’s causing your extreme pain. A laminectomy is where we go in and scrape away all of that painful crabmeat.
My hospital roommate turned out to be a young Vietnam vet, obviously in much worse pain than I. Our surgical procedures were to be somewhat similar, with his obviously being the more perilous and painful. His injuries were located up along the forward sections of his spine, meaning that the surgeons were going to have to cut their way in from the front, and then push his stomach temporarily out of the way so they could get at his spine. The description made me almost pass out.
After his surgery the next day, he came back reeking of warm antiseptics and moaning ghastly moans in a troubled sleep, especially when they rolled him like a corpse-in-a body-bag back off the gurney and sacked him back onto his bed. I watched as they re-connected him back up to the IV’s and monitors. Then they logged his vitals and swept out of the room. And I, with nothing better to do, settled in for the long watch, waiting for him to come to. A half hour later his longer drawn-out moans started getting mixed with mumbled curses, primarily sighed F-bombs. And at last his eyes, the wild eyes of some crazed, stampeded steer, opened and burned into mine. “Fuck!” It was spat at me like his condition was somehow all my fault.
I said, “Hi.”
Then he jumped the bejeezus out of me by suddenly yelling, “HEY!” at the door to the hallway which had been left open. That volley had stopped a passing nurse in her tracks. She turned, smiled prettily, and said, “Yes?”
“Percodan!” It was spoken like a command, the way someone might say, “Your money or your life!”
Her eyes twinkled as she continued the pretty smile for an overly long moment, sizing him up. “Well, we’ll just have to see what your doctor has to say about that, won’t we.” And away she went on down the hall.
He fired the single word “NO!” after her. I was shocked. But she was gone. So what? The hallway was filled with ambulatory nurses, wasn’t it. And as each one passed, he’d stop moaning long enough to call “Percodan!” at them. They paid him no mind. Apparently he wasn’t unique.
It was both humorous and pathetic. And as time went on, his plea became an auctioneer’s sing-song: “Percodan percodan percodan percodan…” with his hand, held palm up like some legless beggar’s squatting in an alley of a Moroccan bazaar, awaiting alms. “Come on, people! You’ve got it. I know it. You know it. We ALL know it! Eventually, of course, it paid off. When it was time for his meds anyway, of course. A nurse did materialize, dropped the prescribed Percodan into his sweaty little palm, and cooed sweetly, “There. I hope you’re happy now.” He was, thank God. I rolled over onto my back.
A bit later, I noticed it had gotten very quiet. Too quiet, as they say in Hollywood lines. I looked over. And there he was, lying on his side, looking straight back at me, a big grin plastered all over his face. “You’re feeling better,” I observed.
“Oh, you better believe it,” he said. And then he started doing something terrible. He began struggling at pushing himself upward with his elbows and arms! He was trying to… get up!
“Hey! Whatta ya think you’re doing!?”
“Gotta… take… a piss.”
“No no NO! Stop that. Right now! You’ll rip out your damn stitches for Chrissake!”
“I’ll just be a minute.”
“NO!” I clawed the little hospital room buzzer out from under my pillow and laid on it, sounding the alarm, and started yelling, “Nurse! NURSES! HELP!”
He’d actually gotten his legs dangling over the side of the bed before a small phalanx of nurses and doctors rushed in and almost literally tackled him. They got him wrestled down onto his back. In the ensuing struggle, and as they went to work checking his incision, I unfortunately caught just a fleeting glimpse of his wound. And it was awful. A foot or so long, an “smile” cut across the abuse-swollen, pink-salmon abdomen like some Stephen King Halloween grin, all crazy-stitched back together with black surgical threads like the kind Polynesian natives used to sew up the eyes of their infamous shrunken heads back in the nineteenth century . I came close to gagging. Close to fainting. But…
I was also thunderstruck. I had just learned something. I was thinking, Wow. With a few-hours-old serious injury like that, and he was serenely smiling. He was gonna get up on his feet and head to the can. In all that pain. I mean, Jesus, that “percodan’s gotta be pretty powerful and mighty stuff!
Good to know…
The following afternoon it was my turn . I got wheeled back in and dumped like a side of refrigerated beef onto my slab of a bedbed. My roommate, my guru, was sitting up and waiting for me with an opioid grin. The pain got overwhelming. But in no time at all, my coach had me going through the routine by the numbers: Hey! Nurse! C’mon! Percodan percodan percodan… and right away I got to discover first-hand the perk behind what it was that put the perk in Percodan. It was magic. My body was dying in pain and yes, I knew this… but my brain didn’t. It was crazy. Oh sure, there was still a lot of pain, but it was nothing like the dreaded Percodan-less agony, was it. Not only that, I’d also discovered two side effects of The Big Perc that I was going to have to get accustomed to dealing with during my hospital stay.
The first being that Percodan left me drowsy and helplessly prone to drifting off to dreamland without warning several times a day. That wouldn’t be so remarkable if it weren’t for the dreams. I’d be in a car or on a bike that would start rolling, faster and then terrifyingly out-of-control faster and then, all of a sudden WHAM! I’d end up slamming face-first, eyes-wide-open into a brick or concrete wall. Short-lived little dreams, yeah, but they’d jar me awake so violently that I’d almost tear my stitches loose. And man, that was exhausting!
The second effect turned out to be really wild and weird, but didn’t involve dreaming. See, I’d brought along a couple of books to keep me entertained during my stay. One was a paperback anthology of humorous literature. In that one, I began reading one titled “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” a James Thurber short story.” Right from the get-go, I found it myself thinking, Wow, this is pretty cool, so funny! Another page or two into it, it had become outright hilarious, and I was giggling after every paragraph. I couldn’t get over just how damn funny Thurber actually is, you know? And then for some reason, my giggling wouldn’t stop. It was like the babble of a brook, just… on-going. And then…it started getting louder. Sounding more like the low roar of a river than a brook. Shit, man, I was crazy-giggling… I don’t know how else to put it. I mean, yeah, this was one of the funniest stories I’d ever rea in my damn life but somehow I’d gotten stuck in an endless loop. it just wouldn’t stop tickling my funny-bone. I couldn’t stop it. I mean, where were the brakes on this book? I was out-of-control in a world of Can’t-stop-it hilarity!Down-and-out gut-busting, hoo-ha gasping guffaws! Tears-in-my-eyes, snot-running-outta-my-nose, laughing-gas laughter! Sobbing, cackling, wheezing… demented! Help,-somebody-please-come-and-STOP-me… madness!
The two nurse angels of mercy (might have helicoptered down to into my jungle of unreality) began trying to wrench the toxic tome from me, but my iron hands would not be unclamped. I’d become a Charlton Heston. “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!” Momentarily , they were successful at managing to bend one finger back at a time…
They laid me down. They inspected my stitches. They told me to try to calm down. They told me I could have the book back later. “Now, you go to sleep now, alright?” I told them, OK. So they bid me goodnight. And before you could blink,I did fall asleep, totally exhausted. And I was swept right off to La-La-Land where, minutes later, I pedaled myself straight into a brick wall at ninety miles an hour!
On the morning of my final Percodan tablet, taken minutes before, my roommate suggested, “Let’s you and me take us a little walk.” Me being the Cowardly Lion, I cautioned that that probably wouldn’t be such a great idea, it being that we hadn’t been granted permission to stray from our room. By now, however, we were allowed to walking to and fro from the bathroom on our own but, still, I didn’t think…
Well, I wasn’t being paid to think, he countered, and come on, wasn’t I getting sick of being confined to those same lousy four walls too? And of course, I was. We donned bathrobes and hospital slippers. “But not too far,” I cautioned, to which he explained that it was only a matter of a few steps to the elevator. So OK. We stuck our heads out the door, scouted the hallway and, minutes later, pressed the elevator’s “Up” button.
“Let’s go right to the top, the penthouse suites.” And so up we went. And I’m guesstimating the was institution comprised a dozen floors at least. The elevator doors slid open. We peeked out. A low key kind of floor. Less busy than ours. Our kind of floor. We left the lift and shuffled straight across the hallway right into the first room we’d laid eyes on. Unoccupied, yes. Both beds made. Identical to our own downstairs, of course.
The view however, unlike ours, was gorgeous. We were at the top of the world. All sunshine and blue sky. Off to our left lay the shoreline of the beautiful blue Atlantic. Below us, the cityscape. All little streets and side-roads and intersections with toy cars and trucks crawling this way and that, stopping at streetlight intersections and moving on. We were looking for interesting landmarks.
And then we spotted one. The Golden Arches! Mickey D’s! Oh yes! “OK. I’m having the Big Mac meal” he told me. “Want me to pick you up a happy meal?”
“I dunno. Better than the jello and custard we’ve been eating. What toys come with’em this month?”
“Does it matter?”
“Nope. Just hurry back soon? You know I can’t stand the fries when they get col… oh, JESUS!”
Somebody’s loose kite just wafted right up out of nowhere to our window on an updraft of the wind outside, and began hanging there, at a tilt, a matter of inches in front of our very eyes!
“Holy shit!” my roommate added. “That’s a… That’s a… fuckin’ seagull!” And it was, that’s exactly what it was, beady little idiot eyes glaring straight through that window into ours, hooked-beak-to-noses! Hanging airily like a Casper the Flying Ghost balloon on the other side of the glass!
“Oh, wow, man…”
“Yeah.”
“Look at’im! Is he for real?” I mean, somehow, he was remaining just pinned right there in the middle of the air like some fake, yet realistic 3-D display.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I wanna know… like, just how the hell did he even know we were even gonna be up here anyway?”
And it was such a stupid, dumbass, and illogical question that I just laughed right out loud. And my laugh mad him laugh, and… well… that and the fact that I suddenly farted. And Jesus, that’s all it took, it was as simple as that. The giggles began. And the giggles didn’t stop . And oh no, before you could even find the brakes, it was already too late,we were laughing our asses off! Laughing way too loud, both of us, a somehow very strained and muscular laughter but at the same time, the hilarious laughter of little girls at a late night sleepover. And damn, I just knew the Big One was coming, I could feel it, grumbling up there like a winter’s worth of snow starting its grinding, gravitational slide down the roof, wave after wave of it. And then it hit! Both of us this time. Both at once. THE RAPTURE OF THE LAUGHTERS FROM THE RAFTERS! Avalanching down on top of us, burying us alive, smothering, suffocating us! Both of us this time.
Thankfully, a party of three nurses, clucking like a trio of petulant hens, found us. Down on our knees. White-knuckled fingers clamped desperately to the sill, hanging there, sniveling, a pair of snot-nosed, giggle-sobbing bats. Suffering lockjaw from the hard bellowing.
Emergency wheelchairs were rolled in, the “patients” expertly installed into those and then whisked back to the waiting elevator. The “down” button was pressed. (And man, didn’t we need our “down” buttons pressed.) And so down we went. Back down to our shared room, to be put to bed. A couple of naughty little boys. And the contingent of white-coated superiors who summarily “debriefed” them.
Yes, that Percodan was pretty powerful and mighty stuff! I’d never heard of it in the ‘70s until then, and I was surprised, (well, not so surprised, not really) to Google it and find out it is a combination of oxycodone and aspirin. I guess the surprise is that I was doing oxy’s way back then.
The laughter episodes herein can sound pretty funny. But the truth is, there was something very unfunny about it. That being that the uncontrolled, unstoppable laughing was a lot like having a terminal case of the hiccoughs from hell. Percodan, coupled with a innocuously humorous moment, triggered it, but there was the danger of not being able to untrigger it. It became more of an very unfunny seizure, actually. It was an exhausting experience…
So yeah, I find the workings of our brains interesting. Always have. Speaking of which I do, by the way, have a couple more “hospital anecdotes” lined up to add which, I believe, are purely humorous and true. I plan to share in these in “ALTERED STATES II. And if you feel you might be interested, please join me in this next episode of NEARING THE END OF THE LINE, coming out in approximately a week from now.
As a child, I was so spoiled at Christmas time it was embarrassing. See, Mom had grown up in the abject poverty of The Depression. She hadn’t gotten doodly-squat at Christmas when she was a little girl. One of her personal legends was the Christmas when the lone present she received was a coat hanger personally decorated by her older sister. And damn… she’d loved it. Yes, I know. It kind of makes you want to cry, doesn’t it. And it sounds made up, like something right out of the musical, Annie. It wasn’t though, according to my dad who eventually rescued her with a wedding ring. Now, how’s that for a family legend? And he hadn’t had any picnic himself when he’d been a kid, either, but he’d fared a whole lot better than she had.
The sad thing is, she’d gotten somewhat psychologically bent by all that poverty. And as a result, beginning on New Year’s Day (if not earlier) when January had already begun chugging slowly toward the following December, she was once again the volunteer soldier in the lifelong war against poverty-stricken Christmases. Not only for us, her kids, but for all of her nieces and nephews, regardless of what faraway states they lived in, all of whom were living in some degree of poverty themselves. Meanwhile, at home, our Christmas trees were alwaysburied alive in bright holiday-wrapped presents, large and tiny.
So I was lucky, right? Honestly, in retrospect, a little bit too lucky. The bounty of our Christmases wasn’t all that great for my character development, if you must know. Not that I needed any help in that department with the bad genes I’d somehow inherited. I just became more and more all about the getting, getting, getting despite the fact that I was already getting,getting, getting. And I’d get such great gifts. We all did.
For instance, I got a beautiful Lionel train set. I’ll never forget that. It was a dream come true. You’d set it all up on the living room floor and then… you were the engineer. But, and here’s the rub, there were only enough tracks to for a tiny little oval. The beautiful engine and the realistic box cars would go whizzing round and round, over and over. Round and round. Over and over. And you know what? That gets old in a hurry. And why weren’t there more tracks, is what I wanted to know. I wanted a figure-eight railroad. (OK, I probably wanted enough tracks to lay down rails going from room to room all throughout the ground floor of our house.) And then, you had to keep taking it all apart and putting the pieces back in the box again, ‘cause you couldn’t just leave it on the living room floor forever, right? It was a small living room. So that quickly got old as well.
I suppose I should tell you about the cool Lone Ranger ring I got. It was silver and featured a small embossed rendering of the Lone Ranger astride the rearing stallion, Silver. Yes, the very ring under which I brainlessly jammed a pebble between it and my ring finger just above the knuckle, where it got stuck, causing my finger to swell all up. All I can remember now is the horrendous emergency car ride to some old guy’s house, a guy who had some kind of a power saw.
Most Christmas gifts were basically toys and clothing. They didn’t have Amazon gift cards back then. Clothes were just clothes. The toys were appreciated of course, if only for a little while. Why? Because they’re just…things, aren’t they. Days or months later you haul them out of the closet and look them over and you discover they’re the exact same old objects you tired of a long while back. Things. Things that you’d gotten oh so used to, ho-hum. And maybe you’d play with them one more time but…you’d find yourself just going through the motions somewhat.
And yes, I do realize now what a petulant, ungrateful little jerk I was.
As far as gifts go though, I hit the jackpot in 1956 on my tenth birthday. What I got wasn’t a thing. Well, of course it was a thing. It’s just that it was so much more than a thing. A gift that could, and did, keep on giving. Day after day, year after year. It was nothing expensive at all. Small, plain little box— perhaps 10 by 4 by 4 inches. A metallic blue. But I swear, it changed my life. Bent my life like a glass of water bends a ray of light passing through it. And I’m so gratified that it did. Even today.
I got a radio for Christmas that year.
Now when you hear the word radio, you have to keep these things in mind because this was the mid-1950s.
So first of all, to turn it on you first had to plug it into a wall-socket. It wasn’t portable.
Secondly, the broadcast voices and music received were amplified by 3, maybe 4, glass vacuum tubes. So when you turned your radio on, the vacuum tubes would first begin to glow, getting warm and then warmer, till they were radiating an orange glow (which you could never actually see without taking the back of the radio off). The innards of radios were like little ovens back then. Due to the fact that the tubes had to really get red hot in order to amplify the stations’ signals, you always had to wait almost a full minute before the thing would actually start working , unlike today where everything is instantaneous due to the invention of transistors.
Thirdly, almost all radios ran on AM back then, and mine was no exception. With FM, you can listen to your music clearly regardless of the weather; but with AM, any thunder storm 25 miles or so away would be breaking up your programs with unwanted static crashes that could drive you nuts.
And fourthly, with FM you could only pick up stations within about a 30-mile radius, all depending on the height of the stations’ antennae. With AM, especially at night, you can pick up stations thousands of miles away, but with one problem: stations with relatively weak signals would tend to fade in and out, which could also drive you nuts if you were trying to listen to a faraway baseball game.
We had a table-top radio in our kitchen. Mom usually kept that on throughout the day while doing her housework, and I listened too. WABI out of Bangor was always playing the top-40 hits of Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson, Peggy Lee, The Big Bopper, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly. And man, didn’t I just think WABI’s top DJ, Jim Winters, was real-deal cool! He had such a deep voice and he knew everything about the artists. I was gonna grow up and be a DJ myself sometime, for sure. Along with a number of other things.
Funny thing about Jim Winters. He’d host the sock hops over at The Crystal Ballroom, the old renovated church out on South Street. The Crystal was off limits to me because “that’s where the high school crowd hung out.” So who knew what tings might be going on over there? Not me. I didn’t. Not my mom either, but… she could just imagine. But I’d watched a dozen high school rock and roll flicks at Center Theatre, and they were siren songs to me. So one Saturday night, my rug rat buddies and I pedaled our bikes over there and slipped in while Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” was blaring from the loud speakers. So exciting! So forbidden fruit! I know my heart was pounding.
Well, the first thing I noticed was, wow, the great big crystal ball slowly revolving from the ceiling, lighting up the darkness with twirling fireflies of red, green, and blue swimming about the hall. I’d never seen anything like it!
The second thing that hit me was… oh my God, was that him? Yes it was! There he was himself! Jim, the DJ, Winters! But wait, it couldn’t be. What, this was the DJ I’d been putting up on a pedestal all this time?? Holy cow! He looked like some… creepy car salesman. And his head was way too big for his little shoulders. And partly bald? I was aghast.
Thirdly, something stated happening that made me nearly faint from a combination of forbidden-fruit ecstasy and fear. Winters was suddenly announcing over the loudspeaker, “At this time, all the young ladies who’ve signed up for “the Golden Garter Beauty Contest” should now approach the stage.” WHAT? WHAT WAS THAT? And before you could say Sodom and Gomorrah, a line of high school beauties had formed up there amid a raucous roar of hoots and catcalls and wolf-whistles. And holy-moly, didn’t my knees tremble as my eyes followed Young Lady #1 as she marched coyly up to the waiting chair, took a seat, hiked up the hemline of her skirt, and displayed for God and everybody to see… some frilly little lacy elastic encircling her thigh maybe 3 inches or more above her knee! I mean, What would her mother ever think!? And then I thought, Jeez, what would my mother ever think if she knew where I am and what was going on?! Here, a timid little Sunday school voice from my one of my shoulders gasped, “Tommy! You must run home now! This instant!” while the carnival barker voice that lived on my darker shoulder reasoned, “Oh come on, kid. What your mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her… right?No, Stick around. We’ll skedaddle soon, I promise.” Now, I’d heard the word “garter” before, but I had no clue what one actually was until that dizzy night at the Crystal Ballroom!
But I digress. We’re talking about, what… oh yeah, the radio I got as a gift. OK, back to that.
So I imagine you’re probably thinking, OK, you got yourself a radio. What’s the big deal? Because, like, getting a radio today is nothing. But hey, I’m here to tell you that for a ten-year-old in 1956, it was a very big deal. Especially since I was I was transitioning right then from the age of late prepubescence to the age of near puberty. And the songs I was getting interested in were about that mysterious world of guys and girls and… garters and stuff? And sure, we had the kitchen radio. I just couldn’t hear it so well from my bedroom for one thing.
So I plugged my new radio into the wall socket and tucked it away on the floor, right under the head of my bed in easy reach. That way I could just be lying there, reach down, and fiddle with the station dial to my heart’s delight, bringing in the music from the out-of-reach, nearby city stations. But when it got really dark, like when I was supposed to be sound asleep, I found myself reeling in DJs in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and amazingly sometimes as far away as California. I’d never realized what a small-town redneck Jim Winters really was.
But… regardless of all that, I now had… a night life.
When Paul Anka was singing, “I’m Just a Lonely Boy,” then I was that lonely boy. When Elvis was “All Shook Up,” so was I. When the Everly Brothers were frantically trying to “Wake Up, Little Susie,” I was feeling frantic about what I was gonna hafta tell her old man, waiting on us at her front door. And I was getting hip to the ways in which “Love Is a Many Splendid Thing.” But itching to find out what was going on behind “The Green Door,” though I suspected it was probably more of the same (or worse) as what I’d witnessed going on over there at the Crystal Ballroom. And yes, I knew what it was like to be “The Great Pretender,” even though when I listened to Peggy Lee, there was no pretending that I was coming down with “Fever.” Face it, I was in the onset of going batshit girl crazy. But… “what a lovely way to burn…”
Of course the sad thing was, I didn’t have a girlfriend, nor did I have any real clue as to how to get one. I was the shortest kid in my class, after all. And I was deadly shy around girls. One girl I had a crush on stood a foot and a half taller than me. An amazon. So I was doomed. Doomed to be a listener. Just a dime a dozen listener of love songs. And in that capacity, what I did do is get myself a little notebook. Kept it under the bed right next to the radio. Then night after night after night, crawling slowly up and down the dial from 55 to 160 khz, I sampled all radios stations I could find, searching for just the right ones, finding any and all songs that would try to have their way with my bleeding, lonely heart. I’d enter the call signs of the best stations into my log, along with the frequency points on the dial so I could easily find them again, plus each DJ’s name, a listing of the song titles I’d heard and fancied, and the artists’ names. I was becoming quite the bookkeeper. My all-time favorite stations and DJs were WMEX (AM) in Boston with Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsberg at the helm, and “Cousin Brucie” of WINS (AM) New York.
I had a few cronies very much like myself in this regard, and we’d swap our gleaned info next day on the playground. I had it bad. We had it bad. And then, afternoons after school, my notebook and I would stroll down to the neighborhood convenience market where I’d stand in front of the magazine rack, surreptitiously (lest the proprietor catch me) lift one from the display, and hurriedly scrawl as much of the desired song lyrics as I could manage from the two or three pop song magazines that would publish them. I couldn’t afford to buy one on my allowance.
So yeah, I’d become a bookkeeper, a miserable scribe, a lonely hearts chronicler of heartfelt doo wop. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and, sure enough, I was on my way to becoming the hopeless, lifelong romantic I am to this day.
I can clearly remember one particular night of listening when my ears particularly perked right up. The DJ du jour (no, make that DJ de nuit) announced that he was about to play a brand new song, that this would be the song’s exclusive debut, to be performed by a brand new, up and coming group calling themselves The Elegants! Desperately I clawed my little log out and pencil out from among the dust bunnies under the bed. I mean, it was well past midnight and the whole town I languished in was probably sound asleep, so it was like being Superman’s sidekick, Jimmy Olsen, getting a scoop for The Daily Globe! The song title was titled “Little Star,” and opened with the forlorn line, “Where are you, little star…?” It was such a sad song. Another song by some sad and lonely soul like myself. Where was my little star? Next day on the playground, all puffed up with self-importance, I (numero uno, the self-appointed president of our Lonely Hearts Club) altruistically enlightened my sad disciples with the new found data. As it turned out, “Little Star” did reach #1 on the Billboard Charts, stayed there for one week, and spent 19 weeks in the Hot 100. Unfortunately it was doomed to become just a one-hit wonder for The Elegants.
As it is with most people on the planet, I don’t believe I could feel whole without music. Music has become such a major part of my life. It soundtracks me every step of the way. A sad example: when I was a sophomore in high school, my steady girlfriend (yes, it took me that long to finally acquire one of those) gave me my ring back and just flat out and out dumped me. She’d found somebody else, alas. I was devastated. So what did I do? Sat in my room all day pitying myself for a whole month, that’s what. All the while wallowing in my Johnny Cash 45 rpm record collection. There were so many songs to choose from. “Guess Things Happen That way.” “Home of the Blues.” “Cry, Cry, Cry.” “I Still Miss Someone.” “Thanks a Lot” “Walking the Blues.” I mean, oh what an epic pity party that was! But… Johnny helped me pull through, didn’t he. Yes, he did.
Now it’s odd, but in what I call my jukebox brain today, random lyrics get automatically triggered by almost anything anyone says. I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I find it entertaining, personally. Often during conversation among friends, I find myself just coming right out singing a couple of triggered song lines. However I’ve had to learn over time that it’s usually a lot more polite to try to stuff these little outbursts down inside because, understandably, some people can find this Tourette’s-like and, well, just a tad annoying. Just ask my wife.
Now I made the claim earlier that the little radio gift I received bent my life, changed it, and in such a good way. Oh sure, I realize if I hadn’t received my little blue box right then, the music would still have found me, would still be a big part of my life. But it came at a good time. It was something I hadn’t known known I needed, but as soon as it arrived it immediately became an integral part of my emotional life. It definitely filled some gaps.
See, my bedroom was my little fort. Just as the bedrooms of teens today are their fortresses of privacy, their domains. But one of the biggest differences is that my fort didn’t have a smart phone in it. (Hell, it didn’t even a have a phone of any kind in it.) And before 1953 our family didn’t even have a television in the house, let alone one in my bedroom. So I didn’t have some screen to stare down into during every minute of my free time. Those distractions were totally non-existent. Our 1950s “social media” was a physical hang-out, the lunch counter at Lanpher’s Drug Store, right after school got out every afternoon. It was comprised of real face-to-face kids, nothing digital or virtual about it. And for a half hour to forty-five minutes, you’d load up on all the school drama gossip and then head home. Where maybe you had some chores to do first, after which maybe you’d hang out on the family phone for a bit…but you weren’t allowed to live on it. You’d have dinner, maybe do some homework (maybe not, as was often the case with me), but eventually you’d retire to your room.
My bedroom was a quiet, peaceful sanctuary after 9:00 pm or so. I could be alone with my thoughts. Maybe I’d had a rough day and my thinking might’ve gotten hung up on dwelling on what’d happened, so I’d spend some time licking my emotional wounds. Maybe I’d spied some new girl in school that had caught my eye, and I could sorta daydream what she might be like, and what maybe she liked, and OK, wonder if I might ever be one of the things that she could possibly like as well (probably not.) Maybe I’d work on building my model airplanes, or dabble in trying to write out my feelings in a poem or two. But it was my time, me time. We kids had a lot of me time back in the fifties. It was built right in.
And then my radio showed up. AM. Mono, not stereo (stereo wouldn’t be available for a few years, so I didn’t know what I was missing). A plain, homely little thing. But it was a conduit. A conduit to worlds I hadn’t discovered yet. Emotional worlds. It was like a little ride on of the amusements at the carnival, me being the only kid there. I could just strap myself in, and ride any old time. It was a new adventure, one I would never tire of. Rock and roll. Then rock and roll turned to folk songs, which in turn became protest songs, and I was on my way. All because of a little inexpensive AM radio my parents had given me as a gift.
Today, I have Sirius XM. It’s great, it really is. I can stream songs from just about any genre and any time period. So I’ve got it all now. But you know what? It’s great, yes, but it all seems so easy. Too easy. The truth? All these modern-day streaming abilities feel too convenient. It’s a convenience that, I dunno, sucks the serendipity right out of it.
Should I be worried? See, lately I’m sort of hung up on this phenomenon that’s raised its curious head in my life since turning 76 a year ago. It’s an odd thing. Probably an aging thing. A bit troubling but much more intriguing than troubling, actually. Still, a real head-shaker, something I‘ve been mentally chewing on like the dog with its proverbial bone.
“When a person drowns, Your whole life passes before youin an instant!”
You‘ve probably heard that at some point in your life. As a kid, it was simply part of the bigger patchwork of urban legends that swirled around the neighborhood back then, something you took for granted– that, and all the other playground malarkey that was getting passed around back then. It was the Fifties, after all. And whenever I think about it back then, I’d try to imagine what it would look and feel like, having all twelve years of my twelve-year-old life, say, go barreling straight across my vision in the blink of a frickin’ eye like a steam locomotive with 4,380 boxcars of animated images on board behind it . A marvelous set of images.
I remember thinking to myself, But how could anybody ever even know that? ‘Cause if you drowned, you’re dead, right…? And dead men tell no tales, right? So… unless there was somebody right there with that drowning person to witness our guy crying out, “Oh my God! I‘m drowning here and, jeez, my whole life from my birthday till right now just swam by right in front of me… glug glug glug!” then there’d be no way to pass that info on, right?
However in the long run, I was just this young and guileless kid, plus in the Fifties you learned fast that the adults knew everything and you didn’t know squat, so whatever they told you must be RIGHT.
So when my mom “taught” me that if you sliced the tips off both ends of the cucumber that you were peeling, and then rubbed them vigorously in a circular motion back against the cuke’s exposed ends, any bitterness in the cucumber would vanish, like Voodoo. I swallowed that one hook, line, and sinker, and guess what: years later, whenever the grown-up-me prepared a green salad, I was still that guy, the one still performing The “Amazing Cucumber Exorcism Ritual.” And then too, how many years had to pass before I could shed that Never swim until a full hour after eating a meal or all your muscles’ll cramp right up and you’ll drown! (which could only occur, mind you, after your entire life passed before you in a split-second)? Gawd! That’s pretty embarrassing to look back on now. Yep, go back in a time machine and you’ll find my generation a crazy little tribe of junior shamans with so much occult “knowledge” etched between our ears, you’d fall down and die laughing.
But I’m digressing here. Let me get back on track with that aforementioned phenomenon I started out with: Your entire life would pass before you in an instant.
I’ll begin with a confession. In this, my 77th year on the planet, I’ve begun to be plagued with some slightly serious memory loss. But not the garden variety “memory loss” so many of my peers complain about all the time. No, “I’ve got that beat,” as Hooper once assured Captain Quint and Officer Brody during their Who’s Got the Prize-Winning Scar Competition? down in the belly of the Orca. Truth? I’ve pretty much had to get myself over the embarrassment of constantly having to just come right out with, “Hey, look. I’ve got your name dancing right on the tip of my tongue but just can’t for the life of me seem to spit it out. So please accept my blushing apology for having to ask you to remind me what it is again.” And of course 99 times out of a hundred (because we old farts almost exclusively end up chewing the fat with other old wrinkled bags of bones like ourselves), the response I get back is the knowing chuckle and warm assurance not to worry, that yes, they too often find themselves in the very same boat. Now see, thatis what I call the garden variety of geriatric memory loss. The trouble is, with me it’s much much more often than… often. And see, we’re not in the same boat, because my boat’s leaking like a sieve. And sure, we all occasionally cross the living room and end up wondering why the devil it was I came over there for. But with me? Not so much ‘occasionally’ about it.
Fortunately, I’ve become big on The Philosophy of Acceptance over time. So the way I view it, a good portion of the trillions of gazillions of souls who’ve populated the planet between the time of the Neanderthals and the astronauts probably had to deal with memory loss too, so… it’s just my turn, right? They got through it. One way or another. So too then will I. Nothing I can do about it anyway.
However, and here’s the thing, FINALLY:
My actual problem is not the fact that I’m seriously plagued with short-term memory loss. Nope. The problem is something quite the opposite. Allow me to demonstrate with the following dramatic dialogue, depicting a true story (with close to 90% accuracy of the exact word-for-word dialogue recalled from memory [yes, my memory]):
Lights! Camera! ACTION!
Me: Hey, kiddo. Uhmmm… There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.
Wife: What’s that?
Me: Well… alright. I’ll tell you. But I gotta warn ya, it’s weird.
Wife: (sarcastically) With you? Huh. Who woulda thunk it? What?
Me: OK. see, I’m thinking here… alright, here it is: I think I may be dying.
Wife: …What? No, wait wait wait— what’re you talking about?Are youOK?
Me: Well, yeah. Sure. I’m. good. Fine. Basically. But I mean…OK, actually, I’m thinking might be I might be… I dunno. Drowning or something.
Wife:Dying?Drowning?
Me: Well, don’t panic. It’s OK.
Wife: Don’t panic. OK! What, the house is burning down but…don’t panic?
Me: No, it’s not like that…it’s…
Wife: Not LIKE that!? So what’s it like then. Talk!
Me: OK. OK.
Wife: You told me after your last check-up, everything was good, was fine!
Me: It was. It is. It’s just that… just that…
Wife: Just what?
Me: Yes. Yeah, I will! I am…fine. See, it’s just that… OK, you remember that old saying about how… just before a swimmer drowns, his whole life passes before him? You remember that? His whole frickin’ life?
Wife: Hey! Talk to me. Now. And make sense. I mean it!
Me: Well, see, that’s been happening to me lately. Only not in a flash like, you know, just before going down for the third and final time.But see, thishas been going on for…. months.
Wife: You lost me. Your whole life…? In months?
Me: Well it seems like it anyway. Pretty much. Not in a blink of an eye, no. But still, that’s what this whole thing’s been reminding me of. Only like in slow motion…
Wife: Your life. Passing before you? Your life which you haven’t even… finished yet?
Me: I know. I get it.
Wife: And this has nothing to do with dying or swimming.
Me: That was… a metaphor
Wife: So, then…
Me: Look. I know it sounds stupid. It is stupid. But it’s happening to me. And I was just needing to tell you what’s been going on! To get it off my chest.
Wife: You’re not dying…
Me: Not in the forseeable future anyway…
Wife: So your health… it’s OK.
Me: For 77 anyway. You know how my health is. I haven’t kept anything from you.
Wife: Oh please.
Me: Hey…what can I say? My life is passing before me. Or so it seems, is all. So… it’s LIKE the drowning thing.
Wife: Even right now?
Me: Well, no. Not this minute. It’s not a constant thing. I do get breaks in between. Just…it’s on-going. This morning. Last night. Last week. Twenty minutes ago.
Wife: Twenty minutes ago.
Me: Yeah. Approximately. Pretty much.
Wife: Twenty minutes ago what?
Me: Another memory. Again. Clear as a bell.Which is why I’m bringing this up right now. Fresh on my mind. Just sitting there on the couch and it popped into my head in a flash. I didn’t ask for it. But when it happens, it’s just like I’m there, it’s like an industrial strength déjà vu. Almost like Virtual Reality. But not.
Wife: You said again. When was the last one before that?
Me: I dunno, sometimes when I’m lying in bed, almost asleep. Or… just lying awake in the morning, you know? Quite often it’s when I’m in the shower with all those little jets of hot water needling my scalp. Flash-backs from early childhood. My brain’s a regular amusement park these days.Very specific and detailed memories.
Wife: OK then. So? What was this one? This time.
Me: Oh. Something that happened back when I was, what… four? That big family reunion up north. Before Joyce and Bruce were even born, so just Ma, Dad, Denny, and me. This isn’t the first or only time I’ve ever reclled it. I’m not saying that. Actually, it’s a common remembrance for me. Part of my personal history. In fact, I think I’ve probably told you about it before.
left to right: me, Mom, Dad, and Dennis
Wife: Your mom’s family. Yeah…
Me at the Craig Reunion 1950
Me: The rooster?
Wife: Oh. OK. Yeah. That definitely… sounds familiar.
Me: No idea what triggered it today though. It just came flooding back right out of the blue. With a vengeance. In the past, whenever I’d happen to think of it, it’s always been kind of a flat, ho-hum, standard, two-dimensional memory. No where near as vivid as it was today. A steamy hot, sunny summer afternoon. I only mention that because, God, I was conscious of the sun’s heat prickling the skin on my bare arms. See, that’s the thing. These recent remembrances are always so vivid now. The only way they could be moreso would be if they were in 3-D. They’re not. It’s just, most of the senses are all in play. Smells. Tastes. Touch, etc. But why it popped up today? Or when they pop up any day? No clue. They just…come.
Wife: What are some other memories for instance?
Me: God, such a slew of’em. Fight on the playground. Getting hopelessly lost in Bangor as a little kid. Fighting tooth and nail on the operating table, age seven, being anesthetized against my will. Plucking slimy night crawlers out of the wet grass late at night with a flashlight. Memories. I got a lifetime of’em. And all… saved up apparently. Because they’re all still there! Seemingly! Everything I’ve ever done, every minute of my life is… right there like an apple ripe for the picking. Coming back to wow me all this last year. Like watching, no, experiencing, a movie.
And sure, I’m not drowning, but honestly? It really seems like my whole life is passing before me, or will have before I’m through. Not in a flash, no, in real time. So odd. Gotta say, I kinda enjoy it actually.
Wife: Well, it’s good if you can enjoy it.
Me: But you know what? There’s an irony standing out like a sore thumb here. I mean here I am in the present, losing my short-term memory. Struggling to come up with acquaintances’ names for crying out loud, and even common everyday words? Our conversations have become games of charades, you guessing and supplying me with the words I’m fishing for, to finish my freakin’ sentences. So damn frustrating. Embarrassing. But then on the contrary, my long-term memory is kicking into over-drive, over-compensating off the charts.
Wife: Seems like you’re handling it…pre tty well.
Me: Yeah, I guess. I’m unable to answer the simple question, What’d you do thisweekend? But on the other hand, I dare you to ask me about what I was doing at that Craig family reunion in Presque Isle as a three and a half foot tall little tyke back in the summer of 1950. I can describe the half ear of buttered corn-on-the-cob, peas, potato salad, hot dog, chips, and the brownie I’d already taken a bite out of, all lying right there on my paper plate… me, belly down in the grass, propped on my elbows. But man oh man, I can really paint you a detailed damn mug shot of that feathered, lizard-eyed, Godzilla Rogue Rooster that came lurching down over me suddenly from out of nowhere and landing right in my picnic plate! Red wattles a-flapping all herky-jerky, his hellish eye giving me the hairy eyeball! Me screaming and wailing bloody murder while he went to stabbing the hell out of the corncob with his killer beak, rolling peas overboard everywhere into the grass! I mean, I’d never even seen a goddamned rooster in my 4-year old life before that, let alone beak-to-nose!
But anyway, here I am today, a 77 year old retired English teacher who’s seemingly become “unstuck in time” like Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s protagonist in SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, and also undergoing something similar to what Daniel Keyes’ character, Charlie Gordon, went through in the novel FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON. Charlie being the fictitious mentally challenged man who undergoes experimental brain procedures that stimulate his 5th-grade-level intelligence into rapidly blossoming to the point of unparalleled genius, only to sadly lapse back into an even more severely handicapped condition than before as the effectiveness of the drugs dissipates at the end. And yes, here’s me, a guy who was never either mentally handicapped or anywhere near a genius, but who did rise from an embarrassingly mediocre high school student to earning a Bachelors in education, and then going on to teach high school composition, vocabulary, and English literature for 34 years. And guess what: now being reduced to the ignominy of having to rely on the kindness of strangers and loved ones to charitably drop the pittance of a common noun, verb, or an acquaintence’s name in my rusty tin beggar’s cup to keep me going in a conversation.
So after a not-so-successful attempt at instilling the beginning of a love of poetry in the hearts of my little motorcycle EXILES with the poem “The Family” by Jacques Prevert (yeah, Jack the Pervert from my previous BUMMER II episode), I had to reach deep down into the dark recesses of my Poetry Arsenal. And the lethal weapon I pulled out (heh) was as ticklish as nitroglycerin: Bukowski!
A movie based on Charles Bukowsi’s life was aptly titled Barfly. Apparently, that’s pretty much what he was. Mickey Rourke played Hank, “Hank” being Charles’ popular nickname. Most of the film takes place in sleazy barrooms and hotel rooms with his sleazy girlfriend, Wanda (Faye Dunaway). Guess why. Right.
Hank lived his adult life as a functioning alcoholic.
Despite that life, he was a prolific and surprisingly successful writer. According to Wikipedia, “Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s. He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books during the course of his career. One of these works he titled Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window,” (a title that hints at a darkness within the man). Songwriter Leonard Cohen once said of him, “He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”
The Wikipedia article further says, “Bukowski’s work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground newspaper Open City… In 1986 Time magazine called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife.’ Regarding his enduring popular appeal, Adan Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski’s appeal … [is that] he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp fiction hero.’” So Bukowski, sleazy drunk that he was much of the time, enjoyed a global popularity, as the number of biographical texts dissecting the man will attest.
The first of his poems I selected for my EXILES (others were soon to follow) is “Me Against the World,” a seemingly appropriate motto for my boys. I’d discovered it serendipitously. One afternoon, browsing the Poetry Section of a Borders’ Book Store, I happened to pluck a random book from a display, flip it open to the middle like cutting a deck of cards and… Jesus,there it was. And it had already had me in its death grip after only the first six or seven lines. It felt as if I were to look into a mirror, I’d discover that I’d just suffered a metaphorical black eye! That was honestly a day I can’t forget.
Now I need to point out that this book was an anthology in the annual Best of American Poetry series, so “Me Against the World” wasn’t one of those elegant, cerebral pieces I apparently was expecting that day. I bought the book immediately. I’d become a Hank Bukowski fan immediately. I was taking my first step on a counterculturally sentimenal journey of a thousand Bukowski poems.
Back in the classroom, I opted to dramatically read the poem aloud first, before passing out the lyrics sheet. I wanted to grab their rapt attention the same way the poem had initially muckled onto mine in Borders. I began with the opening, “when I was a kid one of the questions asked was, would you rather eat a bucket of shit or drink a bucket of piss? I thought that was easy. ‘that’s easy,’ I said, ‘I’ll take the piss.’ ‘maybe we’ll make you do both,’ they told me.”
Now if you happen to be new to Bukowski, you are probably finding yourself as much in a state of shock as I was at first. Even nearly every one of those Exiles’ jaws had just landed in in their laps, not because the language came as a shock, but because the language had occurred spoken out loud by a high school English teacher in a public school classroom. It was an unusual moment indeed. But please, dear reader, please hold on and bear with me. You will be rewarded, I swear.
Back to the poem:
ME AGAINST THE WORLD
by Charles Bukowsky
when I was a kidone of the questions asked
was,would you rather eat a bucket of shitor
drink a bucket of piss?I thought that was easy.
“that’s easy,” I said, “I’ll take thepiss.”
“maybe we’ll make you do both,”they told me.
I was the new kid in theneighborhood.
“oh yeah?” I said.“yeah!” they said.there were
four of them“yeah,” I said, “you and whosearmy?”
“we won’t need no army,”the biggest one said.
I slammed my fist into hisstomach.then all
five of us weredown onthe ground fighting.
they got in each other’s waybut there were
still too many ofthem.I broke free and started
running.“sissy! sissy!” they yelled.“going
home to mama?”I kept running.
they were right.I ran all the way to my house,
up the driveway and onto theporch and
into thehousewhere my father was beating
up my mother.she was screaming.things were
broken on the floor.I charged my father
and started swinging.I reached up but
he was too tall,all I could hit were hislegs.
then there was a flash of red andpurple
and greenand I was on the floor.
“you little prick!” my father said,“you
stay out of this!”“don’t you hit my boy!”
my motherscreamed.but I felt good
becausemy fatherwas no longer hitting
mymother.to make sure, I got up and
chargedhim again, swinging.there was
another flash of colorsand I was
on the flooragain.when I got up again
my father wassitting in one chairand
my motherwas sitting inanother chair
andthey both just sat therelooking at me.
I walked down the hall and into
my bedroom and sat on thebed.
I listened to make sure there
weren’t any more sounds of
beating and screamingout there.
there weren’t. then I didn’t know
what todo.it wasn’t any good outside
and it wasn’t any goodinside.so I
just sat there.
then I saw a spider making a web
across a window.I found a match,
walked over,lit it, and burned
the spider todeath.
then I felt better.
much better.
This gut-wrenching piece of creative writing still affects me, to this day. And believe me, did we ever have a great discussion, or what!? A discussion on the significance of this one, on them, and on me; a discussion on poetry, on creative writing. God, I was clam-happy at the end of that class period. Stories were triggered and told. I felt myself really starting to bond with these yahoos. And once again, I was left with the distinct feeling I’d won implicit “permission” to try one more poem. As long as it was written by this dude, good ol’ Hank Bukowski. Or somebody very much like him. You know. No Daffodils, no clouds. But I had a number of them waiting in the wings.
Stay tuned for a few more of my fave Bukowski hits coming up in my next episode, “Bummer IV.”
(I’m calling this one “Part One,” not because I have a specific Part Two in mind at all. It’s just that, knowing me, I’ll probably have a couple hundred Parts on this theme. I mean, who knows?)
We begin…
As a 34-year teacher (a career that came to an end over two decades ago), I was forever unearthing priceless little tidbits of poetry from the many literature anthologies I’d inherited in whatever classroom I was assigned. That was one of the big English teacher perks, for me. I collected any and all the ones that touched me in one way or another, and now I carry around a gazillion of them in my iPhone (well, technically they’re warehoused in the cloud). But… anyway, sometimes when I’m languishing in a doctor’s waiting room, manning the circulation desk during the quiet moments at the local library, or riding in the passenger seat while my wife, Phyllis, drives the car, I can simply pull out the phone and alter my mood with a poem, just like that. And I have so many genres: love poems, war poems, protest poems, sci-fi poems, beat poems, horror poems, anger poems, hilarious ones, short ones, endless ones… you name it. Strange little things, smart phones. You never really know who’s packing what.
Sometimes there have been these important-to-me poems in my life that I’ve somehow managed to lose and, consequently, I’ve ended up investing a great deal of my years tracking them back down. Which is next to impossible if they’re ancient and especially if you can’t for the life of you conjure up the title or the poet’s name. But if and when I ever do recapture one of those, there’s a little celebration that goes on down deep inside me that flutters my heart (somewhat like A Fib only more fun). I kid you not.
Here’s a true story. About three or four months ago, a TV commercial was advertising an upcoming boxing match featuring a boxer whose last name was Saavedra. I probably shocked my wife when I leapt up of the sofa and shouted, “That’s IT!THAT’S HIS NAME!” Then of course I had to explain to her what the hell I was yelling about.
Well, a little poem that I’d discovered way, way back when had somehow vanished from my collection. It was just a snippet of a thing, a little love poem only a few lines long. Wouldn’t be deemed important to most of the citizens of our planet but, as I often say, we’re all occupying our own little unique spaces on the social spectrum, aren’t we. And yes, it was a love poem. I’m a sucker for love poems if they’re well-and-creatively written. The main reason I was having no luck recovering this one is because of the hard-to-remember-let-alone-pronounce name of the poet: Guadalupe de Saavedra. Plus wrack my brain as much as I could, the title refused to leave the tip of my tongue. For years! And then…
Bingo! There was some unpoetic dumb-ass boxer named Saavedra going to box some other unpoetic dumbass palooka on TV. And finally (and serendipitously) gifted with the boxer’s name, I only had to seek the help of the Great God Google. Ding! Retrieved it in five minutes!
The poem is titled “If You Hear That a Thousand People Love You.” And today is the perfect day for me to share this love poem here, it being Phyllis’ and my 57th anniversary today (7/30). So that’s got me feeling all warm and fuzzy here. Spoiler alert: I’m such a damn romantic. But now that I’ve talked about it and put it on a pedestal, I imagine you’ll look at this piece off fluff and say, “What the hell does he think is so special about this thing?!” And that’s OK because, right after this poem, I’m going to share two or three poems I’ve written to Phyllis over time and, yeah, sure, they’re bound to be deemed head and shoulders above this one, right?
IF YOU HEAR THAT A THOUSAND PEOPLE LOVE YOU
by Guadalupe de Saavedra
If you hear that a thousand people love you remember… Saavedra is among them.
If you hear that a hundred people love you remember… Saavedra is either in the first or very last row
If you hear that seven people love you remember… Saavedra is among them, like a Wednesday in the middle of the week
If you hear that two people love you remember…one of them is Saavedra
If you hear that only one person loves you remember…he is Saavedra
And when you see no one else around you, and you find out that no one loves you anymore, then you will know for certain that… Saavedra is dead
Yeah, not really such a great poem perhaps. But when I first found it, I was smitten. My favorite line is Saavedra is among them,like a Wednesday in the middle of the week. I dunno. I can identify with a love like that.
Story of my life with Phyllis: since I was a high school junior and she my freshman sweetheart in 1962-63, I went crazy writing poems for her, about her, and about us. I was a rhyming fool, a creator of bad doggerel (poetry written by dogs, I was once told). I don’t know why, but I was madly driven to capture The Adventure of Our Old-fashion Crush with all its ups and downs on reams of notebook paper. Each verse was honestly a sonnet in itself. I get this feeling I might still have a few “chapters” of those maudlin verses lying around somewhere, in a box maybe, but I couldn’t find them. Just as well, I imagine. I’m pretty sure I’d be embarrassed by them today.
Funny, immature me, I’d go to the movies and hear how cool Clark Gable or Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart would speak to women, and then I’d try to model my own ‘lines’ after some of theirs. One time at Phyllis’ home, I was sitting at her kitchen table and watched her making me a cup of coffee. Then, as she brought it over to me, I dunno, the whole scene felt so domestic and she so wifely, that I Abruptly came out with this one: “Hey, you and me? Let’s grow old together.” Now how corny is that?
OK, I’ll tell you how corny it is. It’s laughingly as embarrassing as a Harrison Ford line in the 1973 film, American Grafitti. The year is 1962. Ford plays Bob Falfa, the reckless badass dude driving a hot, souped-up, black ’55 Chevy. Bob wants to prove his car is the fastest car in the valley. So, he’s itching to go up against Paul Le Mat’s character, John Milner, who drives the locally famous yellow 1932 Ford 5-window coupe, the hot rod that had long been the fastest car in the valley. Before the race, however, badass Falfa picks up Laurie (Cindy Williams) who’s virginal, vulnerable, and on the rebound from having just been dumped by her steady, Steve (Ron Howard). Unfortunately she’s about to become the lady-in-distress as Falfa has decided she will accompany him in the ill-advised speed race out on the outskirts of the city. But first, he tries to come on to her, in his way (who wouldn’t) but the way he attempts it is something that is so weird and awkward it caused me to cringe. First he grows all serious, then looks her straight in the eyes, and after a moment (what?) begins ridiculously singing “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific. I know, right?! Don’t believe me? Stream the flick. It’s a wonderful film (with the exception of Ford’s musical come-on). But as awkward as that was, it’s a little bit too similar to my out-of-the-blue “Let’s grow old together” attempt. Oh well, it’s funny now. And of course it’s taken 60+ years, but Phyl and I eventually did succeed in accomplishing just that.
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
you crossed the square heading west on main… we were the yang and the yin
i was the fire & you were the ice, the odds stacked against us had loaded the dice
but we didn’t know that then
i watched you walk with your new friend & talk, unaware i was being reeled in
that was the fateful momentous day in our tinytown lives so mundane
just a fall afternoon with the sun dropping down
autumn leaves underfoot, yelloworange&brown
on the corner of north street and main
i watched you walk with my cousin & talk
(through the drugstore display window pane)
the gambler in me told my heart & my soul: though opposite charges attract
i’d look you in the eye & retain full control…
our fate’s cosmic die rode the crapshooter’s roll
& rolled boxcars— the odds had been stacked
(magnetic north pole & magnetic south)
our futures were processed & packed
the bi-polar pull of our gravities’ force set our orbital paths for collision
inevitable contact… there was no recourse
our hormones alone were our single resource
the dice roll had made its decision
no time for reflection, no room for remorse
the outcome was nuclear fission
when matter and anti-material collide: cataclysmic, the chain reaction
its thunderclap echoes through all space and time
it alters the future’s & past’s paradigm—
twin suns, we were lock-stepped in traction
each destined to fall as the other would climb
the orbital dance of co-action…
you crossed the square heading west on main (we were the yang and the yin
i was the fire & you were the ice
we were starcrossed as soulmates—indelibly spliced
but we didn’t know that then)
i watched you walk with your new friend & talk
aware you were reeling me in
FETCHING
needling your quilt in your lamplight halo
you look over and catch me
your “RCA dog”
gazing into your eyes
my spiritual tail beginning to wag
and me growling some humorous
something or other—
this old dog’s old trick
for fetching me
the biscuit
of your sweet
laughter
THE BIG CHILL
“we got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout”
— johnny & june carter cash
you were the spark
that ignited the fuse
for the
big bang
of my hitherto
relatively uneventful
love life
it flashing incendiary
roman candles & rockets
molotov-cocktail love
flame-thrower love burning
magnesium hot
launching me in a straight trajectory
right over lover’s leap at
e=mc2
but that was in my callow youth
today
like the olympic flame
my love for you
still burns
patient now & serene
fireplace cozy
cup of cocoa hot
electric blanket warm
Happy 57th anniversary to us (7/30 /1966 -7/30/2023)
So once upon a time I found myself on a jumbo jet headed for something called Basic Training. I say found myself, not because I was just waking up from amnesia. And not because I’d been drafted, either. Nothing as exotic as that. And in case you’re wondering, I was stone cold sober. Oh, I could’ve listed off the steps that had placed me on that plane. It’s just that the Big Decisions in my life never seemed entirely real… until, that is, I’d end up landing on both feet in some rock-hard consequence that I might not be too happy with. That’s just the way most of my life was— always sort of discovering myself somewhere or other, involved in doing something I really hadn’t particularly chosen and didn’t necessarily want. Strange, huh. I was born without foresight.
Something other than me seemed to be the force that determined what I was to become, and when. Consequently, I’ve felt a strong kinship with Juliet’s Romeo when he cried out in anguish, “O, I am fortune’s fool!” (act 3, scene 1). Remember, he’d just accidentally executed Juliet’s favorite cousin Tybalt, something he hadn’t planned on doing at all. In fact, it was the last thing on earth he’d wanted to do. But nonetheless, there he was, stuck with the consequences. That was so me of him. Well, I’ve never killed anybody. Still, I see myself suffering from something close to acute Fortune’s Fool Syndrome.
My parents were loving parents. I know they loved me and my siblings dearly. We were blessed. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was me. See, they made the decisions. All the decisions period. And I guess I didn’t always like that so much. For some reason I’d been born downright contentious and I had a dark side. (I wasn’t all bad. Half of me was good… I swear). But as the black sheep of the family, I never saw much fun in practicing responsible-decision-making. There was just something off about me. Dad tried his darndest to teach me responsibility, but all of his lessons just seemed to drip off me like water off a duck’s feathers. My mind was always elsewhere. I dunno, was it my DNA? I often wondered. I really did.
For instance when Disney’s Pinocchio hit our local theater again, I know I identified with Pinocchio. The movie left me feeling guilty for some reason, and chewing on some probing questions about who and what I was, even at age ten…
ON FIRST WATCHING PINOCCHIO
Did the virgin-pure, see-no-evil hearts
of any of those other little boys in the
fllickery moviedark leap up (like mine?)
at all those all-night carnival-barker
come-ons amid the sparkleworks of
Pleasure Island?
Those free Big Rock Candy Mountain
Cigars, say?
That stained-glass church window just
begging you to pitch a brick through it?
The punch-somebody-in-the-face-&-
get-away-with-it “Rough House”?
And the mugs of free draft beer served at
The Pleasure Island Pool Hall Emporium?
Did the NO MORE CURFEWS concept set
their y-chromosomes a-resonating like
little tuning forks? Did Disney’s Pinocchio
arouse the snakes & snails and
puppy-dog tails in
those guys too?
Or (good lord!)
was I the only
donkey boy
in the
crowd?
Anyway, I know I never liked my parents’ lessons and rules, but it was made clear to me from the beginning that I didn’t have to like them. It just was what it was. I always fought against them, but pretty much all my rebellions were firmly and promptly squashed. Dad was military after all, served as an NCO who, a few years prior, saw extreme combat in World War II. So… obedience, and all.
But Ma’s rules were crazy. Her being a fundamental evangelist, she was always on guard and ready to exorcise the devil in me. Would you believe she once made me swear not to get a girl pregnant, simply because some high school girl right up the street had gotten in the family way? And would you believe I was in third grade at the time; knew ZILCH about how to, or how not to, do that particular thing but swore up and down and crossed my heart anyway that I would never do it? Poor Ma. She also made me pledge that I would never fall in love with a Catholic girl. And then one day, my sophomore biology lab partner (a year older than me) said she’d like to meet me at the hometown basketball game that night. With a fluttery heart, you bet I showed up. We sat with our backs against the wall in the top tier of the bleachers and… before I knew what was going on, I found myself lip-locked in a make-out embrace! I know! I came back home from the game later that evening just in time to hear the tail-end of my older brother squealing on me, “…and she’s Catholic too, Ma!” Yep. That was every bit as shameful as when Jerry Seinfeld’s “parents” found out their son had been spotted making out in the movie theater during Schindler’s List! But what the hell. Later in life, yeah, I married myself a good Catholic girl.
So anyway, I ended up just floating down river of my life through the puberty years and beyond like some youthful Long John Silver on The Good Ship Lollipop. I lived only for the moment, totally oblivious to any real decisions and future planning that I needed to be making. They’d take care of themselves when the time came, right? They always had. Somehow. The only gnawing problem was, as time went by, I began feeling this ominous, not-so-far-off-and-getting-nearer metaphoric roar of Niagara Falls up ahead, that drop-off where I’d someday find myself deep-sixed down in Adultsville and on my own..
Back through fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, our teachers would subject us to The Annual Career Planning Unit. Each year the student must select a career that he/she might possibly to pursue for consideration in her/his possible future. The assignment: a three or four week project wherein an encyclopedia entry on the selected career might be painstakingly copied down verbatim (no computers, no Google back then), a worker in the selected field might be contacted for a personal Q&A interview, informative pamphlets might be sent away for, etc. I was excited about this project. If you’d asked me back then I’d say, “I can tell you exactly what I’m going to be when I grow up.” It was gonna be the same thing I’d always wanted to be since giving up being a singing cowboy movie star like Roy Rogers: a bona fide United States Air Force jet pilot ace. So yeah, I hit the old library encyclopedia, sent for some packets, talked to the flyboy down at the local recruiting office, and presented my report to the class as glowingly as the infamous Ralphie of The Christmas Story movie ever delivered his eloquent plea for his Red Ryder BB rifle. But…right off the bat, I had luckily stumbled upon the two most critical keys to becoming America’s next flying ace: simply a minimum height requirement (I wasn’t there yet, but it was still early), and a vision score of 20/20. Bingo! I already had 20/20 vision! Simply grow a few more inches and I’d be in like flint! So there. I was practically flying my Sabre jet already.
By the time I got to high school I had only another inch to grow, so things were looking up. I loved talking about my future in the wild blue yonder. Actually I talked about it too much because as my junior year rolled around, I was abruptly sat down at the dinner table to have the talk with Ma and Dad. (No, not that talk. I never got that talk, actually.) It was a rather grim family meeting. The topic was that my future beyond high school was not up to me. (What?)It was up to them. ( I said, What?!)And it didn’t involve the service. It involved college. (Wait a minute. As Cool Hand Luke was once informed, What we had there was a failure to communicate.) I didn’t want to go to college, I informed them. It was gonna be the Air Force for me. No, I was informed, it was going to be college for me. “We’ve thought about this, your mom and me, and what we’ve decided is… well… you’re going to be the first one in our family ever to graduate with a college degree.”
I was dumbfounded! “Oh. You’ve thought about it, have you? How nice! Funny, I can’t remember me thinking about it. Now why’s that? Oh yeah, now I ‘member: it’s ‘cause: That’s. Not. What. I.Want. Let somebody else do it!” It was for my own good, I was told. No, I argued, it was for my own bad. It would be a waste of my time. Because maybe they didn’t realize it, but (and oh boy, here came my two aces in the hole!) I had just that year met my height requirement (barely) and plus, I already had 20/20 vision.
“What, you think that’s all it takes to be a pilot. I’ll tell you what it takes. It takes a good solid math background for one thing. And your grades in trigonometry aren’t too stellar right now, are they. Listen, I had to take calculus.” Hell, I didn’t even know what calculus was. Whatever it was, it sounded awful. But anyway, long story short— ever hear that song, “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”? I was destined to lose. It couldn’t have gone any other way. Why? Because my whole little lifetime, I’d been brainwashed into knowing that I was under their thumb. Stockholm Syndrome. Losing was all I knew.
Growing up, Dad was “my agent.” He was always getting me jobs I didn’t want. I remember one beautiful, sunny, summer afternoon. I was just sitting on our front steps staring blissfully up at the clouds, chewing on a stalk of grass. Suddenly, dad’s pick-up stormed into the driveway. He rolled his window down and called out, “Get in.”
I was confused. “What’s going on?”
“You’re gonna be mowing lawns at the local cemeteries this summer.” Hey, I didn’t even like having to mow our lawn, let alone somebody else’s, but cemetery plots? Alas, within minutes I found myself a fresh-fish kidnap-ee among a rag-tag brigade of whiskered old scarecrows trundling behind lawn mowers. Another summer he got me two wretched custodial jobs which I thought way too demeaning for the likes of me, as the last thing I wanted to be known as was a friggin’ toilet-cleaning, garbage-hauling “janitor.” But the topper was that evening he came home from work grinning and told me I was now an employee at the local ESSO station. “What!? Hey, I… no offense but see, I don’t know the first thing about working at a gas station! I’m…not even qualified.” That seemed to tickle his funny bone as he assured me that the proprietor had personally assured him that, not to worry, he’d turn me into a grease monkey in no time flat. “A grease monkey?”
OK. But before I go on here, allow me to pause and come clean about something. Me wanting to be a flyboy ace? That was stupid. An irresponsible childish fantasy, just as stupid as my once wanting to be a singing cowboy movie star. Very likely I would have washed out of flight school in the first day but of course, I couldn’t see that then. A) I was oh so immature, B) a drama queen, C) a spoiled little brat, and D) a wuss to boot. Ma and Dad were right much more often that I was wrong. It’s true. I was the problem. I’m embarrassed right now traveling back there in my mind and witnessing, in retrospect, my childish behavior. All my whining and complaining would’ve fit right into some black and white 1950s sit-com like Father Knows Best or My Three Sons. Shame on me. OK? OK. There. I feel better now. Young Tom, drama queen extraordinaire.
That being said, my immaturity didn’t do me any favors in my actual young adulthood. Sure, I ended up enjoying a 34-year career in education, but how did that happen? Answer: by default. I’ve said that a thousand times. By default. (I’m smiling to myself now because that just reminded me of a comical quote from Homer Simpson: “Dee Fault Dee Fault!! My two favorite words in the English language!”)
And the fact that I became a teacher by default points right back to that very time I was having the spat with my parents about Air Force vs. College.
When I‘d finally caved on the issue (I always caved), and when it was obvious to all three of us that I’d really caved, Ma and Dad were excited. Me? I was left feeling sad, powerless, bruised, and happily wallowing in self-pity. So when the prodding started as to what I might want for a career and where I might like to apply for school… my martyr’s answer: “I don’t care. Why don’t you pick.” And when they started really pushing it, I’d get passively aggressively sarcastic. “Oh I dunno. Brain surgeon? Maybe a rocket scientist? I figure with my grades, I might as well go to Harvard. Or if I can’t get in there, then Yale is a shoo-in.” Then my Guidance Counselor got into the act of course. Pick a card. Any card. So I ended up picking the Joker, the least expensive card in the deck, which just so happened to be a state teachers’ college. Maine residents like myself were gifted with a seriously much reduced cost of tuition at state colleges. Did it matter to me that it was a teachers’ college? Not in the least. Because who cared? What difference did it make? Bring it on. Oh, pity-party me… So the die was cast by default.
So, off to college I went. And you ask, How was college? Great. I loved being off on my own, away from the parents. I loved living in a dorm. I loved making new friends. Hell, along the way I accidentally fell in love with the courses I was taking, not that I meant to. And of course as time went on I also fell in love with learning to drink and being quite utterly irresponsible. Goes with the territory. But when it was over, boy didn’t it ever used to piss me off when I’d catch Ma proudly telling her friends, “Oh, you know I’ll never forget that exact moment when Tommy announced that he had a calling to be a teacher!” Jeez, Ma. Gimme a friggin’ break.
The first two years passed in those ivy-covered halls. And then, on the second week of my junior year, something life-altering happened. During an educational class on Classroom Management, the professor herded us across the street to the local junior high school (think middle school) where we got to sit in the back of a classroom to watch a real live teacher in action. Two things happened to me. A) I was utterly knocked out by the (wow!) unbelievable mastery in action of that teacher, and B) I was (oh shit!) hit over the head with an epiphany that, once again, I’d ‘found’ myself somewhere. Only this time found myself strapped like a saw mill log on a conveyor belt that was barreling me toward the Big Buzz Saw straight ahead : an actual teaching job! An actual life-long career of teaching, oh my! I was suddenly terrified.
You’ll no doubt find it strange that I’d just lived through two whole years taking classes in a four-years teachers’ college and hadn’t realized, what… the obvious? I know. I get it. So do I, I still find it strange, not to mention embarrassing. I dunno, maybe I have ADHD or something. But the truth is, never in my wildest imagination had I consciously comprehended the cold, hard reality of what the academic motions I was robotically going through actually meant. In my mind, I was still in high school and going to nowheresville. Don’t forget, pity-party me had left high school in a real dark zombie funk, and I’d entered that college feeling like nothing more than a wooden pawn in somebody else’s chess game. And then following that, I’d become way too distracted by the joys and opportunities of campus life to even focus on the fact that my non-decisions carried actual responsibilities.
See? Romeo’s Fortune’s Fool Syndrome.
But long story short, sure enough, I became a teacher. Didn’t like it much that first year. Felt I wasn’t cut out for it. So instead of hanging in for a second year, I joined the Army National Guard instead. Why? Because my best friend had just done that. But then BASIC Training sucked so bad, I took the path of least resistance again and sort of allowed myself to fall back into a second teaching job. Which turned out to be a great thing because… well, I fell in love with teaching there. And then I worked very hard at becoming good at it. So many great memories from the various classrooms…
You know, I’ve heard a lot of people repeat the old adage, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” The ironic thing is…they say it like it’s a bad thing.
“What goes on…in your heart?What goes on…in your mind?” –The Beatles
By first grade, I was pretty convinced that whenever I climbed into bed at night and closed my eyes, whatever I was secretly thinking would appear in a cartoon word balloon right above my forehead for my mom to “read,” just like a Beetle Bailey or Dennis the Menace comic strip. And honestly? Some of my thoughts tended to border on being a tad naughty by definition. Spooky how she seemed to always have a pretty good idea what might be going on in my head. She’d often ambush me in the act of some evil family felony, like pilfering one of Uncle Sherman’s left over cigar butts from the guest ashtray. So when she’d slip into my bedroom to say goodnight, I’d surreptitiously tighten all my muscles, ball up my little fists, and strive for only LOUD Sunday school thoughts until she’d leave. Acute Guilt Paranoia.
I went to college and became a high school English teacher, teaching English and American literature and tons of grammar and composition. However, teaching creative writing was my specialty and my passion. I’ve dabbled at becoming a writer myself and, even though my literary output is “small potatoes,” I get a lot of enjoyment out of the pastime.
In my grades 9-12 short story units, I’d get really pumped when we’d work on characterization. “Invent a character,” I’d begin, “in a single 5-sentence paragraph. But in your paragraph, no including your character’s name, height, weight, eye or hair color because… a preacher, a serial killer, and a rock star could share all of those identical attributes. The idea here is to bring out something that really distinguishes the person. So what can you include? What are some observations that reveal something that those stats don’t?” I’d might get corny and sing a line “Getting to know you, getting to know all about you…” or the chorus of the Beatles “What Goes On?” Then, for a springboard… I’d offer up myself as the artist’s model.
“OK. All of you, look at me. Check me out. Who can pin point something personal about me that reveals something, anything that goes beyond the yadda yadda mugshot stats. Don’t be afraid of offending me. I guarantee immunity.”
I’ll never forget the very first time I started with that prompt. Despite my assurances that that there would be no repercussions, it of course took a while to get a response. Then finally, after a tense silence, a mousey girl who almost never let us hear her voice during class discussions surprised me. She had raised her hand. “Tell me whatcha got. Lay it on me…” I said.
“You… have… a dog.”
Whoa! Did I ever do a double take! Totally flummoxed, it took me a few moments to gather my thoughts. before I could respond. (A) I did not own a dog, (B) I had never owned a dog, so (C) how she’d come up with that out of the blue I couldn’t imagine. But there she sat.. Waiting. Smiling brightly. Smiling hopefully. And I immediately realized something about her. She was a dog person.
“I’m guessing a white dog? Or at least partially white.”
“Uhhhmmmm…wow. I mean, well, see… that’s… that’s pretty interesting. I’m totally… surprised. Never in a million years would I have expected that. So… I really hafta ask. What made you say I have a dog?”
Continuing to beam at me, she bravely replied “All those little hairs on your shoulders. And down the front of your shirt.”
“What?”I automatically eyeballed those areas she had identified. Oh crap! Yep. There they were. Busted. How embarrassing! I could sense the class really getting interested in our dialogue. Apparently this quiet mouse of a girl was turning out to be a little Ms. Sherlock Holmes.
My face must have been showing some consternation because she worriedly asked, “What?”
Humbled, trying not to gag too noticeably on my pride, I had to say something. “Man! Man oh man. First of all… relax. You did really well here at zeroing right in on something… very specific. Perfect in fact. Exactly as I asked. Which, I guess, makes you an A+ student for today. Yeah. And I… have a confession I need to make now. No, make that two confessions. One, no, I don’t own a dog. Never have.” I could see I was confusing her. “And two, I’m a little embarrassed. Because…well, I have to own up what this i…”
“You trimmed your beard this morning!” She was right in her TV-quiz-show-contestant-mode glory.
“Bingo,” I conceded lifelessly. “Yeah. The white hairs. In my beard. So, yeah, it appears… I guess… I’m a little vain, aren’t I. Trying to ward off old age with a pair of scissors. Sheesh. But you know… you, youdid a great job here. Spotting something really telling. About me. More than I expected. Or realized. That was… wonderful really.” Yeah. (heh heh) Right.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Sometimes, since I had no budget, I would take the kids out to the school parking lot on a “poor man’s field trip.” I’d send us all wandering around, checking out all the cars and pick-ups, both students’ and teachers’. The assignment was to take notes on the automobiles’ little give-aways, things that were revealing about the owners or drivers. Bumper stickers. Vanity license plates. Decals. Rust. The kinds of trash littering the car seats and floors, etc. Any way to tell if they were male or female, old or young, wealthy or not so much. They had a field day with my old rust bucket. But it was a fun assignment, I think. Got us out of the classroom anyway.
Back in the classroom I enjoyed creeping them out a little by having them contemplate the proposition that had intrigued me so much as a kid. “Imagine for a moment that there’s this… way to look into a people’s brains and see everything going on inside them. Everything they’re thinking, or have ever thought. Their hopes and dreams. Their fears. Their pain. Their guilt. Who they have their eye on right now (elbow-elbow, nudge-nudge). Could be a some kind of technology… or just ESP. Or…” And then I would confess to them my early childhood fear of Mom knowing my every single naughty thought or idea, and the crazy little cartoon balloons I imagined filled with give-away readable text appearing above my forehead. They’d get a big kick out of that… until I left my desk and slowly began approaching them, getting up close and personal…
“Imagine for minute if you will that each of us has one of those cartoon balloons floating over our heads right now. No wait, instead of cartoon balloons, let’s make that our own personal little Goodyear Blimps, electronically reading out everything that’s going on in those private little vaults we call our brains, OK? And we have no control over what it’s revealing. It’s spilling our guts, on everything we’re thinking. Every thought hanging right out there, front and center for everyone to see, just like clothes drying on an old clotheslines. Imagine! You can look left, you can look right, turn around and look behind you and guess what: no more secrets! Wouldn’t that be fun?”
And by then I’d be standing right in front of the front row, looking down upon all of them… with the Dreaded (oh no…) Personal (oh no!) Eye-Contact. “So, look around at your neighbors. What are we going to learn about Johnny or Roberta? Hmmm? Or… what are we going to learn about…” and here I’d let my eyes travel around the room like the little silver ball on a spinning roulette wheel “…you, Betty!?” The response would be a terrified spastic jerk, a look of shocked embarrassment, and an ‘Eeek! No way!’ “And how about we all take a look at Fred back there. What’ll we find, Freddy? What are you secretly up to these days, eh? (Fred: ‘Jesus!’) Class laughter. Nervous laughter. All fearing it might be them in the spotlight next). After a bit more of the sweaty palms fun, I would add, “Or what about… me?”
And then I’d end by restating my thesis. “People are interesting, not boring, folks. Every single one of us, every face in the crowd. We’re not cookie-cutter cardboard cut-outs here, are we. Not just height, weight, and hair color. When you create your characters, try to imagine what their Goodyear Blimps are hiding. Have fun with them.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
All right. Enough of this reminiscing bullpucky (“bullpucky” being a much-used Colonel Potter word on the TV sitcom M*A*S*H). Time to get on with my intended purpose in creating this blog (which does, by the way, actually relate to the above ramblings).
Quite a few years ago, I was invited to spend two whole days in a second grade classroom, getting to sport an officious little badge that read, “GUEST.” Having garnered a modest reputation as a local writer who had published a number of poems in different magazines, I was there to entertain the little rugrats who were ankle deep in a creative writing unit. What a challenge for a teacher who had spent 34 years dealing only with teenagers. But what fun it was, a really positive adventure for me. At the end of the second and final day, the regular class teacher assigned her students to each write me a personal note, thanking me for visiting and telling me what they had learned as a result of our time together. What a sweet thing. When I got home, I read them all. They were all nice, as you would expect. However one stood out from all the others. It read, “Dear Mister Lyford, What I learned from your visit is that old people can be interesting.” How about that!?
In my 77 years, I’ve self-published 7 books of poetry, 2 memoirs, and a few episodes of a podcast (and yes, self-published, I know. So, not bragging here.) Basically I’m a long-in-the-tooth story-teller who’s gotten tired of his own stories, all of which have been non-fiction by the way. That’s what I was doing in my podcasts too, telling anecdotal stories of my earlier past. The podcast never went anywhere and I do understand why. Primarily it was just another one of my little “adventures,” or hobbies I’ve dabbled in all my life to ward off boredom. The podcasts comprised stories of my long Charlie Brown life.
With podcast publishing, you receive daily viewership counts. Like a lot of hacks, mine were miniscule. Once again, I’d turned out to be just that same old same old, peculiar, local non-phenomenon. My last podcast episode, however, did surprisingly much better. The reason, I believe, is that I’d said to hell with the stories, and instead tried simply taking a “walk” in my own head, to capitalize on what was going on in there. My mind has forever been a behive of thoughts and conversations buzzing so loudly it’s a wonder I can sleep at night. So for that last podcast, I finally ended up with a piece titled I, Robot, an odd philosophical patchwork inspired by many of my favorite artists from Rod Serling to Cole Porter. I’m somewhat proud of that little effort. It was a lot more of a challenge because I didn’t really have a whole plan to begin with. I only knew I wanted to begin by rehashing the plot of one of my favorite old Twilight Zone episodes. After accomplishing that, I just sort of wandered off into the words looking for my path. It felt adventurous to do it that way.
In this effort right here I’m planning to capitalize on being 77, an age I’m amazed I’ve actually reached. Seems unbelievable. And just as I described in my very first blog post, “Unstuck in Time with Billy Pilgrim,” (this one is number 2) I really am being overrun by mini-flashbacks of my escapades in the time-space continuum. And I’ve been feeling a real need to share what I’m “receiving,” from this freight train overloaded with time travel memories, roaring up the tracks from yesteryear. So I want to dedicate this blog to being that guy with the revealing cartoon word balloons floating up and out of his brain like chimney smoke, that vain guy with the sprinkles of tell-tale beard whiskers down the front of his shirt. I want to tattoo “OPEN HOUSE” on my forehead. “MY BRAIN AND WELCOME TO IT.” As Bob Dylan once quipped, “I got a head full of ideas and it’s driving me insane.”Not so many “stories” with beginnings, middles, and ends this time, but…story bytes. Topics and impressions. Remembrances that reflect my brushes with music, literature, poetry, sports, and visual arts, and how they affected me emotionally and helped me grow. Foods? Personalities? Fears? Superstitions? Danger? Evil? All of the above and more. Who knows? The possibilities are endless. But it’s open house…
NEARING THE END OF THE LINE 