Channel 9

Because of the internet and the thousand television channels we’re now subjected to, I doubt the local TV newsfolk carry the same celebrity cache they once did. Indeed, there was a time when they were about the biggest, baddest deals in town, back in the ages when not every soul was on television, video, or a web cam.

I’m reminded of an incident from the summer of 1975, when I visited the Ozarks for an outing at the lake home of a fellow named Stan. We arrived at the same time as a party that included two boys who were about my age. Standing in the driveway, one boy said to his friend, “So who lives here?” The friend replied, “Stan.” With a spasm of hope, the first boy said, “Stan Carmack?” The friend said, “Yeah, I wish.”

So, yes, even Stan Carmack was a star. He was then a street reporter who wore extremely large glasses and plaid sport coats and who anchored the news on Thanksgiving and Christmas nights for the highest-rated news station in town, KMBC TV 9.

Channel 9 was lousy with stars. I don’t think our family trusted any family that did not regularly watch channel 9 news in the 1970s.

Larry Moore was the franchise there. Moore was a tall, sideburned anchorman with a basso voice. It was common knowledge that he would become the next Walter Cronkite. Kansas Citians said the same thing about Moore that had been said about JFK: mothers wanted to mother him and their daughters wanted to make love to him. In fact, that was one of the station’s promotional messages.

Actually, I do recall one print ad for channel 9. A head shot of Moore was featured front and center, while below him were smaller photos of sportscaster Don Fortune and the new weather gal, Cheryll Jones. The headline: Moore. And more.

The “more” in that ad was tilted in favor of Cheryll Jones, who’d replaced the legendary Fred Broski. The TV teasers that preceded her debut had shown the woman from the waist down, in a short skirt and provocative boots, accompanied by Nancy Sinatra music and this voice-over: “You’re going to like the rest of her, too.”

At that time, I was in the throes of puberty and therefore singularly interested in seeing the rest of her. When that evening finally arrived, our living room was all abustle, much as it had been for Maude’s abortion. But when Cheryll Jones’ face was at last revealed, we felt cheated. The disappointment among my brothers and I was so thick you could have sliced it with Don Fortune’s razor-sharp shoulders.

In fairness, Cheryll Jones was attractive, but in an over-processed sort of way. Her chest, however, instantly became two-thirds of the channel 9 franchise, sharing top billing with Larry Moore. To clarify, when Cheryll Jones stood alongside Nevada, one could not see the day’s highs from Boulder to Topeka. Her promotional department seized on the term “accu-weather,” which around our house soon became “accu-tits.”

This woman was a star, but she was not very good at her job. She had a fixation for the word “breezy.” Every accu-tits forecast included predictions of breezy days ahead. No doubt the market for windbreakers went crazy, but it all began to drive us mad.

The channel 9 sportscaster for many years was the shrimpy, bespectacled Don Fortune, a fellow who looked like the stereotype of an insurance salesman who might drop in on a sit-com family to tell them their policy has been canceled. More so, he reminded me of a TV wrestler’s sinister manager, the type of puny gent who enters the ring to smack an opponent over the head with his briefcase while hundreds of outraged fans stomp and point and try to engage the referee’s attention.

Fortune lacked the visceral star-power of his colleagues, but he was still quite the star in his own right. If nothing else, his black glasses and his oft-furrowed brow indicated a serious and cerebral quality that we just had to admire.

Fortune manned the regular shift, but on weekends and holidays we were treated to the likes of Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson, aka “Lenny the Cool” and “Lunchmeat Lenny” because he did TV ads for a bologna concern. Now that I think about it, Lenny was actually as reviled as he was revered in town. He had quarterbacked the Chiefs to two Super Bowl appearances and countless big wins, yet many folks still claimed he was inferior to his backup, Mike Livingston, and that he was the starter only because he was Coach Stram’s son in law. For the record, these folks may also have been the same who claimed the rolled-up publication that Coach Stram always gripped during the games was a Playboy magazine.

In our discussion of these luminaries, it would be criminal to overlook Fred Broski, the longtime weather maven at channel 9 and probably the most famous Polish figure in Kansas City. Broski was a little irreverent, especially compared to his somber competition on channels 4 and 5—chaps who would not crack a grin even if their grandpas gave them a titty-twister. The daring Broski made bold, undisciplined use of a black magic marker, and every night he repositioned the big happy-faced suns around the weather map with almost felonious disregard. Sometimes he’d even throw the suckers onto the map, hoping they’d stick!

But when the chips were down and the black clouds approaching, he was like Hawkeye and Trapper John: the highjinks ceased and you knew you could count on him.

Thanks to Broski’s bloodlines, I once had the pleasure of witnessing a channel 9 newscast in person. He was the cousin of a classmate and I was a budding journalist, the anchor of a weekly newscast held in our school library. My teacher and Broski’s cousin helped expedite this momentous meeting.

On a spring evening in 1975, our teacher, Mrs. S., chaperoned a few sixth-grade boys to the channel 9 studio, located in the basement of the Lyric Theatre downtown. The news set, situated in the southeast corner, looked cheap and breakable, like something we kids might have put together for a school project. The desk itself was backed by a blue-gray wall with dozens of yellow 9s upon it. Fifty feet to its north was the set for Etcetera, a daytime show that invited local celebrities, politicos, and Hollywood old timers who were performing at the dinner theatres or Starlight. To the far west stood the set for Bowling for Dollars, a nightly thrill hosted by Broski.

And milling about the big room, in bright-yellow sport jackets and blue jeans, were the celebrities themselves: Moore, Dawson, Broski, and Fortune, as well as a few B-teamers—backups, I presumed, in case one of the varsity suddenly came down with Ptomaine poisoning.

The taping of the 6 pm newscast that night was uneventful, if not boring, and my memory of those thirty minutes is vague. We kids stood about ten feet behind the bank of cameras that stood about ten feet from the news desk. There was the predictable lineup of stories: a murder perhaps, a fatal accident or two, a child being left on a school bus, a grim study on air pollution, et al. And, as always, the broadcast ended with an uplifting story so the viewers could brave the rest of their evening—in this case, news of a giraffe that had found its way into a San Diego mall.

Afterwards, the stars descended from the hot lights and into the darkness to chat with us. The estimable Larry Moore and Fred Broski were especially pleasant and accommodating, but Lenny the Cool came off as impatient and arrogant. I guess I can forgive him. We were inquisitive—perhaps nosy—twerps and he was still a young man and had better fish to fry.

The scholarly Fortune escorted us to the set and demonstrated the wonders of the “blue screen.” I think it was called the blue screen. Anyway, if you wore any blue clothing, it would not appear on camera. Or else, it would appear. I’m pretty sure it was one or the other. Frankly, I cannot remember the purpose of the blue screen, if indeed that was what it was called. But the sportscaster was very devoted to educating us upon it.

Soon there was loud chatter among the technicians and the on-air talent about somebody heading to Bryant’s or the Colony or Dinkledorf’s to pick up some dinner, and so Mrs. S. consulted her wristwatch and we kids found our windbreakers and started toward the exits.

Moore and Fortune followed us. Near the doors, the tall anchor placed a hand upon my shoulder and said, “So, from what I gather, you will be replacing us before too long.”

And for one dizzy moment I wondered if some backroom deal had been struck. Had I, the anchor of the fifth-grade news report, been hand-picked to become the next channel 9 star? Could it really be? Granted, I had been impressive so far that evening. My questions to Moore had been precocious (“What happens if you ever need to poop during the news?”); and my questions to Broski were not of the “soft ball” variety (“Isn’t Bowling for Dollars rigged so that almost nobody ever wins?”). And I had kept my trenchant comments and my throat-clearings to a minimum during the taping.

But Fortune disabused me of that dreamy notion rather speedily. As he held open the double doors to the lobby, he said something like this: “Boys, take every speech class you can in school, and read US News & World Report every week, cover to cover, and maybe with a lot of hard work and a little good luck you’ll someday find a job in . . . Waterloo, Iowa, or, or . . . Salina, Kansas, or someplace like that.”

Now that was a disheartening sign-off.

Telephone Line

Today, telephones are largely a nuisance. One-hundred percent of my incoming calls interrupt my naps, and ninety percent of these calls are from a Citi-Cards robot who greets me with the phrase “Don’t be alarmed.” The first time I heard it, I got very alarmed.

I also avoid making calls whenever possible, mostly because I have a lousy phone voice. I sound like an old lady calling the cops.

Things were different when I was a kid. If there was nothing good on TV or no one to horse around with, I often turned to the telephone for companionship.

Sometimes I dialed 333-999-333 and listened to Frankenstein’s heartbeat for as long as I liked. One day I invited a friend over and together we called the number. But the connection didn’t take. We got some static and then dead silence. “Hmm,” said my friend, “maybe Frankenstein’s on the pot.”

Sometimes I called the homes of pretty girls and hung up, which caused my own heart to throb as rapidly as Frankenstein’s.

For a time I made a habit of calling Dial-a-Joke, wherein I was treated to an entire joke for free. The joke teller had a voice like that of a nervous cartoon animal, heavily informed by Johnny Carson’s Tea-Time Movie host. I spent much of a summer calling that number, but the joke never changed. I phoned so often that I still remember it, word for word:

Hiya again, Booby. You say you really got troubles? You say your wife threw away the birth-control pills because you told her you bought a condominium?

Then one morning I dialed that same local number, expecting to hear “Hiya again, Booby,” but I was greeted by a different voice—a stern voice, like that of Jack Webb. This sober gentleman thanked me for calling Phone-a-Funny.

Phone-a-Funny? Had the world gone crazy overnight?

The only thing I recall about Phone-a-Funny is that it couldn’t pack Dial-a-Joke’s lunch.

Soon I discovered talk radio and began phoning the local shows. I confess this freely and without shame, for I was just eleven or twelve at the time. Anyone beyond that age who calls talk radio should hang his head and weep.

Anyway, I became a loyal follower of a nightly show on our AM dial that had a no-nonsense name like “Night Line” or maybe “Night Scape.” Each evening the show featured a theme. My memory is dim on the specifics, but it’s fair to guess the themes were variations of this central idea: How to Refrain from Blowing your Stack and Punching a Hippie in this Age of Aquarius.

Though I was young, I had a lot of opinions on stuff. So one evening, when the topic was “The Cohabitation Crisis,” I dialed the number. It rang and rang. Finally the host answered. “Hello, caller. This is Chuck.”

“Uhm, hi. Can you explain tonight’s topic so I could give my opinion and junk?”

Chuck’s laughter echoed tremendously, as if he were alone in a nuclear-fallout shelter. When he finally regained his composure, he said, “Son, maybe you should pay more attention to your Weekly Reader at school.”

Meanwhile, an older sister and some friends were listening to Chuck in her car. She recognized my voice and they all had a great deal of fun with it. The next day, in an effort to nurture my precocity, she explained the topic in a secular, objective manner, much better than my Weekly Reader ever could have.

Those days, if my beloved Kansas City Royals were on the air the talk shows did not stand a chance. When we finally got a talk show that was devoted to sports, I called in often to complain about our crummy players and crummy coaches. Late one summer night, my brothers Joe and Phil and I took part in the kind of incident that will sound entirely made up.

We’d been listening to the sports-talk show after the Royals had clobbered the Angels in Anaheim. Phil, age 13, dialed up and was put on hold. Then he realized he had no question prepared. Our frantic conversation went a lot like this:

Me: Ask if he thinks George Brett will make the all-star team.

Joe: No, ask if he thinks Steve Busby will make the all-star team.

Phil: Wait a minute. Shut up and slow down.

Me: George Brett.

Joe: No, Steve Busby.

Phil: Shut up.

Me: George Brett.

Joe: Steve Busby.

Host: South Kansas City, you’re on.

Phil: Oh. Uh . . . do you think Steve Brett will make the all-star team?

Host: Steve Brett? Steve Brett? I don’t know any Steve Brett.

Needless to say, I took part in my fair share of prank calls back then. I best remember a day at my cousins’ house when a bunch of us took turns asking strangers if their refrigerators were running. We also emitted a lot of unpleasant noises and swear words, such as “crap” and “ding dong.” The capering was cut short, however, when an angry man announced he was calling the cops. In a panic, we all stripped off our shirts and charged outside and jumped into the swimming pool.

The final time I abused my telephone privileges was the day my friends Gilbert and Alan and I called Dodgers’ pitcher Don Drysdale. It turns out he was in the shower, so we waited a long darn time and ran up the phone bill to seven or eight dollars. The Mayfield Gazette even published a feature story on it. Boy, my dad got really sore.

When I was in the sixth grade, the Weekly Reader promised we’d someday have picture phones—telephones with screens attached so you could see the person you were speaking with. That week, five-million sixth-grade boys across our great land were imagining the same thing: calling a lady as she was getting out of the shower. I can still see the artist’s rendering of this space-age invention. In his illustration, the traditional black rotary phone with the dial and the cradle and the dual transparent nipples—the kind of phone Archie Bunker used—had a small, boxy screen attached. Even better, I can also still see my own imaginings of the lady getting out of the shower.

In the seventh grade I changed schools and was soon introduced to a most curious phenomenon. It was called The Interview.

One October day a girl I scarcely knew called and asked if I'd submit to an interview. I had to ask her to define her terms. She said she would recite the names of girls in our class and I was to apply a letter grade to each. A letter grade based on what, I asked. On you know, she said. My first instinct was to strip off my shirt and jump into the swimming pool.

I never quite embraced these interviews. Today I cannot give one good reason why I behaved like Gilligan when these girls called. Certainly there were girls I liked, and some of them I liked madly. Yet, when first confronted with the formality of the interview, I gave every girl—all thirty-five of them—an F.

Undaunted, this young lady and others called regularly for my rankings, and soon I began conferring the grade of C upon them all. Once, one of my brothers pretended to be me, and he gave one classmate an A because he liked the musicality of her name. This led to a lot of excitement and agitation and grief that the girl and I are still sorting out.

The Special New Boy

In the autumn of 1985 I spent fifteen days on the British Isles, where I dedicated my youthful energies to complaining about the way the English did things. In London when I wasn’t carping I was staring at beautiful international women in the exact way I had always stared at beautiful American women—with a hopeless melancholy from afar. If my fellow traveler pointed out where Dickens had lived or where Samuel Johnson lunched, I might say, “Yes, but look over there. Could that be Phoebe Cates?”

He and I had planned to spend a couple fortnights in Britain, where at a minimum we hoped to discover if English girls kissed with an accent. Then we were to sail to the continent and give the Parisian women a break. But I never made it to France; I got physically exhausted in Ireland and returned to Kansas City. So, indeed, I did end up giving the Parisian women a break.

The more important reason I had gone to Europe was to acquire the kind of enlightenment that might benefit me as a writer. At twenty-two I had done just about nothing in life that would constitute “experience” or result in enlightenment. But all I returned with were a few pages of worthless journal notes.

Still, when I got home I was eager to write something, if only to confirm that my British adventures had christened me a writer. In the converted garage I occupied behind my parents’ house, I sat down to the electric typewriter and wiggled my fingers above the keyboard like a gunfighter wiggles his above a holster when he’s ready to take down the sheriff. I jiggled them some more, and then some more, until I realized the only thing keeping me from writing something meritorious was a word processor.

Soon my parents helped me buy one, from a place called Computer World at the Ward Parkway Mall, and from a cute salesgirl who really saw me coming. She was totally fascinated that I was a writer. When she recommended the Apple 2c and a really cool software called Bank Street Writer, I did not put up a fight.

At home the Apple 2c looked so sleek and pristine that I was almost afraid to use it, much the way we can be hesitant about cutting into an elegant birthday cake. The shells for the keyboard and monitor were a reassuring white. The screen was the size and shape of a dime novel held sideways, and it had a grim, dark color. The text on the screen was a fluorescent green that trembled against that grave background. The dot-matrix printer I also got was, of course, slow—slow even for 1985. It took longer to print many of my stories than it did for Raymond Carver to write his.

That first night, my eight fingers began a deceitful dance over the home row, each digit rising and falling but never touching the virginal keyboard. And that was when I realized I still had nothing of value to write.

Not long ago my mom unearthed the Apple 2c in her basement from among the boxes and the tubs and the bones of old furniture. She wondered if I wanted to resurrect it so my kids could play with it. Fifteen years had passed since I had seen the thing and now it looked like a museum relic. Nothing could have prepared me for its smallness.

When it was a big part of my life, the Apple 2c had never seemed small, especially when I had to move it. From 1985 to 1993 I changed addresses nine times, and each time I had to account for the 2c the way opposing basketball teams had to account for Michael Jordan. I’d lie awake at night in anguish, plotting how to best box up and transport the appliance, where to place it in the car, how to cushion it in case of an accident.

Gazing on it all these years later, I was almost convinced I could move it telepathically. I took a long, last look and then told my mom she could toss it.

Later, when I knew it was buried in a landfill somewhere, I got a little sentimental. The truth is, I had used it quite a lot throughout my twenties--too much, if you were to ask any of the slush-pile editors at The New Yorker.

I had used it to write dozens of short stories and humor pieces, as well as their query letters that were at once self-deprecating and boastful. In 1986 the 2c accompanied me to Columbia, Missouri, for graduate school, and on it I wrote a lot of term papers, most of them concerning novels and Middle English poetry I hadn’t read. I also used it to co-write a rollicking screenplay about some nutty caperings at a campus newspaper.

But what had the most sentimental impact was recalling the “spec” scripts I’d composed for television’s “The Wonder Years.”

Maybe you recall “The Wonder Years,” which debuted in January 1988. It was the kind of show your mother might have described as being “a cute story.” The youthful hero, Kevin Arnold, was also the not-so-youthful narrator. His voice and perspective were easy to mimic, and so one week in 1990, with nothing better to do, I wrote my first episode in just two or three sittings.

The plot was this: Kevin’s teacher announces that a “special” new boy will transfer to their school soon. The kids’ imaginations take off as they dissect the meaning of “special.” Kevin’s girlfriend, the adorable Winnie, becomes infatuated with this special new boy even though she knows nothing about him. Kevin gets frustrated and envious and their relationship is duly tested. In the end, this new boy never shows up, but Kevin and Winnie have learned some valuable lessons about life and whatnot.

Buoyed by the ease with which I’d written this script, I quickly pecked out another. In this one, the ornery older brother, Wayne, somehow lands an attractive girlfriend. When Kevin sees her, his eyes pop from his head and linger in mid-air, heart-shaped and throbbing. One thing leads to another, and by the second commercial break Kevin and the girl are smooching.

This script, I concluded, was even stronger than the first.

Like most of my peers, I had grown up in front of the television, memorizing syndicated reruns. That I might someday write for television was the kind of long-shot dream I had always kept at a safe distance. I knew that to make it in Hollywood one needed an ungodly amount of resilience, ambition, and luck—three things I lacked.

But with two scripts in tow, I took careful inventory of my connections in Hollywood and zeroed in on the only one—a most tenuous connection at that. I’ll call her Marie.

Marie was a television writer I’d met at a conference a year earlier. Well, I hadn’t officially met her: I had sat in a folding chair among thirty or forty others as she told a rags-to-riches story about her rise from a secretary to an actual screen writer.

Now, I’m the type of guy who’s almost too shy to phone my own brothers and sisters. I feel like an intruder when I attend a party I was invited to. I apologize to waitresses and mechanics even as I give them my business. So the thought of ambushing this stranger, even by mail, was terrifying.

Worse, though, was the thought of not giving it a try.

I sat at the Apple 2c and typed out a nice letter that struck all the right chords. I assured her I was just a nobody from the Midwest who’d been so inspired by her presentation that I had begun writing scripts. After dozens of missteps I finally believed my work was ready to showcase. Would she be so kind as to take a quick look?

A few weeks later a big manila envelope came in the mail, postmarked Burbank, California. Somehow just by looking at that folded envelope I knew it contained good news. So I secreted it to my bedroom and tore it open and read of how much she’d enjoyed the scripts. She suggested a few small revisions and then sought permission to pass them along to her agent.

I looked up. My eyes fixated on the Apple 2c and I wondered how in the world I’d ever get that thing to L.A. safely.

My next few weeks were like those spent by a young man preparing an elopement. There was a lightness to my step, and I wore the kind of silly grin that adults affect when they see a small boy in a tuxedo. But there were also plenty of butterflies in my belly as I dreaded the logistics of such a big life change.

Well, a month passed without any news from Burbank. And with each succeeding day the roundness of my smile deflated ever more so, like a tire with a slow leak. At the three-month mark I had to seriously consider the unthinkable: a follow-up letter.

With a heavy heart and heavier fingers I returned to the Apple 2c and tapped out a letter to Marie, asking for an update. This time her response was rapid. She said she’d had to get away from the business because of family issues. She had severed ties with her agent and had been out of the country for a while. Someday things would return to normal and maybe she could help me then.

The disappointment was profound; Marie had been my only conduit to a miracle. But I was still a young man with plenty of ideas, and I did have unfettered access to that Apple 2c, and there really wasn’t anything else in life I was good at. So I continued fighting the good fight, and before long I had composed a couple more scripts, for Chris Elliot’s “Get a Life” and for a chatty new show called “Seinfeld.”

One night that fall, in November of 1991, I had occasion to think of Marie again. The plot of a fresh episode of “The Wonder Years” mirrored one I had given her. In the show that aired, Wayne procures a cute girlfriend—played by the lovely Carla Gugino—whom Kevin ends up usurping. It had been months since I’d looked at my own script but it seemed every line the actors spoke was familiar to me. Had my script gotten out, after all?

I started making phone calls. Somebody I knew was friends with somebody who knew an entertainment lawyer, and with full-throated ease I assured this attorney that the show matched my own teleplay. He advised me to get my hands on a videotape of the episode and to compare it to my script.

Those days it was easy to find a neighbor or an in-law who routinely recorded “The Wonder Years,” and so I landed a tape and followed the attorney’s instructions. I discovered that while the plot was similar to mine, only two lines from the show were the same. Two lines would never constitute theft in a court of law. Besides, that week there were probably a dozen other spec writers like me who upon the advice of their attorneys were comparing their scripts to the one that aired.

But the incident did serve as a confidence booster. It seemed proof enough that I really could write for television.

For years I had weighed the pros and cons of moving to L.A., and I was finally tiring of the internal debate. I was pushing thirty and had no assets other than a Corolla and that Apple 2c. Everyone from my high-school class was earning more than I, including Father Greg. Clearly it was time to grow up, in some fashion or another. So the next spring I decided to go to L.A. for just a week to measure first-hand all the aggravations I’d have to put up with if I made the big move. And maybe if struck by a bolt of courage I’d look up Marie.

An old friend lived in Encino at the time, and he had what I needed: a spare couch to sleep on. I booked a flight for Sunday, May 3rd.

A couple days later the Rodney King verdicts were issued and L.A. caught fire. For three days and nights I watched the special reports from home and debated whether to make the trip. By Sunday the 3rd, most accounts claimed the tensions were easing, that some sense of normalcy had returned.

The car ride from the L.A. airport to Encino was not extraordinary, except for the presence of national guardsmen and armored vehicles. On Monday I kept a low profile to recover from the long flight and to catch up on some sleep. By Tuesday I was ready to get out of the house. At mid-day I caught a ride to an outfit on Reseda Boulevard, where I rented a Ford Festiva with the intention of sight-seeing.

The boulevards in the Valley were reassuringly congested. The weather was perfect, with the kinds of breezes that old men cannot help but comment on (“now she’s a nice one”). It was the kind of day where anything could happen. So I cruised back to my friend’s house and bundled a few scripts into a manila envelope and penned a letter to accompany them, in case Marie was not home. I got out my map and soon had the Festiva pointed toward Burbank.

Marie lived in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains. A vehicle sat in her driveway—a Range Rover or something like it. On her roof knelt a dark-skinned man, hammering incessantly. In either yard beside hers, lawn-care workers carried on with their mowing and edging, unaware of my private drama, unaware that in five minutes my life might never again be the same.

The entertainment magazines and gossip shows feast on stories of long-shots who overcame steep odds to make it in show biz. In these stories the heroes always benefit from a dramatic stroke of luck that borders on the paranormal—the kind of thing that happens only in the movies.

In my case it was magical enough that I knocked on her door.

Nobody answered.

So I left the package and returned to the Ford Festiva. But I was not ready to return to my lodgings in Encino, where the phone might ring for me at any moment with news I was not sure I wanted to hear.

I drove to the nearest parking lot and unfolded the map and spread it on the passenger seat. A radio dee-jay was telling us today was the first day that music sounded good to his ears once again. He played something upbeat by Marshall Crenshaw, and I spiked the volume.

A little while later I was in the Hills of Beverly, happily strolling the sidewalks of Rodeo Drive in my blue jeans and sneakers, looking a lot like the tourist that I was.

Snaring

It strikes me as a little bit ironic that while I grew up in the Age of Aquarius and the “love the one you’re with” period, I never saw any evidence of physical affection until one night in 1973.

At the Pizza Pub, a parlor near home, I saw something that was remarkably remarkable. In a semi-secluded booth not far from our table, a black man and a white man had their arms around each other and were kissing on the mouth!

Our party was sizable and skewed young: a sister or two and their boyfriends, a brother or two and their girlfriends, a friend or two. While no one swooned, every forehead got damp and every cheek pallid. There came elaborate dartings of eyeballs and lots of scandalous whispering.

“Look!”

“Jesus H. Christ!”

“Do you see that?”

“Stop your staring!”

“You wonder what drives some people!”

One lad in our party couldn’t decide if he was more repelled by the fact that two men were smooching or by the fact that the smooching was interracial.

Up to then, kissing was mostly a rumor, something that well-paid actors did on television because they had to. In any event, a door had been opened. I realized that some adults did sometimes choose to kiss. And it gave me a lot to think about.

An uneventful year or two passed—and by uneventful I mean to say that I saw no kissing and took part in none. But then someone in authority at school came up with the idea of a skating night. A yellow school bus would transport kids to the Coachlight skating rink out south for a couple hours of good, clean fun.

I’d been a decent enough athlete on the playground—good at kickball and such. But the prospects of trying to walk on wheels in front of my peers terrified me, and so I adopted the attitude that I was much too cool for something as sissy as skating.

Opting out may have been the biggest mistake of my life. That’s because the bus ride home was a microcosm of Woodstock, according to several reliable sources. Reportedly, a number of older kids had paired off in the back of that bus to kiss. A friend listed the names of each pair, and with each citation I got angrier at myself for having missed out on the excitement.

Thankfully, I soon got a second chance. Because the skating event had been so successful—and those days nothing at our school was successful—another event was scheduled.

I began strategy sessions with my friend M. The purpose of these sessions was not to strategize ways to land a kissing partner, I must sadly confess; instead, they were all about how best to observe the make-out sessions. Our conclusion, after much painstaking debate, was to procure a pen light.

Happily, the skating went well. I fell time and again but always laughed it off gamely and displayed a great good sense of humility because none of this mattered. The ride back to school was all that mattered. So when the lights in the rink blinked on and the final song—“That’s the Way (I Like It)"—faded out, M. and I tore off our skates and hustled for the bus.

The rear quadrant was already occupied by amorous older kids, most of them with pinwheel eyes and silly grins. We managed a seat somewhere in the middle of the bus. As the cabin darkened and the bus grinded out of the parking lot, I looked M. in the eye and gave him a solemn nod that spaketh thusly: “This could be amazing.”

When things got quiet in the rear, I brandished the pen light and leaned into the aisle. I trained the light in that direction and took a deep breath and then turned it on.

Only, I discovered it was already in the ON position. But nothing was illuminated.

“These are brand-new batteries,” I whispered as I flicked the device off and on a hundred frantic times.

“Shucks,” M. said.

We soon deduced that on one of my many falls to the rink, the pen had gotten jammed into the ON position, where it proceeded to spotlight the baseball cards in my pocket until the batteries were drained.

There may have been plenty of righteous necking in the back of that bus as it rumbled north on Interstate 435. Tongues may have slithered from one mouth into another. Hickeys may have been meted out, for all I know. I was so consumed with disappointment in my pen light that I made no effort at all to monitor the proceedings.

The next autumn I attended a different school, if only to wipe the slate clean and help me forget about the pen-light fiasco. At this new school, the concept of necking was rather passe. Among my fellow seventh-graders there were boyfriend-girlfriend relationships that dated all the way back to fifth grade. Boast-offs in the lunch room even made frequent use of the term “second base.”

My new buddies employed a term that was foreign to me: snaring. There was a lot of talk about snaring a Debbie or a Stacy or an Elizabeth, and though I should have figured out that snaring meant smooching, I pictured all sorts of possibilities, most of them involving complicated traps.

By then I had dropped out of the Beaver Cleaver Academy, where I’d long been taught that kissing a girl was creepy. By then I had rejected the teachings of Gilligan, who advised that when seduced by a starlet you flee with such celerity that you must grasp your first-mate’s cap with both hands. By then I had read most of Joseph Wambaugh. I had read The Catcher in the Rye and The Last Picture Show and even some Shirley Ann Grau. I was armed and ready to snare a gal, no questions asked.

And, man, the opportunities were unlimited!

In the eighth grade, there were so-called graduation parties every weekend. We’d gather in the finished basements of small Cape Cods and bungalows. This was 1977, and so you can imagine the typical décor: navy or olive-green shag carpeting; dark paneling on the walls; a wet-bar in the far corner; non-functional furniture, such as bean-bag chairs and ill-proportioned love seats; an aquarium that bubbled and hummed; a big stereo with furry speakers; and stacks and stacks of the dad’s LPs, invariably with Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights featured most prominently.

After a while the lights dimmed and a few couples ended up on bean-bags or the love seats, where they’d neck until their moms were honking in the driveway. Most were seasoned pros; the rookies you could always detect because they sounded like thirsty kids attacking a garden hose.

The rest of us—and by “us” I do include me—passed the evenings by slow dancing, usually to Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself.” For me, slow dancing consisted of clasping my fingers on the small of a young lady’s back, safely above ass-latitude, while she clutched my shoulders (or what passed for shoulders). In this semi-embrace, we’d sway a little as we moved incrementally in an orbital path with no pattern or destination in mind.

On an average night I might slow dance for two or three hours with five or six girls, and every single minute was spent plotting the perfect “move”—some crafty line or gesture that would get the two of us onto a bean-bag chair. All these years later, I cannot remember the details of my internal deliberations, but I’m sure they were solemn enough and wrenching enough to make Hamlet blush. I do know that I never put a single one of them into play.

Late in the year at one particular gathering I was asked to dance by a heavy-set girl who resembled Andy Taylor’s Aunt Bee. When the song ended (Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself”), she did not free her hands from my shoulders. So I continued dancing with her into the next number.

Midway through it, she said, “Do you want to kiss?”

I did want to kiss. Desperately so. But not her.

“What?” I stalled, hoping to think of a graceful rejection, for she was a nice girl.

“You want to kiss?” she repeated.

“Not really,” I said.

It got a little awkward. The song continued and continued. It had to be the longest pop song ever—perhaps an “extended play.” Or maybe it was one of those talky Arlo Guthrie pieces that go on and on, like “Alice’s Restaurant.”

Anyway, after a long darn time the song did end and we did separate and I strayed off the dance floor, all by myself.

Fast Food

I realize that fast food is 20 percent sodium, 30 percent fat, 30 percent fecal matter, and 20 percent polymers, and that the chains are ruinous to individuals and communities in any number of ways.

But still I go, once or twice a month.

I go even though I realize the youthful workers in these places are prone to effecting all sorts of malice and tomfoolery. Matter of fact, I always just assume the fry cooks are going to “make hay” with my order. Twenty-five years ago, a college friend told a tale of his fry-cook days that continues to reserve a place in my daily thoughts. With salacious delight, he described all the things he had done to a cheeseburger that was destined for a cop who’d given him a ticket.

My earliest memories of fast food involve a Smaks restaurant about a half-mile west of home. It predated the McDonald’s that was later built a half-mile east of home and which later became my home away from home.

Smaks was a lot like McDonald’s, and in some ways superior. Unlike McDonald’s, the chain offered onion rings, tenderloins, ice-cream cones, and something called a Smakaroo, which was either a souped-up burger or some fashioning of an Italian steak. The advertising mascot was Smakky the Seal, a rather erudite sea lion in beret, bifocals, and ascot—or, perhaps I’m confusing Smakky with Sir Laurence Olivier.

Of course, there were several other fast-food joints nearby. Like Smaks, many were situated along Troost Avenue. There was the short-lived Jim Dandy’s Fried Chicken, an enterprise that soon surrendered to Church’s Fried Chicken, which sat two blocks from it. In the early seventies it was rumored that a lady had bitten into a Church’s drumstick and come away with a mouthful of dead rat. News of this unusual incident, which my older brothers swore had happened at “our Church’s on Troost,” somehow scandalized all four corners of the globe, even into those countries where rat is a delicacy.

Across from Church’s stood an Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips, which we forever confused with H. Salt Fish & Chips. Now suddenly, as I’m typing these words, I’m wondering if it really was a Treachers. Maybe it was a Salt after all. At any rate, the Treacher/Salt divide has always been a bitter one. Just as there are Munsters families and Addams Family families, there are also Treacher families and Salt families. For the record, we were—and remain—proud supporters of the Munsters and the Treachers.

When I was small, getting dinner at Smaks or any place like it was a rare and wonderful adventure. An older sister would round up everyone and then go from kid to kid, compiling a list of orders. Each order had its own conditions and footnotes and disclaimers to the point that her pencil had to be resharpened before the list was complete. Some of us liked onions and mustard and ketchup and pickles. Others hated onions and mustard and could tolerate pickles at gunpoint only, if it were to come to that. Others hated onions and loved ketchup but could not conceive how any human being with a shred of dignity and good sense could eat something as sick as mustard. And still others wanted cheese on their patties. In those days you had to make a special request for cheese on your burger, whereas today you have to make a special request to omit the cheese.

But it was the topic of onions that fueled the greatest turmoil. Onions were to our household what the Gaza Strip is to the Middle East.

Generally speaking, the girls were fond of onions and the boys were not. And these complications played out daily, whether the subject was Smaks, meatloaf, fried potatoes, or spaghetti sauce.

“Gross! You’re using onions!” one boy would say, his thumb and forefinger pinching his nostrils shut.

“But you can't even hardly taste them!” the offending sister would protest as she continued slicing the bulb.

“Good! Then let’s do without!” came the inevitable reply.

Most of the younger boys insisted their fast-food burgers be plain. The opposite of plain, at least in our house, was “loaded.” My sisters got their burgers loaded.

When I was finally old enough to place my own order at a Smaks or McDonald’s, I’d ask the clerk for a loaded hamburger, which always made the clerk scowl a little from irritation and confusion. Those days, I also referred to any kind of ice cream as a Dairy Queen and to any kind of soda pop as a Coke. One time at Smaks I ordered the following: a loaded hamburger, a Dairy Queen, and an orange coke. My sister had to translate the order: a burger with everything, an ice cream cone, and an orange soda.

By the mid-seventies, the nearby McDonald’s had begun to clobber Smaks, and if I could’ve, I would’ve dined on the former every day. It so happened there was a morbidly obese student a few grades older than I whose mother picked him up at lunchtime every day and drove him to McDonald’s. He was the luckiest kid alive.

For the longest time, hamburgers at McDonald’s were just twenty cents each, as were the fries and small soft drinks. In fact, an ad campaign touted how you could order a complete meal—two burgers, fries, and a cola—and receive change from your dollar! One Saturday, a couple of my fellow fifth-graders and I helped a nun re-paint the four-square lines on our playground. For recompense, she treated us to McDonald’s. When I asked if I could order two hamburgers, she reared back and distorted her lips and tightened her manly brows. So I withdrew the request. Our parish was going through tough enough times as it was.

Some twenty years later, one of those same fifth-grade painters must have gone through a tough stretch of his own. One day from a McDonald’s drive-up window he greeted me with the conventional “long time no see” type of remarks, and when he handed me the sack he said, “Dang, if I’d have known it was you, I’d have loaded you up with extra fries.”

He’d always been a good guy, nice looking, well behaved. And there he was, in his early thirties and working the drive-up window. It made me so sad I could scarcely complete my Filet-O-Fish.

I considered a fast-food meal to be something special and luxurious up through my high-school years, though by then multinational-chain pizza was rapidly becoming the dish of choice. The McDonald’s nearest my high school was where the popular kids hung out—at least, that’s what I’ve been told. I do know the cool guys often sneaked away for a stealthy McDonald’s breakfast, perhaps hoping to be caught and punished by the school authorities so everyone would know they had sneaked away for a McDonald’s breakfast.

In addition to all the belly aches, the fast-food industry has given me a lot of belly laughs over the years. When Mark Twain said “everybody talks about the lousy service at fast-food chains, but nobody does anything about it,” he was on to something.

And when it comes to lousy service, one of my favorite series of anecdotes involves an old friend and an old Hardee’s that was situated near the university in the late 1980s, when these events took place. One day, as the counter girl rang up my friend’s order, she could not resist the urge to nibble on a few of his fries.

Another time, he ordered a fish sandwich, prompting the counter girl—possibly the same girl who’d poached his fries—to reflect on how good a fish sounded. She soon turned and called to the fry cook: “Drop a fish for me, too, but put mine in the clean grease!”

Americans are a forgiving lot, and so this fellow made yet another visit to this illustrious Hardee’s. In the drive-up lane, he ordered a burger but requested the tomato be omitted. What apparently followed was a long series of miscommunications that played over the subpar speakers and microphones between a skeptical customer and a distracted employee who had probably just received his paycheck and was crunching numbers in his head and finding the results unsatisfactory. When my friend finally made it to the window and opened his bag, he noted not a burger without tomato but instead a plain biscuit with a large slice of tomato.

If that’s not bad enough, on three occasions my wife has been on the receiving end of unsolicited McDonald’s McRibs. She would never order a McRib—that’s why I married her— yet three times one has ended up in her paper sack.

I suppose my strangest fast-food moment occurred at a Wendy’s near downtown that an obit colleague and I frequented, for reasons that twenty years later remain unclear to me. Had there been plaques awarded for filthiness, discourtesy, and inefficiency, the store’s walls would have glittered with them. Yet there we were, at least once a week, paying our money and taking our chance. At one particular dinner hour, as we fossilized in line, a certain comment reached our ears. A clerk there told a customer “we’re outta meat tonight.”

My colleague looked at me and I at him, and after a while one of us said, “Hmm, I guess we’ll have to try back tomorrow night then.”

Ink

If you use the term “journalism” loosely—and today there’s no better way to use it—you could say my journalism career began when I was eleven. That’s how old I was when the Kansas City Star published my first letter to the editor, which complained that the Watergate hearings were pre-empting reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Leave it to Beaver.” The newspaper section was called “Speaking the Public’s Mind,” a most clumsy and presumptuous name.

Though my letter failed to sway the local affiliates, its appearance in newsprint whetted my appetite, and over the next few years I sent a couple dozen other letters, most of which were published. They centered on my distaste for Nixon, for television cartoons (too many robots and too much futuristic nonsense), and for the lame-brains who ran the Kansas City Royals. I even got the last few of them published under the pseudonyms of David Sanders and Peter Andrews; I guess these were written when I was finally old enough to have acquired a sense of shame.

Based on these letters, my maternal grandfather referred to me as “The Reporter.” I liked being called “The Reporter,” and I certainly considered myself one, even if my reporting consisted exclusively of reporting my own opinions.

When I was a fifth-grader, my social-studies teacher, Mrs. S., was very “with it.” For instance, during religion class a girl proposed it’d make more sense to sit in a park on a Sunday and think about God and plants and nature than to sit in a church and daydream. And Mrs. S. replied, “Yes, it probably would.” Even the troubled kids liked her. One bad seed offered this bit of praise: “You let kids do stuff!” So it was no surprise when this teacher embraced my suggestion that a couple chums and I deliver a weekly newscast to the class. She was so enthusiastic that she reached into her burlap satchel and produced a pile of tabloids. “You might find some good material in here,” she said, handing them over.

These were back issues of Grit magazine.

I soon discovered that Grit published human-interest stories with a sunny, rightward slant, as well as other oddities, curiosities, diversions, bafflers, and recipes. This all suited me just fine, for the quality of the content wasn’t what mattered; it was the celebrity aspect of it—the act of reading the news in front of an audience—that interested me the most. So I transcribed several of the articles onto notebook paper and soon recruited two lucky friends to help me deliver the news.

The next Friday morning, the three of us strode down the hall to the school library, where we prepared for our first WMS newscast—the letters standing for our last names. The librarian, who’d apparently been tipped off, helped us shoo other learners from other grades to distant tables and study carrels. We then bullied the empty chairs into four tidy rows and placed an oblong table at the front. Soon my classmates were herded in. Many sat stony-faced with their arms folded at their chests. While they were probably tickled at having the chance to leave the classroom, I think they were also by then rather sick of me.

I thanked them for choosing to make WMS a part of their morning, and then the three of us took turns reading the news from the sheets of loose-leaf paper we held in our hands. It’s fair to say that WMS was a rather low-tech enterprise: no teleprompters, no green screen, no special lighting, no Bryll-Creme.

The WMS newscast became a weekly event. But after the third or fourth edition, Mrs. S. took me aside and suggested I firm up the content by borrowing from more traditional media sources. She said, “This may be the only outlet for news that many of these boys and girls have.”

When she appealed to my civic duty, what choice did I have? So, the stories about parakeets that could sing like Durante and the Colorado first-grader who’d founded the charitable Loaves & Loafers program were replaced with hard-hitting pieces on Nixon, inflation, Golda Meir, and Helmut Schmidt. Needless to say, our Neilson ratings took a beating.

In the spring, without seeking permission from the school, I invited a pair of local news luminaries to join the audience. One, Bruce Rice, was a longtime sports anchor for KCMO channel 5. The second, Jack Cafferty, was a junior-varsity weatherman for WDAF channel 4, a station nobody watched. Cafferty also hosted an afternoon show on channel 4, called “Cafferty & Company,” which centered on municipal issues, cooking demonstrations, and other amusements, oddities, diversions, and bafflers. Today he airs on CNN and is considered a curmudgeon—which simply means his opinions run contrary to those of the corporatists.

Why I selected these two guys is still a mystery. There were plenty of sexier choices: for instance, Super Bowl quarterback Lenny Dawson; or the sideburned, basso-voiced Larry Moore, whom we all knew was on the short list for a plum network job; or the polska-kielbasa lovin’ Fred Broski, who introduced jollity to the weather reports and who single-handedly made “Bowling for Dollars” a nightly destination.

A couple weeks later, the classroom intercom summoned me to the principal’s office. In most schools, getting called to the principal’s office was a bad thing, but at ours it usually meant you’d be leaving the premises for the day or forever. Perhaps your dad was just fired from his job and wanted to take you hunting, or your grandma died, or the creditors had caught up with your folks and it was time to flee.

The school secretary stood at the counter with the telephone trembling in her hand. “He says he’s Bruce Rice,” she whispered.

The sportscaster and I had a nice conversation, during which I gave directions to our school and advised him we couldn’t pay anything. I nearly went into elaborate detail on our school’s financial woes, of how the white flight had deprived the parish of hundreds of tithing families, of how the “hippie nun” mentality had alienated dozens of other folks, of how the zeitgeist of the day militated against organized religion. “Mr. Rice,” I wanted to say, “we have no air conditioning, no cafeteria, no gymnasium, and our basketball uniforms date to the 1950s and smell like Hoss Cartwright’s trousers.” But there was no need for any explanation. Payment was not an issue, he assured me with a chuckle.

Rice indeed showed up at our school as scheduled, on Friday, April 26th, 1974. As I escorted the special guest up the stairs and through the long, gray corridors, there was some small amount of fanfare which consisted of students in classrooms looking up from their textbooks. In the library, a special table had been placed perpendicular to our news desk, and I ushered Rice to it, where he was joined by Mrs. S. and the hippie-nun principal.

WMS proceeded to report the news as we commonly did, with all the professionalism and objectivity our audience had come to expect. At the end, I opened the floor to a Q&A. As it turns out, most of the questions were asked by me. In one, I solicited our guest’s opinion of Connie Chung, who had begun reporting for CBS World News. Rice said she was a “smart cookie” who had a great future. (Boy, was he wrong.)

One fellow, a delinquent whose brother was later killed while holding up a liquor store, raised his hand and said, “Will you talk about us on the news and stuff?” Rice said of course he would mention us.

So at lunchtime a different hippie nun wheeled in a prehistoric Zenith TV (it was prehistoric even then) and dialed up "Noon Edition." We ate our sack lunches at our desks and strained to see the picture through the snow and squiggles. Bruce Rice had a prominent forehead anyway, but the distorted screen made him resemble one of those futuristic robots in the cartoons that I had railed so passionately against in “Speaking the Public’s Mind.”

When it finally came time for the sports report, the anchor turned to Rice and said, “So, I understand there are some kids out there who want our jobs.” And Rice said we were a bunch of great kids with great futures, causing our classroom to erupt in the kinds of shrieks and applause you nowadays hear when a Ben Affleck makes a surprise appearance on "Saturday Night Live."

The following Friday, Cafferty visited. He was equally gracious and generous with his time, but already the thing had lost its luster. Cafferty and even WMS were yesterday’s news.

The next fall, in an effort to fill the news void left by the discontinuation of WMS, I founded a newspaper called Intermediate Info. The name owed itself to its captive audience; the paper was distributed to those students in the intermediate grades (fourth, fifth, and sixth), whether they wanted it or not.

For each issue, my sister would gather some typing paper and carbons and sit at the kitchen table and keystroke my notations into the official record. Apparently one of the issues was too dense with news and needed some levity, for she took it upon herself to plagiarize a cartoon from a popular midstream magazine—Look, perhaps, or Saturday Evening Post. I can still see it. An uptight fellow in his forties is lying on a couch in a psychiatrist’s office, his hands clasped behind his head, and the quotation says “Try as I might, I can’t keep Goodrich and Goodyear straight in my head.”

I delivered the carbons of each issue to our school secretary, who by now was probably rather sick of me, and she made copies in the principal’s office. An issue consisted of the fronts and backs of two standard sheets of typing paper, stapled. While most traditional newspapers were black and white and “read” all over, Intermediate Info had the familiar mimeograph-purple hue on white background.

The newspaper was light on hard news—an unfortunate precursor to today’s dailies. I was also ahead of my time in that I devoted a lot of column inches to the public’s voice. A department called “Speaking Freely” gave my classmates a chance to opine on any topic that interested me.

One survey asked if they approved of the new 55-mile-per-hour highway speed limit. R., a simple-minded boy who might have sprung from the imagination of Jerzy Kosinski, gave this response: “My brother likes to drive fast!” Another poll asked what had gone wrong with the Kansas City Royals. This same R. said, “They didn’t play right.” And, for the record, R. had this to say about whether Nixon was faking his bout with phlebitis: “I think he is dumb.”

Indeed, the Intermediate Info was harsh on Nixon, even though he’d already bade his staff and the country a stiff and comical au revoir. Again, regarding the phlebitis, this opinion was voiced by another lad: “How come he went in the hospital immediately after the jury heard the new tape which has him cussin out the Canadian president? It might be true about his blood clot, but it’s awfully fishy.”

The paper also ran classified ads, for which I charged (but never managed to collect) five cents. D. wished to sell a nearly full bottle of Elmer’s Glue. M. was anxious to relieve himself of a bowling ball. One boy’s dad took advantage of the favorable ad rates: I’m selling a ‘74 Caprice in good shape, 9000 miles. Come out and see it at 7640 Prospect!

All good things do come to an end. Sad to say, declining revenues and cut-throat competition from other sources (The Weekly Reader) soon exacted their toll, and after the third issue was put to bed I unceremoniously ceased publishing.

But my affair with journalism was not at all over. It goes without saying that in high school I contributed to the paper, called The Sword, where I tried, but failed, to make it all about me.

In college—well, where does one begin?

I’ve heard that Al Gore still cannot talk about the 2000 election. There are seasoned English professors who are afraid to open Moby Dick. Woody Allen claims to have never watched one of his movies after its release.

In this same vein, I’m skittish about revisiting those drama-filled years at the UMKC University News, where I began in 1983 as a humble contributor and climbed the treacherous ladder from arts & entertainment editor to managing editor to editor-in-chief to, finally, notes-page editor.

What a long, strange trip it was. And I’m not prepared to say much about it. Except to share this digression:

There were benefits to being on the University News staff. You had the run of the facility, with no adults getting in the way. You could park in the adjoining lot, which was centrally located. Between classes you could take a nap on the sullied couch in the anteroom or just kick back with the other greatest minds of your generation. In the evenings you could bring a young lady there and get her in an amorous mood by showing off the equipment—the computer terminals, the typesetter, the headline machine, et al.

And, most important, you got to run free personal ads.

“Nobody reads that rag, except for the personals.”

You’d hear that over and over, and you’d even find yourself repeating it. In fact, the assertion was often used to justify laziness. For example, a reporter at the keyboard might say, “Hey, do you remember if it was the chancellor or the vice chancellor who got that DWI last year?” And a colleague might reply, “I think the chancellor, or maybe it was the vice chancellor. But don’t sweat it. Nobody reads anything but the personals.”

On most production nights there were several blank inches in the classifieds section that had to be filled at the eleventh hour. It was up to the staff to darken these column inches, and usually this was effected in a fit of slap-happiness as one wag after another supplied quips, benign insults, inside jokes, and other bite-sized commentary.

Just as often, however, profound drama intruded on the fun, as some staffers saw the personals column as the optimum venue for salvaging their rocky relationships. A section editor named John, for instance, might belly up to the keyboard and type a message to his gal.

Sheila,
Funny but I thought “forever” meant MORE than two weeks. Check out a dictionary, okay!
John

Then he’d get on his knees, reach into a compartment, pull out a tubular contraption, rise to his feet, transport the contraption across the office to the typesetting machine, insert the contraption into a compartment there, take a seat, press a few keys, bang on the side of the machine to get it to work, bang on it again, and then wait two or three minutes for his message to be typeset. Next, he’d reach into the typesetter for a different tubular contraption, open it, extract the glossy sheet, reach for an exacto knife, slit the message free, take the message across the room to the galleys, and adhere it to the page.

Sheila, who from a small distance had been watching all of this, would soon happen to find herself at the galleys, where she’d happen to have a look at his message. Then with noisy footfall she’d march across the room to the computer terminal and tap out her reply.

John
Speaking of dictionaries, you might look up CHEATING and see what it says.
Sheila

She’d then drop to her knees, reach into that same compartment, extract the same contraption, carry it to the typesetting machine, and so on and so forth.

When the paper hit the racks the next afternoon and the readers hurried to the personals, they might have seen this series of messages:

Sheila,
Funny but I thought “forever” meant MORE than two weeks. Check out a dictionary, okay!
John

---

John
Speaking of dictionaries, you might look up CHEATING and see what it says.
Sheila.

---

Sheila
I told you a thousand times nothing happened!

---

John
You take me for a fool or what?

---

Dave You Mother Smith! That’s the last time I eat your homemade Crap Rangoo! God have mercy on my intestines!

---

Sheila
You’re the one acting like a fool. I swear I didn’t lay a finger on her. But now I wish I had.

---

Remove a nuclear war head: Impeach Reagan.

---

John
That’s not what I hear from Michelle. So give it up already.

---

Sheila
This is war. So kiss off. I’m calling Michelle right now!

---

Grits ain’t groceries and eggs ain’t poultry and Mona Lisa was a man!

---

John
Don’t you dare call her! You’ll be sorry! Leave her alone or else!!

---

Speakin o’ grits, Ed Meese can kiss my grits!

---

Sheila,
I’m dialing. NOW!!!

---

And if we ran out of space the volley—and presumably the relationship--would be held in abeyance for a week.

None of the many dramas that I observed and took part in while employed at the University News was ever matched during my years as a part-timer for the Kansas City Star and Times. To my experience, that big newsroom downtown was not a site of great and recognizable drama. The plot lines that played out there were as loud and as interesting as the fingers tapping at the keyboards.

I had begun working there while still in high school, as a “fifteener” in the sports department. A fifteener got paid fifteen bucks for answering the phones and writing game stories on weekend nights. The glamour of working among dissipated, pot-bellied sports writers and copy editors apparently compensated for the low wages and for the fact that you were inside a tall building answering phones on a weekend night.

Eventually I moved to the obituary desk, where I worked part-time for much of the 1980s. Despite the ingenuity and ambition I had demonstrated in my youth, at the Times I was happy to be just another body filling another chair. Of course, the obit desk has long been considered a springboard for greater things, and there were opportunities to show your gumption, and many colleagues did so by asking the city editors a lot of questions. But by then I had come to realize that journalism was not my destiny, based on the single, simple fact that I hated speaking with strangers on the phone.

Still, I was pretty good at my job and I took care to do it right. The only error I can remember was, unfortunately, quite a smash-up. In the obit for a young woman who’d died of breast cancer, I somehow referred to the Mastectomy Support Team as the Vasectomy Support Team.

Though I didn’t enjoy the work, I did like being in the newsroom. Nothing big ever happened, yet you had the sense that something could. Plus, it was easy to pass the time there, and most evenings I had three or four hours to kill. You could scan the electronic mailboxes and read unedited versions of articles (and thereby discover that a couple of the more prominent bylines were almost functionally illiterate). You could surf the wires for all kinds of news stories that never made it into the paper. You could use the terminals to work on your own short stories. And if you were brave enough you could print those stories using the dot-matrix teletype down the hall, but you ran the risk of a copy editor getting there first and ratting you out or, worse, reading your work-in-progress and having a good laugh at your expense.

Sometimes in the late afternoons the stocky little publisher wended his way through the newsroom, and naturally most of the editors and reporters sat up straighter and swallowed hard. He was both a corporate good-old-boy and a Texas good-ol-boy, though few in the building seemed to find anything good about him. After he passed through, the editors and reporters invariably exchanged glances that suggested the emperor was wearing no clothes.

One evening the phone at my station rang. The phone didn’t ring often. I was hoping it was a girl I liked.

“Obits,” I said.

I was greeted by a Texas-styled growl. The man identified himself as the publisher.

“Heyyy! How are you?” I responded blithely, which was my customary phony response when all callers identified themselves, and which continues to be my customary response for any caller, even telemarketers from New Delhi.

The publisher had no time for phatic conversation. An acquaintance had died. And this death had caused the great publisher a great inconvenience. He said, “You make sure you get every God-damned last detail perfectly correct because I don’t want those bastards ribbing me on the golf course, you hear?”

I learned a lot about life that day.

A few years later, when my journalism career was a thing of the past, I landed a gig as a copywriter in an ad agency. Our biggest client was a local corporation that was micromanaged by a larger-than-life figure who, like the publisher, had a tendency for scaring the bejesus out of everyone. After I was assigned to write a television commercial, a marketing rep from that company took me aside and whispered this advice: “All that matters is the Boss wants a commercial that won’t get him teased by those bastards at the country club.”

But even before he could complete the sentence, his advice was old news.

Rumors

As she stared into the book she was reading, my wife’s eyelids began to droop. I figured it was time to give her a break.

“Say, have you heard the rumor about that guy on the Chiefs, Tony Gonzalez? He’s demanding an extra locker next to his, so he can store his hundreds and hundreds of comic books. The Archies. Richie Rich. Superman. Even Prez.”

“Prez?” she asked from the recliner.

It was about a 16-year-old Commander-in-Chief and his with-it administration. Somehow, the frizzy-haired, leftist teen won enough states in the Deep South to get elected. I think he came out in favor of executing atheists. Anyway, Gonzalez likes to read these comic books at halftime, to relieve stress, I told her. Because of this, there aren’t enough lockers, so the punter has to dress in the men’s room.

“I have not heard that,” she said.

“That’s because it’s not true. It’s just a rumor I tried to start last season, to see if it would catch on. But it didn’t catch on.”

“That’s a fairly dull rumor,” she said. “I can see why it bombed.”

I said it was no less dull than the Paul Newman story. In 1990, Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, spent several months in Kansas City filming “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.” A rumor spread that when Newman visited a Baskin-Robbins on the Country Club Plaza, one woman was so discombobulated by his presence that she shoved her ice cream cone into her purse. I’d heard it from no fewer than five sources, all of them vouching for its validity.

There seems to be no logical basis for the success of a rumor. One can thrive despite being crummy, as the Newman tale proves, or one can deserve its notoriety. When I was in the third grade, the word on the playground was that a newborn baby had recently proclaimed the world would end on May 5th. A moment later, this infant croaked. It turns out everyone had heard this one, including my wife, who at the time was in kindergarten in Iowa City.

“It was scary and lurid and easy to picture,” she said. “Of course it’d catch on.”

To counter this claim, I told her how my friend who lived in another part of town was party to an equally lurid rumor back then—that our CBS affiliate would convert to an all-nude format. But I had never heard hide nor hair of it. If ever a rumor should stretch from one corner of town to another, it would be that.

She disagreed. She said it was too unbelievable to have legs. Even foolish kids would see through it. Not even Prez would rubber stamp something like that, she said.

I assured her that this kid believed it and was rather shaken by it. He didn’t want to look at a lot of naked people on “The Bill Cosby Show.” But, fortunately, this was in late April, and he was relieved to know that May 5th was just around the corner.

Beer

Beer was always in plentiful supply around our house and Dad didn’t tinker with his choices. Over time I knew him to be a serious patron of just three brands. For years it was Hamms. Then something happened and he started buying Schlitz. Later he turned to Falstaff. He’d buy four or five cases at a time and stack them on our back porch, close to our main point of entry and exit. When they saw the inventory, guests of all ages had to react in some way. Most of them responded with a moment of awe-inspired silence.

Then one day when I was in the sixth grade, Dad brought home a case of Miller Ponys.

I had not yet acquired a taste for beer, though I’d had my chances. In those days, adults always offered small kids a swig from their can or bottle. It wasn’t done as an amusement: it was just routine. And at weddings, the minors lingered around the kegs the way the stags lingered around the prettiest bridesmaid. At one anniversary party in our church basement, the guest of honor took a few minutes from his busy schedule to explain to me the importance of properly pumping the keg.

Beer was never forbidden or out of reach, so at age twelve my attraction to these Miller Ponys was based solely on appearance. They were small bottles whose crystal-clear glass emphasized the caramel tint of this champagne of beers. In contrast, Falstaff’s malformed, hump-backed bottles and Medieval shield had always left me dry.

And therefore after school one day I drank my first beer ever—one of those Miller Ponys. Eight ounces of chilly pilsner brew. When the bottle was empty, I was glad.

Beer has always been a pain in my ass. In high school, especially, it was an undeniable force. For a while I affected an anti-beer stance that was based partly on my bent for nonconformity, but more so on self-interest. If I had any currency among my peers, it stemmed from my reputation as a guy who could say things in a certain slanted way that made others think they’d just heard something very interesting, if not amusing (and it usually was not). But beer changed the dynamics. After a few drinks, many of my peers found everything from belches to bellicose chants to be totally hilarious. In effect, my skewed and trenchant observations on high-school life took a back seat to loud farts.

So, for the longest time I denigrated beer, not in a Carrie Nation way, but more from a standpoint of superiority. It was simply beneath me, I attested.

And then at some point in my junior year—I don’t recall the moment of transformation—I ceased fighting the good fight and let it be known that I’d made my peace with beer.

But it was mostly a lie. Beer still—to borrow a phrase from my dad—“griped my butt.” There were a hundred social outings when I was enjoying things until some smart guy declared we had to score some beer. Each time, all the fun ground to a halt while we dug into our pockets for coins and argued how best to get our hands on the stuff. The most creative scheme took place when a friend went into a convenience store and pretended to be deaf. We watched from the car as he took a package of Bud to the counter and then responded to the clerk’s concerns by pantomiming, in exaggerated fashion, that he was hearing impaired.

“It almost worked,” he said as he got into the car empty handed.

One night my senior year of high school, through some unimaginable tilt of the Earth on its axis, the school’s best-looking girl and two of her cute friends were deposited into my ’71 Cutlass. And to a woman they all needed beer. I was eighteen, old enough to cross the state line and buy “Kansas three-two pisswater,” but uneasy about having such contraband in my car. I had seen the chilling documentary “Scared Straight” some years before, as well as the made-for-TV movie called “The Glass House,” starring Alan Alda as a sensitive fellow in jail. I didn’t want any of that.

But when you’re eighteen and a beautiful girl wants beer, that beautiful girl gets beer.

So I drove into Kansas and the girls joined me inside a 7-Eleven and snatched a couple sixes. Even though I was legally allowed to buy beer, I was still nervous and ended up apologizing to the clerk.

Back in the car, as I liberated the bottles from their casing, I insisted the girls keep them low at all times in case we crossed paths with a cop. If you’ve ever had open containers in a car, then you know every passing vehicle has a cherry on top.

“How we supposed to drink then?” asked a chick in the back seat.

Drink? It never occurred to me they’d be interested in drinking the beers. I had assumed it was all about the process: the mingling of dollars and coins, the surveying of the glamorous product behind the big glass doors, the debates over Busch vs Bud and bottles vs. cans, and the purchase of a communal pack of smokes—for everyone knows that pretty girls cannot hold a beer in one hand without having a cigarette in the other.

“Isn’t it all just an affectation?” I said.

“What?” said one of them.

“You’re kind of weird,” said another.

“All right. But just keep ‘em low when you’re not taking a drink, please.”

You can guess what happened next. I was puttering below the speed limit, southbound on Wornall Road, just south of Red Bridge, when the prettiest girl and another began wondering if beer made you fat. Suddenly the prettiest girl flicked on my dome light and held her bottle up to it to read the caloric content. Her friend did the same. Before I could scold them, a patrol car approached in the opposite lane.

“The fuzz!” shouted the third girl, and they all squealed in laughter.

The brake lights reddened on the cop car. I goosed the gas and got the Cutlass up to forty in no time and took the first turn, into a flush neighborhood where I wended through side streets until I was at State Line Road and then into the safety of Kansas. The girls responded with Dixie shouts of triumph, and for a couple minutes there I was pretty cool. I lifted my chin and puffed my lower lip, like Barney Fife when he took the gang out for a Sunday drive in that lemon that Grandma Walton sold him.

Not long after that, I survived another close scrape with the law, one a bit more dramatic. A couple of friends and I made plans to carpool to a party at a classmate’s home down deep in the city. When my friend E. picked me up, I came armed with a twelve-pack. E. was able to match my twelve-pack, bottle for bottle. Our other friend, T., soon added twelve more soldiers to the equation.

At a Milgrim’s grocery store we bought a bag of ice, and then in the parking lot we transported the beer into coolers. Just looking at thirty-six bottles of beer was intoxicating, and so we got very giggly and slobbery as we deposited them into our coolers.

The party was a blast. By all accounts, the class of 1981 blew the roof off that mother. The three of us managed to conquer those thirty-six beers, which was quite a feat since collectively we weighed about two-hundred and were not at all seasoned drinkers. It was the first time I was ever drunk and therefore I recall only a few snapshots from that party: the smartest girl in class rolling down a grassy incline over and over, as if she were trying to perfect the act; the basketball hero drinking a tall boy, which made sense because he was a tall boy; the intrusion of a freshman girl who toted a flask of whiskey as if it were her ticket to the proceedings—and indeed it sort of was.

After one a.m., the three of us returned to E.’s Chevelle for the long ride home. T. immediately fell asleep in the back seat, curled in a fetal position. I rode shotgun. My only memory of the journey is when we approached the busy intersection of 39th street and Southwest Trafficway. I looked at the driver and noted his eyes were Magoo-like. The lids were puffy and about 90-percent shut as he whizzed through the traffic light, which may or may not have been green. I laughed and laughed. It was straight out of a Harold Ramis movie.

Some time later, near 82nd and The Paseo, which was just a few blocks from my home, the car struck a curb and popped a tire. The three of us awakened and clambered out to take a look. We circled the Chevelle like wobbly fighters taking standing-eight counts. Then to the north I saw a police car approaching. Even in my state of dissipation, I realized what would happen next. We’d be booked, jailed, and summarily scared straight.

The patrol car inched along until it reached us. From the far lane of traffic, the officer eyeballed us and then accelerated like a madman. He made a sharp turn west, into a neighborhood.

We could not speak, but through crude gestures and grunts we demonstrated relief, and through similar gestures and grunts we agreed to leave the car and walk to my house.

After relieving ourselves in my back yard, we lingered at the top of the driveway for about five minutes, until I decided I was sober enough to transport them home, which is what I somehow did.

That weekend, a small article in The Kansas City Star reported on a murder that had occurred just a couple blocks west of 82nd and The Paseo, at 1:45 in the morning—concurrent with our tire mishap. A woman had come out to her front porch, perhaps to investigate a prowler or perhaps to sleuth out the popping sound of a blown tire, and was shot to death. Gripping that newspaper, I felt shivers down my spine as I recalled how the cop had bypassed us that night.

Later, when I reported the creepy news to T. and E., I concluded with this skewed observation: “That poor woman died for our sins.” T. and E. were of course sober by then, and so I can only hope they received the remark as something insightful, if not profound.

Basketball

On December 21, 1972, I spent 97 cents on a novelty called Puff Basketball. The ball was the size and color of a plump orange and composed of a spongy material that predated nerf and was possibly used in the manufacture of certain birth-control devices. The rim was made of hard plastic and had strings for a net. The entire production relied on the wherewithal of two suction cups. When moistened, these fickle cups were supposed to adhere to any flat surface, but it was an all-or-nothing proposition. Either they’d stick so well that a grown-up would have to be recruited to rip them free, or they’d instantly pop loose, each cup making a fart-like noise.

My dad was not happy to see it. He scowled and said “Gawd dammit.” He was in a foul mood anyway because the Oakland Raiders were beating the Pittsburgh Steelers in a playoff game, and around our house the Raiders were football’s version of Richard M. Nixon: corrupt, slimy, and quite nearly invincible. But, even more than that, he was afraid that if my brothers and I played puff basketball, we’d lose our touch for shooting a regulation ball into a regulation basket, and we’d never make it big. We laughed off such logic, but it turns out he was correct.

Of course, I was eager to set up the goal and begin playing, but the vagaries of history delayed my gratification: Franco Harris' “Immaculate Reception” occurred before I could unwrap and assemble the thing, and then I had to linger in the living room with my family and in-laws to observe the proper amount of time for expressing awe.

Later, I dampened the suction cups and affixed them to an archway that separated our kitchen from the back porch. Somehow all my brothers sniffed it out from the distant living room, the way the I.T. guys at work are always the first to sniff out the leftover bagels that get deposited in the break room. Before I could release my second shot, I was surrounded by moppy-haired Maraviches.

Our back porch was the size of a storage shed and we treated it like one. A pair of sickly orange restaurant booths occupied the north half, and piled on these booths and tabletops were the kinds of junk you’d walk past at a swap meet. Several of Mom’s sprawling house plants covered the southern quarter. Against the east wall stood a wrought-iron shelf laden with books and gimcracks. So there really wasn’t room to show off your jump shot. Which was okay, because you couldn’t shoot the ball with any sense of confidence; an uncle’s emphysematic cough might be strong enough to disrupt its trajectory, if the ceiling didn’t disrupt it first. And dribbling was out of the question. You’d have better luck trying to dribble a marshmallow.

But none of that mattered. Puff Basketball was all about the dunks.

These slams came fast and furious, and to a bystander—a delicate aunt, say—it must have been a frightening blur of bony arms, inadequate mustaches, cigarettes dangling from lips. More than one humpbacked bottle of Falstaff was upended as we mixed it up there on the yellow linoleum, not three feet from the kitchen table where the women were setting out a roast baron of beef with all the trimmings.

At first the dunks were greeted with the kinds of exclamations that greet municipal fireworks displays, but that got old pretty quick when we realized that anyone with arms could dunk the thing, and soon our cheers turned to taunts and challenges. But that got old, too. And, besides, dinner was just about ready.

Like all toys, and like too many things in life, Puff Basketball was a disappointment. But this did nothing to diminish my love for shooting baskets.

In my earliest years, we had a backboard and rim affixed to a thick-trunked tree midway up our driveway—a configuration that would have made Ralph Nader bust a gasket. To perform a layup was to risk your life. A particularly wild shot might result in an explosion of sparrow feathers.

Soon we erected a self-standing goal near the top of our driveway, and that was when shooting baskets became less of an adventure and more of an obsession for me.

I shot and shot nearly every day of the year, and most of the time alone. That’s how I liked it best. Add just one individual to the equation and you could count on that person suggesting a game of one-on-one or PIG—two of the most tedious things ever invented by modern man.

More important, the presence of another person was always a distraction from the internal storylines I’d develop each day on our paved court. I’ve never seen “Rocky,” but I bet my storylines paralleled those in the Stallone movie. In my fantasies, I was always the unassuming underdog, matched up against a glamorous team that had at least one loud mouth—the type of show-off who’d never been challenged by the likes of me. This show-off was always based, to varying degrees of looseness, on Muhammad Ali.

Looking back, I now see there wasn’t much variety in those plots. Each day I’d proceed to sink sensible jumpers from all around the perimeter while the show-off tossed up clunkers and whined to the refs and argued with his teammates and coaches. Still, these games remained close to the very end so that I could drain an historically long jumper at the buzzer and then walk away as if I’d done nothing more spectacular than mail a letter.

Did I mention that in these imaginings I also happened to be an amazing fiction writer? In fact, at halftime, after the coach was finished praising me and hollering at my teammates, I’d work on my next great novel until it was time to return to action.

Well, I’ve never published a great or even a lousy novel, but I did play organized basketball in grade school.

My fifth-grade and sixth-grade teams were utter embarrassments; we were lovable losers minus the lovability. Our Catholic school’s dwindling enrollment provided a tiny pool of talent to choose from. We were short, clumsy, funny looking, and in some cases in-bred, the kind of crew that needed a Bill Murray character to whip it into shape.

For instance, there was one fellow who assumed you could carry the ball up and down the court without dribbling, as long as you came to a complete pause between each step. There was another starter who was so afraid of having the ball that he’d heave it to the first warm body he saw, including the opponents and referees. And there was our skinny center who couldn’t remember if the three-second rule applied to the offense or the defense, so he stayed out of the paint the entire game, just to be safe.

I, too, contributed to the failure in at least one ass-backwards way. These were the days when basketball trunks were shiny and notoriously brief, like something Judy Carne might have worn on “Laugh-In.” By the fourth quarter, through the convergence of perspiration, polyesters, and what Sir Isaac Newton called “The Precepts of Concavity,” one’s trunks threatened to ride into one’s anal cavity, resulting in a “snuggy” (or, if you live east of the Mississippi River, a “wedgie”). I always called attention to any snuggy and made a lot of mean comments, which probably inspired my teammates to move about on the basketball floor with extreme caution in order to avoid the shame.

There were other factors that contributed to our badness. We had no gym to practice in, so each season on two or three Saturday mornings we’d gather at the one decent hoop on the school playground. Coach would have to brush aside Crazy Jack and some neighborhood teens and dogs so we could run our layups and bounce passes. Usually if we wanted to scrimmage we’d have to recruit Crazy Jack or the neighborhood teens in order to field two squads of five.

We lost a lot of games those two seasons—all of them, I think.

In the seventh grade I switched to a more prosperous school, where I played for an above-average team that had an above-average gym and extraordinary cheerleaders. The gym was nice, but the cheerleaders were what I liked the best.

By then I was an above-average shooter but totally uninterested in, and unsuited for, the tougher facets of the game, like rebounding and playing defense. In high school, because the coaches demanded that you rebound and play defense, I hung up my Chuck Taylor sneakers before the freshman season even began, and I never played organized basketball again.

But for some fifteen years I continued to follow the sport with a zeal that now makes me blush.

Then, suddenly, I quit watching college and pro basketball, cold turkey. I'd simply had enough of the three-point shot, noisy dunks, countless free throws, droopy shorts, high-fives, lazy officiating, sweaty faces, and the pouty coaches who stand on the fringes with their arms outstretched, as if demanding an explanation for why they’ve been treated so unjustly all their lives.

I haven’t gone back and never will, especially now that all the players’ bodies, including the whites of their eyes, are covered with tattoos.

A few years ago we moved into a suburban home with a regulation goal in the driveway, and I’ve once again taken to shooting hoops. The backboard is weathered and chipping, and with each shot taken a few shards drizzle down. My sons enjoy shooting around with me as well, and I worry a little that this backboard might collapse someday—even perhaps in the Darryl Dawkins “Chocolate Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam-I-Am-Jam” kind of way.

In any event, we’re brave and we carry on, and before long my kids and I are flinging and punting all sorts of balls at the hoop—kick balls, soccer balls, tennis balls, golf balls, and a crappy Wal Mart-branded yellow thing that’s shaped less like a basketball and more like Sam Walton’s skull. In these moments there’s too much noise and action and too many neighbors passing by and remarking about the weather or the kids’ talents (“sign ‘em up!”) for me to concentrate on any dramatic storylines where I vanquish a most villainous foe.

I suppose that’s okay. I’ve already fought a thousand such battles and won them all—in dramatic fashion, no less. It’s time to move on.