The Dispensables

Channel 9

2010-02-26T16:08:00.003-06:00

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

2008-11-06T19:58:00.010-06:00

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

2008-09-22T21:23:00.002-05:00

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

2008-05-16T21:27:00.003-05:00

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

2008-03-22T11:47:00.005-05:00

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

2008-02-06T16:12:00.005-06:00

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

2008-01-02T21:31:00.000-06:00

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

2007-11-28T16:50:00.001-06:00

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

2007-10-04T19:34:00.003-05:00

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.

Murphy

2007-09-07T17:11:00.000-05:00

Recently, through a grave misstep, my car radio got tuned to an AM talk station. Upon discovering this, I panicked and started pushing buttons in an effort to find anything that resembled music, which is no easy feat these days. When calm was finally restored, I began feeling a little bit lonesome for Mike Murphy.

I hate talk radio, but the Murphy program, which ran for years and years on various Kansas City stations, wasn’t really talk radio. Listening to it was like lounging in a basement rec room while your know-nothing uncle and a few Humphrey Democrats played bumper pool and spoke disjointedly on topics they knew little about.

The show’s strength was not its quality, which was spotty, but its originality. And I found the show especially unique when he worked with John Wozniak (the Woz) around 1999 to 2001. It was not intense, important, or in your face. Sometimes there were guests—snake-oil salesmen or assassination experts or B-team celebrities. Sometimes there were callers. Often there was free food. When food was brought in, the wheels fell off the show. You’d hear lip smacking and not a lot else. It was good radio.

Murphy often ran the show from restaurants, and his most loyal listeners tended to join him there. This custom led to at least one humorous misunderstanding. One morning, a caller spoke her piece about Marilyn Maye or crop circles and then said, “Oh, by the way, what’s going down this Thursday?” Murphy was stumped. She continued: “I caught the end of that call with Genevieve, and she said she’d see you Thursday.” He said, “Oh, Genevieve. She's coming over to my house to groom my dog. You’re welcome to join us.”

Murphy once said he saw a mosquito so large that it was standing on its hind legs and French-kissing a turkey. He said his biggest regret in life was not taking tap-dance lessons as a kid. On I-70, returning from Colorado one summer, Murphy and his wife saw the face of an alien through big storm clouds. It stared them down for half an hour.

Woz was his perfect complement. A seasoned reporter and radio guy, he was a square peg in the round hole of life, with more than one ex-wife to prove it. Like Murphy, he had curmudgeon tendencies, but what he loved he loved, and he never made you feel crummy about life.

Woz, too, had his share of offbeat stories. For instance, one night some buddies and he got drunk with Thomas Hart Benton and they all went outside and tossed around the original Persephone—the painting, not the woman. Another time, he said he believed Jesus looks like Robert Duvall.

Often Murphy asked Woz totally dense questions. “What’d they call that villain on Batman that looked like a penguin?” he might ask. Or “What’s the name of those little tomatoes that look like cherries?”

Then his questions would turn epistemological: “Why are people always tryin' to get you to ride wild animals?" or “Who’s the greatest?” Sometimes Woz replied that Darryl Hannah was the greatest. He liked leggy blondes.

Murphy has said there’s nothing dumber than drinking beer from anything that’s not glass. This remark got some buddies and I to thinking about his tastes. I proposed he was a Bud man, but that his allegiance floundered based on ad blitzes. In the early 80s he probably drank Olympia, while later he gave Keystone a fighting chance. One friend said Murphy probably smuggled in his share of “Colorado Kool-Aid” in the 70s.

Like beer, Murphy was something of an acquired taste, and something to be consumed in moderation. When taken in doses, his show could really hit the spot and make you feel a good kind of silly.

One of my fondest memories is of the time Murphy claimed a polar bear could whup any other creature on dry land. Somehow, Woz thought he’d said panda bear, and this made for an unusual debate. As I listened that morning, I knew it would all end too soon. No corporate accountant or media consultant will put up with that stuff for long.

Indeed, the home offices soon brought in a boy wonder from Texas to run the station. Murphy got kicked to a time slot that was less accommodating to my schedule, and Woz got kicked out. They were replaced by a breakfast team called Hickman and Doyle. In their promotional ad, they went “Whazzuppp!”

Homemade

2007-08-26T16:25:00.000-05:00

Occasionally my young sons build a clubhouse in a spare bedroom. They spend a delirious half-hour gathering bed sheets, clothespins, flashlights, corn chips, yard sticks, first-aid kits, and other essentials. When the components are in place and the appropriate warning is affixed to the door (KEEP OUT or you will meet your DOOM!), things get real quiet real fast. Five minutes later, the boys are back in the public domain, announcing they’re bored and wishing there was something to do.

This sequence of events reminds me of the process of creating home-crafted music tapes, which I often did in my late teens and early twenties. It was a lot of fun to plot out the songs I’d pirate onto a cassette tape. But it was less fun to record the songs, for it involved a lot of kneeling and twisting and reaching, whereby my dorsal cleavage got bared and my skivvies ended up sideways.

And it was still less fun to listen to the end product, which usually stank. That’s because I wasn’t very good at working the needle or calculating the recording times or even getting the volume right—sometimes Jimmy Buffett sounded like he was broadcasting a golf match in Margaritaville.

I littered my homemade cassettes not with songs I liked but with songs that I thought would make me look cool. These were cuts taken from the albums my older brothers had bought, and the songs had such irresistible names as “I Hear You Been Layin’ My Ol’ Lady” and “Pissin’ in the Wind” and “Red Necks, White Sock, and Blue Ribbon Beer” and “Sangria Wine” and “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” and “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?” Indeed, they concerned subject matter that a bookish, over-cautious, urban teen like me could sink his teeth into.

In high school, I don’t think I procured a single girlfriend or friend based on the ribald and raucous nature of these home-crafted compilations, and it’s probably just as well that I didn’t get what I thought I wanted, for it might have gone something like this:

“Hey, man. Yeah, you in the Dodge Dart. With the Fred Travalena hair. Hey, ain’t you in my gym class? Ain’t you the guy the retarded kid pinned in wrestling yesterday? Anyways, I gotta say that you’re listenin’ to some really kick-ass tunes over there. Songs about gettin’ a piece and drinkin’ whiskey and puffin’ on some Panama Red and kickin’ hippies’ asses. So, hey, you got room for me in there? How about we go chase down a few of my public-school friends and then we get us some weed and a bottle of Sangria and go kick some hippies’ asses and then find us a coupla’ hookers! . . . Hey, wait up! Wait up, man! . . . Come back!”

I’ve been told that nowadays you needn’t get splinters and wedgies when compiling songs. Apparently you can download individual numbers willy-nilly from some ethereal server onto tiny devices—iPods or BlueTeeth or BoysenBerrys or what have you. I don’t know what kind of hocus-pocus is involved, but I do presume it’s just one more example of joyless instant gratification that I will declaim until the very minute I chisel open my wallet and buy such a device of my own.

Writerly

2007-07-27T16:07:00.001-05:00

Up into my twenties I aspired to become a writer of favorable repute. I think these hopes were kindled in the third grade when I was assigned to write about a village. Our choices were Spooky Village, Happy Village, Silly Village, and a few others. I chose Silly Village and dashed off a page-long exposition about a community where the kids smoked cigarettes and drove cars and the grown-ups rode tricycles and played kickball. The piece garnered such resounding guffaws from the other kids that my ears are still ringing.

Let me tell you, it's tough on a guy to peak at age nine. I will forever feel a certain kinship with Rodney Allen Rippy.

I never topped "Silly Village," but for years and years I tried. These efforts weren’t always honorable. Often in my youth, desperate for ideas, I appropriated tales that were already in the public domain. One that comes to mind was the fable about the dog with the bone in its mouth. This unsatisfied hound happened upon its own reflection in a pond and decided it wanted that bone. Of course, the dog ends up with nothing but a broken heart. Feeling only the slightest pangs of shame, I put that story into a Big Chief tablet as if it were my own.

A couple years later, I planned to top "Silly Village" by publishing a sports biography. We had dozens of those cluttering our house--bios of Jerry Kramer and Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain and the like. In fact, this idea was inspired by a paperback on the coffee table nearby. Called Earl the Pearl, the book chronicled the exploits of the legendary cager Earl Monroe. I figured local hero Len Dawson might be a good subject for a biography, but I didn't have his address or phone number handy, and I was really in a hurry to publish. So instead I chose Earl Monroe as my subject and began transcribing from Earl the Pearl into my spiral notebook, careful to rearrange a few words and punctuation marks to appease any uptight copyright judges.

On most weekend nights in high school, while my peers were off wasting their time dating and having fun, I sat in a recliner with a pillow on my lap and a notebook on the pillow, and I wrote in longhand for long hours. Those days, I didn't date much. I was five-eleven and weighed one-twenty. I drove a car that made the nuns laugh and point. I wore my hair in the style a friend calls “the Julie Andrews cut.” I clipped the same necktie to a polyester shirt every school day and wore cowboy boots before they were cool—back when all of Garth Brooks’ friends were in low places because they were crawling around in diapers.

On some of those nights I went for a solitary drive with the goal of immersing myself into any experience I could later write about, the way a Tom Wolfe or a George Plimpton might. This goal was conditional: I would not immerse myself into anything that might result in bloodshed, embarrassment, or harsh words from grown-ups, other teens, or outlaw bikers.

Writerly matters were always on my mind. Anything could inspire a trip to that recliner and the aforementioned pillow and spiral notebook. If the night was speckled with fireflies, for instance, or if the dusky sky had a peculiar-shaped cloud, you’d find me hard at work, incorporating such visions into a brand-new novel.

I began writing a brand-new novel just about every day, a habit I shared with Joyce Carol Oates. Unfortunately, I presumed a novel must begin at daybreak and must chronicle every move the protagonist makes. By the age of fifteen I had completely worn out every way to describe the brushing of teeth and the sizzling and crackling of bacon in a skillet.

Often I tried to build the stories around what I believed were exceptional metaphors or funny lines. For example, one evening I worked like the devil to construct a story around the simile “he’s as slippery as a bar of soap in a bathtub.”

I now recall an anecdote that sent me speeding to the writing chair. As the story went, while on a car trip in high school, an older brother and some buddies stopped for gas in the kind of sweaty southern town that might employ Rod Steiger as its sheriff. In the men’s room, a townie said to one of them, “From where we come from, we wash our hands after we piss.” And my brother’s friend said, “From where we come from, we don’t piss on our hands.”

For better or worse, I never resorted to spirits or hallucinogens to help me complete a piece of work. In college another fledgling scribbler often boasted of how liquor was an inspiration and a device. He once told me, “When I sit down to write, I got a pen in one hand and a bottle of Jack in the other, and I don’t stop writing till the pen or the bottle goes dry.”

At least his approach resulted in something. He became an alcoholic.

The most important years in the development of a writer are ages fifteen to twenty, roughly speaking. During those formative years, I squandered a lot of time by emulating such raconteurs and lightweights as Hunter S. Thompson, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack Kerouac. And, regrettably, I enrolled in all the creative-writing workshops I could, where the prevailing advice was “show, don’t tell,” and where consensus by committee, which is always a bad idea, was driven by the blowhardiest among us.

So the fact that I’ve yet to surpass “Silly Village” is really no surprise.

Cops and Hippies

2007-07-14T10:54:00.002-05:00

I’ve said a lot of dumb things over the years, but perhaps the dumbest came as the big finish to an oration I gave in speech class my freshman year of high school, in 1978. I concluded a speech about the police department with this Nixonian challenge: “So, if you ever need help in an emergency, try calling a hippie and see what happens.”

The incident is made doubly pitiful because the line wasn’t even mine to begin with. I had lifted it from the dictatorial Monsignor who reigned over my parish grade school. He was also the city’s police chaplain, and he spoke of cops more highly and more often than he spoke of Christ. A hundred times I heard the silvery Monsignor say this: “If I’m going thirty and I see a cop, I drop down to twenty-five. If I’m going twenty and see a cop, I drop down to fifteen. And if I’m going fifteen and see a cop, I wave him over and buy some tickets to the police circus.”

The first time I heard it, I said to myself, “Monsignor, I’m with you on the Trinity, and I’m with you on the Transubstantiation, and I’m with you on the Virgin Birth, but with this one you’ve gone too far.”

I was fifteen when I delivered to my class that encomium on the valor of police officers, but in truth I’ve always had mixed feelings about law enforcement. It seems that whenever I’m feeling somewhat positive about the thin blue line, an ugly incident shakes things up—say, Deputy Fife incarcerates a 90-year-old Burt Mustin for the crime of upsetting a board of checkers in public.

There was even a time when I considered becoming a policeman. I think what held me back was my fear of mean dogs. No doubt there’d be occasions when I’d have to run through the kinds of dark back yards where mean dogs lurk.

But I did take part in the ride-along program. It was in December of 1982 when I rode shotgun (almost literally) for an evening shift in the city’s East Zone.

The tour was eventful, at least compared to how I usually spent my nights. The highlight was a Hollywood-styled chase through hilly sidestreets. It lasted for five thrilling minutes and had everything but the sensational upsetting of a fruit stand.

The owner of the pursued vehicle had been implicated in a recent homicide. The boxy van contained a teen-aged driver who resembled the garden-variety white kids you see on “COPS,” except that he wore a shirt. His companion, though, was an anomaly: an auburn-haired pixie in a pony tail and a black sweater. Handcuffed and shivering, she stood isolated in the middle of the street for the longest time, often engaging me in eye contact, as if I had the power to free her. I certainly had the will to free her.

I was happy to see the police escort the scraggly driver into a paddy wagon; later, though, I was equally unhappy to see them escort the pretty girl into the back seat of a patrol car.

Even in the face of such ambivalent feelings about the law and its offenders, I’m never hesitant to call the police, and have done so about twenty times.

My first such call was placed while I was a grad student in another town, in 1987. I lived one floor below a most despicable fellow who happened to look just like Howie Mandel—the ridiculous 1987 version, not the ridiculous 2007 issue. Thanks to Google, I’ve since determined this ersatz Mandel was from a “connected” family back east, and therefore I’ll disclose no other details about him or his sporty red car or his Brit-model girlfriend.

This upstairs neighbor sold marijuana, but his real offenses were blasting heavy metal music at all hours and reading the Riot Act to the Brit-model—the Riot Act being the only thing this college student ever read.

After a few months of misery, I phoned the TIPS hotline and ratted him out. But it was not the weed that forced my hand; it was the noise. I say “live and let live,” as long as you don’t live too loudly near my doorstep.

I’ve been on the other end of such phone calls, so I know what it’s like to be hassled by The Man. One summer evening in the middle 1970s, my youthful buddy Tiger and I were treating whiffle-ball bats like guns, much the way today’s kids treat guns like guns. When we got tired of shooting each other, we trained these colorful cudgels at passing cars. Soon a Plymouth Fury sped our way. It was the fuzz. Someone had narked on us. Someone had mistaken our plastic bats—the type with the skinny handles and the ends that flared like Popeye’s forearms—for munitions.

The cops got to the bottom of things in just ten seconds and then departed; it was an emergency that even a hippie could have handled.

Speaking of hippies, ever since I delivered that unfortunate speech in 1978, I’ve felt the need to apologize to our shaggy friends. So, here it is: I am sorry for impugning you in front of twenty uninterested freshmen.

And, dear hippies, while I have your ear, I’d like to thank you for getting on the nerves of Spiro Agnew, John Wayne, and football’s Earl Morrall. Really, other than enabling Charles Manson and bumming too many smokes and “crashing” wherever you’d like, you’ve done humanity no harm. It’s my firm belief the world is large enough for you. But please know that my living room floor is not.

Stooges

2007-07-04T18:47:00.000-05:00

I think I read somewhere that George W. Bush enjoys The Three Stooges. It makes sense. He’s a compassionate conservative and also has a soft spot for people who can’t do their jobs right.

For a group of men who could never do their jobs right, the Stooges somehow managed to find work during the Great Depression. At one time or another they were tailors, ice men, plumbers, chefs, law men, musicians, construction workers, boxing impresarios, and traveling salesmen, to name a few.

The other day I watched the boys (Larry, Moe, Curly) serve as gas-station attendants. A snazzy open-topped sedan pulled in, bearing three professorial gentlemen in the back seat. Each man wore a black top hat and each was appointed with monocle and urbane facial hair—goatees or van dyke beards. To their credit, the Stooges tried like the devil to give these academics good service, but perhaps they were trying too hard. Hats got knocked from heads, for instance, and monocles got shattered, and rivers of oil got sprayed onto faces.

Then soon, through an unorthodox turn of events, Curly was rotating on a spit. Either the special effects were better for that particular episode than they were for the thousand others, or Curly was actually rotating above a fire. He went round and round until his partners finally rescued him. He next bounced on the grass and made that signature noise that I cannot spell, while smoke emanated from his rump.

The Stooges don’t easily amuse me in my old age, but as a kid I watched them in the kind of blissful state that today is found only on Tibetan hills and in the audiences of Norah Jones concerts. I even wrote a Stooges episode and recruited my buddies to perform it with me for our sixth-grade class. The act of writing this script brought great agony. I spent days and days hunched over a Big Chief tablet, making James-Dean faces as I tried to decide whether Moe should poke out Larry’s eyes or rip luxurious tufts of his hair, and whether Shemp should drink motor oil or turpentine.

When they saw the manuscript, my buddies were alarmed that I had chosen Shemp over Curly.

Curly is the world’s favorite Stooge, but I happen to think Shemp is superior to his brother. Curly is more of a one-trick pony. He does everything loudly and largely. Shemp, on the other hand, can play big and he can play small. Plus, there’s much more to his face—more to empathize with. When Curly takes a carpenter’s saw to the skull, you know it’s fake. When Shemp takes the blade, your thoughts and prayers go out to his agent. In short, Curly is sometimes amusing, but he cannot pack Shemp’s lunch. And if he could, I suppose that lunch would consist of a coat of brown paint slathered between two slices of white bread.

Anyway, when my script was ready, our teacher let us kids caravan across the parking lot to the church basement, where we rehearsed on the stage without adult supervision. Soon the old custodian happened by. He had a history of saying little and saying it softly, but our antics sent him into a rage. The coot waved his industrial broom and demanded we return to our classroom at once.

Later, our teacher said the janitor told her we were horsing around on the stage.

“Yes,” I said. “We were rehearsing ‘The Three Stooges,’ not William F. Buckley’s ‘Firing Line.’”

The truth is, I did not say that, but I wish I had.

Pearls

2007-06-03T12:34:00.002-05:00

When I was finally old enough to stray from home and explore the neighborhood, my pickings were slim. The other kids on the block were of the public-school variety who went shirtless a lot and had menacing dogs and parents. So I often took the easy way out and ended up across the street, at the home of an elderly couple who each bore the first name of Pearl.

The masculine Pearl went by his middle name, Glenn; it must have been the easiest decision of his life. Glenn wore what we kids called pop-bottle glasses, back when pop bottles were made of thick glass rather than today’s polyurethane. He was a sedentary coot, but in the evenings he liked to stand in his front yard and gaze open mouthed at the heavens. His glasses were so thick, he may have watched the moon landings from out there.

Glenn also had a heart condition and therefore could have dropped at any time, a fact that made him interesting to me, much the way I found Evel Knievel and the Flying Wallendas to be interesting.

His scrappy little wife, Pearl, was a character. Today the medical and psychiatric professions have all kinds of diagnoses that apply to her. I once got out a dictionary and looked up “paranoid” after hearing my mom talk about her.

Pearl had a reputation for shooting first and asking questions later. She cozied up to guns and sometimes charged through her front door and trained a big pistol on some imagined threat, looking very much like the undercover officer Christie Love from “Get Christie Love,” except that Pearl was seventy-five and as white as Edgar Winter.

As noted earlier, I paid the Pearls a lot of visits. What drove me there must have been our shared interest in the Kansas City Royals, for there was nothing else to attract me. She never offered soda pop or sweetmeats, and she boasted none of the novelty gew-gaws that lots of seniors kept around their houses for the sole purpose of impressing neighbor children, such as porcelain frogs that blow smoke rings or anatomically correct salt & pepper shakers.

Inevitably, while she and I chattered about Ed Kirkpatrick or the team's lame-brain owner, Glenn lost interest and dozed off in his recliner, his mouth hanging wide open. It was a frightful sight: many times I was sure I had just witnessed him passing to the other side.

One afternoon in May of 1971, Pearl wore the gravest of expressions as she beckoned me onto her gravel driveway with a solemn curling of an index finger, like one detective alerting another to a gruesome crime scene. I expected her to lead me inside the house where I’d find Glenn on the floor, belly-up and stiff as a board. Instead, she only wanted to grieve about the latest Royals trade, in which a white player (Tommy Matchick) was swapped for a black one (Ted Savage).

My folks didn’t have a lot of use for Pearl—and rightfully so—but after Harry S Truman died, my mom took her and me to the Truman Library to pay our respects at his public memorial.

That day, President Nixon was scheduled to attend as well, and as we drove to Independence, Pearl spoke with great confidence that some nut in the crowd would “pick him off.” Naturally, I began eyeballing the bulging satchel she had brought along.

Imagine my excitement as I realized there was a fair chance I’d become a part of history. Granted, our household hated Nixon, but the prospect of being a hero, of seizing a pistol from Pearl’s gnarled fingers, was more attractive than letting the villainous leader die.

When the motorcade finally arrived, the three of us peered down from an overpass and tried to determine which of the black sedans held Nixon. Suddenly Pearl began jumping. “It’s that one! That one! I can see his nose!”

Let the historical record show that the only thing she pointed as the president passed beneath us was her index finger.

Tiger

2007-05-08T16:21:00.002-05:00

I lived in the same house for my entire childhood, and it recently occurred to me that in all those years I had just two neighborhood companions—and one of them was less than half my age. He was Tiger, a five-year-old who could have passed for Curly Howard from The Three Stooges, if Curly had stood just three feet tall.

Tiger represented a dying breed: he was a child who loathed such things as shoes, shirts, and shelter. He was kind of like Huckleberry Finn, though he probably lacked the acute sense of moral introspection and certainly the corncob pipe. Year round, the fuzzy-headed lad wore cut-off shorts and not much else as he canvassed from house to house looking for playmates of any age or gender. Of course, these were still the days when five-year-olds could leave their homes at daybreak and return at twilight, none the worse for wear.

Despite our age difference, I spent an unhealthy amount of time with him, but I cannot imagine what he saw in me or I in him. It’s safe to say we had little in common. I was eleven and fond of Mad magazine and baseball and creature comforts, and he was the kind of kid who walked barefoot on gravel without wincing.

Soon after he moved in, Tiger became the most popular figure on the block. I guess the fact that he was “up for anything” accounted for his success at finding companions. He had a talent beyond his years for insinuating himself into the moment. Had Bob Dylan written an anthem about Tiger, a few of the lines may have gone like this:

I seen him diggin in gardens with old neighbor ladies
And shootin free throws in the Rick Barry style
And racin three teens who were ridin bicycles
A-chasin them Schwinns, his blisters a-blazin
And changin Pennzoil in a man’s dingy driveway
His bare feet protrudin from under the bumper

Tiger often made the rounds on a three-wheeled contraption that was a step-sister to the Big Wheel. It must have come from Thailand or Red China because it had a name that didn’t stack up, either—something like “Rapidly Racer” or “With Abundant Zoom.”

Like the Big Wheel, it was loud and colorful and low to the ground, but its designers had ignored all safety specifications. Whenever Tiger sped, the contraption flipped backwards, and, sad to say, Tiger often sped.

Those days, I took nothing more seriously than major-league baseball, and one July night as I lay on my living-room floor and absorbed the spectacle of the All-Star Game with the singleness of focus that one has when viewing the Mona Lisa, I detected a familiar rapping at our front door. It was Tiger.

He cupped his hands around his chubby face to get a better look through the screen door. “Can you come outside and pway?”

Suddenly I turned into someone from a Joseph Wambaugh novel. It may have been the first time I ever used the notorious “F” word in public: “Tiger, have you lost your $%#@* mind! The All-Star Game is on!”

“Pwease,” he begged, slanting his head like your puppy does when you’re telling it secrets.

That September, Tiger entered kindergarten. He had to wear shoes and shirts and hold still. A week or two later, my dad asked him how school was going, and he said, “I get in twouble a lot, Pete.”

Pete and Tiger got along well. I’m not sure what Pete saw in Tiger—perhaps he saw in him the son he never had, despite having had seven sons. But I know what Tiger saw in Pete: ice cream bars. My dad consistently dispensed ice cream bars to this little fellow, no questions asked.

I think my mom, too, got a charge out of Tiger. Sometimes she called him Savage. Either she got mixed up or she did it intentionally, as if the name Tiger could not capture the boy’s feral nature.

Tiger and his family didn’t stay on the block for long. Suddenly, without warning, their sunken slab of a house was vacant.

The last time I had seen Tiger, I’d given him hell over one silly thing or another—those days, I was always giving other kids hell, especially smaller kids—and I firmly suggested he find companionship elsewhere that night. In response, he sped down our driveway on his three-wheeler at such a fierce clip that we both knew what would happen next. I turned so as not to witness the inevitable smacking of skull upon asphalt, but I certainly heard it.

Seemingly trapped by the monstrosity that lay upon him, he managed to lift his head like a dying guy in the movies, and called out to me, “That didn’t huwt!”

Static

2007-04-13T09:04:00.001-05:00

Not long ago, I gave my car door a slap before I opened it. My wife, who doesn’t miss a trick, asked if I had finally lost it.

I told her I was simply asserting my dominion over static electricity. I’m so fed up with getting shocked that I’ve become the aggressor in my war against static electricity. When I commit a pre-emptive strike by slapping the sheet metal, I still get shocked, but I don’t notice it. Instead, I feel the mild pain from the actual slap. It’s discomforting, but it’s discomforting on my terms.

She said, “And until this explanation, I’d thought you had finally lost it.”

I asked her why I get shocked so much more than everyone else.

“Because you’re constantly fidgeting,” she proposed. “You’re constantly establishing friction with the furniture and carpet. You can collect a lot of amperes that way.”

It’s true that I shake my legs and wiggle my feet a lot. In fact, if I’m awake, my legs are shaking and my feet are wiggling. Just ask anybody who has ever tried to concentrate around me.

But leg shaking seemed a weak explanation for the chronic condition of fly-away-hair that I grew up with, back when we all wore our hair in the style of the Bay City Rollers. It seemed a weak explanation for why I once received a static shock from touching a banana. It seemed a weak explanation for why I’ve twice shut down television sets merely by touching them.

She said, “Please tell the story again about the stocking. It’s one of the few stories you tell over and over that I enjoy.”

So I once again recounted how I had grown up in a house that was much too small for the many people who shared it. One corner of the dining room somehow became the depository for all the clean laundry. On any given day you’d see a mound of clothes that reached halfway to the ceiling. The only thing I can compare it to is the pile of coats that accrues in the master bedroom during a well-attended party. But that analogy doesn’t quite capture it. If it were a nudist party where more than just coats were deposited, the comparison might work better.

Anyway, in the mornings before school we kids pawed through the pile, looking for anything that came close to fitting us. If two or three of us tugged for the polyesters at the same time, the pile might crackle and hiss like the beginnings of a Boy Scout’s campfire.

One day in a crowded high-school hallway, a classmate behind me said, “Hey guy, what’s with the stocking?”

I halted and turned. “What stocking?”

“This stocking,” he said, stripping it from the back of my shirt and dangling it for all to see.

“Oh, that stocking,” I said, sounding a lot like Beaver Cleaver when he realizes the jig is up.

When she stopped laughing at me, my wife asked what I did with that stocking.

I said I took it to my physics class that day and got some extra credit out of the deal.

Monsters

2007-04-07T12:07:00.007-05:00

On a morning some years ago, my wife and I awakened to the commotion of our toddler sons skulking behind flashlights. The older boy said, “We’re searching for pigs and monsters!”

They come by it naturally. When I was young I absolutely loved monsters. At age nine or ten, my friend M. and I decreed that on one night a year monsters should be permitted to wander unchaperoned in our neighborhood. I think we even wrote a letter to the mayor about it.

“Would that one night a year have been Halloween?” she asked.

I noted that M. wanted it to be on Halloween because it was the only night he could stay up sort of late. But the way I saw it, if you let the real wolfmen run around on Halloween night, how could you tell them apart from a neighborhood kid in a really good wolfman costume?

I simply wanted to portion out our enjoyment of monsters.

Those days, if you wanted the company of monsters, you had to tune in each Saturday night to “Creeper,” which was hosted by the bespectacled Ed Muscare. By day he was Uncle Ed of “41 Treehouse Lane,” where he introduced minor-league puppets and Porky Pig cartoons. On Saturday nights, through the magic of UHF television—a flashlight, shoe polish, a bed sheet, and a jiggly camera—he became Creeper. Somehow in this get-up he was less creepy than Uncle Ed.

Each week, the program recycled chillers like “Frankenstein,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Mummy,” and “Them,” which featured ants so large that even the bravest exterminator might give his two-week notice.

For a short while we were blessed with Mo-Mo, the Missouri Monster. From the look on her face, I knew Mo-Mo meant nothing to my wife, even though she’d spent half her youth in Missouri.

One year in the early 1970s, Mo-Mo was seen all over town. Witnesses said he was hairy, smelly, and fleet of foot (a description that also applied to most of the neighborhood kids). I told a few classmates that I had seen Mo-Mo in the parking lot of Smaks Hamburgers, near 80th & Troost. I also told them the monster could only be repelled by rubber, and they must therefore wear tennis shoes to bed. M.'s parents refused this request, but they did let him drape his sneakers on his bedpost.

I said, “In a way, I miss the good old days when I could obsess about such controllable fears as monsters and bogeymen.”

“Monsters and bogeymen?” she said.

“There is a difference,” I said.

Monsters come in all sizes and shapes, and most smell rotten. They can crawl, fly, swim, scuttle, and skulk faster than any kid. They make creepy noises that are hard to spell, and they hide in closets and under beds. Some monsters can change their appearance just for kicks; one moment they’re slightly odd humans in slightly inappropriate fashions, and the next they’re wolves or bats.

Bogeymen, meanwhile, are freestanding bipeds who are darksome and disfigured and possess great physical strength. They enjoy shadows and dark doorways, but they also think nothing of strolling down your street at midnight or tramping in your town’s millworks after hours. Their goal is to scare you silly and perhaps bang you around, but not eat you. No matter what the experts say, Frankenstein is a bogeyman and not a monster.

She said, “You are so absolutely full of it.”

Then she made for the bedroom, where she plucked her sneakers and hung them on our bedpost.

“But why take chances?” she said.

Sanctuaries

2007-03-25T15:27:00.001-05:00

Not long ago, while watching one of the cable news channels, my wife and I discovered the Bush Administration had just deprived us of still another of our constitutional liberties, and in response we did what Democrats do in the face of authoritarian oppression: we grumbled a little and then switched the channel.

We hoped to land on something soothing.

Unfortunately, there are few sanctuaries on the cable spectrum, channels where you can rest easy and forget about all that’s bad and ugly out there, channels where you know you won’t happen upon plastic surgeries, Paris Hilton, chefs with attitude, autopsy photos, poker tables, Dr. Henry Lee, televangelists, Nancy Grace, prison cells, shrill brides, and beefy tattooed arms.

But we tried anyway. We began with the flyover channels that are halfway down the box, channels that run shows like “Mummy Makeovers” and “Cold Cabinet Files” and “World’s Most Extreme Adjectives.” Mostly what we came upon were plastic surgeries, Paris Hilton, prison cells, and beefy tattooed arms.

Soon my wife suggested I try Animal Planet. That had always been a decent recourse. But increasingly, if not perpetually, it airs “Animal Cops.” The program is not about lovable animals who happen to be sworn officers of the law, such as Deputy Dawg. Instead, it’s a real downer about trashy people who abuse animals.

At that hour, The Jeff Corwin Experience was on. Do not mistake The Jeff Corwin Experience for a rock-and-roll band that might have played the Shawnee Mission West prom in 1982. In fact, it is one of the dozen shows on Animal Planet in which the hosts traumatize reptiles and amphibians, all in the name of love.

Corwin remains a little brother to the more famous Steve Irwin (the Crocodile Hunter). In case you live in a cave and don’t know who Irwin was, he was the guy who may have scuttled into your cave one day with a flashlight affixed to his head.

Compared to Irwin, who was larger than life and somewhat taxing on the nerves, Corwin is almost soothing, so we spent a while watching the guy canonize crocs and sonnetize snakes.

“You know, if snakes and lizards had any brains, they’d get a restraining order against that guy,” I said.

My wife said, “Spoken like a true Democrat. Protect the animals and pad the lawyers’ pockets.”

She’s a Democrat too. But sometimes we give each other playful hell about our shared political orientation. It’s one way to keep our marriage fresh. It’s not my ideal way to keep our marriage fresh. My ideal way doesn’t interest her at all.

And then I exercised this analogy: In high school I found a lot of girls to be beautiful and worthy of pursuit, but my feelings always went unrequited. Imagine if I had behaved like Corwin, stalking, chasing, and groping these girls against their pleasure, only to dump them in their habitats when I was done.

“Then you’d be the Governor of California,” she quipped.

I quickly switched the channel. “Well, now you just ruined it for me. I can no longer watch this Corwin guy because I’ll always associate him with that freakish California governor.”

What sanctuary does that leave us with?

Each other, I suppose.

Memoirs

2007-03-17T10:26:00.002-05:00

Last fall my wife suggested a diary as a Christmas gift for our son who is seven. I told her I had mixed feelings.

When I was young I got a diary for Christmas, and I decreed it the greatest present ever because it combined my two favorite subjects: writing and me. But the gift turned out to be bittersweet because I couldn’t use it until the new year. And that remains the most agonizing week of my life. I’d hate to put our son through a week like that.

It intrigued her that I’d kept a diary, probably because she knew its contents would embarrass me. To that end, she suggested we scrounge through the junk in my mom’s basement. I told her the diary was collecting maggots in some landfill, and that even the maggots were bored with it.

Back then, any of my brothers who unlocked the diary with a toothpick were surely disappointed by the entries—and they couldn’t have expected much in the first place. With few exceptions and with minimal variations in stylistic technique, I’d recorded whether I had a headache and what I’d had for dinner.

On Fridays I noted whether the good shows aired, such as “The Brady Bunch” and “The Partridge Family.” Too often these viewing treasures were pre-empted in favor of some low-rent circus that had skittish acrobats, lazy clowns, and elephants just phoning it in. (This circus may have been the inspiration for a fake ad I co-wrote for my college newspaper in 1984. It was a full-page spread, headlined “Bargain Circus.” Highlighted acts included “The Bearded Man,” “The Heavy-Set Guy,” and “Joey the Banana Swallower.”)

Against better judgement, I disclosed to her that somewhere in my mom’s basement there exists an autobiography I wrote in the fifth grade.

“The life story of a fifth-grader?” she asked with a wry grin.

Indeed, no one so young should be so presumptuous as to write an autobiography, except King Tut.

But that hadn’t stopped me. It all began when I was in the fourth grade and learned the fifth-graders were assigned to write their autobiographies. I soon begged our English teacher, Sister Roberta, to assign the same for us.

This was 1973, a period when nuns were becoming “with it,” as defined by someone like Norman Lear. Overnight, these formidable figures discarded their black habits and gowns for denim skirts and paisley blouses, and they renounced their patriarchal religious names as well: Sister Michael Janet became Sister Trish, for instance, and Sister John became Sister Becca. Likewise, the school adopted an Age of Aquarius mentality whereby the student was always right.

So you can imagine the anguish Sister Roberta felt as she considered my request.

A couple days later, she unhappily said, “I spoke with the other teachers, and we agreed that fourth-graders haven’t had enough life experiences to write their memoirs.”

But a year later, they deemed us ready.

My autobiography was twice as long as all the others, owing to self-importance more than to any breadth of experience. Many of the adventures I wrote of were fabricated, which is why it fetched an E.

“An E?” she asked.

My school had renounced the A-to-F grading scale. It was imperialistic and demeaning. But an E was equal to an A, and so my head throbbed with pride—until a friend claimed my document was boring.

“Truth is, I’ve never fully recovered from that.”

Nodding, my wife said, “That explains a lot. Instead of a diary, let’s get the boy a basketball.”

Smoking

2007-03-11T21:20:00.002-05:00

I recently came upon a cigarette lighter among some junk in my mother’s basement, and it put me in a nostalgic way.

It was a Zippo-styled square with the tiny, notched wheel you had to spin to ignite the fluid inside. Though dormant for thirty years, this particular lighter retained that unique fluid smell. My wife caught me sniffing it and assumed I was copping a buzz.

“The butane smell,” I began, half-dreamily. “It really takes me back. It was a smell I used to love for the first eighth of a second.”

My wife took a sniff but didn’t get nostalgic. She hadn’t grown up around cigarettes.

When I was young, every adult smoked—teachers, coaches, talk-show hosts, other kids’ moms—and they smoked everywhere. It’s possible they even smoked during mass. I think Vatican II permitted puffing up to the gospel reading, if you wished to receive communion.

My childhood home was lousy with smokers. A conversation there held more interruptions than a Charlie Rose interview does today: “Pass me that ash tray” and “Pass this ash tray on down, willya?” and “Can one of you kids empty this damn ash tray?” and “Who’s got a match?” and “I got a match: my butt and your face,” and so on.

My wife couldn’t remember the last time she even saw an ash tray.

Those days, ash trays were scattered all over the place, the way remote controls are today—and many were as difficult to figure out. The typical ash trays in the early 1970s looked like aquarium decorations. My brother Joe called them “Michael Sarrazin ash trays,” and I knew exactly what he was driving at. They were marble-based, poly-colored dugouts with smooth recesses that were much too wide and slick for the cigarettes to stay in place. These Sarrazin ash receptacles were too heavy for kids to fetch. Around our house, that’s why they were trumped by beer cans and pop bottles.

My wife asked what brand my dad had smoked.

“Luckys, then Camels, then at the end something less loaded.”

She asked about a brother. “Larks,” I said. She asked about an in-law. “Tareytons and nothing but.” She asked about a cousin. “Virginia Slims. But he was always a little flamboyant.”

She asked if I ever smoked.

I might have, I told her, except a friend in high school was under the impression that cigarettes were cool. If he found something to be cool, then it most certainly was not. The anti-tobacco ads would have been wise to feature this guy blowing smoke from his nostrils instead of showing Brooke Shields sticking cigarettes in hers.

My friend also took to calling cigarettes “toasts,” perhaps hoping the term would rival such classics as “smokes,” “fags,” and “cancer sticks.” A pack of cigarettes was a “loaf of toasts.”

This fellow didn’t get invited to very many parties.

But to answer her original question, I said I’d smoked maybe a few dozen toasts in my teens, but thankfully I never got the hang of it.

She began laughing.

“I’m picturing you as a smoker, trying to get out of the driveway in the morning,” she said. “You always come back inside for something you’ve forgotten—your keys, your badge, your phone, your iced tea, your acid reducers. If you were to become responsible for cigarettes and a lighter, you might finally go mad.”

Now there’s another idea for an anti-smoking commercial.

The House Next Door

2007-03-07T20:51:00.001-06:00

Over the years, in the house next door to the one I grew up in, at least three people have died—two of them execution style.

In my toddler years, Mrs. Mills lived in the boxy little bungalow with her adult sons, Marvin and Bud. Like most old women, Mrs. Mills was small but had a body shaped like a garbage bag stuffed with dumplings. She wore ratty slippers and flower-printed gowns that could've been mistaken for pajamas. Mrs. Mills was the first person I had ever known who died, much the way Dan Blocker was the first celebrity ever to pass away. I was probably five or six when she croaked from natural causes, inside that house next door.

Marvin, the older son, expired a couple years later, perhaps in that same house, though I cannot be sure. He'd worked at an amusement park nearby, distributing towels at the pool, back in the good old days before such jobs were outsourced to Bangalore. He was plump and had a cartoon face: sad-dog eyes, round nose, exaggerated creases on the forehead and around the eyes and mouth.

One day when I was retrieving a ball from his yard, Marvin came out and gave me a package of polish sausages. He could not eat them, he said, on account of his diabetes. A couple weeks later he was dead. I still think of him every time I bite into a kielbasa.

Bud lived in that house for many years after. Much in the fashion of his species, he wore so-called “muscle tee-shirts” and drab khakis and black suspenders. He, too, resembled a cartoon character. But while Marvin may have originated from the pen of a Warner Brothers artist, Bud looked more like a harried husband in a New Yorker cartoon. He had swirls of dark hair and wore outsized glasses. Those black glasses, in fact, dominated his appearance, in a Drew Carey sort of way.

Bud was the farthest thing from a harried husband. A confirmed bachelor, he continued to harbor warm feelings for a Filipino woman he'd met during the war. The fact that he was in the war has always puzzled me, for Bud had no peripheral vision. He wasn't allowed to drive a car, yet there he was, in the Pacific, battling the Axis Powers. At times I picture him as a prisoner of war, taunted by the Japanese: “Ah, poor silly Occidental cannot see from the corners of his eyes!”

In all the years he lived alone there, Bud never once had a guest. On occasion the old bachelor invited me inside to retrieve some magazines he was finished with. In that dark, smoky living room, his easy chair was sandwiched between identical coffee tables. On the nearer table were the magazines I’d take: Argosy and True and various Naval-themed publications. On the farther table were heaping stacks of Playboys and Penthouses. These were not proffered. At that young age, I didn’t know much, but I knew Bud had it good.

He had a good job at a print shop, but one day in the late 1970s he got sore over something and quit. He spent the next couple years traveling a lot, mostly to dude ranches in the Southwest, and he found time to become a Yahtzee aficionado. Then suddenly his passbook was bare. These were the days of stagflation, and it was difficult enough for anyone to find good work, much more so for a man of sixty with no peripheral vision. Desperate, he took a dishwashing job at an Italian restaurant nearby. He went through that position and about ten others like it until, mercifully, he reached retirement age.

Bud didn't die in that house next door, but he lost his mind there. He began suffering from Alzheimer's disease. While talking with him over the back fence, I found his sentences increasingly disjointed, as if a prankster had spliced audio tapes of his past conversations. Soon he moved to a subsidized high rise in Grandview, where by some accounts he was a big hit with the widows.

One of my brothers bought the house next door and lived in it for a while, even when it was no longer the house next door, owing to my parents’ move to a nicer part of town. The white bungalow and its neighborhood quickly reached an acute state of disrepair. My brother kept a pistol handy at all times, for he regularly heard gunshots at night. One day he came home from work and discovered new locks on the doors, a mystery that put him in the mood to shoot someone and ask questions later.

During the early 1990s, an arsonist torched a dozen or so homes in the neighborhood. Perhaps the fires and the gunplay inspired my brother to sell the place, to an outfit that converts rotten properties into Section 8 housing. About a year later, the occupants of that bungalow, a couple in their twenties, were gunned down while their young children watched. The newspaper said the male victim may have been a drug informant.

Just hours after the corpses were removed, that house was boarded up so securely that nothing but ghosts could come or go.

The Hacienda

2007-03-04T20:25:00.002-06:00

The other day, my wife complained there was nothing to do.

I said, “Let’s burn Myrtle.”

She gave me a strange look.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “But listening to it will give you something to do.”

So I recounted how in the mid 1950s my parents bought a house in a working-class neighborhood in what was then south Kansas City. To make some extra money, Dad converted the detached double garage to a rental space. In size and ambition, the place was like a studio apartment. The roof, ten feet off the ground, had a non-threatening pitch. Only the biggest cowards in the neighborhood were afraid to climb on it and horse around.

“What’s this have to do with burning poor Myrtle?”

I told her Myrtle rented the apartment for a while. She was like any other old lady; there was nothing especially flammable about her. When we were little kids, a cousin and I were loitering near the apartment. Looking for something to do, he said, "Let's burn Myrtle."

“Did you boys burn Myrtle?” my wife asked.

“No. We made poison instead.”

“Poison? What a couple of ghouls you were.”

The poison was an agglomeration of water from the hose, kitchen scraps, mud, cigarette butts, piss, dead bugs, and leaves. The poison was not meant for Myrtle; she was off the hook by now. We intended to feed it to some Japanese soldiers, if any happened into my back yard in 1967.

Riding a wave of momentum, I told her about others who’d rented there: loners, vagabonds, dowagers—the kinds of folks Kris Kristofferson might celebrate in song. I spent a few minutes recalling a pair of journeymen laborers named Stony and Clyde. The duo once appeared on “Gone’ Fishin,” a local show hosted by Harold Ensley, a man so gentle that if Satan were his son he'd probably never even spank him. Stony and Clyde reeled in lots of good eaters but always tossed the fish back, an act my father never could accept. Each time, it seemed to catch Dad by surprise. He'd make an anxious sound effect—a wet inhalation through clenched teeth—and say, "Stony, no! No!"

As the 1960s ended, my family had less need for the rental income and more need for the space the apartment offered. Nine of us ten kids still lived at home. For the next twenty years, one sibling or another held squatter's rights there. In the mid 1970s my brother Joe had dibs on the place, and he christened it The Hacienda, though there was nothing Spanish about it.

One of the beauties of The Hacienda was that you could live there and escape the stigma of living with your parents, though in reality our parents—and their refrigerator, medicine cabinet, and laundry facilities—were just thirty feet away. And so well into my twenties I lived in that converted garage, where I spent most of my hours pondering life’s bigger mysteries and grousing about man’s inhumanity to man. I also found time to co-write a screenplay inside those walls, called “University Times,” a rollicking adventure that chronicled the exploits of Mafia stooges, librarians with cleavage, and a zonked-out dormie named Squid.

As I slept in The Hacienda one chilly night in November of 1988, an explosion at a construction site a couple miles away killed six Kansas City firefighters. Two pumper trucks had come to the site around 4 a.m. to douse a fire in a pick-up truck. They were unaware that 25,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil were stored in a semitrailer near the truck. The blast, at 4:08 a.m., killed them instantly.

The explosion broke my deep sleep, and I bolted upright, much in the style of a character rising from a nightmare in an Aaron Spelling melodrama. Those days, natural-gas leaks had caused several area homes to explode, and the enormity of this blast convinced me it had happened again. In the darkness of The Hacienda, I rushed from the bed to the big front window, which was now dislodged from its frame, and saw that my parents' home was intact. Relieved, I switched on my police scanner just as the first confused calls were crackling across. All over town, folks were claiming something had blown up in their neighborhoods. After four or five minutes, the correct location was determined: the site of the expressway under construction, near 87th Street and South 71 Highway. On another frequency, I soon heard the fire dispatcher plaintively call for someone—anyone—from the pumper trucks to respond over the air. The ensuing silence was louder than the explosion had been.

In 1989, with our neighborhood ravaged by Reaganomics, my parents bought a nicer house out south. A poor couple scraped up enough money to buy our home. To avoid legal complications, my dad disengaged The Hacienda's faulty plumbing and blocked off the pipes with cement. Before the contract was signed, Dad made sure the home buyer understood the implications of this plumbing shutdown. Still, after the deal was sealed, the buyer shook my father's hand and said, "Now you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna rent out that place and make me some money!"

My wife said, “If he did, I bet he could add a few good stories to its history.”

Visual cliches

2007-02-21T22:30:00.001-06:00

On those nights when I have no urgent business at hand, I like to settle in my recliner and flick through the television channels in search of cliches. Over time, I’ve identified dozens of visual clichés but will focus here on five. I call them finger to the monitor; chopsticks; Cubs cap; underarm overexposure; and couch cuddle.

The most exercised of all visual cliches on television is the finger pointing to the monitor. You’ve seen it half a million times, mostly in commercials for technical training schools and the kinds of law firms that Republican politicians say are destroying the American dream. Most commonly, Older Guy leans over Younger Gal and points out something very important that’s on the computer screen. Younger Gal nods slowly and forms a smile that suggests everything in the cosmology is beginning to make sense. We at home never see what’s on that screen, though I suspect in most cases it’s Nick Nolte’s mug shot.

The chopsticks chestnut is the toughest of the five to find and therefore the most satisfying. It’s almost exclusive to the Sorkin and Kelley types of serials that involve lots of self-absorbed white-collar professionals who are very good at what they do. Whenever these telegenic bores are eating around a boardroom table or in the judge’s chambers, you can bet the cuisine is Chinese and they are using chopsticks. For college-aged characters, blue-collar stiffs, and inveterate bachelors, pizza serves the same purpose; the camera captures a couple pizza boxes flung open on a coffee table or the floor. Clearly, the chopsticks somehow imply sophistication, while gaping pizza boxes assure us the characters are not at all uptight or sell-outs—in fact, they’re regular guys.

Speaking of regular guys, that’s where the Cubs ball caps come in. This cliché was most prominent from about 1980 to 1995, when directors put a Chicago Cubs ball cap on a character as a way to assure the viewing public there’s nothing to fear: this guy is totally regular. More often than not this guy was Jim Belushi. But we all know Jim Belushi is not a regular guy. I’d go so far as to say he’s been irregularly lucky in his line of work.

Regular guys in TV and the movies have forsaken the Cubs. Instead, they now wear Boston Red Sox caps. This gradual shift may have begun with the death of Cubs’ announcer Harry Caray, a hero to most regular guys, or it may have something to do with the disproportionate attention given to New Englander Ben Affleck.

If you watch TV for a couple hours and don’t tune out the commercials, you’re bound to see more bare armpits than you could shake a Lady Speed Stick at. In most of these cases, the sight of a young lady’s naked underarm is gratuitous: she may be contemplating what flavor of breath mint to buy or which wealthy guy at the bar to pursue, when suddenly she raises one or both arms and flaunts her stuff. I’m convinced there’s nothing organic about this phenomenon. The shots are so commonplace and cold-blooded that a marketing consultant must have decided pristine underarms attract our attention and put us in a buying mood.

This same visionary has enlightened the industry on how to sell sensitive products and low-fat cookies to women. The trick is to choose an attractive brunette in her early thirties (blondes cannot be trusted to provide advice on sensitive products and low-fat cookies) and tuck her in the corner of a white love seat or couch, where she will cuddle her knees to her tummy and wrap both hands around a coffee mug as she gives us the inside word on a feminine hygiene spray or a prescription drug that in rare cases may cause high blood pressure, night sweats, and the desire to behave like Ted Nugent.

Crazy Jack

2007-02-21T22:03:00.002-06:00

Crazy Jack lived with his mother in a corner house on the other end of our block. In June 1975 a fire destroyed their home, and neither mother nor son was seen again in the neighborhood. I was twelve then and an aspiring writer, so I composed stories and light verse about them since they epitomized my idea of local color.

When his house burned, Crazy Jack was about forty. He was a small man with thick, matted hair that reminded me of the bristles on a paint brush. He always had a five-o-clock shadow, like on bad guys in the comic strips. His grin was toothy and unwashed. He wore a toylike cowboy hat, its string dangling under his chin. Crazy Jack had a tired mutt he called Danny Dog. It was a peaceable hound; kids who were afraid of dogs weren't afraid of Danny.

Crazy Jack's old mother, Donna, was small and bony, with flowing hair the color of gunpowder. She preferred flamboyant dresses and the kinds of hats I associate with proud white women in Flannery O'Connor stories. Donna was reclusive, but not a hermit. A couple times a year she canvassed the neighborhood, collecting coins in a tin can for some charity we've all since forgotten.

Crazy Jack spent countless hours dragging an old manual grass cutter through his front lawn. He usually took that squeaky contraption with him on his daily strolls around the neighborhood, too, looking like a man soliciting business. But I don't think any of the neighbors entrusted him with cutting their grass. Truth be told, Crazy Jack was just a figurehead in lawn care.

He also hung around the playground of my Catholic school a block to his north. There, with Danny Dog snoozing at his feet, he watched pick-up basketball games and joshed with us kids. Eventually some of the guys pitched in and bought him a cheap basketball. It was oddly shaped and sometimes clogged the hoop. If no tall kids were around, somebody would have to stand below the net and throw another ball upwards, underhanded, in the hopes of dislodging Crazy Jack's.

He was a source of amusement at times. I remember this exchange between my brother and him:

BROTHER: Jackie, can you count?
JACK: One two three!
BROTHER: Can you count higher than that?
JACK: One two three high!
BROTHER: Higher?
JACK: One two three high high!

Inevitably, some kids tried to corrupt him. For a while his catch-phrase was "Playboy magazine—it's e'ertainment for men!" Older kids asked him to buy beer for them at the nearby 7-Eleven. Usually he'd return with a bottle of Dr. Pepper and no change from the cashier.

Crazy Jack liked everyone except his mother's unlikely boyfriend, a fellow named Joe, a lean man who wore a burr haircut that clashed with the hairstyles of the day. Because Joe was about twenty years younger than Donna, his attraction to her remains a mystery. We neighborhood kids, clever with nicknames, tabbed him “Crazy Joe.”

Crazy Joe came around in spurts. You'd see him a dozen times in the space of a month and then not again for half a year. When he was near, you knew it, because he and Crazy Jack fought like mad. Crazy Joe'd get drunk and pretty soon the two of them spilled onto the front lawn, shouting and gesturing. Those days, Crazy Joe’s visits nearly always ended with him in the back of a paddy wagon. Each time, neighborhood dads and moms would say, “Well, certainly that's the last time she'll let him come around.”

On a June twilight in 1975 an older brother and I were playing baseball catch in the street when we heard the familiar whine of sirens. We got to the corner at the same time as the patrol cars and fire trucks and other neighbors—some of whom we hadn't set eyes on since the last time the sirens blared. Soon Crazy Jack stumbled from the house, splattered in red. Behind him, Crazy Joe emerged. In one hand he gripped a paint brush dripping red, and in the other a bottle of whiskey. He was yelling at Crazy Jack and threatening to throw the bottle at him. It was soon determined that Crazy Joe had gotten sore at Crazy Jack for spilling the paint and playing in it. “I swear to God I'm a' gonna burn down this house and everyone in it!” he allegedly promised as the paddy-wagon doors closed on him.

Seven hours later, I awakened to the sounds of my brother announcing a fire. His excited words played against the soundtrack of sirens. Everyone in the household, even our parents, managed whatever clothing was within reach and raced to Crazy Jack's place.

This was no false alarm. Flames billowed from the home on the corner; it looked like hell was trying to attack the heavens. The firemen found a hydrant and trained their hoses on the blaze. Some sixty or seventy bystanders angled for better views. On the cross sidestreet, an ambulance idled, its lights flashing. From my vantage point I could not see inside of it, but word spread that Crazy Jack occupied that ambulance, alone. His mother's corpse, it was said, had already been taken away. Because of the logjam of fire engines, patrol cars, and hoses, I could not get closer to the ambulance before it was gone.

After a while, the firefighters got the blaze under control and were left with nothing to do but swing axes at the shell and douse the hot spots that survived. People began speculating about the fate of Crazy Joe. Had Donna sprung him from the downtown lock-up earlier that night? Had he returned to make good on his threats? The answer to both questions seemed an obvious Yes. But no one had seen him. Some of the older kids happily announced the man was dead within the ashes. What followed was a giddy flurry of metaphors: "Crazy Joe is Kentucky fried!" and "Crazy Joe is Crispy Critters!" and "Shake and bake that ol' gandy!"

Between the hours of three and four a.m., most adults returned to their beds, but dozens of kids remained to see the production to its end. While standing alone in a front yard two houses south of Crazy Jack's property, I detected a rustling sound and looked up and saw a figure shimmying down a puny tree. First I noticed fishbelly-white legs—old-man legs, hairless and splinty. Next my eyes locked on a most horrible sight— a dropsical dinger. I saw the sunken torso and then the face of Crazy Joe. He dropped the rest of the way to the ground, picked himself up, and approached me, his manhood flipping and flopping with each unsteady step. To me, he said, "Hey boys, what's all the excitement?"

By now others noticed the spectacle, and what resulted were the kinds of shrieks of laughter and catcalls you'll hear from studio audiences when something naughty is spoken. A few firemen ushered the drunk away, his rawboned legs dragging in the grass behind him, leaving a ghost of a trail that somehow resembled the wheels of Crazy Jack’s mower.

A tiny article appeared in the paper the next afternoon. It made no mention of fatalities. Indeed, we never saw an obituary for Donna. It was our hope that she had survived the blaze.

For the next few years I struggled to write profound stories about Crazy Jack and the fire. Though my adjectives were extravagant, the finished products were always disappointing. Perhaps befitting my age and inexperience, I had tried too hard to apply a moral or a twist to the story. I guess there’s nothing inherently profound about majestic flames and naked geezers dropping from trees. Sometimes a fellow simply drinks too much and acts impetuously, and some people suffer while the rest of us enjoy the show.

Passion

2007-01-17T21:13:00.002-06:00

Every year during the season of Lent, our parish dads produced “The Passion Play,” which dramatized the arraignment, death, and resurrection of Christ. In the 1972 production, something so big happened that we kids figured it might be the greatest story ever told.

The planning meetings each year for “The Passion Play” were routine. The same men gathered in the church basement to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, gripe about hippies, and discuss when to hold the two or three rehearsals. But in 1972 a handsome young snapper showed up and nothing was ever the same again.

I’ll call him Mr. Duncan. New to the parish, he was a clean-cut fellow in his mid thirties with a sexy wife and a lot of handsome kids. Not only did Mr. Duncan volunteer to play the role of Christ, but he insisted on being scourged, just as Christ had been.

I can only imagine the response he got in that room. I’m guessing it was like the pivotal scene in “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone offers to kill the corrupt police captain. There must have been dropped jaws, hyperactive brows, nervous titters, spilled coffee. As the enormity of the notion sunk in, some of the men may have seen Mr. Duncan as a heroic figure. Others probably thought he was just a nut.

Of course, these were the days before kids were inundated with sensational news. Other than rumors of Mo-Mo the Missouri Monster, there wasn’t much for kids to get worked up about. So, predictably, news of Mr. Duncan’s proposal buzzed through our classrooms and playgrounds. Some kids claimed the man was actually going to be crucified, on the same stage where our third-grade class had performed “Willy Claus” just a few months earlier. The nuns quickly began damage control. They tried to explain things in terms we’d get, calling his gesture “charitable” and “friendly” and “Christlike,” which it almost was.

When you’re a kid, unless you’re having fun, the minutes and hours always just snail past, but I cannot describe how insufferably long it took for that Saturday morning to arrive. When it did, my parents and brothers and I got to the church hall early and found good seats about five rows from the stage. In the back, Boy Scouts were carting in extra folding chairs from the school basement.

A half-hour before curtain, every seat was occupied. The spill-over crowd gathered in the rear and along the sides. I’d like to say that some public-school kids were outside, peering in from the ground-level windows, but that may be wishful thinking on my part.

Like everyone else, I wanted to rush through the Last Supper, Gethsemane, the kiss of betrayal, and the arraignment. And, like everyone else, my attention was fixed on Mr. Duncan; the rest of the cast may as well have been other kids’ dads, which they were.

After Jesus was finally sentenced to death, the curtain dropped and the lights dimmed even further. All eyes strained to see in the darkness, for we knew that at any moment the flogging would begin, and none of us wanted to miss a single lash.

A disturbance erupted from the rear of the hall. Mournful spotlights washed the center aisle, where the character of Christ was staggering toward the stage, a big cross caving his shoulder. Mr. Duncan was now shirtless, his waist and legs concealed by the tangle of a robe. Upon his head lay a crown of thorns, or something appearing to be thorns. Each step he took was marked by the horrible, thrilling sounds of twisted palm branches slicing the air and whipping his skin. As he passed, I saw that his back was a bloody mess.

Under the weight of that cross, Mr. Duncan continued his terrible struggle to the stage. A few robed, sandaled dads helped him upon it. Others erected the cross at center stage. He was carried there, his limbs limp, his eyes downcast, his false beard dangling. The men tied his wrists and ankles to the cross while others taunted him, their hearts not really in it. Then, mercifully, the curtain fell, to thunderous applause.

No doubt Christ was resurrected a scene or two later, but I don’t recall that.

Free Verse

2007-01-17T21:07:00.002-06:00

When I was ten or eleven I learned of a beguiling opportunity. A local university press was putting together a poetry collection to be called For Kids By Kids. As the title suggests, kids (like me) would be the authors. Those days, even though I didn’t enjoy the company of kids, I was a vocal proponent of what you might call Kid Power. In short, I wanted grown-ups to respect, if not be influenced by, the talents and wisdom a kid (me) could have.

Within an hour of learning of this rarest of opportunities, I composed a four-line ditty, which I titled “Mondays.” It reads thusly: The dog is chewing the paper/The baby is hungry, crying/As I get in the shower the phone rings/Oh the Mondays are so tiring.

If you want to know why a kid would communicate such an adult scenario to an audience of other kids, then get in line behind me. Even I cannot say how or why I landed so quickly on such discordant subject matter. We had no dog. We had no baby. And we had no showering facility; in our house, we took baths and nothing but.

No doubt you’re also assuming the esteemed editors and contributing editors and associate editors rejected that poem outright.

But they did not.

Apparently they gave the piece of work an uncommon amount of scrutiny because roughly three years passed before the rejection slip arrived. It included the most heartfelt, impassioned apology this side of Jimmy Swaggart. By all accounts, the editors had really, really wanted to include “Mondays,” but in the final analysis they went in another direction and gracefully wished me the best of luck in placing it in my scrapbook.

Still more years passed before this poetry compilation was published. The kids who wrote the verses that comprised this collection were by now wearing their hair to their shoulders and drinking tall boys and grooving to ZZ Topp and driving second-hand Camaros, as was their intended audience.

Well, that may not be entirely true. Many of them, like me, were probably still camped out alone in their bedrooms on weekend nights, scribbling free verse, and if these teens were anything like me, these lines were chaotic, Ginsbergian, semi-Beatnik, semi-angry lines about phonies and bullies and capitalists and Ed Meese.

Anyway, I never looked at For Kids By Kids, but I hope its poems at least rhymed.

Today, even while I’m still hostile to phonies, bullies, and Ed Meese, I uphold the opinion that poetry should rhyme and scan. This judgement goes counter to everything that was taught in the universities when my forehead last rested on those desktops.

Likewise, the book editor of our local daily sees fit to publish a poem each Sunday in his section, but he has one abiding rule for the submissions: they must not rhyme. For the longest time I wondered what kind of wrongheaded motivation fueled this rule. Not long ago he solved the riddle by asserting that no contemporary mind could dare write a rhyme that rivals the greatest rhyming poetry in the Western canon.

I suppose he’ll be pleased to know that I can meet him half way. He’s right that he’s unlikely to discover the next Alexander Pope. But how dreadful it must be to open those submissions day after day and see nothing but agglomerations of pretentious words that gather with a seeming randomness on the page. How can he possibly determine what to publish and what to ashcan?

In 1984 I finally published a piece of free verse, in our college newspaper. I present it here:

Poetry

Made like

T
H
I
S

Takes

up

SPACE

That, for the record, best sums up my stance on this very important issue.

Hunting Ghosts

2006-11-18T19:26:00.002-06:00

Not long ago I spent a good amount of time watching “Most Haunted.” It’s a program from Britain that chronicles the adventures of a handful of excitable, if not reluctant, ghost hunters. When they see anything that strays from the ordinary, they often flee or faint, much like a bosomy matriarch in the old drawing-room comedies.

Either the footage for “Most Haunted” is shot in night-vision photo-negative style or else the British really do need to get more sun. This visual technique makes the viewer at home question what he is actually seeing, and it has the added effect of making every woman look like Mary Travers from Peter Paul & Mary.

On one episode they were in an airplane hanger where some poor soul had long ago burned to death. One of these spirit-hunting sleuths got so wrapped up in the moment that a rare instance of transference occurred. His body turned hot as fire. His colleagues touched his flesh and drew their hands back, screeching. Another hunter’s arm got broiling hot as well, and the gang took turns sniffing it for clues.

In another scene, Mary Travers and an Irishman named Paul (not Paul Stookey) were summoning the spirit of Jack the Ripper in the cellar of an ancient public house. This Paul was something of a skeptic and a hard guy—if a skinny, bespectacled chap with a Mr. Drysdale mustache could ever be a hard guy.

Anyway, Paul came off as quite intrepid—that is, until he mistook a smudge on his glasses for Saucy Jack. Suddenly he’s shrieking and he’s exercising all four limbs like a man who just intersected a spider’s web. We at home see nothing but a photo-negative of ass over elbows as we hear the kind of clomping and banging one hears several times during an episode of “COPS.” This Paul, we learn, has ascended the cellar stairway, leaving Mary Travers on her own.

The courageous man shortly returns and submits that he had spied a figure standing in the corner of the room. We can trust his word because he raises his right hand and swears to it—on the good name of everyone from his grandmother to the Metaphysical poet George Herbert.

Somehow emboldened, he resorts to calling out the spirit of this most infamous figure: "Ya coward. You’re jist a rotten coward who kilt ladies behind closed doors. Ya were nuttin’ in life; ya nuttin’ in death."

Content that the ghost of the Ripper is afraid to take him on, Paul repairs to a rocking chair among a pile of beer casks, where he is last seen rocking comfortably like Will Rogers.

The ghost hunter emeritus is a bloke named Derek. He too is seen as an eerie photo-negative, though one assumes he’d look just as washed out in living color. At times he resembles the elderly Stan Laurel, at other times times a whitewashed David Bowie. Derek is a medium, but not a happy medium, for most of the time he’s possessed by the grim spirits he summons. At one point he’s an old lady, Elizabeth, aged 72, dead. As Elizabeth, he speaks in tongues and makes everyone around him uncomfortable. Later, he’s a murderer named Edward Bryan, and in this persona he goes off into a corner and looks like someone imitating rocker David Byrne playing an air guitar.

My fervent wish was for less Derek and more spooks—or “spirit persons,” to use the official name. At one point Derek was prattling about the spirit person he was sensing but not seeing. If memory serves, it went a lot like this: ". . . and he's got a bit of an overbite. He's quick to anger, though steady as she goes. His mother may have been a charwoman. He's a straightaway honest chap. He's murdered at least five people in a rather heinous fashion. He's fond of rice pudding. He formerly amused his neighbors by wearing wax lips. He only attended the theatre once, to see a matinee of The Importance of Being Earnest" and so on. It got to where you could hear the spirit people snoring.

I’ve also watched episodes of genuine American ghost hunters, airing on the SciFi Network. The show, which bears the proportional title of “Ghost Hunters,” follows the exploits of six or seven regular guys and occasionally a big-boned, attractive woman. They hail from Warwicke, Rhode Island, but they evince a Missourian’s “show me” mindset: they don’t necessarily expect to encounter any real haunts on their assignments, which is something they make very clear to those who request their services.

The night I watched, the gang tried to detect ghosts and other otherworldly phenomena at a shut-down prison in Mansfield, Ohio, where “The Shawshank Redemption” was filmed. The best they could summon were rats—actual rodents, not tattletale prisoners.

They also tested at the Lizzie Bordon home. In the bedroom of this notorious murderess, they held up their tiny microphones and asked, “Does anyone here have anything to say?” In the prison, their predominant question was, “Is there anyone here who’d like to get something off their chest?”

But nobody said nothing about nothing, and as Bob Dylan might say, “Nothing was revealed.”

Heads and Tails

2006-10-28T22:10:00.002-05:00

In my youth I always honored the estimations of my older brothers when it came to the arts, and therefore my tastes rarely aligned with those of my classmates. In the fifth grade this was exemplified by my allegiance to singer-songwriter Harry Chapin, especially his Heads and Tails album, which featured “Taxi,” the coolest song in the world. At age eleven I could readily identify with a footloose cabbie who took his tips and got stoned. “Taxi” was a long song—much longer than what my big brothers called “that bubble-gum crap they play on WHB”—but I committed every word of it to memory.

I tried like the devil to recruit my friends to the Chapin Club, but it was a no go. They were hooked on “Bennie and the Jets” and “Love Will Keep Us Together” and the other five or six songs that cycled on the AM airwaves. Their resistance, of course, only made Harry seem all the more impressive.

One Sunday I scanned the TV listings for the week ahead and saw that Harry was the featured performer on “Soundstage.” I don’t recall what night “Soundstage” ran, but it was likely late in the week—Thursday or Friday. No analogy can capture just how anxious I was for that air time to arrive, but this one may come the closest: I felt the way a pair of virginal newlyweds must feel at the hotel’s front desk when the clerk is all thumbs and cannot figure out the computer.

The night of the show, I went into an empty bedroom and placed the microphone of our Emerson tape recorder near the TV. In all likelihood I was violating some sort of copyright code by recording in this fashion, but I’m pretty sure the Statute of Limitations applies here, so back off.

As zero hour neared, I grew increasingly afraid that “Soundstage” would get pre-empted by a President Ford speech on inflation or a bulletin announcing the death of Walter Brennan or something like that, but at the appointed time Harry’s head filled the screen. He sat on a wooden barstool and sang “Taxi” and “Any Ol’ Kind of Day” and eight or nine other songs. He looked anguished at times, blissful at times, contemplative at other times. His bed of curly hair flopped around as he underscored certain guitar strokes with thrusts of the neck. The veins on his forehead grew more pronounced by the minute.

That was the fastest hour of television to date.

Immediately I replayed the cassette tape so I could relive the experience. By pasting my ear against the recorder I could make out the songs, yet too often I also heard the neighbor dog, Satan, howling away, as well as our toilet flushing and my own throat-clearings.

During that general time period, I wrote a song lyric about a retarded fellow down the street whose house had burned to the ground. It was a song that expressed the opinion that we should not burn down the homes of the retarded. Crazy Jack hadn’t actually died in the fire, but I took some poetic license, as this refrain implicates: “And the question was passed/From father to daughter/Could a whole town be charged/For manslaughter?”

I recognized that such a lyric of moral outrage was perfect for my idol, who had an affinity for writing songs of moral outrage, so I sent it to him for his immediate use. A couple years later I got a response from his publicist. She said Harry enjoyed the song but, regrettably, would be unable to use it.

By the time that response arrived, Chapin had gone bubble gum with “Cat’s in the Cradle,” and my feelings for his catalog of work were lukewarm on my most charitable of days. Receiving the rejection slip, therefore, was like getting turned down by an employer you didn’t want to go to work for in the first place—which is something that’s happened to me about a dozen times, by the way.

Sadly, Harry was killed in an auto accident on Long Island, New York, in May of 1981. He died the week of my high school graduation, and the timing of it really made me stop and think.

These days, “Cat’s in the Cradle” remains as Chapin’s musical legacy for the mainstream. Mostly, though, the title is invoked for laughs at parties and happy hours where really cool people gather.

Classic Rock

2006-10-23T11:01:00.000-05:00

Something that happened on a Saturday in 1981 forever sticks in my craw. It was probably the first warm day of the spring, and I turtled along in the stacked-up traffic near the city’s hot spot, Bannister Mall. With all four windows down, I listened to a tape called Angry Young Them, by Them, a band of British rockers led by Van Morrison. The song “Mystic Eyes” played at a volume just boastful enough for a neighboring car to enjoy. At a traffic light, a station wagon filled with teens was equal to my Cutlass, and though I never looked explicitly in that direction, I could tell there was a lot of agitation inside that wagon. The traffic light was long. “Mystic Eyes” turned into “If You and I Could Be As Two,” and meanwhile the unrest in the car beside mine intensified.

Then a voice addressed me: “Hey, you.” I did a slow Oliver Hardy-like turn of the head to let the caller know I wasn’t easily bossed around. He, the driver, had underachieving whiskers and wore a ball cap. Five or six carbon copies of himself crowded the wagon. He smiled and said, “Ah, you like your bubble-gum music?” His passengers went apeshit with laughter.

I’ll tell you why this rankled me. I had never listened to bubble-gum music or, for that matter, the popular music of the day. From age nine forward I was, in my own fashion, a musical snob. Unfortunately, I was not the kind of precocious snob who listened to classical music and Gershwin and Cole Porter and Rogers & Hart, but instead I was more like the kind of snob a John Cusack might portray in an independent movie. I liked the stuff my older brothers liked, music by heady singer-songwriters who were rarely played on FM radio and never on AM. Meanwhile, I lived with the fear that classmates as well as strangers assumed I was into all of those arena-rock bands that had one name—Kiss, Journey, Heart, Boston, Yes, Styx, Kansas, Queen, Rush, Foreigner, Missouri.

Despite my resistance to it, the popular music of the day had an undeniable presence, as it always does, no matter the era; it played at high school mixers, for instance, and in shopping malls and restaurants, on television commercials, and in other kids’ cars. Therefore, I always had a working knowledge of what the crowd listened to and talked about.

I knew, for example, that Boston was too arrogant to tour, and that Steve Miller rhymed “Texas” with “facts is,” and that Kiss had a sensitive ballad called “Beth” that a popular senior couple reportedly played over and over while doing it. I’d of course heard the rumors about Rod Stewart needing his stomach pumped after a night of historic debauchery with the boys. I was fully aware that Joe Walsh had destroyed the Eagles and that because Jackson Browne was in love again his next album might really suck. I knew Bob Seger kept getting mistaken for a woman in one truck stop after another, and that cat scratch fever had nothing to do with cats, and that the fellows in Kansas were claiming I consisted of dust particulates. Meanwhile, across the state line, Missouri had a song whereby the road-weary rocker sings “Girl I want you but I just gotta go.” (My advice then as now is this: Stick with the girl; you need her more than the airwaves need you.)

Now, from this safe distance of twenty-five years, I sometimes dial up the classic rock station, as an amusement of sorts. KCFX, known as “the Fox,” is our city’s version of the cookie-cutter classic-rock station, and though I listen only periodically and with a pronounced amount of ironic detachment that I make sure is apparent on my face, I seem to hear the same twenty songs over and over, despite the station having fifty years of classic rock to cull. Curiously, whenever a caller wants to hear one of those twenty songs—“Hey, would it be remotely possible to play ‘New Kid in Town’ for my buddies and me?”—the dee-jay acts like the station could lose its license over this: “Ohhh, Jeez. Gosh, let me see. I think that is permissible.”

Last March, a friend and I set out to predict the ten songs KCFX would play in some randomly chosen hour. This friend, who now lives on the East coast, had been wary of radio rock in his teens as well and, like me, occasionally dips into it today. After fifteen minutes of thought, I devised my own list, as follows:

• “Bohemian Rhapsody,” by Queen
• “Heartache Tonight,” by the Eagles
• “Main Street,” by Bob Seger
• “Spill the Wine,” by War
• “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” by Meatloaf
• “The Best of Times,” by Styx
• “Roundabout,” by Yes
• “Cold as Ice,” by Foreigner
• “Layla,” by Derek & the Dominos

I felt good about my selections until I saw my friend’s, and then I felt like the kid who orders a Mister Misty at the Dairy Queen only to catch an eyeful of his brother’s banana split. His list made my list look sick, and I was sure he’d gotten nine of the ten correct. (Nine was the maximum possible in his case, because for his tenth choice he listed a jokey song.) Here, then, is his list of nine:

• "All Right Now" by Free
• "The Boys Are Back in Town" by Thin Lizzy
• "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf
• "Reeling In the Years" by Steely Dan
• "More Than a Feeling" by Boston
• "Carry On, My Wayward Son" by Kansas
• "Life's Been Good to Me So Far" by Joe Walsh
• "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" by BTO
• "Barracuda" by Heart

A night or two later I bellied up to my kids’ portable CD player and tuned in to KCFX. In between promotional announcements for a national dee-jay team called Bob and Tom (or was it Rick and Dom, or Whacks and Wayne), the station played these ten songs in this order:

• “Fat Bottom Girls,” by Queen
• “Love is Like Oxygen,” by Sweet
• “Black Dog,” by Led Zeppelin
• “Angel is a Centerfold,” by the J. Geils Band
• “Fame,” by David Bowie
• “Stand Back,” by Stevie Nicks
• “Here Comes My Girl,” by Tom Petty
• “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” by Traffic
• “Night Moves,” by Bob Seger
• “Foolin,” by Def Leppard

I shared this list with my friend. I had envisioned a rollicking dialogue in which we’d jabber about each song as a representation of some memory or moment. Alas, neither of us could think of a single anecdote or association that pertained to any of these songs. I don’t know if that was the consequences of having rejected radio rock back then, or more a matter of not having gotten out of the house much. At any rate, the telephone line that connected us halfway across the country that night transmitted little more than vocalized pauses and strategic throat clearings.

What, ultimately, can we take from this experiment? The experiment disabused me of the notion that the Fox only plays twenty songs. Clearly, this classic-rock station plays thirty.

Malts

2006-10-23T10:52:00.006-05:00

After a Royals game in 1975, my brother Joe and two of his buddies visited Wimpey’s, a hamburger joint on Troost Avenue that was a hangout, if not a city-wide destination. They’d been to Wimpey’s a hundred times before, but that night one of the teens was disgruntled by the quality of his chocolate malt, so he stepped outside and heaved the cup at the front glass window and shouted “This malt sucks!" His pals inside had no choice but to grab for their food and drinks and scurry out, their long hair flying behind them.

Inside that car that sped away on Troost, I imagine the offender was both congratulated and censured; no doubt there were explosions of laughter and loud words spoken with the kinds of exaggerated inflections that are peculiar to such a moment—all of which played against the backdrop of an Allman Brothers eight-track tape.

Then the offender said this: “My bi-nocs!” The fool had left his father’s expensive binoculars on the customer countertop.

When the boys returned, the proprietor, Sam, was in the parking lot spraying down the mess. Somehow he resisted the urge to train that garden hose on them.

“You kids think you’re so funny,” he snarled into the car window.

He was right. But it was a safe call. Most high-school kids think they’re so funny.

I’ve heard that story a couple dozen times, and it continues to puzzle me, for I always thought Wimpey’s malts were delicious. They were as thick as pudding and therefore long-lasting, a welcome contrast to the watery, grainy shakes you’d find at McDonald’s. They were so thick, in fact, that when I dipped my stubby french fries into them the way a normal person dips his fries into ketchup, they often broke apart, only to reveal themselves later at the bottom of the cup as I dredged for the last vestiges of viscosity.

While the Wimpey’s malts were good, the best I ever had were blended in a certain Baskin-Robbins on a dozen or more occasions in 1985. But my malt-drinking buddy and I paid a steep price in both dollars and nervous energy. A large malt ran about three-fifty, an expenditure we took seriously because our hourly wages were equal to that sum.

Worse, the pair of adolescents who were always behind the counter believed that making malts was beneath them. They were ten years younger than us, looked like Eddie Haskell, and weighed fifty pounds each, but we spoke to them like low-level street soldiers might speak to the Godfather on the day of his daughter’s wedding. We’d even rehearse in the parking lot. I’d paste on the kind of silly grin that people affect when they’re introduced to Jimmy Carter, and I’d say, “Yes, could you be so kind as to concoct a large chocolate malt for me, using equal portions of chocolate and vanilla ice creams?” And my drinking buddy, playing the role of either Haskell, would park his hands on his hips and say, “I could lose my job because of this.”

They were always saying they could lose their jobs if they obliged any request we made. If we wanted more malt powder, less malt powder, a new straw, we were clearly putting their jobs on the line.

We suffered these surly kids only because each had the Midas touch when it came to blending malts. But they did not appreciate their special talent. Imagine if George W. Bush rolled his eyes every time someone dark-skinned got tortured—that’s how odd their behavior seemed.

No longer are there interesting ways to describe good food and drink. If you doubt me, watch the Food Network for a couple hours. I won’t dwell on how good those malts were, but I will spend a moment on their metaphorical significance. They simply represented all that was good on this earth, up until our straws began making those sad, sad sounds that prophesied the end was near. These noises were at first abrasive and rather belching in nature, but too soon they turned frightfully asthmatic as the southernmost points of the straws danced their desperate dry dance on the tiny round dance-floors. At that point, neither of us could think of anything outside of man’s inhumanity to man.

One night we got dizzy from spending half a minute inhaling nothing but the ghosts of malteds past.

“Now what?” said my friend, looking as glassy-eyed and wobbly as Ted Nugent looks at his breakfast table each day.

“Well, we can’t order another one or those kids might get fired,” I said.

“Those phonies. They’re nice to the cute girls but never to guys like us.”

As if on cue, a pair of pretty girls half our age approached the store. We sped toward them in a high-kneed gait, like British comedians would, and waved paper money and shouted “Girls! Say, girls!” Those pretty girls must have suddenly remembered they had a lot of homework to do because they turned and fled, leaving us with a diminishing view of the soles of their sneakers.

At some point, something must have cost the surly Haskells their jobs, or else they chose to work elsewhere. At any rate, after the boys were gone, the quality of malts spiraled at that store. One fall night, we polished off our runny drinks in about nine seconds flat and didn’t even bother to exercise our straws against the soggy bottom.

“Now what?” he asked, dispirited.

“Dairy Queen’s only ten minutes away.”

He looked at his shoes. “Has it come to this?”

It had.

Back before we discovered Baskin-Robbins, and decades before there were custard stands and creameries on every corner, a Dairy Queen was a welcome sight. The day I passed my driver’s test, my first destination was, of course, McDonald’s. I was sixteen and therefore hard-wired to make that sad choice. But my second trip, the next afternoon, was to the Dairy Queen in the Waldo community a few miles west of my home. I ordered a medium chocolate malt, and for the next two or three years I made that same purchase just about every day. I’d like to say there were cute girls behind the counter who drew me there on such a regular basis, but that would be a lie. The malts were why I came.

As I bring to a close this homage, allow me to describe an incident from the middle 1980s. One frosty evening, at the Minsky’s restaurant in Watts Mill, my malt-drinking buddy and I shared a large pizza that was festooned with Italian sausage and red onions, accompanied by industrial-sized sodas. Afterwards, while in the parking lot, with our belt-buckles loosened and pounds of masticated bread dough gassifying within our stomachs, we agreed that nothing would hit the spot so much as a large chocolate malt, and we knew there was a Baskin-Robbins not far away.

As I sat in my car a half-hour later, I recalled a favorite saying of my grandmother’s: “I’m so full, I couldn’t drink a thimble full of water.” Warily, I lifted the plastic lid and peeked into the cup to see just how much malt remained. Imagine my shock and agitation when what I spied within that cup were Ethan Brand’s furnace and Shylock’s ducats and Gatsby’s Daisy and Yoric’s skull and even Jon Lovitz’s devil, which was especially agitating because the evening predated Jon Lovitz as a featured player on “Saturday Night Live,” much less a regular cast member.

With trembling fingers I replaced the lid and asked my friend to take a look inside his cup. “What do you see?”

“Peacocks,” he said with a shiver. “And I do believe they are Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks.”

I nodded soberly. “Maybe it’s time we take a step back.”

The drive to my home was tough. We were so full that the very idea of respiration struck us as highly distasteful. We sat in a grim silence as my car proceeded north on Holmes Road. It was the kind of tense silence most often found between young felons who suddenly realize it wasn’t such a good idea to kill that neighbor kid a few minutes ago, and who both suddenly realize it was the other guy’s idea in the first place.

Then I don’t know why I put this out there, but let the record show that I did: “You know what’d go down good right now? A big greasy plate of onion rings.”

Now I remember why I put it out there. Even in my misery I hoped to make him laugh.

Indeed, his first response was to laugh, and it was a response that triggered my own laughter. But these laughs devolved into moans as we each focused on our own visions of greasy rings piled one atop the other. Suddenly, red and yellow spots danced before my eyes. I rushed to lower my window and noted my passenger doing the same. The pizza and the soda and the malt and everything I had eaten since the sixth grade now conspired towards liberty. I suspended my head out the window like a dog even as I hastened my dash home.

In troubled moments like that, when the sweat builds on the forehead and the saliva pools beneath the tonsils, even the most uneducated among us might find himself engaged in an interior monologue that owes much to Elizabethan prose styles: “O damn ye dissembling Dr. Pepper! Thou cursed shards of parmesan and thou divers boluses of leavened yeast, I entreat thee remain in thy hallowed repose for nigh on three or four minutes—depending on the caprices of these traffic lights—till I reacheth my most private and sanctified chamber.”

My friend tucked his head back inside and swallowed very hard and then called to me: “How’s a plate of sweet and sour pork sound right about now?”

We replaced our heads into the chilly air once again.

“Or a nice big bite of butter?” he proposed, green of face.

“Or, I called out, “a stick of butter dunked into a bowl of melted butter.”

“Speed, friend, speed,” he begged.

Rest assured that we made it home safely, somehow, where we soon split a six-pack of beer and chatted about television or something.