“All right, give it some gas,” my dad tells me, “and start easing the clutch out — not too much,” he warns me when the engine revs too high. I lift my foot off the gas; a blink of an eye later the clutch engages, the car lurches forward, and the engine stalls. I killed it, I think to myself morosely, waiting for my dad’s reprimand. It comes in the form of a long sigh modulated in such a way that I can’t help but notice his displeasure with me.
“Start it up,” he orders me. I turn the key and the car lurches forward again. “Foot on the clutch,” he barks, and I’m certain that this surely is how his recruits on Parris Island must’ve felt. My dad: the consummate Marine DI, even though he retired from the Corps a few years before I came along. I expect that, once we get home, he’ll have me run a mile in full gear.
I start the car and tease the clutch with my left foot while feathering the throttle with my right foot to get the car rolling. I’m accelerating now, still in first gear, toward the far end of the parking lot. Topps, a local retailer, went out of business a year or so ago so the parking lot is empty, making it a good place for Dad to teach me how to drive the manual transmission in our 1965 VW Beetle.
“Shift it into second,” he tells me as the engine revs escalate. I release the gas pedal and step on the clutch with my left foot, shift the gearshift into second gear, and then resume accelerating. At the far end of the parking lot Dad tells me to come to a complete stop and has me repeat the process of engaging the clutch and shifting into second gear. We do this several times, the last two I manage to reach third gear; I notice a marked improvement in my technique.
“All right,” Dad announces. “Let’s take her out onto Michigan Avenue.” I think I hear a note of excitement in his voice and wonder whether he’s getting into this as much as I am.
Michigan Avenue, I tell myself. It’s only a four-lane divided highway that once was the main connector between Detroit and Chicago, but eighteen or twenty miles east of here is Tiger Stadium, where the Tigers play and where the Lions played when last they won a championship. I hear Ernie Harwell, the radio voice of the Tigers, say in his southern drawl, “Welcome to another afternoon of Tigers baseball here at the corner of Michigan and Trumball.” Another eighteen or twenty miles west of here is Willow Run Airport — Charles Lindbergh was Henry Ford’s advisor on the aeronautical aspects of Willow Run when it was built back in 1941. That was 30 years ago — fifteen years before I was born and to me ancient history. Dad works for Zantop Airways. Two years from now, after graduating from high school, I’ll get my first job at Willow Run Services, pumping 100 octane into World War II vintage aircraft — C-46s, DC-3s, and DC-6s, among others. But at that moment all Michigan Avenue means to me is another step toward achieving manhood: I’m learning to drive a stick-shift.
I pull out into traffic and accelerate from first to second to third gear, up to the 35 mph speed limit. Each time I take my right hand off the steering wheel to shift, the Beetle veers left. I wonder if the wind is really that strong — in a rear engine car, the front end is light. Dad tells me, matter of fact: “If you didn’t have such a death’s grip on the steering wheel the car wouldn’t swerve like that every time you shift.”
We get caught at a couple traffic lights; I’m getting more practice starting from a stop, once on a fairly steep incline, and now, cognizant of keeping a loose grip on the steering wheel, the car no longer veers left when I shift.
We’re approaching the city of Wayne. Once we get through downtown the speed limit will jump to 50. I hope Dad won’t make me turn around before I can achieve fourth gear. He doesn’t, and by the time I pull into our driveway at home I feel as if I’m ready to qualify for the Indianapolis 500.
I eventually bought that ’65 Beetle and made it my own: eight-track quad stereo, ten-inch diameter chrome steering wheel, Hurst short-throw shifter (replacing the knob with a Coors beer can), black shag carpeting on the dash, and replacing the VW emblem on the hood with a chrome swan taking flight. Of course by then the running boards had rusted off along with the back bumper, and on cold winter mornings Dad had to push me, backwards, with his car to jump start it. But it was all mine, and it gave me my first taste of independence. It got me to work for two years, I took my first real girlfriend to a drive-in movie where I stole my first kiss, and while I never qualified it for the “500,” it got me down to Indianapolis as a spectator, and provided me with some near-miss adventures.
When I finally sold it to buy a new car, I felt as if I’d let an old friend down; worse, that I'd dumped my girlfriend for another girl, one that was prettier and wore more baubles but had little personality.
—JCG/January 2007
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Monday, November 27, 2006
Future's Past
Amok leaned his weight against the body and twisted the knife, felt the body tense and rise up, then go limp. Amok stared into the blank eyes, wide with fear and the comprehension it was dead, and felt the warm viscous fluid seeping from the wound in the body’s torso, somewhere just beneath the sternum. One hand on its shoulder, the other still on the hilt of the knife, Amok took a step back. When the body tipped forward, he performed a combination sidestep and pirouette, exchanging places with the corpse, and gently assisted it, as if it were a lover, to a prone position on the floor.
The date was November 8, 2041, a critical date in Amok’s past. On this day — a day the dead man on the floor lying beneath Amok would refer to as his present but which Amok would call his own past — the dead man had traveled back in time to 1941, to a date which they each could lay claim as their past, driven by the same mission as Amok’s: to change history…
“Of course,” Cassel told him, “in all likelihood, you will not survive. You’re free to refuse; yet if you agree, and you succeed and survive, you will be a free man.”
“I have your word?” Amok asked.
“You won’t need it. But if you want it, you have it.”
“Why me?”
“I presented my requirements to those in charge of this facility and your name appeared at the top of the list. It helped that I’m somewhat familiar with some of the environmental treatises you wrote in your youth— I’ve little doubt that in another era you’d have enjoyed much notoriety as a writer. I think I can help you to achieve some measure of success.” Cassel paused. “The life you took was accidental. Others here serve sentence having committed far worse transgressions, even as others walk free, and crimes committed in the name of survival will escalate as Man’s days as the dominate species dwindle.”
Amok nodded, although he understood little; Cassel took the movement as acceptance and launched into his pitch.
“In 2041 the empire Hitler vowed would last 1,000 years was nearly a century old. Fascism exists on hate, and so after elimination of the Jews, in short order the Poles, Estonians and Latvians were exterminated.”
“That’s not the history they teach in school,” Amok said.
“Of course it isn’t,” Cassel said, “because we’re living an alternate reality.”
Amok only stared at Cassel.
“It was then that a rogue group of scientists, recognizing the acumen in diversity, embarked upon a plan to change history. They sent a genetically enhanced being back in time to mere weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to implement a conspiracy to allow the raid on Ford Island to take place, hoping that the premeditated strike against a world power would stir them to action, thereby assuring Hitler’s demise. The plan succeeded, setting the table for the end of Mankind, which is certain to occur within our lifetime.”
Amok understood that many revisionists viewed the Allied victory in World War II as the beginning of the end. By the end of the 20th century, absolute power succeeded in corrupting absolutely the twin political parties of the United States. The population was immersed in accumulation of wealth and materials. The government seized on this and, under the guise of protection, began robbing Americans of their rights, which included denial of truth and the destruction of individual rights.
With the new century came a new war. Not fought for gain of land or resources, this war was instead fought for ideals; and so George W. Bush, behind the mask of champion of human rights, commenced a Crusade against Islam. And the might of a world power made him right.
A nation blessed with resources continued to be unmindful of waste. The planet cried out: earthquakes increased, in numbers and severity, global warming escalated, weather began to change. By the middle of the century rising temperatures and changes in precipitation increased forest susceptibility to fire, disease and insects. The quality and quantity of drinking water diminished, the result of rising population and increased industrial use and evaporation. By the end of the century it was too late; her injury irreparable, Mother Nature turned a deaf ear to Man.
Amok shook his head, fully aware of America’s contribution toward Man’s extinction. “Such is the nature of hindsight,” he said, “its boon as well as its bane: history shows again and again Man’s inability to learn from past mistakes. Only in the end, when it’s too late, does he see the folly of his ways.”
Amok knew his summation of Cassel’s discourse was merely a preface, backfill, to the mission in which he would be asked to participate.
Amok agreed to the mission — thwart another time traveler’s mission to enable the planet’s greatest democracy to facilitate the ultimate destruction of Man by enabling the 20th century’s most malignant dictator to prevent that from ever happening by ensuring Nazi Germany’s world domination. This was Amok’s chance to rewrite to a happily ever after ending the great cosmic novel that chronicled Man’s existence, even if it meant the extermination of millions of innocent people —Amok believed in the discipline of a strict father (a disciplined child is a conscientious child).
Akin to many famous writers who had lived prior to the end of the 20th century, Amok would enjoy his greatest success posthumously, for even if he survived he would be unable to return to his own era (for security purposes he was not permitted to carry a time travel device) to see what crop had sprung from the seed he would sow. He could only hope his name would be revered in 22nd century history books.
And so on a warm, moist morning in early April, Amok felt the effects of time travel wash over him: a slight tingling in his extremities, blurred vision, nausea.
A moment after Amok disappeared, Cassel sat, anxiously awaiting the effects of the machine he had set into motion, contemplating that while Hitler had indeed been evil, he at least had been honest concerning his goals — John F. Kennedy, he thought, LBJ, Nixon, the Bush tandem: there is no greater evil than evil masquerading as good. It never occurred to him that the more things change the more they stay the same…
... While 100 years in Cassel’s past Amok’s last thought was whether it was true that a man never hears the shot from the gun that takes his life.
—JCG; 11/2006
Do You Like to Kill?
I relish playing God, having within me the power to give or take life. To take away everything it embodies, everything it is and everything it ever will be — that’s power.
As a boy my dream was to play Major League Baseball. I idolized Tigers Hall of Fame right fielder Al Kaline and dreamed of roaming right field at Tiger Stadium making spectacular catches, and of hitting for average and homeruns, of setting records and winning a World Series. Watching Mickey Mantle launch a blooper intentionally served up by Denny McLain in 1968, just a few months before Mantle retired from baseball, only inspired me further.
But I never had the chance to see if I had it in me to play in the Majors. Fearing I’d get hurt my parents denied me, discouraged me and dissuaded me. “Baseball is for only a privileged few,” Mom advised me, perhaps thinking she was saving me from disappointment. “Learn a trade,” Dad said, “and get a job at a Union shop.” Dad had joined the Marine Corps, avoiding the drudgery of a mundane life, but that was exactly the path down which he was advising me to go. Bad advice that, coming from a man who’d chosen to avoid working an assembly line to become a walking zombie and retire in 40 years with a gold watch.
And then fate struck in the name of Sgt. Schreiber, who’d served with my dad in the Pacific Arena, on Okinawa where some of the bloodiest fighting in World War II took place. Schreiber showed up at our house in June 1974 to attend a Marine Corps reunion with my dad. I was 17 and hadn’t seen Schreiber in maybe five years. He was colorful, larger than life, and had made a life of the Corps. He looked approvingly at me, already over 6 feet tall, and although I was skinny as opposed to muscular, he looked at my dad and proclaimed: “Jim, we’ll make a Marine of him, eh?” Then he asked me: “Do you like to kill?” I stammered something about mosquitoes being the only things I’d ever killed and that while I couldn’t say with any degree of certitude I enjoyed it, I enjoyed a certain gratification in succeeding with my first strike initiatives.
Schreiber left shortly after the reunion and I never saw him again — he was destined to die a few years later the result of being given HIV tainted blood during open heart surgery — but his question stayed with me, haunted me to the point that, after I turned 18, I didn’t register for the draft but instead enlisted in the Marine Corps. It’s strange how sometimes small events impact us in big ways; how a simple question often results in life-changing decisions.
From my perch high in a tree, I watch the VC approach the crossroads. Turn left, I think to myself centering my crosshair on his chest, and I just might let you live. Turn right or keep coming and you will die. At the crossroad he stops a moment, glancing left and right; after a moment he continues straight ahead. He’s maybe 900 yards from my position. He’ll be dead before he even hears my rifle’s report, I reason.
I draw a slow breath, hold it, listen to Schreiber’s voice — Do you like to kill? — and squeeze the trigger. I feel my weapon recoil against my shoulder, and a moment later the VC falls heavily onto his back, and lies still.
That would be a yes.
—JCG/June 2006
As a boy my dream was to play Major League Baseball. I idolized Tigers Hall of Fame right fielder Al Kaline and dreamed of roaming right field at Tiger Stadium making spectacular catches, and of hitting for average and homeruns, of setting records and winning a World Series. Watching Mickey Mantle launch a blooper intentionally served up by Denny McLain in 1968, just a few months before Mantle retired from baseball, only inspired me further.
But I never had the chance to see if I had it in me to play in the Majors. Fearing I’d get hurt my parents denied me, discouraged me and dissuaded me. “Baseball is for only a privileged few,” Mom advised me, perhaps thinking she was saving me from disappointment. “Learn a trade,” Dad said, “and get a job at a Union shop.” Dad had joined the Marine Corps, avoiding the drudgery of a mundane life, but that was exactly the path down which he was advising me to go. Bad advice that, coming from a man who’d chosen to avoid working an assembly line to become a walking zombie and retire in 40 years with a gold watch.
And then fate struck in the name of Sgt. Schreiber, who’d served with my dad in the Pacific Arena, on Okinawa where some of the bloodiest fighting in World War II took place. Schreiber showed up at our house in June 1974 to attend a Marine Corps reunion with my dad. I was 17 and hadn’t seen Schreiber in maybe five years. He was colorful, larger than life, and had made a life of the Corps. He looked approvingly at me, already over 6 feet tall, and although I was skinny as opposed to muscular, he looked at my dad and proclaimed: “Jim, we’ll make a Marine of him, eh?” Then he asked me: “Do you like to kill?” I stammered something about mosquitoes being the only things I’d ever killed and that while I couldn’t say with any degree of certitude I enjoyed it, I enjoyed a certain gratification in succeeding with my first strike initiatives.
Schreiber left shortly after the reunion and I never saw him again — he was destined to die a few years later the result of being given HIV tainted blood during open heart surgery — but his question stayed with me, haunted me to the point that, after I turned 18, I didn’t register for the draft but instead enlisted in the Marine Corps. It’s strange how sometimes small events impact us in big ways; how a simple question often results in life-changing decisions.
*
From my perch high in a tree, I watch the VC approach the crossroads. Turn left, I think to myself centering my crosshair on his chest, and I just might let you live. Turn right or keep coming and you will die. At the crossroad he stops a moment, glancing left and right; after a moment he continues straight ahead. He’s maybe 900 yards from my position. He’ll be dead before he even hears my rifle’s report, I reason.
I draw a slow breath, hold it, listen to Schreiber’s voice — Do you like to kill? — and squeeze the trigger. I feel my weapon recoil against my shoulder, and a moment later the VC falls heavily onto his back, and lies still.
That would be a yes.
—JCG/June 2006
Betty Rubble, or Wilma Flintstone
Life would be so much easier if I were a cartoon character.
“Did you always feel that way?” Dr. Whiteside prompted. Dr. Whiteside was my analyst, or as I liked to refer to her to my girlfriend, my analist.
“No,” I replied. “Thirty years ago, during the golden age of underground radio on the FM dial, the era of album oriented rock and roll — before they edited the 17 minute version of Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida down to three and a half minutes to accommodate jingles, contests, weather and traffic reports, along with a six-minute block of commercials, there was a segment on WWWW (or as they promoted themselves, ‘W-4’) — where they asked listeners which cartoon character they’d sleep with if they could: Betty Rubble or Wilma Flintstone?” I paused, wondering if Dr. Whiteside would be curious enough to ask which would be my cartoon of choice. She didn’t ask; but this was my 50 minutes and I was, after all, paying her to listen. I went on, wanting to believe she thought my choice was important. “I scoffed at the notion of either one. Why would I want to sleep with a piece of celluloid? This was 30 years ago, before Jessica Rabbit appeared on the scene — she wasn’t bad, she was just drawn that way.”
“So you’d prefer a virtual relationship?”
I thought about her question for a moment. The notion hadn’t occurred to me, but that, too, was what I was paying for: questions from a different perspective. I shook my head but filed the question away for introspective analysis on my own time.
“I’m nearing 50,” I said, feeling a sort of phony wisdom, as if I were the first person to have ever reached this plateau. “Life is beating me down. As a youth my dad always told me, ‘Son, you only live once, and I don’t think you’re going to make it.’”
“You feel he was setting you up to fail?”
I waved aside her assessment. “He said it tongue in cheek, but his point was, or at least I took it to mean, that none of us makes it out of this life alive; Dad certainly didn’t.”
“You see similarities between your life and your father’s?” she asked.
I shook my head; she still didn’t see where I was heading. “I managed to outgrow the geekiness of my teen years to turn a few heads in my 20s and 30s. Hell, my girlfriend tells me I’m still capable of walking into a Meijer grocery store — where they subscribe to the Parking Lot channel — and turn a head or two. But in youth I viewed myself as invincible. Every day was an adventure and I risked more. I grew stronger, more confident, until I couldn’t help but believe that it would always be so. But at some point I found that, like the sun, I’d reached my zenith and was now sliding slowly toward that horizon I’d always seen as so distant. The one behind which my dad disappeared.”
Dr. Whiteside nodded, as if I’d said something profound.
“When did you realize this?”
“Sometime in my late 30s I think. But it wasn’t until I turned 43, after my dad died, that I realized it had happened: I was never going to play major league baseball except in my dreams. Actually, the last baseball dream I had I was playing minor league baseball for a team in Chicago, still trying to catch up to that high inside fastball for which I was always a sucker.”
“And how does this relate to Betty and Wilma?” Dr. Whiteside asked. So she really had been listening.
“You read Archie and Jughead when you were a kid?” I asked. She nodded. “Their problems in school or with girls always seemed trite to me. Somehow I must’ve realized, even as a kid, that their troubles weren’t real; well, maybe they were but their resolutions, which always managed to come within a finite number of pages, I knew wouldn’t always work in the real world. Might isn’t always right (nor is the obverse always true ), playing fair doesn’t always net you the promotion, nor do you always end up with the Betty or Veronica of your dreams. Maybe that’s why I always went for Marvel Comics — Peter Parker got bit by a radioactive spider and developed spider powers, Superman feared only kryptonite. I loved it all for what it was: escapism. It’s important as adults to hold on to dreams of escape.”
“You feel the dreams of your youth will never be realized.”
I cringed. Dr. Whiteside wasn’t asking, she was telling me. I sensed the session was drawing to a close. But I wasn’t done.
“Pinky and the Brain’s incessant efforts at world domination invariably fail, yet I admire Brain’s adamancy in answering Pinky’s same question at the end of every episode, ‘What are we gonna do tomorrow night, Brain?’
‘The same thing we do every night, Pinky — try to take over the world.’
“Yosemite Sam always had something or other setting his pants afire; Wile E. Coyote, with those ACME mail-order rocket powered roller skates strapped to his paws, always managed to speed off the edge of a mesa to disappear into the desert floor below in a mushroom cloud of dust. But in the next scene they were always back — Sam’s biscuits might be burnin’ but his stones never scorched; Wile always walked off the accordion effect of those sudden stops after falls from great heights. They always came back, ready to eat bear, although it was always the bear that ate them.” I paused a moment, glanced at the clock on Dr. Whiteside’s desk. “I was a lot like Sam and Wile E. in my youth — always bouncing back in the face of adversity.”
“Bouncing back has gotten a lot tougher for you?”
I nodded. “Trying to keep up with technology and stay ahead of the kids who are coming out of college smarter and more resilient than I. Eventually I won’t be able to keep up in a world that’s changing faster and faster and becoming smaller and smaller.” I looked down at my hands, flat on my thighs and wondered whether my arms were really getting shorter or had micro technology merely gone insane. Not that it mattered: I still needed reading glasses. I shook my head. “I know I won’t be able to keep up. I watched it happen to my dad, and I think it’s going to happen to me a lot sooner than it did to him. Not that he was any smarter than me, but life during his time moved at a much more leisurely pace. The snowball of my life is picking up momentum.”
Dr. Whiteside glanced at her watch.
“Brain’s schemes inevitably fall short,” I said. “Sam never bags Bugs, and Wile never snares the Roadrunner.”
“Yet they never stop trying,” she offered, as if that were some sort of consolation.
“I envy them that.”
“We have to stop for today,” Dr. Whiteside said, and I was reminded yet again that life’s problems, mine at least, couldn’t be solved within a finite number of minutes. Yeah. Life would be so much easier if I were a cartoon character.
“Did you always feel that way?” Dr. Whiteside prompted. Dr. Whiteside was my analyst, or as I liked to refer to her to my girlfriend, my analist.
“No,” I replied. “Thirty years ago, during the golden age of underground radio on the FM dial, the era of album oriented rock and roll — before they edited the 17 minute version of Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida down to three and a half minutes to accommodate jingles, contests, weather and traffic reports, along with a six-minute block of commercials, there was a segment on WWWW (or as they promoted themselves, ‘W-4’) — where they asked listeners which cartoon character they’d sleep with if they could: Betty Rubble or Wilma Flintstone?” I paused, wondering if Dr. Whiteside would be curious enough to ask which would be my cartoon of choice. She didn’t ask; but this was my 50 minutes and I was, after all, paying her to listen. I went on, wanting to believe she thought my choice was important. “I scoffed at the notion of either one. Why would I want to sleep with a piece of celluloid? This was 30 years ago, before Jessica Rabbit appeared on the scene — she wasn’t bad, she was just drawn that way.”
“So you’d prefer a virtual relationship?”
I thought about her question for a moment. The notion hadn’t occurred to me, but that, too, was what I was paying for: questions from a different perspective. I shook my head but filed the question away for introspective analysis on my own time.
“I’m nearing 50,” I said, feeling a sort of phony wisdom, as if I were the first person to have ever reached this plateau. “Life is beating me down. As a youth my dad always told me, ‘Son, you only live once, and I don’t think you’re going to make it.’”
“You feel he was setting you up to fail?”
I waved aside her assessment. “He said it tongue in cheek, but his point was, or at least I took it to mean, that none of us makes it out of this life alive; Dad certainly didn’t.”
“You see similarities between your life and your father’s?” she asked.
I shook my head; she still didn’t see where I was heading. “I managed to outgrow the geekiness of my teen years to turn a few heads in my 20s and 30s. Hell, my girlfriend tells me I’m still capable of walking into a Meijer grocery store — where they subscribe to the Parking Lot channel — and turn a head or two. But in youth I viewed myself as invincible. Every day was an adventure and I risked more. I grew stronger, more confident, until I couldn’t help but believe that it would always be so. But at some point I found that, like the sun, I’d reached my zenith and was now sliding slowly toward that horizon I’d always seen as so distant. The one behind which my dad disappeared.”
Dr. Whiteside nodded, as if I’d said something profound.
“When did you realize this?”
“Sometime in my late 30s I think. But it wasn’t until I turned 43, after my dad died, that I realized it had happened: I was never going to play major league baseball except in my dreams. Actually, the last baseball dream I had I was playing minor league baseball for a team in Chicago, still trying to catch up to that high inside fastball for which I was always a sucker.”
“And how does this relate to Betty and Wilma?” Dr. Whiteside asked. So she really had been listening.
“You read Archie and Jughead when you were a kid?” I asked. She nodded. “Their problems in school or with girls always seemed trite to me. Somehow I must’ve realized, even as a kid, that their troubles weren’t real; well, maybe they were but their resolutions, which always managed to come within a finite number of pages, I knew wouldn’t always work in the real world. Might isn’t always right (nor is the obverse always true ), playing fair doesn’t always net you the promotion, nor do you always end up with the Betty or Veronica of your dreams. Maybe that’s why I always went for Marvel Comics — Peter Parker got bit by a radioactive spider and developed spider powers, Superman feared only kryptonite. I loved it all for what it was: escapism. It’s important as adults to hold on to dreams of escape.”
“You feel the dreams of your youth will never be realized.”
I cringed. Dr. Whiteside wasn’t asking, she was telling me. I sensed the session was drawing to a close. But I wasn’t done.
“Pinky and the Brain’s incessant efforts at world domination invariably fail, yet I admire Brain’s adamancy in answering Pinky’s same question at the end of every episode, ‘What are we gonna do tomorrow night, Brain?’
‘The same thing we do every night, Pinky — try to take over the world.’
“Yosemite Sam always had something or other setting his pants afire; Wile E. Coyote, with those ACME mail-order rocket powered roller skates strapped to his paws, always managed to speed off the edge of a mesa to disappear into the desert floor below in a mushroom cloud of dust. But in the next scene they were always back — Sam’s biscuits might be burnin’ but his stones never scorched; Wile always walked off the accordion effect of those sudden stops after falls from great heights. They always came back, ready to eat bear, although it was always the bear that ate them.” I paused a moment, glanced at the clock on Dr. Whiteside’s desk. “I was a lot like Sam and Wile E. in my youth — always bouncing back in the face of adversity.”
“Bouncing back has gotten a lot tougher for you?”
I nodded. “Trying to keep up with technology and stay ahead of the kids who are coming out of college smarter and more resilient than I. Eventually I won’t be able to keep up in a world that’s changing faster and faster and becoming smaller and smaller.” I looked down at my hands, flat on my thighs and wondered whether my arms were really getting shorter or had micro technology merely gone insane. Not that it mattered: I still needed reading glasses. I shook my head. “I know I won’t be able to keep up. I watched it happen to my dad, and I think it’s going to happen to me a lot sooner than it did to him. Not that he was any smarter than me, but life during his time moved at a much more leisurely pace. The snowball of my life is picking up momentum.”
Dr. Whiteside glanced at her watch.
“Brain’s schemes inevitably fall short,” I said. “Sam never bags Bugs, and Wile never snares the Roadrunner.”
“Yet they never stop trying,” she offered, as if that were some sort of consolation.
“I envy them that.”
“We have to stop for today,” Dr. Whiteside said, and I was reminded yet again that life’s problems, mine at least, couldn’t be solved within a finite number of minutes. Yeah. Life would be so much easier if I were a cartoon character.
Bathman
I’d had a miserable day… a perfectly miserable day. A perfectly miserable ending to a perfectly miserable week.
I work with college nincompoops. They may be very good at what they do — providing consulting services to the healthcare industry — but they sure aren’t any good at writing about what they do for our clients. That’s my job — making them look good in the eyes of our clients. I format their documents to a certain standard and perform a business read. I chase down errant punctuation and place it where it belongs, correct incorrect punctuation, and eliminate it entirely when it’s unnecessary. I cut the strings on dangling participles. I splice split infinitives and juxtapose compound sentences into their proper order, making sure all clauses are properly tucked into place where they belong, and further making certain that the predicate actually predicates what the subject is or does. I get tense ensuring proper tense, and lower case in cases where uppercase is inappropriate and vice versa (or as one nincompoop once wrote, “visa versa”). I correct misspelled words as opposed (or as another nincompoop once wrote, “aposed”) to letting the nincompoop embarrass himself in the eyes of our clients by ignoring my penchant for perfection. I ensure that modifiers modify what they’re supposed to modify and make my own modifications when they don’t. I also meet impossible deadlines.
Got a deliverable that needs to be at a client site by tomorrow? Give it to me; I’ll get it to done. I just wave my magic wand and it shows up at the client site on time looking like a million bucks and reading like someone with some actual intelligence wrote it. Clients love me. Unfortunately none of them know I even exist; the consultant receives all of the accolades for my work. It’s true: excellence never goes unpunished.
It was Friday and I’d had a particularly brutal week. I’d had to stay late tweaking some nincompoop’s HIPAA impact analysis — over 100 pages of drivel (if you can’t impress them with clarity, overwhelm them with garrulous claptrap) — and had just finished a hastily prepared meal: a Dolly’s pizza that had been less than hastily delivered a little more than an hour after I’d ordered it… 20 minutes longer than had been promised. The pizza was good, but it was difficult to tell whether it had hit the spot all by itself, or whether the shot of bourbon chased by the beer had paved the way.
I settled into my recliner to watch the ballgame. It was late September and the Tigers were struggling mightily. They’d been out of the hunt since late April, and now, instead of struggling to make a late run for the playoffs, they were struggling against finishing the season with 100 losses. If I’d been a betting man, I’d have bet on them to attain that triple digit milestone. Having fallen behind the Yankees early, tonight’s game looked like they would move one game closer to that dubious plateau.
Two and a half hours later, as I’d anticipated, the game ended with yet another loss, and I watched the post-game interviews and listened to the speculation on whether the manager would be fired during the off-season. Discussion turned to the sorry state of the Tigers farm system, which players would be shipped to other teams, which players from other teams might be testing the free agent market and look good in a Tigers uniform, etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
At just after 11:00 I shut off the TV and went to bed. No sooner did my head hit the pillow than I heard the bathroom water go on in the apartment above mine: Bathman was awake and on the prowl…
Since moving into this apartment a few months ago I’d been continuously annoyed by the bathing habits of the resident of the unit above mine. Not having met him, I could only surmise I’d recognize him instantly if not by his acute cleanliness, then most certainly by his water-wrinkled skin, or maybe even by the scales I was beginning to suspect he needed to irrigate so regularly. I never heard splashing, so I assumed he was merely enjoying some perverse Calgon moment, letting the water soak away whatever dirt may have accumulated during the couple of hours since his previous soaking.
He seemed to bathe constantly — morning, noon and night. By noon on weekends he’d already have bathed twice, without ever having left his apartment. Twice more by six in the evening, and twice again by midnight. On one particularly restless night I’d been treated to the sound of his bathroom plumbing (located in my bedroom closet) groaning its protest at 2 a.m., signaling to me that it was time for rub-a-dub-dub, one man in a tub. By the end of my first month, for the first time in my life — no mean feat considering my ex-wife (towards the end I’d taken to playing at full volume Jimi Hendrix’s Hey, Joe, the song that asks the musical question “where you going with that gun in your hand?”) — I had been ready to commit, you guessed it, murder.
I soon began referring to this Bozo as Bathman. The name was accompanied by an image of a caped crusader clad in black latex, with soap scum around his ankles.
The plumbing sang in a high falsetto as Bathman shut off the water, and a moment later I heard him slip-squeak into his porcelain tub. I imagined pasty-white blubbery skin and wondered if his tub, too, might have stretch marks. I closed my eyes and began to drift off to sleep…
*
The bright light outside my bedroom window brought me instantly awake: a circular white spotlight against the night sky with a black “W” embossed within its halo. The Commissioner was summoning The Wordsmith. Someone needed my services.
I bounded out of bed and adjusted my tights made tighter still by a nearly full bladder. “No time,” I told myself and threw my cape over my left shoulder and dashed out the door and down the two flights of stairs that lead to the parking lot. Sliding behind the wheel of the Wordmobile, I flipped the ignition switch and the engine roared to life. I threw it into drive and picked up the Wordphone as I sped around the corner on two wheels and headed east. A moment later the Commissioner picked up.
“Wordsmith,” I heard him say. “We’ve got a situation at a client site.”
“What is it?” I said doggedly. My heart was racing with expectation. Last night I’d been summoned to lop the “s” off a series of pro formas, one of those funny little words whose plural is the same as its singular. The night before someone had relied on Spellchecker and I had been called in to slash all the hyphens from multiple appearances of inter-dependencies and bi-weeklies. God, I love my job.
“One of our consultants has been submitting status reports to a client without first submitting them to you to work your word magic.”
“Damn,” I breathed into the Wordphone. “How many has the client received?”
“Three.”
It looked like I’d be pulling an all-nighter. “What’s the excuse?”
“She said the CEO never reads them anyway.”
“And now?”
“The CEO resigned. The interim wants to see the documentation for everything we’ve done on this project since day one. The three documents in question are waiting for you on your office e-mail.”
“Thanks,” I said. The shortsightedness of some people, I thought. “I’ll copy you on the final versions.” I broke the connection.
Moments later the Wordmobile squealed to a halt next to the unmanned ticket booth outside the parking lot. I palmed the green disk that prints the ticket, pulled the ticket from its slot, and waited for the gate to lift. I stuffed the ticket into my tights so I wouldn't forget it. I’d have to have that ticket validated or pay for the parking myself. Since my costume didn’t have pockets, it would have to come… out of tights.
I dashed across the street and stooped at the door so the scanner could read the big burnt sienna “W” scrawled in script across the olive green backdrop that was my costume. A moment later I heard the lock click open. I sprinted across the lobby to the elevator and pounded the UP button. The door sighed open and I leaped inside and punched the button that would launch me to the fourth floor.
Consultants, I thought to myself as I waited impatiently to reach my destination. I couldn’t think of another business where a client is happy to pay someone they didn’t call to tell them something they already know.
The elevator door parted down the middle (I felt like Moses standing on the bank of the Red Sea), and I bounded down the hall to my cubicle. I put on a pot of coffee while I waited for my PC to boot up.
The files were there, as the Commissioner had said. I downloaded the first one and groaned. It would need a tremendous amount of work to bring it to standard, and from the executive summary I could tell that whoever had written it had probably had someone else write their college dissertation.
I took a sip from my coffee mug and —
Six a.m. and the plumbing in my closet that was my alarm clock went off: Bathman was determined to start the day off with a clean slate. Yesterday’s HIPAA Impact Analysis had had its impact on me. I rolled into a sitting position and launched myself into action. Without bothering with slippers, I raced into the bathroom.
If it’s clean he wants to be, I can help with that, I thought as I reached for the toilet bowl brush that stood in its plastic receptacle in the corner behind the toilet. I was in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, but I didn't care. I needed to make sure I got to Bathman before he hit the water. I bounded up the stairs and pounded on the door with my brush raised, prepared to do battle.
A moment later the door swung in and I stood there, with water trickling down my upraised arm, unable to say a word. In the few months I’d lived here my febrile imagination had created for me an icon I was certain reality could only fail to match. And so before me stood the figure I had not dared to imagine.
“Uh,” I stammered, at a loss, for the first time in a long time, for words. I looked away from the dark eyes that stared at me, down at dainty feet with nails painted red.
“Yes?” came a sultry voice that sounded to me, as my blood pressure fell, as far away as last night’s dream.
My eyes moved slowly up from those two delicately formed feet to take in two dangerously curved legs that disappeared beneath the hemline, about six inches above the knees, of a tiny robe cinched tight at a narrow waist, to linger a moment on the proud swelling of two rather large but not too large breasts that the tiny robe Bathman… um, Bathwoman, wore couldn’t conceal.
What I’d envisioned as pasty white skin akin to something that might crawl out from under some rock was instead a medium shade of Mediterranean bronze, well irrigated not from repeated bathings, but instead, or so I imagined, from repeated application of skin lotion, rich in aloe and vitamin E.
“Can I help you?” the sultry voice asked.
A few minutes later, armed with a pint of Vanish, I padded back down to my own apartment. Yesterday’s HIPAA Impact Analysis was forgotten. And as I vigorously brushed a bowl that didn’t need brushing, I heard my neighbor slip-squeak into her bathtub and cursed myself for not asking her opinion on use of the ellipsis as a licentious literary device…
—JCG/November 2006
Sandlot
I’m still watching, at age 50, this kid’s game that I love so much.“Hey, Buzz, what happened out there today?”
Eighteen years in the Majors and I still don’t like tape recorders pushed into my face after a game, especially not after a loss, and not when I’m heading for the shower with a bar of soap wearing nothing but a towel, and that draped over my shoulder. I’ve gotten used to it I suppose; it goes with the game, but I don’t have to like it.
“I fouled out to end the game,” I said into the recorder. “I stranded the winning runs on base and we lost the game.”
“A few years ago that wouldn’t have happened, right? You’d have brought those two runners home, wouldn’t you?”
He was baiting me I knew, this kid reporter trying to make a name for himself in the local paper, looking for a quote from the colorful veteran. I’ve never considered myself colorful. I’ve always just wanted to play ball. I don’t think of myself as outspoken, but I say what’s on my mind; sometimes, when I’m quoted in the morning paper, they somehow manage to make me sound erudite. Most of the time I find it amusing. I looked at his press badge, pressed it and asked him what was supposed to happen. He didn’t get it. I decided against explaining. I guess you could say I was in a foul mood.
“Yeah,” I said, “and last night I hit a three-run shot to win. So what the game wasn’t on the line in the third inning.”
All the reporter did was stare at me. Somehow he knew I wasn’t yet done. Maybe it was because I had sat down on the bench. I let out a long audible sigh.
“Look, what do you want from me, a scoop? You want me to tell you I’m washed up, finished? That this is my last year?”
The kid sat down on the bench across from me and I thought back to a similar discussion I’d had with my dad 25 years ago, when I was playing ball in high school…
“Look, what do you want from me?” I asked.
“I want you to come to your senses,” Dad said. “Major League Baseball, that’s a pipe dream.
Both Dad and Mom wanted what was best for me, and they both thought they knew what best was: they wanted me to play it safe — learn a trade or get a degree and spend the next 40 years working nine to five for someone else. I saw that as a sentence, one that would end up with me, at age 65, regretting that I’d never even tried, disgusted with myself that I’d given up my dream, sans the pipe, for what my parents had wanted for me.
“I’m going to college, and I’ll get a degree” I said, “but I want to play baseball.”
“But Major League Baseball —”
“Is for a lucky few,” I finished for him. We’d had this discussion before. “Well who’s to say I won’t be among those lucky few? Guys get paid millions for hitting a mere .250. A few seeing-eye ground balls and bloop singles here and there over the course of a season spell the difference between mediocrity and superstardom. I’ve got some talent, Dad, and I’m hard-working. I can hit a curve ball and if I can learn to lay off the high inside fastball I’ll be able to work a count. I’ve a pretty good glove, too. After my playing days are over maybe I’ll end up managing, or in a booth doing color. If I don’t make it, well, then I’ll have my degree to fall back on.”
Dad said nothing more, not then and not after I’d made it to the show; he died the year before I was drafted. Maybe that was as much the reason I continued to play well into the twilight of my career.
Baseball is a humbling game. Trust me, I know. I was drafted… well let’s just say I wasn’t taken early. I spent a year in the Minors; played solid defense at first base and hit well enough, for average and with above average power, to earn a good look the following year at spring training. I was fortunate that I had a good pre-season, so the team took me north. I worked my ass off to stay in the Majors. I might not have Hall of Fame numbers, but I’ve rarely been cheated at the plate; sure I’ve had my share of oh-fers, but I’ve accumulated some three- and four-for-fours along the way, too, and a Gold Glove to boot. I haven’t won a World Series (this might be the year although it’s still only June) and have been voted an All Star only twice, but I’m proud of my career. I’ve played the game the way it was meant to be played, with adolescent joy. I’ve put up numbers good enough to have played my entire career for the same team and I’m thankful each and every day I take the field, which isn’t as often as it once was.
Maybe I should’ve gotten out of the game a couple of years ago, but thanks to the designated hitter rule — a rule I despised when I broke into the game and still loathe for the sake of the game (call me a purist) — I’m still playing, at age 40, this kid’s game that I love so much. I learned long ago not to pay too much attention to what the press writes or says about me, for good or bad, or to listen when the fans boo me — they’re the same ones who’ll cheer me tomorrow. This game, as much mental as it is physical, is filled with ups and downs, and I’m hard enough on myself without trying to please the press or the gate — and I think that has helped my longevity as much as anything.
I didn’t say any of this to the kid reporter who sat looking at me wide-eyed. I sighed, stood up and took a few steps toward the showers, and then I turned back; the kid was still looking at me, still hoping for a story. Sportswriters, I thought wryly. I tossed him, underhand, the bar of soap. He reached for it — it glanced off the heel of his hand and landed on the floor, bouncing once. He sat and I stood, each of us looking at the other. After a long uncomfortable moment, for him at least, he picked up the bar of soap and lobbed it back at me. I snatched it out of midair, rolled my eyes, and headed for the showers.
—JCG/June 2006
—JCG/June 2006
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)