Sometimes I Just Crack Me Up

Walter Swan’s Simple Plan

2010-12-29T08:10:00.000-08:00

The one time I actually interviewed for a job in the journalism field, was as a sports reporter for the Douglas Dispatch in Douglas Arizona. Douglas sits on the Arizona border across from their sister city, the Mexican town of Agua Prieta. Sounds beautiful, but roughly translates as “dirty water”. The town of Douglas was established as a smelter site for the copper mines of Bisbee and was named after mining pioneeer James Douglas.

It’s in Cochise County, Arizona, and that might sound familiar as the County is named after an infamous Chiracahua Apache, named Cochise. No photographs exist or were ever taken of Cochise, and he was buried in a secret location in the Dragoon Mountains. I’m telling you this, if for no other reason, because I find it interesting, and very similar to another infamous Oglala Sioux, named Crazy Horse. It seems they didn’t want their pictures taken because they thought some gadget like the camera could capture their soul and would be harmful to them, so it was taboo. I think it is interesting that two separate tribes had the same feeling about it. Well, anyway, I digress as usual.

I saw the job listing in the Tucson Citizen classifieds, and since I was currently self-“un”employed, I sent them a resume and some writing samples from my days as a reporter for the University of New Mexico newspaper, the “LoBo”, my only actual newspaper “experience.” I actually got a response, which surprised me, until I thought about it. That’s when I realized there probably weren’t too many people applying for a job in a dusty desert town on the border of Mexico with a population of 18,000 on a newspaper with a circulation of considerably less than that. I even got an interview. I was to be in Douglas in the newspaper office at 1:30 on the following Wednesday, and I was told to be prepared to do a short writing exercise. Piece of cake, I thought so I didn’t see any need to prepare.

I had never been to Douglas, had never ventured that far south in Arizona, and was actually looking forward to the trip. We figured it would take us a little over two hours to travel the 120 miles, so as not to be late for my interview, we left at around 8:00 in the morning. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the drive was uneventful until we came to the Mule Mountains and went through a tunnel. I love tunnels for some reason. This one is called the MulePass Tunnel. When we emerged on the other side, there in front of us, in the canyon, was a quaint little town that resembled, at first view, a turn of the century San Francisco. So much so, that they used it as a movie set for San Francisco in “Young Guns II”, we later learned. We had seen the resemblance immediately, except there was no ocean or San Francisco Bay. It is also known as Arizona’s mile high city at an elevation of 5,300 ft.

We pulled off the road at the first exit and just marveled at the place. It was like the tunnel had been a time machine and we had driven back to the 1900s. There was a tall brick building that caught my eye right away, it had a cupola over a Mickey Mouse clock tower, and it was for sale. A two-story building, renovated with four apartments and two retail spaces on the lower level for a mere $120,000. Might as well have been $1.2 million as far as me being able to afford it, but it seemed cheap at the time.

One of the more interesting buildings was “The Stock Exchange, which was originally a Brewery that was closed during Prohibition, then became the only NYSE between Missouri and San Francisco, and operated as such until 1964. The Stock Exchange, now a Bar and Restaurant is currently for sale for the paltry sum of $600,000. See how prices have gone up?

There were many other fine old brick buildings on Brewery Gulch and Main Street: Central School, the YMCA, the YWCA, two bank buildings, the post office, all looked as if we had gone through that time machine. They were little changed from when Bisbee was a mining town, a company town owned by the Phelps Dodge Company. For a time, during the early 1900s, the population exceeded that of Tucson.

We walked over to the Copper Queen Hotel and had an early lunch in the period restaurant. It was there, from talking with the waitress, that we learned about John Wayne being a frequent guest. They even had a suite named for him in the hotel, she told us, the room where he actually stayed. He believed that the copper in the area would be beneficial to his cancer treatment. The hotel has documented ghosts also. You really should check this place out at http://www.copperqueen.com

We hated to leave, there was so much we wanted to see, but I did have that interview at the Douglas Dispatch. We arrived about an hour early and drove around Douglas for a while just to check things out. We weren’t impressed. We found the offices of the Dispatch on 11th street, where I’m sure they had been for some time and are still located there today. My wife sat out in the car while I adjusted my suit jacket and entered the building.

The newspaper office is in a two-story building, in a groundfloor area of maybe 14’ by 30’ with glass block windows facing the street. In other words you got light through the windows but couldn’t see out. The limited light had been blocked further with newsprint from past issues taped to the glass. I was wondering if the sun got a little too much in the late afternoon and they just couldn’t afford blinds. There were three desks in a row on the left side of the space and a bunch of file cabinets on the opposite wall. Newspapers, legal pads, files, were strewn about everywhere. I could see a door in the back and a window, maybe an office. Three ancient CRT screens were on the corner of each desk with the blinking cursors, two yellow boxes and one green. I had one of those all-of-a-sudden wishes that I hadn’t sent the resume.

Reception, Circulation, Advertising, and Classifieds was the first desk I came to. A very nice Hispanic woman asked my business and I told her I was here to interview for the sports writer’s job. She told me to take a seat on the small vinyl and chrome, 60s, settee she pointed to on the wall by the door, which I did. She turned around and yelled, “Bruce, your one-thirty is here.” She turned back and smiled at me, then went on with what she was doing.

I was starting to get that nervous feeling you get just before you go “on.” I was flashing back to Prof. Lawrence’s class. “The “lead” is the most important element of the story.” “ You have to grab the reader in the first sentence.” “Write for an eighth-grade level reader.” I was trying to think of all the reasons I was not working in newspaper, and had not done so after college. And I waited. No Bruce.

I wasn’t sure if she had gotten confirmation from Bruce that he had heard her on the manual intercom, that he knew I was here and ready to get this over with, so I started to get up when Bruce appeared from behind a file cabinet. He reached out his plump hand, which I shook, as he identified himself as the editor and publisher of the Douglas Dispatch.

After a few cursory questions about my background and why I wanted to work in Douglas, he handed me a sheet of paper with some relevant facts about a wrestling match, real or imagined, that happened last night at the local high school. I was to write a short four or five paragraph piece for tomorrow’s edition. He sat me at a small desk with an IBM Selectric, I rolled in a piece of paper and got underway. Within a few minutes I felt I had captured the essence of the event, with a captivating lead and an accurate regurgitation of the facts. Bruce seemed impressed that I had completed the task so quickly. Not so sure he was impressed with the copy, but he said, “Okay, that’ll do fine.”

He dismissed me, thanked me for taking the drive down from Tucson and said he would be in touch with me next week. I figured I had about as much chance of getting this job, as I did winning the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism if I did happen to get it. I told my wife as much when I got back to the car and we headed back the way we had come. Since we still had plenty of time in the day, we stopped again in Bisbee and walked the downtown streets. They were lined with art galleries, gift shops, used book stores, and antique stores.

Then I saw it. In this window was an old man in coveralls with a black Stetson on his head, rocking in a chair behind a stack of books arranged in sort of a round tower. Painted on the glass was a sign, “One Book Bookstore.” I just stood there on the sidewalk transfixed, watching the man sign books and talk to people as they came in, thinking what a great fricking idea. At some point business dropped off and the man, alone, looked up, saw me staring at him, and gave me the “come here” motion. The one book was called “me ‘n Henry” (lowercase on the “me”) and was proudly displayed all along the window. The author, sitting in the rocking chair, was Walter Swan and this was the only book available in this bookstore.

Now, it turns out Walter was a bit of a local, if not national, celebrity. There were framed clippings hanging in the store of him in “People” magazine, the “Tucson Citizen” and “Albuquerque Journal” and the “Arizona Republic.” He had even been on “Late Night with
David Letterman.” He was also featured in Robert G. Allen’s “Multiple Streams of Income” Second Edition. (The “No Money Down” Real Estate guru.)

So what made Walter Swan so unique? He was a plasterer by trade, an eighth-grade drop-out that couldn’t spell, had poor grammer, and wrote an autobiography that no New York publishing houses would touch. To be fair, his wife Deloris had edited his stories. She had been the one to urge him to write them all down for his grandchildren, in the first place.

He taught himself how to type with two fingers and he would punch out the short stories, two, sometimes three pages, give them to Deloris who would fix them up and save them in a file. When the file got full, they put the stories in cronological order and sent it off to the publishers. Walter said he would get excited every time a letter would come, but they were always letters saying they weren’t interested.

Rejection after rejection came from New York, so they borrowed some money, and paid $650 to a vanity publisher in Tucson to print 100 books. Mr. Swan, loaded them in the trunk of his car and went to all the giftshops and bookstores in Southern Arizona, but they wanted too much of the profits so he figured there had to be a better way.

In 1989 he moved back to his boyhood home of Bisbee and that’s when the simple sales plan came to him. He rented out space in the old J.C. Penney building for $100 a month and opened the “One Book Bookstore”, right next to a used bookstore on Main Street. He wasn’t worried about the competition because, as he said, they had lots of books to sell, he only had one. He was worried that he wouldn’t sell enough books to make the rent in that first month, but he did. By November 1990, when the “People” article appeared, he was in his fourth printing of the book and had sold 7,000 copies. Some say, that with his idea, he sold over 35,000 of the books at $19.95, and if he was in the store, he would autograph your copy for you and tell you more stories. The book includes 103 stories about Walter and Henry, his big brother of two years, “….growing up on the old family homestead in Cochise County when Arizona was an infant state.”

We went back to Bisbee many times over the years, and would always stop at the “One Book Bookstore” which grew into the “Other Book Bookstore” after he wrote “me ‘n Mamma” about Deloris and him raising eight children, and “An Old-Timers Cookbook.” There was also a book of children’s stories in there somewhere. Walter is no longer with us and the store has closed, but you can still find the book at online booksellers.

We didn’t lose a Mark Twain, but I will always remember how impressed I was that this man, sitting in his rocker, had came up with this simplest of sales ideas and made the book a success beyond anything he probably could have imagined. Between you and me, the book is really not very well written, but it’s heartwarming and I’m sure Walter Swan thought it was pretty darn good. And if you walked into 38 Main Street in Bisbee, Arizona, you couldn’t help yourself, you had to buy a copy.

I did hear back from Bruce at the Douglas Dispatch the following week. I was right, he wasn’t all that impressed with my writing job. He said they were going to hire someone from within “who already possessed the skills necessary to do the job.” I thought that was a little harsh, because, just like Walter, I thought the stuff I wrote was pretty good, and somebody ought to buy it. Got to find me a small tourist town where I can open up a “One Book Bookstore.”

I Can Tell A Tree Branch From A Deer For Chrissakes!

2010-10-05T18:49:00.000-07:00

The fog was thick and heavy in the valley. We could see maybe 50 yards at best and it showed no signs of lifting. It seemed to be getting thicker as we walked. It was 5:30 in the morning, late October, and cold, to me, really cold. I was standing there worrying about how long I would still be able to feel my feet, wishing with all my fifteen-year-old heart that I was still in bed.
Still I was forcing myself to listen for any movement, any sound. A twig snapping or leaves crunching under an animal’s hooves that would spring me into action. I was ready. All I could hear was the soft rustling of the Aspen trees.

“Not going to see much in this soup,” my Dad said, breaking the icy silence.

He had been planning this father-son excursion for many weeks and the weather was not making him happy. He usually walked in front of me, so I rarely heard what he said. He would occasionally turn back towards me when he said something so I wouldn’t have to answer the standard, “yeah, I guess.” This particular time he turned around and looked at me, maybe just to make sure he could still see me in the fog.

Valley fog, as this is called, is a result of heavier cold air settling into a valley, with warmer air passing over the mountains above. Fog like this can stay for several days depending on the conditions, so it wasn’t like the sun was going to automatically “burn” this off, but my Dad said it anyway.

“It’ll burn off when the sun gets up and we warm up some,” he said.

It wasn’t my first hunt, although this was the first time out that I could remember where it was just me and my Dad. I was gingerly carrying a thirty aught six pointed correctly toward the ground in front of me, the way my father had taught me. I always thought you walked with the gun slung over your shoulder, I mean it does have a “shoulder” strap, but my Dad insisted the safest way to carry a loaded rifle was by holding it under the stock and point it toward the ground. Personally, I thought it might improve the chances of shooting one of our feet off, but I didn’t argue. My Dad obviously knew. He had made many “safe” trips into the mountains foraging for food.

I had no desire to be a hunter, never have. I still don’t like the taste of wild game. I understand the logic of hunting seasons. Without this human intrusion into the wild to cut down the populations of deer and elk, the limited food supplies in the winter would not be enough to sustain the growing herds. Killing actually guarantees survival of the majority. It’s simple management of a natural resource—and commonly referred to as “sport” in northern Wyoming.

Every Fall, thousands of gun-totting, Jim Beam-swilling, Coors (pronounced Curs)-drinking marksmen, true macho men, head for the foothills in search of deer, elk, bear, rabbit, pheasant, duck and other assorted “natural” food sources. They get drunk, lost, cold and sometimes shot at. They walk for miles chasing and circling an animal that’s often been through this before and somehow knows the game. I figured the deer could spot us pretty good too since we were all wearing bright orange vests or hats, the purpose of which was to reduce the possibility of other hunters shooting us, since, of course, deer don’t wear vests or hats. I didn’t learn until later that deer only see in black and white, so bright colors don’t matter much if you’re trying to hide from a deer, only if you’re trying to be seen by other hunters.

If you manage to “bag” one of these animals, it must, of course, be gutted. This is a totally disgusting exercise for most of us I would think. I know it was for me. I could barely stand to gut fish. This “gutting” is done out in the wild which, two-fold, serves as a food source for scavengers, and lowers the weight of the carcass making it easier to haul out of the forest. If you haven’t had the pleasure of gutting an animal, particularly a deer, consider yourself lucky unless your future dream is to be, maybe a surgeon, and warm, steamy, sticky blood and entrails doesn’t faze you much. I found that it generally made me throw up in my mouth.

Then you have to haul, mostly drag, the corpse through miles of freezing forest. Up hills that didn’t look so steep going down, and thrown in the back of a pick up truck, or slung over the fender of the car in transit to its final destination: the garage.

Here the hunter’s prize is hung to “age” the meat, but it’s real purpose, I think, is to show it off to the neighbors who haven’t or didn’t get a deer this season, and to drive the neighborhood dogs into a frenzy. I hear it a lot, but “aging” doesn’t sound like a good thing for something generally refrigerated to keep it fresh. None of these deer carcasses, hanging around in the neighborhood garages, were in refrigerators, but I guess it was cold out most of the time.

In order to get home to the garage, you have to first pass a Forest Service check-point where a government employee, getting double-time for working on a Sunday, confirms that you have indeed killed and gutted an animal that you have a permit to kill and gut. Not a mule, horse or cow, for example. Trust me, it happens.

There was a song out there back in the 60s, written by singer song writer, Doug McGuire, titled “Bernard the Mule”. I doubt that it was ever on the top 100, but it always made me remember those hunting trips with my father.

“Way up in Wyoming where the weather was cool, Up on the mountain stood, Bernard, the mule.”

Then in the chorus, “Oh Bernard, I’da never turned you loose. If I’da thought, Bernard, they’d mistake you for a moose.”

The song nears its end where the government employee at the check point sees that the California hunter, who has probably never seen a moose before, has done shot hisself a mule. He looks at the shoes, the brand, and the government number stamped on him, and “he smiles and says ‘Got some mighty fine meat!”

I mean the mule is already dead and slung over the fender of the truck so there isn’t much the game warden can do. Anyway, it’s rumored to be based on a true story, and Davie Coulter whose name appears in the song as saving “Bernie’s rear from a dog-food can”, actually is/was alive and well in Wyoming somewhere. (I’m doing this all from memory. I know the song by heart. I used to sing it every time I had a few drinks and wanted to humor myself more than those in attendance. A few years ago I found a copy of the original 45 rpm record, online, and had to have it. Yes, I have something to play it on.)

Anyway, like I said, I had no desire to be a hunter, but I was 15 and this was Wyoming. It was necessary for the attainment of manhood. My eyes scanned the lower tree line. My feet were turning into solid blocks of ice and I was silently cursing myself for not putting on that fourth pair of socks. Then I heard it, a couple of heavy thumps and the snap of a twig. Off to the left, just back of where we had come.

I touched my Dad on the shoulder and he swung around. “You hear that?” I whispered. You always have to whisper. Deer can’t hear humans whispering.

“Hear what?” He said. His response wasn’t a whisper.

“Those twigs snapping and that clumping sound, it was definitely a deer. Something back by those trees over there. Yeah, look I see it?” I was still whispering.

He followed my extended arm. “I don’t see anything. Where?”

“Right there. See?” I pointed again, starting to get a little agitated.

The shape of a magnificent buck, the one from “Bambi”, was standing just out of the tree line. He was standing proudly, just visible through the fog, his nostrils flaring, sniffing for the telltale signs of humans with guns.

“Do you see ‘em, Dad? He’s gotta be an eight-pointer! Six-pointer at least.” I whispered again, but a little louder due to my excitement at spotting the animal in the distance. It’s hard to whisper when you’re excited. A six-point buck, for those uninitiated, is a good-sized male deer with three brow tines on each antler. One who has made it through a few hunting seasons in order to grow antlers that size. An eight-pointer, even bigger, and older.

“I don’t see a damn thing. Are you sure?” He still wasn’t whispering.
Well, I didn’t think I was hallucinating this buck, but I might have been. In preparation for my shot, I lifted the rifle to my shoulder and looked through the scope. The buck was there, lined up in the cross hairs.

“Whoa,” my Dad finally whispered, stating toward me. “Are you sure it’s a deer?”

I shook my head in affirmation and sighted the buck again. He had turned his head to the right and I brought the sight lines just below the base of his skull. I was certain he was looking right at me. You know how when you look at someone through binoculars and you swear they looked right at you but they couldn’t possibly have seen you with the naked eye? The buck didn’t budge. He probably figured out what he had walked into by that time and didn’t figure there was much he could do about it but hope I missed.

My Dad was watching me carefully. “Go ahead,” he said, “if you’re sure. Don’t jerk it.”

I slowly squeezed the trigger. You have to squeeze the trigger or the rife will jerk up and you’ll miss. The still, morning air, was shredded by the sound of an explosion. The rifle slammed into my shoulder so hard I had to choke back a cry. You don’t cry on hunting trips.

When the last echo of the rifle shot subsided I looked to where the buck had been standing. I didn’t see anything. No deer body writhing in pain on the ground by the tree. No deer blood. No deer brains splattered on the tree trunk, nothing. I was secretly glad. Almost within the same instant of squeezing the trigger, I wondered how I would have felt had I killed the animal.

“Well, let’s go have a look,” my Dad said.

He found the bullet lodged in the tree about three feet higher than the head of an average buck. At least I had hit the tree. Not bad, I figured from that distance.

“Missed him, I think,” he said.

“Scope must be off,” I said. It was the only possible explanation you see.

He checked the area around the tree explaining that he was looking for any signs that I might have wounded the animal. You didn’t let any animal go off and die if you were the one responsible for shooting it. You had to track it until you finished the deed. That was humane.

My Dad reached up and broke off a “six-point” branch off the tree. It looked remarkably like a deer antler.

“Think this is your buck?” he asked.

“No.” I said it with some manner of indignation. “I can tell a tree branch from a deer for chrissakes.”

“Watch it son,” he warned. “Okay, let’s work this area a little, but if you missed him we probably won’t see anything around here for hours now with all the racket”.

He was a little upset with me for ruining his chances of getting a deer on that particular morning. If you shoot, you don’t miss, I guess. And if you don’t miss there’s no need to carry all that extra ammunition either. After all, he never saw the buck. If he had, I would never have been allowed to take that shot. He would have been all over it for a trophy with them kind of braggin’ rights.

“My feet are freezing,” I whined, wishing he would call the whole thing off and we could just go home.

He reached into an inside vest pocket and pulled out a fifth of whiskey and screwed off the cap.

“Try this,” he said, and handed me the bottle.

“I grabbed it and gulped down a big swig of the golden brown liquid, just like I’d seen him do many times. My stomach instantly burst into flames.

“Take another,” he said with a small smile curling his lips.

“No thanks, I’m good,” I choked out. “I feel better now.” I added that last part so that he wouldn’t think that I wasn’t tough enough to take it. My feet were still cold and my stomach was smoldering. I felt a little like throwing up.

My Dad took an ample swallow from the bottle then slid it back into his pocket. He took a cigarette from the pack in his vest, and tapped the filter end on the side of the box a couple times, and put it in the corner of his mouth. He cupped a lighted match in his hands and the cigarette glowed red. He crushed the match out on the ground by twisting the toe of his boot so the match was safely out and buried under the soil. He dragged heavily on the cigarette and exhaled smoke mixed with his breath into the cold air. Standing there in his gray felt cowboy hat with the cigarette hanging from his lips, I couldn’t help but think that he looked like he belonged there, a true Wyoming hunter, even though he had been born and raised in Long Island, New York.

I, on the other hand, knew with some degree of certainty that I belonged back home in bed.

“Better get on after that buck,” he said.

We never saw another thing all day. The fog lifted, after the sun got higher in the sky, and I still have my feet.

I let my Dad read this story once, years later, and he returned it to me saying “I’m sorry you had such a bad childhood.”

I asked him how the hell he got that from this story.

“I’m just sorry,” he said.

I think he was just sorry I hadn’t gotten that buck.

Massacre at the Zooseum

2010-08-03T14:53:00.000-07:00

A hideous scream pierced the morning air. It sounded like Connie, and it came from the direction of the shed on the back of the Davidson’s property. Dan and I took off at the same instant, racing each other to the sound of the scream. Connie was his sister. I liked her, but she was a girl for one, and we were only nine and a half at the time. We were also first best friends, and it wasn’t cool to have a crush on your first best friend’s little sister.

When we got there, the door to the shed was open, and Connie was standing outside with her hand over mouth pointing. Not saying a word, just pointing at the door. A look of total shock and disgust registered on her pasty-white face. I looked inside first, taking a cautious step forward.

In the dim slivers of light passing through the cracks in the wall boards, what I saw was horrific. Oh my god, the butchery. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Heads, arms, and legs, strewn about everywhere. Blood covered the wood plank floor.

The frogs had clearly suffered a horrible death. The snakes didn’t fare much better. Dead frog bodies were everywhere littered with sections of garter snake. The bull snake was no where to be found.

“Danny, you have got to see this,” I screamed back through the open door. “I don’t see the bull snake.”

When we were kids, there never seemed to be a lack of interesting things to do. We didn’t have video games, computers, or cell phones and we only had three channels of television, THREE, (Yeah, I know, you’ve heard that all before), but somehow we were always busy doing something, inventing things, having adventures. I guess if you think about it, our adventures as kids ended up being the video games of the future. We’re to blame for it. Kids don’t have imaginations anymore because they don’t need one, we supplied it for them.

In the summertime, we were up and out at sunrise and tried to stay out even after the sun had been down for hours. Sometimes our moms would forget what time it was because they were involved in watching the Barbara Stanwyck Show or Bonanza. The rule was you could stay out until you were called in without penalty.

Baseball at the school yard was an every day affair, early in the summer. We had rafting adventures down the Big Horn River. We rode our bikes everywhere. Building soap-box racers and risking our lives rolling them down Thurmond Hill …in traffic, kept our attentions for a time. We flew kites and played hide-and-go-seek in the dark. We nailed our sister’s skates to the bottom of planks and invented skate boarding. (All right, we didn’t invent skateboarding, but we we’re on the cusp.)

We made submarines, and space ships out of refrigerator and washing machine boxes. We’d steal them from behind the Sears Outlet and Montgomery Ward, and the appliance dealer on Main Street. They were probably glad to get rid of them. Our parents, on the other hand, wanted to kill us because the garage would fill up with boxes connected together on the floor. In time they would be abandoned as we moved on to something else.

We turned the back stoop into a PT boat and played “PT109”. How do you turn a back stoop into a PT boat? With a refrigerator box and some imagination. “Combat” was a big show on television in 1962 and our prized possessions were tommy guns that you pulled back a lever on the side and locked it. When you pulled the trigger it would sputter like a tommy gun. If you owned a tommy gun you could play Vic Morrow’s character, Sgt. Chip Saunders. Or you could be the Lieutenant. They sold entire Combat “kits” at Woolworth’s, which included the tommy gun, a German luger, a grenade, a holster, and some other things. We couldn’t afford those although we wanted one. If you had a BB Gun you were just one of the squad or a sniper. We would kick open garage doors in the alley looking for Krauts and hang out in the trees as snipers. When you shot someone that didn’t know you were up in the tree, they had to be told they were dead. Then they were either out of the game or had to become someone else. Being a sniper wasn’t all that exciting, mainly because no one would agree that they were hit.

In the winter, we flooded our backyards and had our own ice-skating rinks, we built snowball forts and raged snowball fights for hours until our fingers felt like they were going to break off in our gloves and mittens. We would climb the snow mountain in the street left by the snow plows and the front loader at the intersection of Brooks and Works Streets. They hauled all the snow off of Main Street and piled it in the intersections a block behind. It was a great climb and you could see for blocks up there. But we weren’t allowed to be up there in the street with cars going by, and we always seemed to get caught. That’s the route my Dad would walk home from work, and he would inevitably get off early on the days we were climbing “Mt. Everest.” We never wandered far from home, but there was enough to do in a few block radius, that we didn’t have to. I hardly see anyone playing outside in the Winter anymore.

Earlier that summer of the massacre, we had used the shed at the back of the Davidson’s property to form a repretory company. First we had had to clean it out. I’m not sure we ever got permission to use it, but Danny’s mother wasn’t one to stop creative urges in their tracks. We turned a huge, old dresser on it’s side to make a stage, and hung curtains made from old blankets and rope. The theater was complete with a ticket booth and folding chairs for the audience. All things we had found in the shed in the first place. It had a door and two windows in the front for light.

We put together a musical, the five of us, using the lyrics from “Que Sera, Sera” a song from the 1960 film “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies,” starring Doris Day and David Niven. I’m not making this up. We probably had just seen the movie recently at the drive-in, and my mother had all the Patty Page and Doris Day records, so I knew the song by heart. Besides, all us little boys were in love with Doris Day.

We took the lyrics, “When I was just a little girl (changed that to boy since I was the lead) / I asked my mother, what will I be / Will I be pretty (changed that to handsome), will I be rich / Here's what she said to me. / Que Sera, Sera,/ Whatever will be, will be....which is the literal translation I guess. For the uninitiated it sort of sounds like “kay sa raw, sa raw.” We had a bi-lingual production. Trendsetters.

If you’ve ever heard the song, it has three distinct verses that match three distinct points in someone’s life; when they’re little, when they’re in love, and when they have children of their own. Perfect three scene musical, chorus in the middle for scene change. So we wrote the “book,” using the song, and voila, we had our own musical, “Que Sera.” I still have no idea how we came up with this, but I swear we did. We had a rope swing hung from the ceiling, we had “trees”, we had costumes for each scene,”casting” found us a couple of little brothers and sisters in the neighborhood for the final scene.

Remembering it now, it seemed like we were in pre-production for weeks, but in reality the show opened and closed the same day. We generally didn’t stay focused on any one thing too long. We started preparations, set construction, and rehearsal at around nine in the morning. We rounded up all the mothers in the neighborhood for the one o:clock show, and fifteen minutes later took the final bow to standing ovations, and closed the theater company. The next day we had a new idea.

My first best friend and I had been down in the Gully. Just in case you don’t understand what a “first best friend” is, I’ll throw in here that I had a “second best friend” and a “third best friend” for that matter, and so on. It was really hard to define, when you’re nine and a half, who your “best” friend really is. But it was somewhat of an honor to be a “first best friend”, although that designation could change quickly depending on which best friend you were with. If you slipped up and called your first best friend, your third best friend by mistake, you can see how that might be a problem.

I wasn’t allowed in the Gully, but Danny seemed like he could pretty much go where he wanted, or so it seemed to me then, so I always had to go. I couldn’t stand there and say something like, “I’m not allowed in the Gully.” That wouldn’t fly. They’d say something like, “I’m not allowed to go there either, but I’m going. Come on.” What can you say to that anyway?

Danny would ask to see your hands, and if they were smooth and soft he would call you a sissy. He’d show you his rough and calused palms and tell you that’s how a boy’s hands ought to look. He said it showed you worked with your hands. I used to rub my hands in dirt to get that rough and calused look. Now I kind of wish they were less rough, cracked and calused. Anyway, when you’re not allowed to go somewhere, and you’re a kid, you’re pretty much going to go there anyway. It’s an automatic. You don’t want to appear to be a sissy. When you’re a kid, you can’t see the dangers that lurk behind cool places like the Gully.

The Gully ran behind our houses and separated us from the cemetary on the far side. If you walked off our back yards down the hill, you would come to some thick vegetation created by the stream that ran through the middle of it. Once you got inside those trees and brush it was a like the Hundred Acre Wood. A totally different, wild, world, with a brook that ran through the center, gurgling and splashing over rocks. There were little ponds full of frogs, and garter snakes slithering along the paths. There were other more dangerous things too, like the stash of nudie magazines we had found and the packs of cigarettes, and once we even found cans of beer cooling in the stream. And sometimes, you ran into the owners of those things, and you had to hide or even run for your life. In short, The Gully, was a perfect place for adventure.

It was the morning following the Opening Day and Final Run of “Que Sera” that we decided to turn the shed into a combination zoo and rock museum. We could charge admission and make some extra money. I had a rock collection that I had gotten for my birthday, that consisted of a one inch thick black box that was segmented with little cardboard walls making an equal number of two-inch squares. Glued inside each of the squares was a small sample of a type of rock and a label. There was a small chunk of bituminous coal, for example, some red shale, a piece of rose quartz, an agate, a piece of iron ore, and others. Twenty in all.

The best sample was the fool’s gold, or the mineral, pyrite. That’s what the label said. It looked just like a gold nugget and we could easily see how a miner could mistake it for the real thing. We had each tried to bite on it like we’d seen in the movies. We didn’t have any idea what that was supposed to accomplish, but it had required me to break it loose from the box of course. Let’s just say the only thing left of the fool’s gold in the rock sample box was the label and some dried glue, having long ago disappeared into the alley gravel on my way home from school. We walked that entire distance, back and forth to the school, three times and never saw the fool’s gold again. We wouldn’t have been very good gold miners I guess. Or maybe not very good fool’s gold miners, which was okay.

So we had originally headed for the Gully to find more rock samples for the rock museum. Maybe a big chunk of granite, or……then Dan spotted the frogs.

“I got an idea,” he says, “we could make us a zoo and a museum. We’ll call it a Zooseum.” I could have been the one who came up with the idea to name it a Zooseum, but I’ll give Danny the credit. He caught most of the frogs.

So that is how the Zooseum came about. We headed back up the hill to his house to get us a couple of buckets and headed back down to the Gulley to catch us some frogs. Within an hour we had over twenty of the critters of different sizes in the bucket with a piece of wire screen and a rock over the top of one. And Danny was agile enough to catch two garter snakes, one of which wiggled so much to get away that a portion of his tail broke off. We re-captured him a little while later and he was immediately named “Tail-less Ted”. Then we spotted the bull snake, which had just moments before scared the shit out of me.

Most bullsnakes have a bad attitude. When encountering something as large as a human, they will go into attack mode, raising up and back tracking in a menancing way. In fact they look a lot like a Diamondback rattlesnake. And while all of that is happening and you’re waiting to be bit and die, you’re not listening for the telltale rattles. Danny came in from the back and snatched the snake up off the ground holding it up and and away from him. Now a bull snake can, and often does, exceed 8 feet in length, but this one was a youngster, maybe three feet long.

“Man, how cool. Now we have a bull snake for the zooseum,” he said.

“Yeah, I said, “what are ya going to put him in?” One bucket had the frogs and the other bucket had the two garter snakes.

“You carry the buckets and I’ll carry the snake. Or you can carry the snake,” and he thrust it out towards me. I withdrew, trying not to act to fearful (that would be sissy) and picked up the buckets.

Bull snakes eat by constriction. In layman’s terms, they choke the shit out of their prey, then swallow it whole. They have this lump the size of whatever they’ve eaten, a short distance down from their heads, that stays there until the snake digests the food. Pretty cool process for a zooseum. You could throw a frog into the cage with the bull snake and watch him murder and eat the thing……for a small admission fee, of course. Bull frogs like small mammals too, like mice, and rats. One of the reasons it’s probably a good idea to keep one around your yard.

We had the materials from the shed cleaning earlier, to build a cage with wire mesh and some scrap lumber. We even found some hinges to hinge the lid, and soon we had our live snake display. “Sammy” was in a bucket with a screened lid waiting for his new home to be finished. I’m not going to take credit for naming him Sammy, but I’m sure I did. Tail-less Ted and Gertie (Get it? Gertie the garter snake.) were in the other bucket waiting for a cage completion, and the dinner (the frogs), were in yet another bucket. We hadn’t figured out what type of display we were going to build for them yet. It was going to take more than some wire mesh and two by fours.

Now with the igneous rock display (those are fire-formed rocks like obsidian, rhyolite, basalt), some minerals, a few arrowheads, and the “zoo” animals, or more accurately reptiles, we were ready to open for business. Same ticket window as the one-run musical.

But by the time we had finished the snake cages, we heard the shrill of the whistle. The whistle was the neighbor kids’ father. They were too young to play with Danny and I, (although they did have that supporting role in the musical production) and we didn’t want to get too friendly with them anyway because they were just going to be there for the summer. The neighbor and his family were from Champaign, Illinois. We found that weird because he was only renting the house from the real neighbor, some grumpy old guy, just for the summer. We weren’t versed on time-shares, or house-swapping, or whatever they were doing, we just knew the summer family wasn’t related in any way to the grumpy old guy and we had no idea where he had gone for the summer. We didn’t think Sheridan was all that wonderful of a place to spend a summer anyway, if one had a choice.

Anyway, blowing the whistle was how he signaled for them that it is was time to come home. He would blow three times on the silver whistle and they would come running within seconds. For the rest of us it became kind of a warning signal that our moms would be calling us soon. So when we heard the whistle we started packing up and securing the zooseum for the night. And by securing it, I mean we pulled the door shut, put the clasp on it and put a padlock on the door. Danny had the key around his neck on a shoestring. Minutes later my mom called us in for supper.

What suddenly became the biggest mystery, while we were standing there trying to calm Connie down and figuring out how we were going to dispose of the bodies, was how did the door get open. We had both seen to the locking of the door and there was no way to get in otherwise, even for a cat or whatever else might want to tear apart a frog for fun.

“Who unlocked the door?” I asked nobody in particular. “Didn’t we put the padlock on it last night?”

“What’s going on out here? What’s all the screaming about?” It was the older sister. Two years older than me and almost a teenager at 11 and a half.

“Mom sent me to find out what’s going on.” She added that as though it gave her some authority to be there, even though, most of the time, we didn’t want her to be there and Mom never sent her.

“Somebody killed the frogs,” Danny said.

Her surprise response, “What frogs?” So we showed her, and she screamed. It was a sissy scream. Which was fun. And then she ran off to report to Mom what we were doing, which would surely be embellished.

Danny and I examined the clasp where the padlock was still hanging and locked. The other part of the clasp was on the open door.

Later, much later, after thorough discussion, we surmised that, although we had closed the clasp, we inadvertantly had slid the padlock behind the hinged part of the clasp and locked it without really securing the door. So any bump against the door, or even the wind, could have forced it open easily. Maybe. It wasn’t concrete evidence, it was clearly circumstantial. (By “much later,” I mean, High School.)

The murder, though, was never solved. We suspected Connie’s cat, Muffin, but there was no blood evidence. Cat’s clean themselves pretty good so the lack of evidence wasn’t all that surprising. It would have taken her a while to commit the slaughter so we figured the time of death to be somewhere around 1:00 a.m and 8:00 a.m. when the carnage was discovered. Sammy, the bull snake, was never found. He probably took the opportunity to escape his captivity and headed back to the Gully where he lived to be eight feet long.

We shoveled and swept the bodies into the trash and closed the Zooseum for good. The summer went on and we moved on to other adventures.

Erma Bombeck once said, “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’” Back on those summer days, I think we should have saved up some of that talent to use later on.

Do Squirrels Fart?

2010-05-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

I saw a headline a while back that just amazed me. In fact I laughed so damn hard the first time I read it, I almost couldn’t stop. Actually it was a guffaw, I guess, as laughing goes.

“President Obama Defends American Wars While Accepting Nobel Peace Prize.”

I almost guffawed as much when I heard that he was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. They reworked it a little, later in the day, to this:

“Nobel-Winning Obama Defends War In Call for Peace.”

In the first place, I didn’t know I could win the Heisman Trophy if I was just a spectator in the stands, but apparently I can win the Nobel Prize in Literature without writing much more than this blog, or, more literally, just thinking about writing it. Which would equally correspond to the amount of effort President Obama has made in the direction of world peace. But I digress. How in the hell can you defend war while accepting a PEACE PRIZE?

The world amazes me sometimes. The recent hullabaloo over the Arizonans protecting their borders by checking for proof of residency amazes me, for example. Oh my gawd the noise that created. Even before the bill was signed, President Obama was speaking out against it. But it was clear from the beginning that very few of the loudest pundits even understood what was in the bill. Arizona Senate Bill 1070 became law at 1:30 pm on the 24th of April, 2010 when Governor Jan Brewer signed it and suits were filed against the bill and it’s constitutionality at 1:31 pm. I don’t think any of the protestors in front of the Arizona Capital Building that afternoon had even read it at all. In the crowd’s defense, I don’t think it was widely available in Spanish yet. So word of mouth and the New York Times had distorted it to the point of ugly.

“The law, which proponents and critics alike said was the broadest and strictest immigration measure in generations, would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police the broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Opponents have called it an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status.”

Thank you, New York Times, April 23rd, 2010. (Who writes this stuff? Have you ever noticed that almost every paragraph in the Times ends with an editorial opinion in some form?)

Opponents were even comparing this to the internment of the Japanese during World War II. Like that had any basis for comparison to this, whatsoever. Most of the Japanese were not only legal immigrants, but most were born here.

What the bill did, simply, so you’all can understand it, was make it a state crime to be in the country illegally, just the same as it is a federal crime. Nothing new, same policy we’ve had forever, just allowing local law enforcement to be able to enforce it. See, police officers in a state with an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants (according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, my favorite oxymoron next to “military intelligence”) couldn’t enforce federal immigration laws. They were actually under policy to let them go even if they were sure they were illegally in the country. Seriously.

Now, under the new law, they have to ask for your DRIVER’S LICENSE if you’re stopped for any violation. Excuse me, but doesn’t this sound familiar? If you don’t have a driver’s license, you’re probably not here legally especially if you appear to be of Mexican (okay, we’ll use Hispanic if that’s more PC) descent, can barely speak English and do so with a heavy accent, and are in the state of Arizona. The only other reason you wouldn’t have your license is because it’s been revoked for some reason, or maybe you left your wallet at home. So now the Police and Sheriff’s Deputies are going to ask you for an alien registration document, or a passport. Again, it is illegal to be in this country without the proper documentation. Why the hell is that a problem? By the way, you’ll also be cited for driving without a license, you better have proof of insurance, don’t smoke in the Police Station, and why the hell do people in this country think driving is a right and not a privilege? .

It was already against the law in Arizona to knowingly hire illegal aliens (okay we’ll use “immigrants”) anyway. Now, you’re going to love this….

Ms. Jennifer Allen, Director of Border Action Network, (Wow, those initials are BAN, I wonder if they know that?) said on an NPR radio broadcast on May 13th, 2010:

“This bill is a fundamental – it’s an enormous affront on the basic rights and dignity that every person has in the state of Arizona, in the United States, and around the world.”

Holy shit. That’s big.

She goes on to say that the law is mean-spirited, unnecessary, and unconstitutional. Aw, I’m sorry it’s mean-spirited, but unconstitutional, are you mad? And, just to clarify, it was clearly and obviously necessary.

Of course the idea of passing this legislation is to save the state money from illegal immigrants tapping into the system for benefits like healthcare, and social security that they aren’t entitled, or, more accurately, have not paid any payroll taxes to support.

But Ms. Allen of “BAN” said, “It will, in fact, result in tens of millions of dollars of additional costs every single year for local law enforcement for training, for the court system, for the jails. It will require bringing on new public defenders, new prosecutors.”

Or, Ms. Allen, it might actually lower the number of ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS from Mexico that are in the state of Arizona, ILLEGALLY because it’s against the law. They won’t be saying, “No hara’ nada. Nada va a suceder. Vamos.” Loosely translated, “They won’t do nuthin’ to us. Let’s go.”

So that brings me to today’s question: “Do Squirrels Fart?”

This question was brought about by a widely distributed video of a squirrel saving the world. If you haven’t seen it, go to YouTube and search “squirrel fart.” It’s a gum commercial from Europe, I think, and involves a farting squirrel putting out a very large fire because of the minty-cool flavor of the gum. Immediately, controversy arose over whether squirrels actually farted and, like, for gawd sakes if this was actually plausible. Really? How about the idea that gum would cause a squirrel to fart?

The consensus was that if it eats and poops, it farts, but it didn’t seem to be that easy. People on the answer sites were questioning the validity of the answers.

All mammals have the ability to produce flatus because of the micro-flora bacteria and yeasts living in the gastrointestinal tract. However, the main constituent of air, Nitrogen, makes up the primary gas that is released during flatulence. Carbon dioxide is also present, as is lesser component gases methane and hydrogen. These latter are extremely flammable which is why we can “ignite” our flatulence with a BIC. This can be very dangerous as seen in other videos you can find on YouTube.

Now, if you have even a limited amount of exposure to Chemistry, you should know that these gases are odorless. So why the hell does a fart smell so bad? Well a 1984 study revealed that sulfur-containing compounds like hydrogen sulfide (that rotten egg smell familiar in Yellowstone Park) is responsible for the smell. And humans fall somewhere in the top end of the smell meter, starting with animals like cows that don’t eat meat and working down to meat-eating species like cats and dogs. The smell meter is based primarily on what we eat. So vegetarians, although they fart, would likely think their sh.. didn’t stink. Do you know any vegetarians you could test this theory on?

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is working on a program to collect cow farts (methane) and convert it into a bio-fuel similar to natural gas. Just think…..transit buses running on cow farts. I’ll bet it will end up costing more than natural gas, but it has the added flare of reducing the methane emissions in the atmosphere. In other words, it’s a GREEN concept.

Well, again I digress. The bottom line, squirrels fart. It doesn’t smell up the forest, and the likelihood of minty-cool farts putting out a forest fire, well come on, did you really believe it was possible?

Actually, I guess, no more possible than Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize while defending war, or Arizona passing a stricter immigration law without public dissent.

One Night at the Circle K....

2009-06-03T17:39:00.000-07:00

I worked the graveyard shift at a Circle K in Albuquerque, in a very high crime neighborhood, for longer than I should have, and shorter than I’d planned. I was divorced, attending the University of New Mexico, and the Circle K job was my only source of income. Minimum wage, 11 pm to 7 am, and some weekends. The Circle K was two blocks down the street from the 7- Eleven and right in front of the largest low-income housing project in the city. They had two employees working the graveyard shift at the 7-Eleven. Down at the Circle K it was just me. It got lonely down at the Circle K. After 2:00 am all you could hear were gunshots, an occasional scream, and sirens, lots of sirens.

The company logo is a red circle with the K in the middle attached to the bottom of the circle, like a branding iron. Circle K was started by past El Paso Mayor, Fred Hervey, in 1951, when he purchased three Kay’s Food Stores and changed the name. He wasn’t mayor at the time, but he did, later, serve two terms.

He moved the chain into New Mexico and Arizona shortly after he bought it, and now you’ll find a Circle K on almost every corner in every city in those states. By the time I was working as the night clerk at the Circle K on Kathryn Ave, there were over 2,100 stores, some even in Japan. By the early 90s, with acquisitions and new store openings, they had double that many. The stores were not franchised, and are still company owned. The company has gone through bankruptcy, been sliced up, reorganized and they are still the second largest chain behind the famous 7-Eleven Stores. You’ll often find them across the street from each other all over the Southwest. 7-Eleven had the “Big Gulp” and Circle K had the “Thirst Buster”, huge fountain sodas in cups so big you could hardly hold onto them, and they cost about 79 cents.

There is a well-known line in the film “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” where Keanu Reeves’ character, Ted “Theodore” Logan, says “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” Believe me, from my own experience, there was a lot of that going on.

One night, on my way to work at the Circle K, I saw a body in the street. It was lying face down in the street, by the curb, at the park. My expert skills of observation went into action, red plaid shirt on the body, denim trousers, no shoes, male, 40 or more years of age. As I drove slowly by the site I noticed three people dart into the bushes in the park. That changed my mind about stopping, although I had originally wanted to stop and offer aid. Still not something you would wisely do in this neighborhood, even if you saw blood, and I hadn’t.

As soon as I arrived at the Circle K to start my shift, I called the police. Told them about the body in rushed sentences, what I knew about the man lying in the street and that I had seen several people running into the bushes in the park. Maybe the perpetrators, but I couldn’t describe them other than they looked young, like teenaged. They agreed to check on it, and I went to work at the checkout, which involved more theft prevention than actually ringing up sales.

For the minor theft prevention I used an axle from a tricycle that I found on the side of the building one night. The axle, when slammed on the counter, made enough of a statement to stop the average candy-bar theft. Although, most of these juvenile delinquents worked in groups, so scaring one wasn’t going to necessarily deter the group. My favorite “group” was the tall kid in a trench coat that walked in with his three buddies. The leader stood in the front of the aisle, facing the register, with the coat open wide to block my view, and he would just stare at me like I didn’t know what was going on behind the open trench coat. In the rear, the lieutenants grabbed as many candy-bars as they could and walked around to the other side of the aisle, also out of view but within a few feet of the front door. Almost on command they would all hit the door, and run up the block, me in chase with the tricycle axle to the end of the parking lot. Screaming obscenities and racial slurs after them.

The graveyard shift got its name from a rather bizarre job in; you guessed it, the cemetery. Back in the day, a couple of centuries ago, they didn’t have very good ways of being sure that a person was really dead. So they would bury them with a string, tied at the surface to a bell. If the poor guy woke up a little claustrophobic, he could ring the bell topside, get someone’s attention, and wait to be dug up. That’s if he had all his faculties and didn’t start screaming in terror. This vigil for the sound of the little bells was run twenty-four seven, three sixty-five, and the attendants that worked the cemetery day and night were said to work the graveyard shift. But then again, that could all be total bunk as some insist, and instead the term just came into being to describe the work shift from about midnight to eight in the morning. It’s just a creepy time to be up on a regular day, and only creepy people tend to show up during those hours.

Speaking of creepy, I used to give the security guard, Max, from the low-income housing project behind me, all the FREE coffee he could drink. I wanted him around as much as possible. I didn’t really like him much. We didn’t have much in common to talk about. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. But he did have a real, loaded, gun. I didn’t think he was going to be much help if he actually had to use it, but it was a silent force in the holster; shiny, deadly. Had a certain deterrent effect and gave me comfort.

Max would walk his rounds and come down to the store every hour and 13 minutes. He could then spend 17 minutes hanging out with me, having a cup of coffee and thumbing through the girlie magazines. Those magazines were kept behind the counter and you had to ask for the new issue of “Playboy”, “Penthouse”, “Hustler”, or one of the more cleverly named titles. The magazines of that nature are all enclosed in a clear shrink-wrap to prevent minors from viewing them. If you look, you’ll find the back magazine in every rack, in every Circle K, has the shrink-wrap removed. Security guards, cops, free coffee and reading material to keep them around. The police cruiser showed up every two hours like clockwork.

Oh yeah, back to the police. I called them at about 1:00 am to see if they would give me any information about the body by the park. I was transferred to a case detective that wanted to know who I was, why I was calling, where I was calling from, and on and on and on. Ten minutes later when I got done answering questions, I finally got to ask one of my own, did they know any more about the body on the street by the park. The officer started to laugh, more like a snicker.

“Yeah, a couple of boys playing a pretty good prank I guess. You were lucky. Most of the drivers coming down the street were faced with the body in the middle of the street. Had to slam on the brakes and swerve and stuff,” he said between chuckles. “ You musta got there too soon after the last incident, and they dropped the dummy and run into the bushes.”

Man, I figured I would know a dummy from a real body, but then it was dark. I thanked the officer and he said something stupid like, “keep up the vigilance, and let us know if you see any more bodies out there.” And there were. Creepy people, things afoot, at the Circle K.

One Night at the Circle K, this Oriental guy comes in the store. Starts looking around and I watch him closely. Don’t trust him. Finally after searching for awhile he comes up to the counter.

“You got any lie balls?” he says.

“What?”

“Lie ball.” He says it really slow, then really fast. “Lie ball. Lie ball.”

“What the fuck is a lie ball?” I asked.

He points up at the ceiling of the store. “Lie ball. Lie ball.” He’s screaming it now.

“No we don’t have any lie balls,” I said. “We don’t carry ‘em.”

“Lie Balls,” he screams again. “L I E….B A L L S!”

All of a sudden the one over my head went off, “Oh, you mean light bulbs.”

“Yeah, lie balls.” He smiles and I walk him over to the rack where the light bulbs are. He looks at a couple packages, checks the price, and puts them back on the rack.

“You awful proud of lie balls,” he said and stormed out without buying any.

One Night at the Circle K, I had a hand in saving a life. At least I’d like to think so, even though I never got any credit or recognition for it, and, I guess, I never really sought any. Somewhere around 3:00 am, shortly after Max had left on another round, a very attractive, twenty-something female stumbled into the store and staggered around the front by the doors, looking out the windows like she was being chased. I was used to the occasional drunk coming in for a pack of cigarettes or a cup of coffee. Sometimes they were attractive females like this, usually not. The bars closed at two around here, and the ones that were still there at last call, would normally be in the state that this girl was, who was now letting the counter hold her up and she was staring at me. She was wearing one of those fake rabbit fur coats, the multi-colored ones, and black suede ankle boots with high heels. She had dozens of those little bracelets that jingle incessantly, on both arms, and she was digging in her purse.

“Can you help me please?” She was a little short in her tone, and I didn’t have an immediate desire to help her, other than out of the store. “I need you to call my psychiatrist.” She handed me a business card with the name, Stephen P. Schaffer, Psychoanalyst and a local phone number. I wasn’t sure if the “doctor” was legit from his card. Plain white, black letters, no professional associations or degrees noted. He could have gotten his training by taking correspondence courses. Anybody can call themselves a psychoanalyst, a counselor, a hypnotist, hypnotherapist, psychotherapist. It’s generally not regulated.

“Why don’t - you- call him?” I handed her the card back. She was clearly drunk, or on drugs, or way past sober anyway. I noticed her eyes were almost black and then realized it was her pupils. They were huge, dilated to the very edge of the iris so you couldn’t even tell what color her eyes were.

“Please”, she stammered and spittle dripped from her mouth, “Please. I need you to call him and tell him what I’ve done.”

“What the hell have you done?” I shot back, maybe a little too brisk. She immediately started to cry and shake. But she hadn’t passed out, so we were still good.

“Call him and tell him I took the whole bottle of these,” she handed me an empty prescription bottle without the top. The physician on the bottle was Stephen P. Schaffer, and I couldn’t even pronounce the name of the drug on the label. “And, I swallowed them all with a fifth of vodka,” she said. “Call him. Please. I need help,” she whined.

That might become an understatement, is what I was thinking. I called the number on the business card, watching the girl sway back and forth and waiting for her to crumple to the floor. I got an answering service. “This is an emergency,” I screamed at the operator. “I need to talk to the doctor now!”

“One moment please,” she said. There was an emphasis on the first syllable, she held the “PLEE” a little long and ended with the “UZ”. I waited what seemed like a few minutes, although it was probably only seconds, and a man’s voice broke through the music on hold. “Can I help you?”

I tried to explain as best I could that this woman had walked into the Circle K and wanted me to call him and tell him that she had overdosed a bottle of pills and chased it down with vodka. He immediately sounded alarmed. I still didn’t even know the girl’s name. A minor detail, but he seemed to know who I was talking about. Either he had only one patient, or he was expecting this.

“Call 911, NOW, and keep her moving, walk her around. How many pills did she take?”

“How the hell should I know? She handed me an empty bottle”, I told him. “It could be one or however many were left in there, I don’t know. What should I do?”

Now you’re probably wondering who was waiting on the customers while all of this was going on……Nobody. They were kind of helping themselves. The one or two that had come in, had gone to the shelves or the cooler, gotten what they wanted, and just walked out when they saw I was on the phone.

I hung up and dialed 911. Told them I had a drug overdose and the doctor had been contacted, and gave them all the location. They wanted me to stay on the line and I told them I needed to walk this girl around, so I left the phone on the counter. Then I grabbed the girl and started walking her around the store. We circled the store maybe three times before the paramedics arrived. Now we were the neighborhood center of attention. A crowd began to gather from the low-income apartment complex at three o’clock in the goddamn morning. Amazing what a set of flashing red lights can do.

I gladly turned the girl over to the paramedics; they put her in the ambulance and didn’t move for over an hour. They worked on her right there in the parking lot. Started pumping her stomach and stabilizing her before they finally transported her to the UNM Medical Center. Didn’t even bother to run the siren when they finally left with her. There was no car in the parking lot, so I don’t know how she got there. After all the hoopla was over, I noticed she had left her purse on the counter. Thought that was odd, that the paramedics and police didn’t want to know if she had any identification. I sure did.

The name on the driver’s license said Marcy Abrahms. She was 22. From out of state, obviously a student. Geology major actually. I discovered that from her suicide note. It was folded neatly in her purse, and was going on to five pages of notebook paper, both sides, before she stopped. That’s probably when the alcohol and pills kicked in and she panicked. I looked for money. I was a starving student myself. There wasn’t any. The rest of the purse contents were things like makeup, and pens, a checkbook, and some odd paperclips, mints, gum, things like that.

I wouldn’t have taken the money anyway. I was doing pretty well at the Circle K, eating microwave meals, ice-cream, candy, chips, had reading material, and was stealing cartons of cigarettes. That was cutting my expenses quite a bit. Every Wednesday night I would load a carton of smokes in the truck under the passenger door mat. Not that I was afraid I would be searched, but they had these “Secret Shoppers” that, it was rumored, would look through your vehicle windows (they knew your car plate) to try and catch you with unpaid merchandise from the store. The really funny thing about that was we clerks knew who the “spies” were and when they came in. They were too obvious.

I went to the hospital the next afternoon to deliver the purse to Ms. Marcy Abrahms. I knew a lot more about her now than I did the night before. She was, of course, being jilted by her boyfriend, a graduate student in Geography. She spent pages lamenting about how she missed his touch, how she knew she wasn’t good enough for him, how much she had loved him……from what I could gather he was a bit older than she was……well, you get the idea. I felt a little guilty about reading the suicide note, but it was hard to put down. I had put everything back in the purse the way I found it, and put it on the truck seat. The secret shopper was in that morning, so I wonder what he thought when he looked in the window and saw a purse?

It wasn’t hard to find her at UNM Medical Center. They gave me the room without question. I was under the impression, for some reason, that they didn’t just let anybody visit someone in the hospital, especially attempted suicides. I probably thought that because I don’t go to hospitals much. I don’t like them. People die there, and they don’t need little bells to confirm it anymore.

I walked into the room, with the purse under my arm. Marcy, who looked like hell, was sitting up in the bed in one of those gowns with no back to them.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m the dude from the Circle K last night. Remember?”

She looked at me standing in the doorway and said, simply, “No.”

“Well I brought back your purse. Thought you might need it. Wanted to make sure you were okay.”

She looked away from me and mumbled something. Could have been “thanks,” not really sure. Her body language said, “Get the hell out of here!” So I walked over and handed her the purse. She grabbed it out of my hand, I turned and left. She never asked what happened to her suicide note so maybe she didn’t remember.

One night at the Circle K, a stabbing victim walked in. He didn’t look like anything was bothering him when he walked past the checkout and went to the coffee machines, which were directly behind me. He was holding his stomach, but I didn’t see any blood. He started pouring a cup of coffee and I went over there just to check on what he was doing, because, like most of the graveyard shift, he was creepy.

All of a sudden he says to me, “I’ve been stabbed! I’m gonna bleed to death.” He lifts up his shirt and shows me a slash in his stomach. It appeared to be a wound caused by a knife. Still didn’t see much blood, but he was able to make some appear on his “white” T-shirt as he compressed the wound in simulated pain. I say this because it was clear that the cut had coagulated a long time ago, maybe even days. Human blood takes approximately 15 minutes to fully coagulate. It separates into serum and red blood cells. This wound didn’t look like it happened just 15 minutes ago.

“You want me to call 911?”

“Sure,” he says again, “I’ve been stabbed. Hurts bad.” Frankly it wasn’t a very good acting job, but he was in a stabbed state.

There was another phone right behind me on the wall in the hallway, so I dialed 911 and told them I had a male, around 45-50, with a minor stab wound in his abdomen, asking for medical assistance. The girl on the other end of the line took my name and verified the address of the store, and said they would dispatch paramedics in a few minutes. I hung up the phone and looked for the victim, but he had left the store, with the cup of unpaid for coffee.

I saw him walking across the parking lot down Kathryn Ave toward the 7-Eleven. Interestingly enough it wasn’t an ambulance that showed up a few minutes later, but a police cruiser. One of my “regulars” came in.

“Where’s the stabbing victim?” he asked.

I told him that he left. Walked down toward the 7-Eleven. Officer Lambert then went on to tell me about this vagrant that stabs himself every few days so he can get himself arrested and get a free meal and a warm bed. He was filling up his coffee mug at the coffee station. I told him the guy wasn’t bleeding that much, if at all and Officer Lambert said that he would be when he opened the surgical scar again to make it look like a stab wound. Creepy.

One night at the Circle K, I was sitting there flipping through the latest issue of “Hustler” or something like that and this kid about fifteen or sixteen walks in. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was 2:30 AM. I usually didn’t “read” the magazines until after I had checked the gas level in the underground storage tank out front, which I had to do at midnight, so I knew it was pretty late for this guy to be up even before I looked at the clock. You used a marked wooden stick to measure the level of the gas, and I was surprised that over two hours had gone by since I had been out there doing it.

In the front of the store, by the door, was a standing rack that had bags of piñon nuts of different quantities and varieties. It was about four feet high and resembled a metal pine tree.

Just like the rio in Rio Grande River means river, and you’re technically saying river twice if you say the Rio Grande River, the same is true of saying piñon nuts. Piñon (pin yone) is Spanish for pine nut. The name originates from Spanish explorers in the 1500s, who named the tree Pino Piñonero, or “nut-bearing pine.” A piñon pine can be more than 500 years old, and may live as long as 1,000 years. They’re not very tall trees. One legend is the tree used to be a towering pine, but God put a curse on the tree, after Jesus was crucified on a cross. The idea being that no piñon could ever be used to make one big enough to use for that purpose. I don’t know, nice story if it works for you.

Every seven years there is a bumper crop of piñon nuts, and all you have to do is lay burlap bags at the base of the tree, tie a rope to the top part of the trunk, and shake the tree like crazy. Mounds of nuts will fall from the cones. You just scoop them up in the bags and move on to the next tree. Generally, in the off years it’s pretty difficult to harvest the nuts which grow inside the pine cones, so they’re a pretty pricey commodity. A delicacy of sorts. The bags at the front of the store, some roasted, some roasted in red chili, some raw, were priced from $5.98 a bag and up. They were prepared by a small vendor in Santa Fe who kept them stocked and paid Circle K a space fee and a markup on the suggested retail price. A full tree of the nuts probably had a wholesale price in excess of $900.00 but that was all pretty much labor.

So like I was saying, this kid comes in and stands by the piñon nut “tree” and spins it a couple of times. Looking for, what I assume, a particular size, price or variety of the treat. I never stopped to think that maybe this kid didn’t have the minimum $5.98. All of sudden, he picks the whole tree up off the floor and backs out the door with it. I jumped the counter screaming at him to stop. By the time I hit the door he was around the corner of the building and heading up the street to the apartments, shedding bags of nuts as he went.

I ran back into the store and called 911. “Somebody just stole a whole rack of piñon!” I screamed into the phone. “The whole damn rack.” I described him as best I could and the direction he was heading. I figured he’d be pretty easy to spot. Now I had to go through the paperwork involved in a known shoplifting. Always a fun thing. Extra work.

About an hour later, a cop that I didn’t know, not one of my regulars, showed up at the store asking if I was the guy who reported the piñon theft. I confirmed that I was.

“I didn’t see anybody running up the street with any piñon,” he said. “How much wood did he take? That shit’s pretty heavy.”

So this officer was driving around looking for a kid carrying bundles of piñon firewood that were stacked in the front of the store under the front windows. They weighed easily 25 pounds a bundle. A running kid might have made off with two at the most. I told him it was a rack of nuts, expensive roasted nuts, and that the kid had taken the whole rack and run off with it. I didn’t bother to ask if he had seen a kid running down the street with that, which would have seriously looked a little out of the ordinary. I just got my police report to put with the shoplifting report.

“Thanks,” I said, “would you like a free cup of coffee?” And then I reached over and picked up my magazine off the rack.

You ever see those signs out front of a convenience store that say, “Cash Register Has Less Than $20. Clerks Do Not Have Safe Combination.” Trust me, it’s not always true. Well the first part, the fact we don’t have the combination…..totally true. It’s a drop safe. The store manager is the only one with the combination. They don’t work graveyard.

What the clerk does is count the big bills, log the amount, then roll them up and put them in a pill bottle that you drop down a steel tube. The possibility that clerks get lazy or busy and don’t drop all the excess bills down the tube every time the register gets over $20, highly likely. A smart thief will watch this busy period. Mill around the story awhile until all or most everyone is gone, stand out of sight, maybe even just outside the front door, and wait for the clerk to open the drawer and take out the twenties, and maybe even a fifty or a hundred, although it clearly says on the counter “NO BILLS OVER $20!” That counting phase, while the till is open, is when you make your move.

One night at the Circle K, I was playing my usual catch-up with the drop safe, when I spotted a guy watching me through the front glass of the store. “Fuck,” I thought, “I’m about to get robbed.”

My heart started pounding out of my chest and I jammed the till shut with my hip, grabbed a pill bottle, rolled the bills I had in my hand as fast as I could and shoved them down the tube, never letting my eyes off the guy now moving towards the door. He was about 5’10”, thin, maybe 30s, the required black hoody pulled up over his head, and he had both his hands in the front pouch pocket of the hoody. He was in the store now walking towards the counter. I thought my heart was going to bust right through my rib cage.

“Hey man, you got any spare change?” Interesting way to phrase a hold up, “spare change.”

“No,” I said and gulped more loudly than I wanted to.

Right about then a car pulled up in front and the headlights illuminated a tattered backpack leaning up against the trash can out front. The guy didn’t go for his “gun”.
This guy was a homeless guy. The air expelled out of my lungs so fast I sounded like an inner-tube hitting a sharp knife.

“You want a free cup of coffee?” I asked.

Ultimately I got fired from the Circle K. Shortly after the piñon theft, we got a new District Manager, a little wimp who thought himself an over important man. A “suit” with a short person syndrome. He decided to solve the inventory losses at the Kathryn store by firing everyone that worked there. He got the day-crew with his secret shoppers first, and then he got me at 6:43 AM for not ringing up a pack of cigarettes. I was extremely busy and just put the money in the till. I rang the sale up on the register, two sales later so the till would balance at the end of my shift. The contention was that we were all stealing money by not ringing up the purchases every so often, and then pocketing any overage at the end of the shift when we balanced the drawer. Good idea, I guess, hadn’t thought of it, but got accused of it just the same.

“Short Fuck” as he came to be known to me, just couldn’t reconcile the fact that the theft of an entire rack of expensive nuts might have a negative effect on his inventory. The constant shoplifting with no security cameras taping in the store, the customers who got a drink out of the cooler and then walked right out with it, the cars that drove away from the pump after leaving a stolen credit card at the counter, the kid in the trench coat, the clerk who ate every meal, snacked and supplied his nicotine habit with store inventory, and the gallons of free coffee, just didn’t seem to figure in to his inventory losses. No, by god, it was clerks stealing money out of the till. One of the day-shift clerks had been with the store for 13 years. Short Fuck fired her the second day he was there.

So on the day I got my call to go down to Corporate HQ and to bring my two white shirts with the red Circle K brand over the pocket, I was pretty certain what was up. I walked into the conference room and Short Fuck was sitting in the middle of a small conference table, back against the wall. If he sat back in the chair, his feet wouldn’t touch the floor, so he was sitting on the edge of the high back chair. I took a seat across from him. He had his briefcase opened on the table and began rummaging around in there pulling out a register tape and a Secret Shopper Report.

“How long you been with Circle K, uh?”……he didn’t know my name. He was looking all over the paperwork to find a name. Finally he got it…….”Leonard,” he said.

“About a year,” I answered. “Name’s Len,” I added for effect.

“Leonard, do you know what this is?” he asked holding up the strip of register tape.

“Len. Yeah, it’s a register tape.”

“On this register tape,” and he laid it down in front of me and pointed to three entries highlighted in yellow, “are the three items purchased by this secret shopper on the night of July 14th, at 6:43 AM. The problem is the secret shopper also bought a pack of cigarettes. But it’s not rung up here as you can see.”

“Are you accusing me of stealing?” I screamed at him. “You think I’m some flunky? If I was going to steal from you, I’ve got much better ways of doing it, and you wouldn’t even come close to catching me.” As I mentioned earlier I had been helping myself to food and cigarettes for some time now. “Give me that receipt,” and I grabbed it out of his hands before he could react.

“See, right here. Two sales down. The cigarettes are rung up,” I explained pointing. “The cash drawer balanced at the end of the shift.”

“How do I know that wasn’t another customer purchase?”

“You don’t,” I said, “I’m just telling you I rang up the secret shopper’s smokes. You think we don’t know who your damn secret shoppers are? How many people you think wait until you’ve rung up the sale, give change, then ask for a pack of cigarettes before you close the cash drawer? You think the normal person does that? A normal person asks for the cigarettes first because it’s what they came in for in the first place. Shit, your secret shoppers are so easy to spot you might as well paint them purple.”

“We’re going to have to let you go.” He said it smugly. Almost enjoying it, but when he passed the official incident report over for me to sign, I shoved it away and stood up.

“I’m not signing a goddamn thing,” I said leaning over the table at him. His expression changed from smugness to fear. “You can kiss my ass.”

“You won’t get your final check,” he said quickly. “You have to sign the release to get the check.”

“What’s the check for, one fucking day? You think you pay me enough to give a shit about one fucking day? Fuck you,” I screamed and shoved the conference table across the room, up against his chest setting him back in the high back chair, and blocking him against the wall. Kind of looked like a toddler in a big high chair. I pitched the two shirts at him and hit him in the face. Gave him another “fuck you,” and walked out. I got the check in the mail about a week later. It was for one day in the amount of $20.81 after taxes.

About a week later, someone drove by the Kathryn Ave Circle K and shot out all the top windows with a semi-automatic weapon. No one was hurt, but that would have seriously given me a stroke. I thought to myself then that things happen for a reason.

One night at the Circle K, about a month later, there was a robbery. Probably during a count for a safe drop, the new guy, an Iranian exchange student working the graveyard shift, was paralyzed by a gunman. The clerk was ordered to lay face down on the floor while the perp got the money out of the till. Then he picked up the cash register and threw in on the clerk lying on the floor. They didn’t weigh very much, but he threw it hard enough and hit him just right so that it crushed some vertebrae and damaged his spinal column. Basically broke his back. The gunman was pissed that the till only had about $20 in it and the Iranian student on the floor didn’t know the combination to the drop safe like the sign out front said.

I was, by then, working the graveyard shift at the Western 6 Motel about a mile away, in a locked office with bullet proof glass. Heard a lot of sirens that night, and read about it later in the paper. As far as I know, they never caught the guy. Without the aid of a secret shopper and a Short Fuck that wanted to solve his inventory problem, that could have been me.

I stopped by the Circle K one night on my way home to get a pack of cigarettes. There were two clerks working the graveyard shift, probably a new security policy. I also noticed video surveillance cameras inside the store next to the concave mirrors in the corners. I got a soda out of the cooler and some Twinkies. I waited for the clerk to ring them up, give me change, and before he slammed the till shut, I said, “Oh, I need a pack of Carlton’s.” He reached up to the overhead rack, handed me the pack, and I gave him the $1.25 out of my change. He put it in the till and slammed it shut without ringing up the sale.

Oh Henry, Call Dr. Pepper, I'm Gonna Have a Baby Ruth

2009-02-16T17:41:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite jokes goes like this: Do you know how to catch a polar bear? Well, you cut a hole in the ice and line the edge with peas. When the polar bear stops to take a pea, you kick him in the ice hole.

I’m sorry, but I can’t keep a straight face when I tell that joke. I laugh harder than anyone that hears me tell it, of course, because I think it’s hilarious. There are better jokes, I’m sure, but there are two things I like about this one. One, I can remember it and two, well………., okay only one thing. Sometimes when I tell this joke in a “tough” room, I’m the only one that’s laughing, but that’s okay, because I think it’s funny.

I can’t remember jokes very well. Sometimes, I can remember the whole entire joke and forget the punch line, or remember the punch line and not how to get to it. I have to write stuff down. Sometimes, if I write it down immediately I can remember it for awhile. I have books and books of jokes, and quotes, and witticisms, but I can’t remember any of them without looking them up. And it’s not an age thing either. If I had a line in a play, I wouldn’t be able to remember it, even if it was just one line. I would need off-stage prompting or queue cards.

I’m amazed by actors that memorize entire scripts and then repeat lines verbatim, even ad-libbing some of the dialogue to fit the character. Me, flash cards…..without them I would be reading most of my lines looking at my hands because that is where the dialogue would be written. It’s interesting to watch Presidents and other public speakers pretend that they are reciting a speech from memory when they are actually reading it from a high-tech teleprompter being projected on what appears to be bullet-proof panels on either side of the podium. Abraham Lincoln probably didn’t read the Gettysburg Address from the envelope he wrote it on, but I’ll bet he kept his notes close by, like in his hand.

I used to carry a joke around in my wallet (besides the lack of actual money that you won’t find in my wallet, which is, indeed, a joke) about a chain of events concerning a fly, a fish, a fisherman, a bear, a cat, and a cheese sandwich, because I could never remember it to tell it, and I thought it was hilarious. Goes something like this, and you’ve probably heard it before:

One day at a fishing hole on the river, there was a fly buzzing over the water.

A fish swam by and saw the fly, and thought to itself, “If that fly drops six inches, I’ll be able to jump high enough to get it and finally have some dinner.

A fisherman sitting on the bank saw the fly and thought, “If that fly drops six inches, and a fish jumps for it, I’ll snag the fish with my net and finally catch something.”

The fisherman had a half of a cheese sandwich left and started to eat it.

Behind the fisherman, hiding behind a tree, was a bear. The bear thought, “If that fly drops six inches, and that fish jumps to get it, that fisherman will grab his net, snag it, then I’ll snatch it from him and finally get some dinner.”

Next to the fisherman, hiding in a bush, was a field mouse. The mouse thought, “If that fly drops six inches, and a fish jumps for it, that fisherman will drop his cheese sandwich so he can grab the net and I’ll get me some cheese.” The mouse didn’t see the bear.

A cat was behind the field mouse watching the scene, and the cat thought, “If that fly drops six inches and the fish jumps for it, and the fisherman drops his sandwich to get his net, and the mouse goes for the cheese, I’ll sneak up on that mouse and catch him.” The cat didn’t see the bear either.

Sure enough, the fly dropped six inches, the fisherman dropped his sandwich to get the net, the fish jumped and he snagged it, and the mouse ran to get the cheese. The bear ran down the hill to steal the fish. The cat pounced on the mouse, but missed, lost its balance, rolled down the bank and ended up in the river.

The moral of the story is: When the fly drops six inches, the ….well it’s something about the cat falling into the river. You figure it out.

I’ve struggled with this joke-telling-memory-problem for years. I’m jealous of all those people that can just roll them off their tongues, and the crowd laughs, and I say, “I’ve got to remember that one.” But I never do. I like to think I have wit, I guess it’s just not quick.

My brother is a quick wit. He once said of my two divorces from the same woman that at least my x-wife was a good housekeeper. “She kept the house both times,” he chuckled. I think he writes his own material.

I just heard this one the other day. “My friend just slept with his third cousin. He was real upset about it. I told him if it upset him so much he should stop counting them.”

Here’s a popular joke genre, the genie joke:

A woman was walking along a beach when she stumbled upon what looked like a genie’s lamp. She picked it up, rubbed it on the side, and sure enough a genie appeared.

The amazed woman asked if she got three wishes.

The genie said he was sorry, but due to the current economy, the layoffs, and downsizing and low wages in third-world countries, and the lack of US car sales, and fierce genie competition he could only offer her one wish.

“So what’ll it be?” the genie said.

The woman didn’t hesitate.

“If I only get one wish, then I want peace in the Middle East. See this map? I want these countries to stop fighting with each other. I want all the US soldiers to come home.”

The genie looked at the map and said. “Lady! These countries have been at war with each other for thousands of years. I’m good, but not THAT good! I don’t think peace is possible in this region. It can’t be done. You’ll have to make another wish.”

The woman thought for a minute, and then said, “Well, I’ve never been able to find the right man. You know one that’s considerate and fun, likes to cook and helps with the housecleaning, is good in bed and gets along with my family, doesn’t watch sports all the time, and is faithful. That’s what I’ll wish for, a good mate.”

(I’m sure you know where this is going.)

The genie let out a long sigh and said, “Okay, let me see that fucking map again.”

When I lived in New Mexico we had Española jokes. They were like, Aggie jokes, or Pollock jokes, or whatever. They went like this:

Why can’t they have a living manger scene at Christmas in Española? Because they can’t find a virgin and three wise men. A camel they can find.

Or, what do you call a guy in Española in a three-piece suit? The defendant.

Or, even worse, in Española they think four-on-the-floor is a double date. You get the idea.

One of my favorites is, the Española football team was going to Albuquerque to play Albuquerque High. They saw a sign on the highway that said “Albuquerque Left” so they went home.

Okay, it’s a groaner, but I think it’s funny. I’ve got nothing against people that live in Española, a small community northeast of Santa Fe, but for some reason they’ve become the butt of jokes. I don’t even know anyone from there. But you could insert any person, group, place or nationality in the place of Española.

Have you ever come up with your own joke? I haven’t. I can say with some certainty that I have never written a joke. I would guess that joke writers obviously exist, but they must be the most plagiarized writers in the world. Have you ever heard of a joke writer suing someone for using their jokes at a happy hour? Maybe there’s some strange copyright on a joke or something. But then maybe it’s because a lot of jokes run on the same base structure and well, like this……

A man seeking a job as a sheriff’s deputy in a border town was being interviewed. The Sergeant doing the interview says, “Your qualifications all look great, but we have to give you an attitude suitability test. We can’t accept you until you take that test.”

The Sergeant slides a service revolver on the desk towards the candidate and says, “Take this pistol, go out and shoot six illegal aliens, six meth dealers, six Muslim extremists, and a rabbit.”

“Why the rabbit,” the candidate says.

“Great attitude,” the Sergeant replies, “When can you start?”

There are a lot of golf jokes, and sexist jokes, and blonde jokes, and Aggie jokes, and racist jokes like that one above, and like I said, genie jokes. Everyone’s heard and told a genie joke, I guess it’s easy to relate to what you would wish for if given the opportunity, and how naturally it would get screwed up by how you asked the genie to grant the wish.

Guys and gals who write jokes for a living have to be some special breed of person. First you have to come up with the funny story. Then you have to hope that everyone else thinks it’s funny. Some subjects are just easy to put in a joke, like farts, and sex, and minorities, and gee, whatever other “funny” material there is. A fart by and of itself can get a lot of laughs regardless of the room without saying a word. Works really well in church, but you usually can’t take credit for it.

The internet has increased joke-telling efficiency. I get emailed an average of 6.35 jokes per day. Most of them aren’t that funny, but the ones you think are funny will get forwarded, and the best part is you don’t have to remember the joke, but you’re still basically telling it.

Here’s my all-time favorite joke. It was told to a group at an Italian restaurant, which was fitting because of it’s subject. The joke teller was a David Lettermen clone. Literally, and his delivery was just as good. He was an Assistant Credit Manager for Delta Faucet though, not a stand-up comic. Here’s how it goes, the short version:

Mario and Luigi were at the bar having a few drinks and the subject turned to women’s breasts, as it often does, and then specifically to Mario’s wife’s breasts.

“Imma tellan ya,” Luigi finally says, “I woulda giva you fifty-a bucks to see-a yer wife’sa tits.”

Well Mario gets a little bent out of shape about Luigi’s confession, “I doughna thinka you shoulda be talkin’ abouta my wife’sa titsa like-a that,” he says. “I’mma gonna kicka yer ass!”

Needless to say, the party breaks up and Mario goes home to his wife.

“Yer notta gonna believa whatta Luigi a-said,” he tells her. “He saidda he woulda give-a fifty-a bucks to see-a yer tits.”

Mario’s wife tells him that maybe that’s not such a bad idea. They could use the money. Luigi, after all is a friend, not like its some stranger looking at her bare breasts. So she convinces Mario to go back and tell Luigi that it’s a deal.

So Mario goes back to the bar and finds Luigi and takes him home. His wife bares her breasts and (here’s where the joke gets visual) Luigi takes them in each of his hands and fondles them and says, “I doughna know!”

Then he does it again (the joke teller cups his hands out in front of him and slightly twists from side to side) and says, “I doughna know!”

Finally Mario can’t stand it anymore. “Whatta ya meana you doughna know?! Whatsa wronga witha my wife’sa tits?!”

“I doughna knowa where I’mma gonna getta fifty-a bucks!”

Yeah, well I think it’s hilarious.

So last night my wife and I are watching a movie called “Leatherheads.” Not important except that the football field in this 1925 spoof of the beginnings of professional football had advertisements around the stands for candy bars and things. There was Oh Henry, and Baby Ruth, and Beechnut Cigarettes, and my wife was reading them out loud. The next thing I know my wife turns to me and says, “Oh Henry, call Dr. Pepper, I’m having a Baby Ruth.” I thought I was going to die.

One of the best laughs I ever had was lying in bed one night, both of us having trouble going to sleep and I said, nonchalantly, “Honey, you want some snew?”

“What’s snew?” she asked.

“Nothing, what’s snew with you?” I guess I’m not ready to give up my day job.

Boy Toys

2008-12-16T22:29:00.000-08:00

Remember when you were a kid and Christmas seemed like it would never get here? To make it worse, they let you out of school for Christmas break, and you didn’t have anything to do to pass the time except wait for Christmas to come. Sure, Mom would try to come up with activities to keep us out of trouble. Popping corn and forcing us to sit for hours with a needle and some string to make garland. You count ten popcorns and then you string on a cranberry. Of course your big sister would rat on you and you’d get in trouble for eating two popcorns for every one you managed to string on without sticking your finger. I can hear her now, “Mom, he’s eating the popcorn!”

Mom’s next project would be to cut strips of red and green construction paper and instruct us how to glue together endless paper chains to be used to decorate the living room. Red tissue paper bells that folded out from two flat bell-shaped pieces of cardboard that clasped together were hung in between the arches of paper chain. We had been making paper chains for years, but there always seemed to be a need for more. “Mom, he’s using too much glue!” In my defense, the glue came in little bottles with rubber tops and if you pressed a little too hard on the paper with the rubber top you couldn’t control the flow of glue very well.

When we finally got to decorating the tree, the only thing I was allowed to put on the tree, along with the smaller kids, was the tinsel. Seems I had logged too many broken ornaments to be trusted with that task. We had to wait for the lights to be put on, and then the garlands and the miles of paper chains and the ornaments and then we tinselers were put into service. We were expected to put one strand of tinsel on a branch at a time. The shorter ones would work on the bottom and the taller ones worked the higher branches. Even though I’m sure it looked better, I’m just as sure Mom made us do it one strand at a time because it took longer. Putting tinsel on a tree, one strand at a time can take hours even with five, six or seven of us doing it as the tinseler population increased over the years. “Mom, he’s clumping it!” You don’t see tinsel on Christmas trees much anymore.

Needless to say, I ultimately got into trouble anyway, numerous times, and not just for wasting glue, eating popcorn meant for garland, or clumping the tinsel. I was threatened with Santa not even bothering to fly over the house, let alone leave me that special present I had been waiting for all year. I can’t tell you the number of times I was afraid that Santa wasn’t going to show, but somehow, he always did. I think my mother either lied about that naughty and nice list or Santa didn’t have a good memory. Or maybe on Christmas Eve you just got a commutation regardless of what petty crimes you might have committed. Parents start the “threatening” the first day of Christmas vacation though. “Santa Claus is watching you. He knows what you did and he’s marking it down.” Total crap, but we were afraid not to believe it. Funny how we were only reminded about this Santa tallying stuff during the final two weeks before Christmas. I think it would have been helpful to point this out at other times during the year as well.

When you’re an adult you spend the month of December trying to figure out how you’re going to pay for everything, and Christmas is always the day after tomorrow. Whatever happened to Christmas Clubs? You know that special bank account that you would start in January and deposit a little each week in anticipation of a small Christmas fortune available in December. I guess if I would have had a Christmas Club account this year I would have cashed it out in August to make the car payment anyway, and I’d still be trying to figure out how I was going to pay for Christmas. Christmas has become a major expense item that needs a year of careful planning. Something I have never been able to do. Christmas, with luck, gets paid off just in time for Christmas to come again. When we were kids we saved our meager allowances, or shoveled walks, or did extra chores to fund our Christmas gift giving. I wonder if anyone needs their sidewalk shoveled.

What do I want for Christmas? When you’re a kid that thought process starts long before the temperatures drop, the snow falls and you have to break out the rubbers. Yeah, we called them rubbers, and if you had the kind with a zipper up the middle, you were a sissy. You had to have the buckle rubbers to be cool. My mom, of course, bought me zipper rubbers. I’m sure she got a hell of deal on them, but her excuse had been that they were the only kind they had left. Girls wore zipper rubbers that came in yellow, or red, or green. Guys wore buckle rubbers that came in black. At least my zipper rubbers were black. I avoided wearing rubbers as often as I could. I still remember the taunts I received about the zippered rubber boots even from my “best” friend.

The method of closure wasn’t really that important anyway because you left them unbuckled (or unzipped) most of the time because it was easier to stuff your pants legs into them. Even if someone didn’t notice that you had on zipper rubbers though they’d find out because you could buckle together buckle rubbers and sling them over your shoulder on the way home from school. You couldn’t do that with zipper rubbers. You had to carry them in your hand. You were less likely to lose a buckle rubber for the same reason. You buckled them together in the cloak room to keep the pair intact. A zipper rubber could get separated from its left or right and you could spend a lot of time trying to match up a right or left zipper rubber with the other sissy’s rubbers in the cloak room.

I still marvel today that my parents were able to afford Christmas. I have three brothers and three sisters. We didn’t have three-page lists of what we wanted for Christmas like my clever grandson, Connor Michael Burton. In his phone message to Santa you could hear him turning the pages as he reeled off the things he wants for Christmas this year. My favorite item on his list was “any type of boy toy”, kind of covering all the bases for anything he might have left off the list, and it got me to thinking about those special Christmas gifts I had gotten over the years. We were allowed to pick one thing. We always got more, but we got to ask for one special “big” thing.

One year it was a bike of course. The coolest 26 inch Schwinn, two tone beige bike on the block. That was when bikes had fenders and headlights that worked on C batteries. In the summer we would add a motor sound to our bikes with playing cards and clothespins. You could get six or eight cards on each wheel and get a fair chuck chuck sound. Mom would start having trouble winning at Solitaire and realize that a few cards were missing from the deck. That usually didn’t go over well.

I spent a lot of my lawn mowing money on patch kits and inner tubes for that bike. I always seemed to have a flat tire. I got pretty good at changing bike tires over the years. You had to use two screwdrivers in tandem to stretch the tire back over the rim without sticking one of them through the brand new inner tube, which happened a time or two. If that happened, you started over and got out the patch kit.

I had some pretty good wrecks on that bike. Once when I was riding Jeff Hartman on the back, he got his foot stuck in the spokes and I went flying over the handlebars landing and sliding down the sidewalk on my face. I woke up several hours later lying on the couch with Dr. Booth looming over me. The first words out of my mouth were, “Is my bike okay?” I wasn’t supposed to be riding people on the bike, but the fact that I didn’t suffer any permanent damage probably had something to do with me not getting in too much trouble. As soon as I was allowed outside I went straight to the garage to check on the bike. Some bent spokes and some scratches on the handlebar were all it had suffered.

I got hit by a car once, on the way to school, by one the teachers. She didn’t see me or I didn’t see her as she came out of the intersection in front of the school. I ran right into the front fender of the Buick and went flying on to the hood of her car. I remember looking through the windshield at her shocked face, lying there spread eagle on her car, my face pressed to the glass. I didn’t suffer a scratch. I don’t think Mrs. Redding ever quite recovered.

The most embarrassing mishap on the bike happened on the way home from football practice one fall afternoon. I had slung my cleats over the handlebars and headed down Burkitt Street. As I began crossing Main Street the right cleat caught in the front spokes and locked the wheel. I went flying over the handlebars head first, again, and landed in the middle of the street. The light changed and four lanes of traffic started honking. Some kindly old gentleman jumped out of his car, having seen the entire performance, and wanted to know if I was okay and helped me walk my crippled bike back to the curb. I learned how to straighten spikes a lot when I was a kid, but I don’t think my wheels were ever really round after that.

I rode that bike for well over ten years, but secretly wanted the 3-speed English Racer that I had asked Santa to bring me.

Another year I asked Santa for a miniature tape recorder. My Dad had one of the bigger reel to reel recorders and it had always fascinated me. I remember I said “Grace” for him on one of his “Christmas Radio Shows” that he was always putting together at Christmas. I didn’t think it sounded like me when played back, but everyone else he recorded sounded like them. When I got older we would trade “Radio Shows” at Christmas, instead of greeting cards. We would MC the shows, tell jokes in between recorded acts, interview special “guests” and pretend, for example, that Bing Crosby was in the kitchen after just having sung “White Christmas” on the show. He was, of course, on the record player. But it was fun and had really started those many years earlier when I got the miniature Sony tape recorder.

My first major recording after, “Testing, testing, testing” (you always said it three times for some reason) was the 1968 Sugar Bowl game between the unbeaten WAC Champion Wyoming Cowboys and LSU. I sat in front of the TV and held the microphone in front of the speaker for the entire game. I have it all on tape, somewhere.

I can remember how excited we all were that the Cowboys were in the Sugar Bowl. The game was televised coast to coast in color! We had a black and white set. Wyoming led for most of the game, up 13 to nothing at half-time, then sophomore, Glenn Smith, came off the bench and became the first sophomore in Sugar Bowl history to win the MVP. They beat us 20 to 13. Smith ran for 74 yards in 16 carries and scored the winning touchdown on a 1 yard run. We never scored another point. Glenn Smith finished his career at LSU without ever starting a game. I sat there for two hours holding a microphone to the speaker of the TV and I never played it back. It’s probably still around here somewhere. I lost interest in the tape recorder shortly after.

Another year I got one of those Hockey games where the players are connected to 5 levers on each side of the game. An oversize puck is dropped in the center and by pulling and twisting the levers in turn, the three inch metal players can pass, backcheck, carom the puck and shoot on goal. One of the pucks was magnetic for a more controlled game and the other had a ball bearing in the center for a more fast-paced game. Within a few hours Christmas Day I was deadly with the ball bearing puck. I could control the puck to the Center and slam the shot on goal before anyone could react. Most importantly, before my Dad could react. I beat him game after game. Finally, late that day, in sheer frustration he ripped one of the controls right out of the game trying to block a shot. In fairness to my Dad, he fixed it later, but I was a bit upset that my greatest game of all time lasted less than a day before it was broken….by an adult.

The most amazing gift I ever received from Santa was a photographic enlarger. It was the kind of gift that was clearly out of my parent’s price range. I didn’t ask for it, because I knew by that time how Christmas worked, who Santa really was, and how expecting something as expensive as a Bogen 35mm Enlarger was just ridiculous.

I had built a darkroom in the basement in the old coal room. I was developing my own black and white film and printing test sheets by laying the negatives on a piece of photo paper and exposing it to light. Then developing and fixing the sheet. An enlarger was the next logical addition.

On Christmas morning (we opened presents right after midnight Christmas Eve) I was handed a small shirt box, expecting just that when I opened it, but inside was a folded piece of paper and on it was written in my Dad’s perfect printing “Go To The Dining Room.” I walked into the dining room, flipped on the light, and there on the table was a Bogen 35mm Enlarger. I was absolutely, totally speechless. I couldn’t figure out how in the world this had happened. How in the world anyone knew what I really wanted for Christmas for one thing. How in the world my parents could afford it. I was just amazed. I probably never thanked my Dad near enough for that gift, but I learned later in life, when I managed those same Christmas surprises for my own kids, what that feeling is like. There is no better feeling in the world.

I was in the basement coal room almost the entire day and there was no heat down there. I made it upstairs for Christmas dinner and to say “Grace”. Saying Grace had been my job since I had first memorized it when I was eight.

“Bless us oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen.” The same way I said Grace on the reel to reel that Christmas day on my Dad’s “Radio Show” recording and didn’t sound at all like me.

Voyage of the Titanic - An Epic RV Adventure

2008-11-18T15:55:00.000-08:00

Chapter 3 – We Christen Thee Titanic

Charles A. Manson stood in the doorway of the 33 1/2’ Southwind beaming, his fat belly swelled out with pride, straining the front of his shirt.

“I told ya she’d start right up, runs like a top, nothing wrong with this baby.” I was guessing he was more excited about the fact that it did start right up, at least in front of me.

He said he would leave the charger on it for a while to make sure the batteries were good. “We’ll put new ones in if they don’t hold a charge.”

From “new” I assumed “different” and coming from the pile of batteries that was just inside the gate where the man and the battery charger had emerged.

“So, we ready to make a deal? This one isn’t going to last long, and we’re practically giving it away.”

I would later remember that statement vividly and think that they probably couldn’t have given it away, let alone find a sucker like me that was willing to actually pay money for it.

“I guess,” I replied. I was figuring that my credit wasn’t good enough to get the loan anyway so I had nothing to lose but the rest of my afternoon going through the motions of buying the Southwind. Filling out the credit application, waiting for the credit check to come back, talking about the N.A.D.A. suggested retail price for a “pristine” 1982 Fleetwood Southwind, 33 ½ foot with all the options. Well, there were some options missing. It did have an awning, a 3-way refrigerator, a driver’s side entrance door, air conditioning on the roof and a dash AC that didn’t work, but we didn’t know it at the time. You can’t live in Arizona without air conditioning and literally very few did until air conditioning was invented. After AC it became one of the fastest growing parts of the country.

Anyway, that was the list of options, and the N.A.D.A. book said it was worth $12,000 in its current excellent condition, low mileage and new rubber all around. Charlie looked it up himself, but declined to show me the book page where he got the information. One epic RV adventure later, I checked the N.A.D.A. book myself for that big box on wheels and it clearly showed an average retail of $3,065.73. Pretty close, and with a slight profit, to the amount that Mr. Manson was telling me would be required for the down payment. But then, I was just expecting to be told that the loan didn’t go through, and so I told him I had the $4,000 and I did.

“Okay,” he said. “How do you want to give me that four thousand, check, cash, credit card?”

“I’ll be writing a check,” I said, “but you’ll have to give me a couple of days to move the funds from my savings account.”

He didn’t think that would be a problem, just that we wouldn’t be able to pick up the coach until it cleared, and he had to check out all the systems anyway before he could, in good conscience, let us drive her cross country. Then he wanted to know when we wanted to pick her up.

“Don’t I have to fill out a credit application,” I asked a bit confused?

Charles A. Manson, turned around and pointed to the sign above his head behind his desk that screamed out, “Good Credit, Bad Credit, No Credit, We’ll Give You Credit.” Funny how I hadn’t noticed that before.

“Don’t need that,” he said, “just sign this retail contract right here. We’ll finance the balance at 15.3%. It’s all detailed right here.” And he pointed to the barely legible standard contract entries detailing the total cost, down payment, financed amount, total interest, total financed amount, monthly payment and late fee. I didn’t remember Charlie making all those calculations, but there they were.

I turned to my wife, hoping she would put a stop to this insanity. “Well, hon, what do you think?”

She didn’t even pause. “I think we should we do it,” she said. And Charles Manson smiled what looked to me like a very wicked smile.

So we wrote the check. I made my wife do it because I have a real problem writing checks with one zero, let alone three. We signed the contract and told Charlie we would pick up the coach the first week in April. I’d like to think it was April 1st, because it would fit the story real good, but it was probably that Saturday, the 5th,1997. That day may live in infamy. I reminded Charlie again that I wanted the windshield fixed and he said he would. I didn’t however have a “Due Bill”, that list of things the dealer promises to do before delivery, but I didn’t think about that then, just took Charles Manson’s word for it. I did have a contract that said I was buying this “As Is” and without that due bill, you have no proof that anything other than that was agreed upon.

Early on Saturday, we went down to Desert RV and picked up the 33 ½ foot Class A motor home that we had been wanting for years. Charlie went through all the systems with us, showed us the repaired windshield, went through the engine compartment, and showed me where to put in the coolant, where to check the oil and the transmission fluid. He just walked us all over that Southwind and we were feeling pretty confident after a while that we knew how everything worked. An hour or so later we were tooling down Benson Highway on the way home, trying to keep the monster between the white lines and wondering how the hell I was going to park it at the house. We had been on the road about 10 minutes.

All of a sudden an incredibly loud rushing sound started up and built into a louder and louder roar, like the sound of a jet engine when an airplane takes off. Almost as loud too and I couldn’t hear or talk to my wife sitting in the seat next to me across the engine cowling where the noise was coming from.

“What the fuck is that?” I screamed in her direction.

“I don’t know,” I heard her yell back, faintly.

Just as quickly as it started it wound down and stopped.

“What the hell do you think that was?” I said it in a normal speaking voice.

“I don’t know,” she said again, “but it’s stopped.”

Well, I guess that made it all right, because it didn’t do it again as we maneuvered the coach down the narrow streets of the mobile home park and pulled up in front of our house. There was barely enough room to pull around us on the street and the front of the coach was up in the small grass patch we had in the front of the double wide, the rest on the driveway, half over the curb. Within seconds our neighbor’s across the street, Mel and Mary, came running out of their house. Their two girls followed.

“Weeeuw,” Mel whistled, “What the hell did you do? That thing is big, ain’t it?” I was looking out at him through the sliding glass window on the driver’s access door.

“Easy to drive though, like driving a Cadillac,” I said, acting like I was an expert.

I wonder why everything big you drive is described like driving a Cadillac? I’ve never driven a Cadillac. I was in one once, and I remember it feeling like driving down the highway sitting on your living room sofa. This was like that, only you were on a recliner chair instead of a couch and you could even cross your legs under the bus-like steering wheel.

“Reminds me of the Titanic from that TV show, Trapper John MD,” Mary says.

Dr. “Trapper” John McIntyre of MASH fame worked with a Dr. George Alonzo “Gonzo” Gates. Gonzo was a resident surgeon at San Francisco Memorial and he lived in a rusted but, by all appearances, functioning Winnebago that he lived in out in the hospital parking lot. He called it the “Titanic”. He often spent time on the roof drinking and relaxing in lounge chairs. I immediately envisioned myself doing that on the trip. It was never determined during the run of the show whether the Winnebago could move, and where he was getting his utilities for that matter.

My wife jumps right in. “Yeah, that’s it, we’ll name it the Titanic. Perfect.”

If you haven't already figured it out, we name all our vehicles. Our current vehicles, a 2008 Toyota FJ is Burgie because of her burgandy color, and the 1999 Ford F-350 Dually we just traded in was The Hulk because it was big and green. The new 2008 Tundra Limited is still waiting for a moniker.

“Okay,” I said, “I’d break a bottle of Coors Light over her bumper and say, ‘We Christen Thee Titanic’, but the bumper would probably fall off and it would be a waste of beer.”

A few minutes later, while we were giving the “tour”, I caught a glimpse of the park manager out the front windshield, leaving what appeared to be my front porch, and walking off quickly, trying not to be seen. I walked over to the porch later and retrieved the letter which was stuck between the jamb and the screen door. The gist of it was that we could not park the Titanic in front of our house and we would have to move it immediately. It was against the park rules. We figured that, hell we knew that it was against the rules to park a motor home on the street. We fought with the managers every day about something that was against the "rules", but cheeeeeeez, the Titanic had only been docked for 15 minutes. He must have seen us drive in and typed our name on the letter as we were driving to our space. Maybe it had leaked out that we were bringing a motor home on the property and he had the letter already prepared. I started to wonder who the leak was, Mel, no he would never tell. Someone Mel told? I would never find out but I knew they weren't that efficient in posting notices of violations. At any rate we would discuss with them the need to have the motorhome parked there for short periods so we could load it, we had already arranged a place to store it.

Voyage of the Titanic - An Epic RV Adventure

2008-11-17T15:12:00.000-08:00

Chapter 2 – New Rubber All The Way Around

Manson sat in the middle of the faded blue fold-down sofa, his arms outstretched, his legs stretched out across the blue kitchen-type carpet, almost filling up the entire space. The carpet was not original or new. He revealed damp pools of sweat in wide circles under both arms. The top of the sofa was now soaking it up too. Sweat was running off his forehead like a dripping faucet. He repeatedly pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead with it. It was getting hot already in the desert southwest, and, even in March, it was pushing 90s this late in the afternoon. It was pushing 200 degrees inside this box with wheels.

I sat in the passenger seat of the rig, which was a love-seat of sorts, a blue vinyl two-seater high back that could be turned around to face the sofa and also could be reclined into a bed, “for a tike”, as Charlie put it. I was watching my wife look and touch.

“This baby’ll sleep 10 easy,” he had said earlier.

I only saw beds for maybe four and a small kid, if you counted the love-seat. Maybe he was talking about putting sleeping bags on the floor. Like those tents they tell you will sleep up to eight. You have to lay out the sleeping bags and the sleepers according to a precise diagram to even remotely attempt to fit eight people in the tent. They don’t tell you how to get the eight people into the tent and into the sleeping bags, which will clearly take some sort of plan. They don’t explain how you would get out of the tent, if you need to take a leak in the middle of the night for example, either.

Barb is walking around inside the 6’ 8” X 30’ interior box. She sits on the queen-size mattress that takes up the entire bedroom area in the back, and looks around, pleased, then down the aisle, through the open door, at me way up twenty-some feet in the love seat. I’m watching her, following her with my eyes. She steps in and out of the bathroom quickly, not much to see in there, toilet, sink, medicine cabinet. The medicine cabinet is clearly not one of the original components, and not designed for the RV industry, so it looks out of place. The bathroom door shuts but she can’t get it to latch, so she gives up. The tub and shower stand alone on the other side of the aisle, and there is nothing that shuts this bathroom area off from the rest of the living space. Presumably someone could be watching TV….. wait, there’s no TV. I just notice it. Not even a place where a TV might have been. I see there’s a “custom made” plaque of sorts, where TVs go in the newer coaches, in the center of the area above the windshield and the roof, with three circular needle gauges about three inches in diameter, a temperature gauge, a barometer, and a compass. None of them appear to work. The temperature needle, I notice, is off the grid, so it might be working. It feels like its well over its maximum possible reading, in the coach. She pulls the shower curtain aside and checks out the tub.

Next she looks over the small L-shaped kitchen with the three-burner stove and the little oven. She pulls the oven door down, looks in. This obviously reveals a non-appropriate situation by the look on her face. She does the same to the micro-wave, a forty-nine dollar Target add-on probably bought at a garage sale. The micro-wave shelf is a hastily built box, stained a color that isn’t even close to the rest of the cabinetry. The cabinets above and below the sink all have a mismatched assortment of latches and pulls. She opens each one and looks in. She tries to open the little slatted window over the sink but the knob appears to be stripped and turns with no effect. There are broken and missing slats in the mini-blind covering it also.

Next to the tub, on the other side of the aisle, is a built-in wardrobe with two drawers underneath. She pulls out one of the drawers and has difficulty forcing it back shut. I make a mental note that the drawer slides are obviously damaged, maybe missing. She opens the wardrobe doors and looks in. Next to that is a three-way refrigerator.

“This refrigerator works on propane, 12V battery, or 110 house current depending on the switch you set it on,” is how it was explained by Charlie. Ultimately, I think it worked on 110 only, if at all.

She opens that too though, and I’m sure she almost passes out from the stench, but she tries not to show it. In my case, I’m not sure if the new stench is coming from the refrigerator she just opened or what’s sitting on the sofa. Both are down-wind of me. She flips up the shelf at the end of the counter and it falls right back down on its hinge. This would give her an additional ten inches of counter space if it had stayed up, making a total of two feet of usable counter space, maybe, but very difficult to walk down the aisle without bruising a hip. The kitchen and bath area are covered with a fake wood floor, also not for the RV industry, and not original.

Finally, the inevitable words come out of her mouth.

“I really like this one.”

That was all she said. I didn’t really like this one much at all. It was too big. It had clearly seen better days, and even worse, I was to find out later. It had a lot of “extras” that were not, shall we say, engineered correctly. It did only have 54,000 miles on the odometer though. Not bad for a 15-year old coach, less than 4,000 miles a year. I was going to have to succumb to the illusion that the mechanical on this Southwind was maintained better than the interior of the coach.

There were a lot of things on this coach that might not work properly, even though Charlie promised that everything would work when we drove off the lot. For one big thing, there was a one and a half inch gap above the windshield on the passenger side, and it looked like the glass was ready to fall out of the opening completely. A good push would have sent the huge piece of glass shattering to the gravel parking lot below.

“Gonna have to fix that,” I said.

‘Of course, no problem, we were going to fix that anyway,” Charlie shot back.

“I don’t know,” I start. I’m talking to Barb. “Lot of work here.”

“I know, but we can do it,” she said. “Mostly just needs to be cleaned up.”

Eternal optimism, if we just clean it up it will be good as new. This place was going to take a lot more that just a sponge, a mop and a bucket, a lot more.

I got up and walked outside to check out the exterior. Manson grunted himself up and followed me. You could tell he was happy about getting back outside. Then he said it again.

“New rubber all the way around, lotsa miles left in those tires, that’d cost ya a thousand by itself.”

The tires did look new; they at least looked shined up. They all had air. Each of the six of them has about 100psi, for future reference.

The outside of the Southwind was clean but had a dingy, un-waxed look.

“You can wax this right up,” Charlie says when I bring it up. “Just been out in the sun a lot. You’ll get it to look like new.”

I glance over the huge exterior surface of the coach and think that if I ever get this to look like new, it will kill me for the effort.

Well I figured I better ask, since we seemed to be sidestepping this issue, “does it run?”

“Sure it runs, starts right up.” Mr. Manson seemed offended. I dare I question that it would run.

My wife is walking around the coach and is at this very moment on the other side, away from me.

“I’ll just go get a key and be right back.” He disappears into the sales shack.

My wife comes around from the back of the motor home. “So what do you think?” she says.

In my head, I think we’re crazy, but I say something else. “It could work.” Pause. “We can probably afford the down. Did he say how much it was?” Pause. “I wonder how much the payments will be?” Long pause. “It does have new tires.” My wife doesn’t answer any of these queries.

Manson comes waddling back with a key on what looks like a hotel key ring. Big orange oval with a number on it, Room 237 I think.

He climbs back into the coach with a grunt or two and plops down in the driver’s seat. The big coach sways. I follow him in and watch him as he, inserts the key, pushes the shift into park, and turns. Nothing. He turns the key back then tries it again. I could hear a few faint clicks and then nothing.

“Battery’s dead, been sittin’ out here too long. I’ll get her plugged in and the batteries will charge up just fine. You should keep it plugged in anyway when you have it parked, just to make sure you have a full charge in the batteries.” Another lesson on the proper care and operation of the motor home, from Charles Manson, whom I am now convinced has never owned one of these.

He left out the part about motor homes having two, sometimes three DEEP CELL batteries. “DEEP CELL” translates into “fucking expensive”. In fact the most expensive batteries you can find, and, at the moment, I just believe that all they need is to be charged.

Charles Manson, sweat pouring from his brow again, yells out into the junkyard.

“Kurt, bring that charger up here and get the Southwind hooked up. Batteries are dead.”

A short, bent over, old man appears from the shadows, through the gate, pulling a large industrial battery charger, the cord unraveling and falling behind him as he goes. It’s plugged in somewhere back in the abyss of motor home parts and pieces, in a lean-to shed that will, I’m certain, ignite with the smallest of sparks, and has no business having power run to it. Certainly a Code issue. He hooks it up and, I assume, sets it to start the engine, because Charlie goes back in and, in a few brief seconds, the beefy V8 roars to life. It runs.

The Subtle Signs of Spring

2008-10-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

Tony Hillerman died last Sunday. He was 83. He died from what was reported as pulmonary failure. The lungs fill with fluid and you stop breathing, but it’s all related to congestive heart failure. Tony had survived two heart attacks and surgeries for prostate and bladder cancer. In his last years he was losing his eyesight, hearing, and had rheumatoid arthritis so advanced that it made it very difficult for him to continue pounding on his keyboard, but he did. I think I’ve read most every book he wrote, and have recommended him to countless others.

But what makes Tony Hillerman special to me, and why I am, maybe, more affected by his death, is I had the pleasure of taking classes from him at the University of New Mexico. He was an integral part of the Journalism Department when I attended undergraduate classes there in the early 1980s. I had him for several core classes. He was a past executive editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican and started his journalistic career as a reporter and editor for the Borger News-Herald in Borger, Texas. He also worked for the Morning Press-Constitution in Lawton, Oklahoma, and related a lot of stories about his days with United Press International in Oklahoma City. Tony later became head of the Journalism Department after I had graduated.

One class I had with him, on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 10:00, was one geared towards editorial and column writing. Professor Hillerman would have us write short pieces every week about any subject, which he would then review, grade, and pass around for all the students to read if he thought they were good enough to share. Only one of my submissions was copied for the class that semester, as I remember. Each week, on Friday, after passing out the work, he would take us, individually, out in the hallway, and give us feedback on our effort for the week.

One spring day on my way to school, I drove by this rather rotund lady bending over pulling weeds out of her flower garden, with, as I put it in the later piece, “Her posterior pointing heavenward and casting a shadow the length of the lawn.” It was a column about the subtle signs of spring, and I was rather proud of it.

Tony had, of course, read all my work. I know he did because I’ve still got his copious notes in red pencil all over the now yellowed typed copies. You paid attention to his critique because he was a published author, a mystery writer. He would later be President of the Mystery Writers of American, and winner of their Grand Master Award. He would also win the Golden Spur Award from Western Writers of America, among others.

So that Friday, after all the stories had been graded and returned, and the reading for the period passed out, Professor Hillerman called me out to the hallway about half-way through the session. He said that this was the best thing he had read of all my work and he emphasized that I should stick with humor writing. He went on to say that good humor writers are hard to find but usually an easier road to success, and that I could be “The next Mark Twain.” Oh yes, he said it, and for years I wanted to believe that he thought I was good enough to be the next Mark Twain. He didn’t say Royko, or Rooney, he said Twain. Of course, I think we all know what he probably meant, in context. I would settle for being the next Jean Shepherd, Robert Fulghum, Patrick McManus, or Tom Bodett, those being some of my personal favorites.

Speaking of favorites, one of my favorite Hillerman novels is one of the few that does not take place on the Navajo Reservation, “A Fly on the Wall.” In this book, the lead character is newspaper reporter, John Cotton, who stumbles onto a story of government corruption after the mysterious death of a friend and fellow reporter. We end up in New Mexico, though, in the end, fly-fishing on the Brazos River, where John Cotton is almost murdered. It was one of Hillerman’s earlier books, and we never got another book with John Cotton as a character. It didn’t get good reviews, but, I still count it as one of my favorites.

We did get several novels with two of his more famous characters, Lt. Joe Leaphorn, and Jim Chee. Professor Hillerman told us during one class session of how he had to buy back those characters so he could use them again. He had made the mistake of selling full rights to a studio for a movie that never materialized. He said all he could think of at the time was how excited he was that they were going to make a movie out of his book, how he was about to become rich, and he trusted his agent. The latter mistake he didn’t make again. After a few years of nothing from the studio, he decided to write another book surrounding his characters, and that is when he found out that he no longer held the rights to them, even though the studio had no intention of going forward with the movie. So for a price that Tony Hillerman indicated was a “bunch of money”, and a hard lesson, he bought his own characters back so he could include them in future books.

Four of the Navajo mysteries did make it to film. The first, “The Dark Wind”, which starred Lou Diamond Phillips, was supposed to be a theatrical release in 1991. However it was never shown in theatres and went directly to video. I remember there was a lot of controversy during the filming in New Mexico centered on the use, or lack of use, of native actors in major roles. In 2002, PBS’s Mystery, aired “Skinwalkers”, and “Coyote Waits” in 2003. “A Thief of Time” was the last film made of Hillerman’s work and aired in 2004.

Tony Hillerman was a decorated war hero too. He was a member of the 103rd Infantry Division that sailed from New York in convoy four months after D-Day on Oct 6, 1944. On October 20th they entered the port of Marseilles, in the south of France. Known as the Cactus Men, they were the first Allied troops to enter the port following the German withdrawal. The Germans had defended it strongly following D-Day in June.

The 103rd committed into it’s first action on Nov. 11, 1944 near St. Die. From there they began a six-month campaign, covering 500 miles up the eastern side of France, spending Christmas and New Year’s in foxholes, and finally making contact with the 5th Army in May of 1945 in Austria. It was during this campaign, at Lorraine-Alsace, that Professor Hillerman was severely wounded having both of his legs shattered. He returned to Oklahoma with a Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster. He always walked a bit labored, although few of us knew why.

So another in a line of people that have had an impact on my life is gone. He leaves the world better for having been in it, and a legacy of over 20 books and numerous citations to his credit. He was a success. He was acclaimed. I’m blessed to have had the opportunity to know him.

I have to admit I haven’t worked very hard to attain that expectation of being the next Mark Twain, but I haven’t given up yet.

Voyage of the Titanic - An Epic RV Adventure

2008-10-21T19:37:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1 – Sounded Doable

I remember getting the call, but I don’t remember actually getting it, if you know what I mean. I don’t know if I was at home, work, or on the way to or from work. I know the call came on January 15th, 1997. Not a day that will live in infamy, necessarily, but a date I remember for some reason. I might have gotten the call on the cell phone. We actually had one at the time, the big bulky flip phone with the antennae and the roaming charges. When you were out of the 2 mile service area that rarely worked, you paid a roaming charge. If you used your cell phone a lot, it was like taking on the national debt. Roaming charges were ugly.

“Daddy,” the voice said excitedly, “Tracy and I are finally getting married.” If I was out of the service area when I heard that announcement, it had already cost me $5.50. They’re right about weddings being expensive.

“Well congratulations,” I said. “When is the wedding?”

“June 6th. I’m so excited. We’re going to have it at the canal park, in the gazebo. It’s really beautiful. Flowers everywhere. You have to be there. I want you to give me away.” This call was going to cost me a fortune whether it was inside the service area or not.

I had already technically given her away to my ex-wife about 5 years ago when they moved to Buffalo, New York with her new husband. The second one or third one, I’m not really sure. Actually it was North Tonawanda, New York. Kind of rolls off the tongue doesn’t it, ton-a-wan-da? The new husband was from there originally, I guess, maybe not. I figure it’s an American Indian word for “Suburb of Buffalo.” Like Tucson, where I was living at the time, being an Indian word for “The spring at the bottom of Black Mountain.” But, actually it is. Indian shorthand of sorts, one word replaces eight. Probably have a hand sign that eliminates the word altogether. Bet it utilizes a middle finger.

“Don’t worry,” I told her, “We’ll be there.” How in the hell we were going to accomplish that feat, I wasn’t at all sure.

We were barely, and I stress that word, getting by, paycheck to paycheck, living in a 20-year-old double-wide, in a mobile home park that was a few miles east of the “Corridor of Death”. So named by the local Tucson press to identify the area where the majority of homicides had occurred in the Tucson area in the last few years. This corridor pretty much ran the length of the main drag in South Tucson, an incorporated city by itself, also known as the barrio. We had lived in the area for three years now. The very day we were moving in there was an incident involving firearms. Police were everywhere, and they kept our U-Haul truck from entering the park for several hours while they cleared up the matter. We should have known then. No one was hurt, and they found the suspect hiding under his girlfriend’s trailer we learned later. No one was hurt except me, who had to pay for an extra day on the U-Haul truck in order to finish moving in.

I had to leave town the next day, and left my wife and daughter to fend for themselves without water, electricity, heat, and facing a possible armed conflict in a high crime area. I left them for a week. It was because I had to be in California for training on my new job. I was staying at the Holiday Inn outside of LA and although I had heat, electricity and water, I also had a hotel full of cheerleaders running through the halls screeching, playing in the elevators, and practicing their routines at the pool, in the lobby and any other open space they could find. I was slowly going insane. My wife and daughter, to this day, have not forgiven me for leaving them without utilities in the drab little double-wide though. I, to this day, insist I suffered more. These weren’t Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, or even high school cheerleaders, it was a competition for Pop Warner cheerleaders. Yep, average age of 8.

Did I mention the drive-by shooting at the nearby high school? That changed the face of high schools throughout the city a few years back, and was also one of the homicides chalked up in the “Death Corridor.” It happened at my daughter’s new high school. High schools throughout the city now had fences, razor-wire, and guards. It was said that our prisons looked like schools and our schools like prisons. They looked at least similar to me. The difference being one was to keep people in and the other was to keep people out. Although, once you were on the high school campuses, getting out wasn’t easy either.

I only tell you all this so you understand the conditions we were living under, and why the idea of purchasing a Class A motor home and driving it across country 5,000 miles might have been a bit insane, even if we could have afforded it.

But that is exactly what Plan A became. We would buy an RV, a used one surely, drive it to Buffalo, NY in four days, go to the wedding, and save all kinds of money by staying in our own “hotel”. We added the Ford Museum, Hannibal, Missouri (boyhood home of Mark Twain), Canada, Niagara Falls, and would hit Washington DC and Graceland on the way back. Sounded doable, at least it did at the time. We immediately began shopping for the motor home.

We had recently owned a “conversion van” of 70s vintage. Those are the Class B motor home classification. They have a raised roof, or a lowered floor, so you can stand in them, a pull out bed, table, a stove, sink and ice box with some limited cabinet storage. We had completely remodeled the inside of this one, and then sold it, at a considerable loss, after the transmission went out. I remember my father, who was visiting when the transmission went out, saying “That’s too bad, it still has good rubber.” I think that goes back to the war days when rubber was a scare commodity and tires that weren’t bald were just as scarce. “Good rubber” became a very important element in this greatest of RV adventures to come.

Transmission failure was the monkey on my back. Every used car I had owned in the last five years had developed transmission problems. I had had two of them rebuilt on two different vehicles and they amazingly cost the same amount: $1,700. I chose not to rebuild the van’s transmission, but I’m sure it would have cost $1,700. I took a road trip with a friend once, and the transmission went out on his car in the middle of the night outside of Stillwater, Oklahoma. The monkey didn’t care if I owned the car or not. The nice old mechanic, that worked all day on a Sunday to rebuild the transmission, charged us $1,700.

The Class B was a Chevy van. Yeah, can’t you almost hear Sammy Johns belting out the chorus about making love in his Chevy Van? Our Chevy van was known as the “Park N Bark” by our friends, because of a local dog grooming business that used an identical vehicle. We called him Bernie. He had a gas-sucking V8, a foot of extension at the back, and a foot and a half of fiberglass roof cap that ran the length of the conversion. We put a swamp cooler in it (not able to afford the preferred AC unit) so we could survive the Arizona summers, the dry heat travels even to the highest elevations, and we had gone camping in it on many occasions. It was the first of a long line of Recreational Vehicles we would own over the years. The Class A motor home was the dream though.

We actually drove a used one on the same consignment lot where we had purchased Bernie. It was great sitting in the armchair driver’s seat and maneuvering the coach the few blocks the dealer let me drive it. It was fully self-contained, had automatic levelers and the coach was in excellent condition with less than 12,000 miles on it. We didn’t have anywhere near the $28,000 asking price, so I reluctantly gave back the keys and told him that, even though it was, it wasn’t exactly what we were looking for. That was a year prior to Plan A, but it was where the dream to own a Class A started.

It so happened, that every day on my way to work, I passed a dirt lot with a bunch of motor homes on it that looked every bit like a junk yard. I had always thought it was a place where motor homes went to die and be parted out. But it had a sign out front, “Desert RV”, and there were a few coaches parked under the sign that appeared to be in one piece, possibly running, and for sale. I starting thinking this might be a place to get a bargain on a used coach. They obviously enjoyed a low overhead, and maybe they passed that savings on to the buyer by way of their margins. Here we might be able to get a Class A that we could possibly afford. Well, could at least afford the down payment. I’d seen many an older motor home still running down the road, and I knew that mileage was usually low on these units. People just didn’t get to use them much after they bought them. They ended up parked for months at a time in storage yards, beat to death by the elements so the outsides looked grim but the interiors were often in excellent shape. Even if their past owners were “full-timers”, people that actually lived in them, whether by choice or otherwise, they usually stayed in one place for long periods of time.

So I told my wife about it, and that following Saturday, sometime in March 1997, we drove up to the sales shack, I’m not kidding, on the lot of Desert RV and parked in front. Immediately I noticed that I was right about the junk yard. There were motor home parts and pieces everywhere behind the chain link fence with the razor wire. This was predominantly a place were moving vehicles no longer could be made to move. As soon as we got out of the car, the proverbial car salesman emerged from the shack. He was dressed in yellow plaid pants, a noticeable amount short of the tops of his white, I’m still not kidding, white leather shoes with a matching white leather belt. The wrinkled short-sleeved white shirt clung to his ample frame and looked like he had slept in it for several days, maybe weeks. Dark circles of sweat were visible under his arms and the way he smelled, I was going with weeks. A crumpled and stained yellow tie rounded out the ensemble. He reached out his meaty hand and I reluctantly shook it.

“Well, what can I do for you folks today?”

“We’re looking for a motor home,” I said.

“I see”, he said. “Well we have a few here. How much are you’all thinking of spending?” This is the trap question, the one that drags you in to commitment, the question that limits to a great extent what you are going to be shown. This question has to be answered carefully.

“We’re just looking,” I said. It clearly didn’t please him, but he kept up the cheerful front.

“Well, what do ya want to look at?” He put an emphasis on the word “look”

I had my eye on a Class C that was a step up from a conversion van, but still built on a van chassis. Class Cs have the signature cab-over bed. He opened up the door and we climbed inside. I could tell right away that she didn’t like it. The “she” being my wife.

“What do you think?” I said. “Pretty nice. Lots of room. Looks like it’s in good condition. Look, it only has 75,000 miles on it.” I added that last part pointing at the odometer as though we should really believe what the odometer reading was.

“Has brand new rubber on it,” the salesman said. “Hardly driven a’tall. Look at how good a condition everythin’ is. Looks to most like brand new. And I guarantee everything works, or we’ll make it work ‘fore you take delivery. We stand by what we sell.”

Our salesman’s name was, you’re not going to believe this, Charles Manson. I swear to god. He gave me a business card with “Desert RV, “Charles A. Manson”, the address, and a phone number crossed off on the bottom, and a new number penned in. I wondered if he did it on all the business cards he had or just a few at a time. I could see him sitting at his desk in the shack passing the time by crossing off the phone number on his business cards and writing in the new one.

“I’ll bet you get a lot of comments about your name,” I snickered.

“Not much, why?” he replied.

I let it go. I could hardly wait to tell everyone that Charlie Manson was trying to sell me a motor home.

When Barb stepped inside the 1982, 33 1/2 foot Fleetwood Southwind, with the queen bed in the back, there was no turning back

The Minute I left Garcia's

2008-10-17T13:11:00.000-07:00

I did it again. I’ve done it several times in my storied career. If I had been alive in the 1940s, there would have been a lot of ships sunk. “Loose Lips Sink Ships”, the famous slogan from World War II. Someone tells you something, they tell you not to tell anyone, or specifically a certain individual, and you do it anyway, for whatever reason, probably an abbreviated version of the something leaving out key identifying source information, and it invariably gets back to the source who told you not to tell, that you did. The interesting point of all that, is the person that told you the something in the first place, was probably told the same thing, not to tell anyone.

The impact to me of these “breaches of trust” has been loss of friends, loss of jobs even, and loss of being trusted with “sensitive” information. The worst thing the teller of the something can say to you is “I guess I can’t trust you anymore.” Trust me to do what, not do what they just did, or when did they actually decide they trusted me with information they were entrusted with? That’s right; don’t tell me, or most anybody for that matter, anything, because it will probably be repeated. In my experience, it runs about 90% of the time that you tell someone not to say anything, they do it anyway, and to someone they trust not to tell.

As I was getting the full diatribe about the breach from the person yesterday about the something, I flashed back immediately to the feeling I had the day Glenn Holm called me into the break room first thing on a Monday morning in 1973 to tell me we were no longer friends. It was an absolutely horrible feeling and it’s stayed with me to this day. It wasn’t a breach of trust, per se, it was that situation where you tell someone you ‘trust’ something, and you trust they won’t repeat it to the person you said it about, because you don’t want the person you’re talking about to know what you said about them, and the person you told knows that right up front. But they tell anyway, and in this case, they told the minute I left Garcia’s. I guess the information was just too good.

Glenn and I started at Mountain Bell in Laramie, Wyoming, at virtually the same time. He was hired as a Commercial Representative and I transferred to Laramie from Santa Fe, NM, as a Service Representative. Similar jobs, but one paid twice as much as the other, and it wasn’t my job title. When I first checked into the job openings available in the Laramie office I talked with Office Manager Charles (Chuck) Holt, and he told me that he did indeed have a Service Rep opening, but said nothing about the Commercial Rep opening that was also available. Now this was right around the time that AT&T had signed a consent decree with the government to put more emphasis on non-traditional jobs, putting women outside hanging from the poles, and putting men inside sitting at the desks and switchboards. Chuck having me as a Service Representative in his office of six woman was perfect for him to meet his quotas. The Commercial Rep job was traditionally a male job because one of the responsibilities besides acting as an Assistant Manager was collecting the pay phones, a job which required lifting hundreds of pounds of coins from the car to the airport freight terminal. Glenn was his man for that job.

So I show up with my family, wife and infant daughter, find an apartment, and go to work a few months after that first conversation. Glenn had already been working for a few weeks, remember, in an office full of woman, and gladly took me under his wing when I started. We immediately hit it off, taking coffee breaks together, talking football, wives, women, the usual stuff. Hanging out after work at a happy hour now and then, or watching Monday Night Football at his house, going to the Wyoming Cowboys’ games, and even going to get a “Dream Steak for Four” in Bosler after the game once with our wives. The thing was, Glenn was paying for everything; the drinks, the game tickets, the dinner tabs, and the beer on Monday night. I wasn’t making enough money to pick up a tab at the time, let alone afford to go out and have drinks, but I truly looked forward to the day when I actually could reciprocate. I’ve bought a lot of dinners, drinks, tickets and beer since those days, but I never got to pay back Glenn for any of it, and I always felt bad about that.

The breach of trust incident occurred at one of those after work, Friday night Happy Hours. The ones where you get home at 1:00 am but you promised your wife you would only be going out for an hour or so. After a few drinks too many, sitting with Glenn, myself, and three other guys from work, all in outside plant jobs, I said the something to Tim next to me, when Glenn went to pee. I probably don’t need to add that Glenn was buying for everybody.

Tim said to me something like “Glenn’s sure a nice guy, isn’t he?” We were almost at that “love ya man” point in our drinking that evening.

I said something like “Yeah, but I should have had his job.” I went on to describe how that damn Chuck Holt hadn’t even told me about the opening and I was certainly qualified and that it was all about this damn Equal Employment Opportunity shit, and I think I finished right about the time Glenn got back to the table. That’s what I said and that’s how I remember it.

True to form, as most often is the case, what I said, got embellished quite a bit in the retelling by none other than Tim whom I expected, drunk or not, not to tell Glenn I had said those things. I left shortly after Glenn returned, because I had made the mistake of calling home and telling my wife I would be home in an hour, three hours ago, and well, it was just time for me to go home. I thanked Glenn profusely for buying yet again and headed out the door.

That following Monday morning Glenn walked up to me the minute I arrived and said he needed to talk to me. We went to the break room and I got my coffee. Glenn was sitting back from the table arms folded in front of him, waiting for me to sit down. I had no idea what was up, but it didn’t look good.

And that’s how I started the conversation, “Man, what’s the matter?”

“Look,” he started, “I don’t mind picking up the tab for people, I like doing it, but I don’t like it when somebody talks behind my back.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I stammered back.

“You know. I pay for your drinks, I’ve paid for you and your wife to go out to dinner, I’ve picked up the tab a lot, and then you go and tell people that you should have had my job? I don’t get it?” There was an awkward pause. “But it’s over. I’m not doing it anymore.”

I sat there literally stunned. I couldn’t talk. This feeling of incredible sadness came over me and it seemed like all the strength was being sucked out, not knowing if I was feeling sorry for myself or what I had done.

“Glenn, that’s not what I meant. I just meant I should have had a chance at the job, not that you shouldn’t have gotten it.”

“That’s not what I heard you said. Tim says to me, ‘What’s that guy have it out for you or something? Told me he deserved the Commercial Rep job, not you. Kind of biting the hand that feeds him isn’t it?’”

“I don’t let people do that to me. That’s it, he said, consider us done.”

The words stung and I just sat there. No argument was going to change this. I had said it after all. He got up from the table and walked out, back to his desk at the back of the office. I did the same.

Not too long after that, Glenn quit Mountain Bell and bought the Sears Outlet franchise in Cody, Wyoming. I offered to come over the Saturday morning they were moving and help them load up the U-Haul truck. He told me to come by around 10:00. When I drove up to his house that morning, the U-Haul truck was driving off. He couldn’t have timed it better. Man, you can believe how that felt.

My wife and I were traveling through Cody on our way to Yellowstone Park a few summers later, and I drove down Main Street to find Glenn and Nancy Holm’s Sears Outlet store. I found it easy enough. Right there on Main Street. Glenn was outside sweeping the sidewalk when I drove up and he recognized me right away. He ran up to the car window and asked how we were doing. What we were doing in Cody. The usual stuff. He wanted us to come on in and get caught up. I told him we couldn’t; we had to get going to make the park by dark. We had reservations. He understood.

“Good to see you,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Have a good time in Yellowstone.”

That was the last time I saw him, but I think about him a lot. Every time I’m in one of those “breach of trust” situations. The feeling is always the same. I wish people wouldn’t tell me things. Maybe someday I’ll learn to tell them I don’t want to know.

Have You Been Drinking This Evening, Sir? - Relief and Disbelief

2008-10-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

My appearance date was set two months out, so I would be expected to appear and, of course, plead “not guilty” on the appointed date in May. I counted the days, made sure I knew where to go (remember I had lived in Tucson for less than a year), checked on everything I could find about DUI on the web, asked everybody I knew about what to expect, and scheduled a vacation day for that date. The one thing I didn’t do was get an attorney.

As the date approached I got more and more nervous about what was going to happen to me and less and less comfortable with my decision not to enlist the help of a capable attorney. My decision was predicated by the fact that I didn’t have even close to enough money to pay for one. So, I was hoping at the very least, I would get a public defender assigned to my case. I watched enough TV to know how this process worked, not having any direct experience with the criminal justice system.

On the appointed date, I headed down into the bowels of the city of Tucson, found the Municipal Court Complex and waited outside the door for the building to open with a handful of other unhappy looking people. I was told I would find my docket number, assigned courtroom and judge on a bulletin board just inside the door. I found the board with a list of close to 75 people, just inside the door on the left. I crowded to the front, got the information and wrote it down on the legal pad I had lifted from work.

Okay, have 2 hours to kill before court is in session. Judge William McCoy. Court Room number 575. “I wonder if he’s the ‘real McCoy,’” I thought, trying to make light of my current situation.

I headed for the court building and sat in the courtyard wondering how I had landed myself in the dregs of society. You know what I mean, there is a certain segment of the group milling about the courtyard that is familiar with the system, and then there is that other small group that looks, worried, upset, lost and totally out of place. I was definitely in the latter. I read for a while, and then watch the people. I’m intrigued by a girl standing on the corner of the courtyard yelling up three stories to some guy who is leaning out the window of the detention center.

“They’re not letting me out, Maria,” he screams down onto the street.

“What am I supposed to do?” Maria says. She looks around to see who is watching. I avert my eyes to the sidewalk. “I don’t have enough money to get bail. I don’t know what to do.”

“You have to get me outta here,” he pleads. I’m surprised that they are not speaking in Spanish, as most of the others in courtyard. “Please get me outta here. Go talk to (I can’t make out the name.) She’ll help you.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she repeats. “Miguel, what I’m supposed to do.”

Almost instantly he turns ugly. “Get the fuck outta of here,” he screams, “Useless fucking bitch! Just get the fuck outta of here!” he pauses for effect. “Puta! What the fuck good are you?” and he disappears into the building. She looks around the courtyard again to see who might be watching. The entire courtyard is watching.

She screams up, “Miguel!” No one comes to the window. The windows are slender, tall, and tinted very dark, with the bottom foot or so, folding out. He had to stick his head out the window to talk to Maria, but he doesn’t reemerge.

I immediately feel sorry for her, but know there is nothing I can or will do to help. She waits a few minutes then walks out of the courtyard and down the street. I think she’s probably more worried about him getting out, and I wonder just how much she did to facilitate his release. She almost seemed to skip down the street when she was leaving. We, the dregs of society, look at each other for a moment and then go on with what we were doing, reading the paper, reading a book, or smoking a cigarette, waiting for our appointed hour to arrive.

“Can I bum a smoke?” A horrible foul smell reaches my nostrils. I look up to see a guy in a tattered brown blazer standing very near to me, but not in front of me, so I didn’t see him approach. He’s wearing a straw cowboy hat. There’s a pretty large hole in the crown. His front teeth, bottom and top, are missing. He’s not carrying anything, but is obviously a member of the homeless society. There are a lot of them in Tucson because it’s warm most of the year. I don’t want to give him a smoke. I want him to get a job. I realize that’s not realistic. I tell him instead it’s my last one.

He sees the pack in my shirt pocket, so he doesn’t believe me.

“Come on man, I need a smoke.”

I reach in my pocket and pull out the pack intending to give him one. He snatches the pack out of my hands before I have a chance to react, and is sprinting out of the courtyard at a pretty good clip. I can imagine the satisfaction on his face. It pisses me off, but there is nothing I can do about it. I’m not chasing some homeless person through the streets of downtown Tucson for a half-empty pack of cigarettes. I notice how I think it’s half-empty instead of half-full.

It’s now 9:30 and I’m to be in the courtroom by 10:00. I start for the door and the metal detectors, and I notice several others are moving in the same direction. Someone else presses my floor on the elevator buttons, and I watch the numbers. We stop on every floor. When 5 is highlighted I get out. Four others get off on this floor as well. I’m struck by how much this reminds me of a college classroom building. I find 575 and go inside. There are two guys in suits, one girl in a yellow pantsuit, and a uniformed person, walking around the front of the room, behind the railing and in front of the bench. The suits, all three of them, are stacking files, pulling stuff out of briefcases, preparing.

I take a seat in the middle row close to the aisle. The room is starting to fill up. I sit there staring at the suits, my hands clasped to the paperback book I brought. I want a cigarette, but I know I don’t have them anymore and I can’t smoke in here anyway. One of the attorneys from the Tucson Prosecutor’s Office starts calling off names. I’m pretty sure I heard my name. Pretty sure, so I listen up.

“Those people I just called, please come down to the front row and take a seat,” he says.

Yellow pantsuit smiles at us as we shuffle into the front row. There are six of us, four guys and two girls. We range in age from, say, 24ish to 50ish, I’m guessing.

The attorney reads the names again. Now I’m sure I’m in the right place. I heard my name clearly. One of us is missing. His name is called twice, then the file returned to the desk stack, the remaining manila folders, he holds between his hands, and looks directly at us.

“You all tested below the legal limit,” he says, “charges are being dropped. You are all free to go.”

We look at each other in relief and disbelief, and then he adds, “You will have no arrest or arraignment record.”

The bunch of us gets up almost at the same instant, file out of the bench, and head out the door of courtroom. I think we’re all thinking we better get out of here quick before they change their minds. No one speaks to anyone as we wait for the elevator. Within a few minutes I’m back out in the courtyard thinking I should go look for that vagrant, and see if he has an extra smoke.

I'm Heading for the Nearest Circle K

2008-10-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

I have a John McCain story. Yes, theee John McCain, the one running for President. Granted, my John McCain story will be a lot more valuable if he actually wins the election, but, still, I tell everyone that I personally know John McCain.

I would like to point out up front that he probably doesn’t remember me from Adam, but he sat in the chair next to my desk on several occasions and we chatted as though we’d known each other for a long time. He’s a very easy person to talk to, as you might imagine.

I was the Town Clerk in a small southern Arizona town, and John McCain was and is a Senator from that state. It was prior to one of his now famous “town halls” that he was sitting in the chair by my desk, making small talk about the major topic of the day: smoking. Or more correctly, the 60 cent per pack tax that was on the ballot in the upcoming general election in Arizona. This tax would raise the price of a pack of cigarettes to well over $2.00 at the time and was to be used by the State partly to educate young people not to engage in the habit. All because then Governor Jane Dee Hull and the legislature had cut the funding for the Tobacco Education and Prevention Program. Know as TEPP. A very successful program and well know nationally, which was launched in 1996. I smoked. I wasn’t happy about another tax on cigarettes.

John McCain had been an admitted two-pack a day smoker for 25 years, and had finally kicked the habit in 1980. He had had some health issues related to skin cancer and just plain decided that smoking wasn’t a good idea. Maybe because he thought he needed more time to get to the presidency. A lot was made of it in the press at the time, as I remember, a lot of it front page.

This proposed increase in the cigarette tax was a pretty big topic of discussion in the small town of Sahuarita, Arizona also. A majority of the town council, town manager, and town staff, smoked. None of us was in favor of paying 60 cents more in tax for a pack of cigarettes. That would bring the total tax on a pack of cigarettes to $1.18, almost doubling the cost.

I argued with John McCain, while he was sitting in my office chair, that it would hurt the low income individuals the most. How about the fixed incomes? Senior citizens made up the majority of the population in this small community and they had been smoking since smoking was cool. Some of these people in their eighties still smoking two packs a day of Pall Mall Reds and Camels. TEPP advertising wasn’t having any effect on them for sure.

By the way, if you had seen these ads, you would have wondered why we were spending tax money on this drivel. They were almost sickeningly humorous. Talked about for their weirdness, sure, but effect, I didn’t think so, especially with the teens they were targeting. We all thought they were being produced by some Madison Avenue ad agency. In actuality though, they were done by a local Phoenix company which grew to be one of the largest ad agencies in the state, predominantly from the TEPP contract money. I wouldn’t waste time betting that there wasn't some shady negotiation in that contract award.

Arizona only spends a small 4.5% of the estimated $518.4 million in tobacco-generated revenue on educating the masses of the ills of smoking. I should mention that some of that five hundred million dollars is part of the tobacco settlement payments and not a result of the cigarette tax.

I continued my argument that smokers shouldn’t have to pay to educate people not to smoke. Shouldn’t that come for that very tobacco settlement and not from me? And how about the loss in tax revenue if the program really was effective and people stopped buying cigarettes?

I also maintained that banning smoking, getting rid of Joe Camel and educating against tobacco use was only serving to make it more attractive to kids. Even if they were showing ads on TV with blackened lungs in jars, and people having their cancerous jaws removed, and people with artificial voice boxes. The bottom line is it was a forbidden thing, and that made it real attractive to a teenager.

McCain generally agreed with my points, or so it seemed, but issued the prerequisite response.

“You really need to quit,” he said.

I used my prerequisite response to everyone who says that to me.

“I have quit, Senator McCain, quitting is easy. I’ve quit at least a hundred times.” I think I’m funny but admittedly steal a lot of my lines.

“I quit smoking over ten years ago,” he said, “and let me tell you, the craving never goes away. I still want a cigarette right now.”

He paused for a second. Looked out my window to the desert outside, and then turned back to look me in the eyes.

“My friend, let me tell you, if the Russians ever push that button, the first place I’m heading is the nearest Circle K and buy me a pack of cigarettes.” And then he smiled.

It’s my own personal McCain story. It might not be much, but it happened, although the witnesses are nil. The cigarette tax issue did come up during the town hall discussion, but it centered around the impact the added cost would have on the residents there. John McCain just gave them a lot of political lip service, but didn’t talk about his personal smoking experience.

The cigarette tax initiative passed by a very, and I mean very, slim margin. It was something like 17 votes. It was hailed as a victory and a clear indication that the citizens of Arizona wanted TEPP and thought it was worth the millions being spent. That figure being around $23 million per year. And it has, according to sources, resulted in significant decreases in the ranks of smokers both adult and young adult (18-24) in Arizona. They also claim a reduction in the number of smokers that are low income and low education (their labels). Ya think? But do you think, really, that the Tobacco Education and Prevention Program’s $23 million dollars was responsible for that? It was a direct result of Arizonans voting to double the price of a pack of cigarettes and give over 50% of the cost to the state.

And let me tell you, they lied and told us the money would be used for additional health care expenses that smokers bring to the table. Instead they ended up with a huge budget surplus that ended up in the general fund, and they spent it anyway they saw fit.

I still smoke. I still pay exorbitant taxes for the pleasure, or whatever you want to call it: habit, addiction, rebellion against society. It’s probably the most unfair, yet profitable for the states, tax there is.

And if they're hugely successful in their attempts to reduce the number of smokers in Arizona, they're going to have a serious budget shortfall. Might want to think about that.

GET THIS MAN OUTTA HERE!

2008-10-07T18:49:00.000-07:00

GET THIS MAN OUTTA HERE!

In the fall of 1972 I was wanted by the FBI. My mother told me this, frantically, on the phone. I told her to calm down. She was rather freaked out by the FBI knocking on her door, as you might imagine. Two agents actually went to our house, showed their IDs, and asked where they could find me. I told her I had taken care of it, not to worry, and that it was just a big misunderstanding. I had just returned for my second year of college, and had to hang up because I was late for “Work Study”.

Work Study for me was climbing inside, literally, huge pans and stainless steel mixing bowls, in an attempt to clean them for the next day’s food preparation. I also ran the “macheen,” as my co-worker, Manny, called it, in between inserting myself into food-encrusted pots. My friends all worked in the offices around campus, or in the library. I made the mistake of putting my summer experience as a fry cook, on my Work Study application. For this, I was banished to dish and pot washing at the Connor Hall cafeteria to help pay my tuition. I was severely jealous of my fellow Work Study recipients, and I tried every semester to have my work assignment changed. It never happened. For those of you who never had Work Study, just so you know, your paycheck went directly to the Registrar’s Office to pay down your tuition bill.

The FBI was looking for me because I was a draft-dodger. I was ordered to report for the Armed Services Physical Examination in Casper, Wyoming in August 1972, but I didn’t show up. I didn’t show up because I told the 92-year-old lady at the Selective Service Office that I would be back in New Mexico by then, that I was getting married in September, and then returning to school. I asked her if it was possible for me to take the physical down there which was scheduled for the end of September. That was fine with her, she said, but maybe she said it because she secretly enjoyed getting us young men put on the FBI’s most wanted list. Not a lot of exciting stuff happening in that small town. I never got anything in writing, my first lesson with regard to that rule.

I was ordered to report for the Armed Services Physical Examination because I scored a low number in the annual Selective Service Draft. Your birth date became a lottery number 1-366 randomly pulled from two drums, one with the birth date and one with a number. So, for example, if September 10th was pulled from the one drum, and 127 pulled from the other, then everyone born on September 10th would have a lottery number of 127. Then you had a letter drawn, A-Z, to determine the last name order for each local board. Then you had the number of inductees needed by the armed services to meet troop levels.

My draft lottery took place on February 2, 1972, for those of us born in 1953. Nine days before my 19th birthday. All the Freshmen men sat around in the dorms that day, waiting for the numbers to be announced, like college football players waiting to be drafted, but we didn’t want to go in the first round. I got number 26. The year prior my birth date got 351. Just my luck. We had two big “winners” in the draft lottery on my floor of the dorm; a #3 and a #6. That afternoon they both got drunk and enlisted in the Army. If you enlisted, the theory was, you could have some control over your military career. The “control” part wasn’t really true, we later found out, and you served a four-year enlistment instead of the inductee’s three. There were other enticements they used, though, to get you to voluntarily sign up. One of them was the automatic induction if you didn’t show for the draft physical. The fact that you held a lottery number in the top third was still their best recruitment tool, however.

I started doing the math, not one of my strongest subjects, but I refused to cave. I knew, for example, that 49,514 men between the ages of 19 and 26 had been inducted in 1972. (There were an estimated 70,000 draft-evaders and deserters living in Canada by that time also.) I expected it to be less in 1973 since the induction number had dropped every year from 1969, when the first lottery was held since 1942. Prior to that, the draft, which was still in place, was done by oldest first.

So I still, in my feeble opinion, had a pretty good chance of not getting an induction notice even though my number was 26, depending on how many men were needed. In the 1970 draft the highest lottery number called was 125. So everybody with a higher number 126 through 366, and likely some individuals with #125 because of last name order, were not drafted. In 1970, 162,146 men were inducted through the draft. As a general rule, the Selective Service said that the upper third of the list would be inducted, the middle third would probably not, and the bottom third would definitely not have to forcibly tote a gun and wear green for three years.

Then there was President Richard Milhous Nixon, who campaigned for his second term on the promise to end the draft as soon as he was re-elected. Since he was also intending to withdraw from Viet Nam, I was putting my faith in the hope that the draft would indeed end in 1973, before my number came up.

So if Nixon didn’t follow through on this promise to end the draft and pull out of Vietnam, like most politicians once they get in office, then I still might have a chance of not being drafted since they would pull all eligible men from the other lower 25 lottery birthdays first to fill the quota. Where they got the quota from is something I was never able to determine, and wouldn’t it suck if you were the last man drafted? The last man drafted to make the 400,000 troop strength number, but you were really number four-hundred thousand and one. Would they let you go once they did the recount?

Registrants with low lottery numbers had to report for a physical, mental, and moral evaluation at a Military Entrance Processing Station to see if we were fit for military service. So that summer, after the draft lottery and my #26, I got the order to report for the Armed Services Physical Examination which was being held in Casper WY in August. I was home for the summer working at the Drive-Inn 4U, my now ill-fated food service experience.

I knew there was very little chance of me not being classified 1-A, but I was hearing about all kinds of ways to beat the draft. One that I actually heard a lot was that you could inject yourself with peanut butter to raise your blood pressure temporarily. I’m not sure how that worked. I can’t imagine peanut butter going through a syringe, but needles were out for me anyway. Another was simply to not register since it would take them a while to find you. Already missed that one, but it usually only took them a week to find you and then you risked immediate induction. You could say you were a homosexual (they weren’t “gay” yet). That would raise some eyebrows, but not always work, although some really practiced at it. I know of at least one lottery “winner” who just walked out of the physical. Many tried to score as low as possible on the mental segment of the test. That didn’t work either. Intelligence wasn’t a requirement to get shot at, I guess. I wasn’t going to be able to get that college deferment that filled up the universities during the 60s either, because they reformed the draft in 1971. You could only get a deferment now until the end of the current semester unless you were a senior, then they would allow you to finish the academic year. Still that could buy you some time if the draft was going to end before you were called up. And then there was my method, I just didn’t show up for the physical. It took the FBI two weeks to find me, probably because I was from a small town in northern Wyoming, still, not a very effective method of avoiding the draft, unless you were already packed and headed for British Columbia.

So I got it all straightened out by reporting to the local Selective Service Board in Las Vegas, NM, where they scheduled me for the physical at the end of September, in Albuquerque, Albuquerque being the closest MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station). We traveled there on a military “school” bus. You know the ones with the hard fiberglass seats. The trip was about 124 miles and would take us 2 hours. We were to arrive at the bus to leave by oh five hundred hours. Yeah, that’s five am.

Within 5 minutes of my arrival at the bus, I was elevated in rank. I was now responsible for the conduct of everyone on the bus, I was told. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to accomplish that, but it was clear that they had picked me because I was the smallest, weakest and least likely to keep order on that bus. In other words, they picked me, seated ignorantly in the front, for their entertainment. I didn’t know anyone on the bus, and most were Hispanic, talking amongst themselves in Spanish of which I couldn’t decipher a word. Well, not exactly true. I did know how to say phrases like, “This street is beautiful,” “Turn to page 3”, “Where’s the bathroom,” and “I want some more beans (or another beer), please,” among others. I didn’t hear any of those familiar phrases in the bus on the way to Albuquerque.

The trip was uneventful. I know this because I’m sure I would have mental scars from my attempts at maintaining order on the bus, and I don’t seem to have any. We disembarked on a downtown sidewalk in front of a tall brick building, and were ushered inside, up two flights of stairs, two abreast, to a classroom, where we were told to take a seat. That’s when the fun started. We were told what our day would entail, how long it would take, and how we were getting home. We were each handed a clipboard, told to fill out the information on the top of several forms, then we counted out in tens. Then the first group was, “stand up, shoulders back, follow me, single file, no talking,” the rest of us were to wait our turn.

The first thing I noticed was the yellow shoe prints on the floor in the hallways with “This Way” printed on each one, going in one direction, and back the other way on the other side of the hall. There were other directions on the shoe prints, like “Stop”, “Wait” “Go Left”, “Go Right”, I later discovered. It was like a yellow brick road. Follow the yellow shoe prints. They were on the floor in a normal stride, so you could actually step from shoe print to shoe print, and we all tried to do that, as we were led down the hallway. The heel and sole cutout must have been made from a size-13 shoe though, because it dwarfed my foot as I went from “This Way” to “This Way”.

The first station we came to was a blood pressure check. Four positions in an 8 X 8 cubicle, each manned by a soldier in a white smock, obviously with no medical experience, putting on the cuff, squeezing the bubble several times, releasing the pressure, making the reading, writing it down on the chart on the clipboard and we were told to follow the prints to the next station.

The next station was a vision check. We were told to read the middle line of an eye chart. While I was standing there trying to focus on it, I heard two different series of letters coming from the two men on either side of me. So, I just said “L M O 9 D G” without pausing. They checked me off. I either hit it perfectly without seeing them, or they really didn’t care whether I could see or not. After all, I was being tested to see if I was physically fit enough to be a target.

Follow the yellow shoe prints to the next booth and the next. Getting our ears looked at in one, our throats in the next. All in an assembly line system. All done very quickly and no one has failed yet, that I can tell. We follow the shoe prints to a door where we seem to be stacking up. The shoe print says “wait”. So we do. Up to this point we have stripped down to our pants, carrying our shirts and t-shirts with us along the trail. Finally the door opens and we are herded into a large room, a gymnasium. We follow the yellow shoe prints to a circle which runs around the center of the floor. There are now 30 of us. Three group of ten.

The sergeant yells for us to get out of our pants. Put our clothes in front of us, clipboard on top and face out from the circle. Several of us don’t understand the directions and are screamed at until we are all facing out, standing in only our tighty-whities (thank god I listened to my mother and am wearing clean underwear) or our colorful boxer shorts, but we try not to look at each other.

“Face forward,” the sergeant screams, and I mean screams, at the man next to me. My eyes are locked on the wall. He walks around the circle. I know he’s a sergeant because my Dad was one in the Army. He was a staff sergeant, and I’ve seen his stripes. I know this guy is at least a higher rank than a private.

“Drop your shorts around your ankles,” he screams. The room echoes. Then there is only the quiet shuffling sound of men dropping their drawers. I feel the cold air contracting the balls. “Arms, at your sides,” he screams. Then he walks from man to man around the circle, telling them to turn their head and cough, as a doctor-type follows and writes whatever result they are trying to determine on each man’s clipboard. I found out he wasn’t just following. He was actively involved in poking his fingers half way through your lower abdomen while you were turned and coughing.

“Everybody turn around. One eighty. Do it now! Keep eyes front. Bend over and grab your ankles!” I’m sure that was a sight. You could hear a pin drop after that order was executed. Then footsteps, stop, footsteps, grunt, footsteps, stop. They’re behind me, groping where I would rather not they grope, and then they move on. I assume I’m an acceptable asshole. I don’t move. Footsteps. Stop. Footsteps. Stop.

“GET THIS MAN OUTTA HERE!”

Someone has obviously come up with a unique way of getting out of the draft. We all strain looking up-side-down through our knees to see what’s going on. We must have looked like a flock of ostriches. The only thing I can make out is a naked guy with his drawers at his ankles waddling quickly out of the room dragged by his arm. The double doors open and shut and he is gone.

“Don’t anybody move!” our leader screams. The review continues, and then we are told to turn back around pull up our shorts, and get dressed. We follow the yellow foot prints and amazingly end up walking down the hall we started in and turning into the classroom where we began. We are told to turn in our clipboards and take a seat. The “mental” part of the test is ready to begin.

To Be Continued………

Have You Been Drinking This Evening, Sir - Continued

2008-09-29T15:29:00.000-07:00

The ride to the substation was uneventful. I watched my house recede into the distance as we passed it, and kept flipping-off the ride-along who thought it was polite to stare at a guy with his knees under his chin. I still have no idea where the substation is, I was “impaired” at the time. Being thrown into the back seat of a police cruiser will sober you up fast however, I discovered.

I wasn’t booked into custody with the fingerprinting and the mugshots, just told to take off my boots (it was during my “cowboy” period) and they put me in a concrete holding cell. The only thing that wasn’t concrete was the toilet in the back corner. I vowed to stay away from that completely. I sat down on the concrete bench. I waited. I freaked.

Some time passed. I was sitting there contemplating my circumstances, when the officer and his ride along showed up at the cell door, opened it and led me into a hallway. They went through the balancing and dexterity tests again, which are harder to do, by the way, in your stocking feet. But I still felt that I had passed them. I was then led to a room that looked a lot like a break room with a conference table, and told to sit down. The officer and the ride along sat across from me.

Officer: “Count from 1 -50 backwards.” Pen poised over a clipboard.

Me: “50-49-48-47-46-45-44….” This was easy. He stopped me at 35.

Officer: “Recite the alphabet.”

Kee-rist, was I in kindergarten? Was that how they treated “impaired” drivers, drivers operating “under the influence”? I start. “A, B, C, D”

“No, backwards,” he says.

Me: “Shit, I don’t think I can do that sober!” Dumb thing to say. I try, and I do pretty well I think. I have to pause every once in awhile to think, and he stops me on “h”.

Officer: “What color pants are you wearing? Tell me without looking.”

Me: Staring at the officer. “Stonewashed, black, Levi 501s, button fly.” Just like Garth Brooks, I think, but don’t say.

The officer does not seem impressed.

“Okay,” he says. “Step over here to the breathalyzer.” After setting it up, he hands me a straw-like thing and tells me to blow. I do. A receipt comes out the side. He looks at it. Puts it down.

“Do it again.”

I do. The receipt pops out; he looks at it and puts it down. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to give him two out of three.

After an uncomfortable pause, me standing there in my stocking feet, rocking from side to side and back and forth and wanting to sit down, “You didn’t test over the legal limit”, he says and he truly sounds disappointed. (At the time, the legal limit in Arizona was .10, it’s .08 now.) “You tested .093.” He shows me the “receipt.” I never see the other one, so I figure it must be lower. “So I have the option of charging you with Driving Under the Influence or not. I’m going to charge you. I also have the option of suspending your driver’s license.”

“What the hell did I do to make him so mad,” I’m thinking. Then I realize that he has to make an arrest because he brought me back to the substation alleging I was DUI, wasted two hours trying to impress a ride along with his tests, and now he had to make it into a legitimate stop and arrest. After all, remember, all I did was turn left on a red arrow as the light was changing, and admit that I’d had a couple of beers that evening. If he hadn’t left me in the cell for as long as he did he probably would have gotten that extra .007. I have been in custody, I note, for almost two and a half hours. It is 1:30 a.m. on the wall clock in the test room.

He hands me back my driver’s license. I guess he decides he’s punishing me enough.

The real truth is DUI can be prosecuted in Arizona (and most other states) either by showing that your driving ability was impaired only to the slightest degree as a result of the consumption of alcohol (or those other “influences”) or the “per se” law, which says you can’t drive a vehicle within two hours of having a blood alcohol level of .08 or greater. How they know what your blood alcohol level is two hours prior, I don’t know. You should know, that violating a per se law has absolutely nothing to with your ability to operate a vehicle safely, it’s all about blood chemistry. The only question becomes how high the blood alcohol level was at the time of driving. Since, as I pointed out, the breath or blood alcohol test is always given after the time of driving, it could be the same, higher, or lower than it was several hours ago when I was driving. Wow, the “Don’t Drink and Drive” signs are making a lot more sense now.

The officer asks me to sign his citation and I do, which of course is not admitting guilt, only agreeing to appear. I have the right to a jury trial, or I have the choice to waive a jury trial and have a judge hear the case, he explains. The arraignment is set two months away, and I’m able to drive until then because he has chosen not to suspend my license.

“Do you have a way to get home?” he asks. I’m taken aback by the complete opposite tone in his voice. He’s being nice. Why?

“Well, I don’t know where the hell I am, for one, and I don’t have a car, obviously.”

“We’ll take you home,” he says. “I have to get back on patrol in that area anyway.” So I get out of jail free, and I get a ride home.

There is absolutely no conversation on the way home. It takes about twenty minutes and he drives right up to my house without me giving him any direction whatever. That makes me a little uneasy, but I thank him for the lift and at 2:30 AM my arrest ordeal is over.

Coming soon.....The Trial.

Have You Been Drinking This Evening, Sir?

2008-09-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

Why is it, when you’re driving home from “league” while “under the influence” the cops you never see on a normal drive home, are at every intersection and following you? Last night, I saw more cops on my drive home than I thought worked in Reno. Does a person driving “under the influence” give off some sort of glow in the dark?

I want to make it clear to all those MADD supporters out there that I wasn’t driving home whilst “intoxicated”, I was driving “under the influence.” Big difference. Was I impaired? Not in my mind.

You know they changed that designation from DWI to DUI so that they could fit those other substances, included prescription drugs, under the law, because being intoxicated is not being “high”, technically. You don’t get defined as intoxicated on Heroin. But the real reason is a .08 blood alcohol level is really not intoxicated in truth. That’s like two beers for most people, kind of a two-beer buzz.You drink any alcohol and you’re by god going to have some level of it in your blood. That’s the delivery system.

“Don’t Drink and Drive”, doesn’t make sense. You drove to the bar, right? You parked in the lot which they provided. And you have to get home when you’re done drinking right? Is the bar parking lot an overnight storage for patron’s vehicles? “Don’t Drive If You’re Shit-Faced and Can’t Get Your Key in the Ignition” makes more sense. The problem, I guess, is the “shit-face or not” decision is made by the person with the key who is, well, shit-faced at the time.

Calling 911 to report drunk drivers doesn’t make sense to me either. I see those little blue signs all over California along with “Click-it or Ticket” signs. How is that call going to go?

911 Operator: “What’s your emergency?”

Reporting Driver: “Some asshole just cut me off on the freeway and I almost lost control of my car, and there wasn’t even enough room to pull in front of me because I was following the car in front of me too close, so I had to slam on my brakes, and then she swerved off to the next lane and cut another driver off, and then she took an exit.”

911 Operator: “Was the driver drunk, sir?”

Reporting Driver: “How the hell am I supposed to know? Would a sober person do that?.........Oh yeah, I guess they would.”

I have been arrested for DUI. I was even charged with DUI. And, interestingly, the charges were dropped and the arrest record purged. Let’s just say, I’ve only been “caught” once. It was not fun. Here’s how it happened.

We had just moved to Tucson, Arizona from Albuquerque, New Mexico and had been invited over to a new acquaintance’s house to play some pool. Beer was provided. I think I had three, maybe four, beers during the course of a several hours visit. The company turned out to be enjoyable and we left, my wife, daughter and I, at about 10:30 pm. All three of us in the front seat of the Brown Ford Ranger.

Now, in New Mexico, where I lived for 12 years, the intersection signals for the turn lane come on after the main signals go red. So if I’m make a left turn with an arrow, I would pull into the intersection and then wait, until the traffic signal turned yellow and when the intersection was clear I would start to turn as the turn signal went green. Not to be confusing, in Arizona they work the opposite. If the light is red, you get the left turn arrow first, then the cross traffic gets the green light. So as I came up to the left turn, approximately three blocks from my house, I pulled up into the intersection waiting for the left turn arrow to turn green. It didn’t. I’m now half way out in the intersection and I have no choice but to turn on the red arrow or get broadsided by oncoming traffic. I can't back up as other cars have formed a line behind me. This is as 8-lane intersection. So I go. As I go, driving “under the influence”, with an open container gratiously supplied by my host for the ride home, I spot one of Tucson’s finest in the inside lane of the opposing intersection. Within minutes of safely clearing the intersection, he is behind me.

I panic. Cops make me panic. I could be doing absolutely nothing wrong and a cop behind me will send me into an absolute panic. I’m trying to hide the open container. I set it behind the seat and make my right turn onto my street. I’m now FOUR houses down the street from home. The colorful lights come on and the siren wails. I pull over. I can see my house from the windshield.

The officer approaches. I roll down my window.

Officer: “Good evening sir.” Cops always fuck with you like that. Your evening is no longer good once you’ve been stopped.

Me: “Yeah?”

Officer: “Do you know why I stopped you?”

Me: “I turned left on a red arrow.” Then I try to calmly explain how I’ve just moved from New Mexico and it’s the opposite there and, and….he’s not buying any of it.

Officer: “Have you been drinking this evening, sir?”

I have since learned the correct answer to this question. The answer, even if you can’t form words that don’t sound like slurs, is NO. You do not tell the truth, period. But I did.

Me: “Well, I had a couple of beers.” Statement results in immediate action.

Officer: “Sir, step out of the car.”

Me: “What’d I do?” My daughter, who is ten, starts to cry. They’re taking her dad away and she’s not happy about it. On the other hand, the cop is clearly enjoying it. I step out of the car and he walks me to the back of the squad car. I go through the routine, arms outstretched, touch the nose, stand on one foot and then the other, walk a straight line. Tests I appear to pass without a problem. The coup de grace is when he tells me to take six steps, start on my left foot and end on the same foot. It is then that I realize he has a “ride-along.”

A ride-along is a civilian who is doing just that, at his request. Anybody can do it. Just call the Police Department and set it up. The cop, is clearly showing off because of it, probably due to the lack of crime that evening to show his ride along how a professional police officer does his job. When I start counting out my six steps starting with the left foot and ending on the right, the wrong foot, and I can’t seem to understand why, the cop jumps in.

Officer: “Sir, I feel that you are impaired, and I am going to take you down to the station. Can someone drive your vehicle home?” I can see my house from the sidewalk where I’m standing.

Me: “They can walk home. My house is right there,” and I point.

Officer: “Fine. Get in the car.”

Now the back seat of police cars, intentionally I find out, has no room for the legs of a six-foot individual, now the person in custody. My daughter, I can see through the windshield is crying hysterically, and the cop is talking to my wife. I found out later what that conversation was. Mainly the officer of the law with his ride along was trying to find some damning evidence. Like an open container of beer.

To Be Continued Tomorrow……….

How To Back Up a Boat Trailer.

2008-09-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to become “lake rats.” Technically, what that means is, we bought something that floats with a motor so you spend all your free time near water. In our case it was a pristine 1996 SeaDoo GTX on a single-place ShoreLand’r trailer. We named it LOBO 1. The LOBO being our initials and the 1 standing for our first boat, assuming we would have LOBO 2 and so on. Lobo is also the Spanish word for wolf, for those of you who don’t press 2 after you call someone. We’re up to LOBO 6 now.

We hooked our new, used, jetski, as they are called, to our Dodge pickup and took off to our nearest state park with a lake. We set up camp on a nice spot on the beach and then drove over to the boat ramp to launch the boat. Launching a boat requires the backing up of the vehicle down a ramp with a trailer attached. For those of you who do this with little or no problem, simply, I hate you.

As I start backing into my approach down the boat ramp, my wife takes a position outside of my angle of view in the side mirror. She then starts making twirling motions with her index finger pointing into the air, first twirling to the left, then twirling to the right. How do I know this since she is outside of my angle of view? Because I screamed out the window, “I CAN’T FUCKING SEE YOU!” Which caused her to move into my angle of view, and I saw the twirling to the right, although it was a different finger, just before the trailer jackknifed behind the truck.

I pulled the truck forward and managed to straighten out the trailer behind me, and back down the double ramp, pretty much using both lanes, and completely ignoring my wife’s twirling to the right and twirling to the left. I got the SeaDoo in the water and launched my wife (okay I know how that sounded, but she was on the SeaDoo) who promptly sped away. I hoped I hadn’t ruined the weekend with my outburst, earlier.

I went back to camp and waited, and waited, and waited. It was starting to get dark and I was starting to panic. Our first trip out on the SeaDoo and we were going to violate Rule #1, “Do not ride after sunset.” Okay, I was worried about my wife too. I had just jumped into the truck to go to the front gatehouse and get the Game Warden when, in the dim light, the SeaDoo beached itself on the shore.

“I got lost,” she said.

“You still mad at me?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

And that was all I said. I know better.

We had a nice dinner, something she called Girl Scout Stew. I”ll tell you how to make it sometime. We had a real nice next day riding the SeaDoo, and getting some sun. Okay, drinking some Jack and Coke too. Okay, drinking a lot of Jack and Coke. Just as a sidebar, you get a lot braver riding a SeaDoo after you’ve had a few Jack and Cokes. You can go airborne on those things. But then, that is the real Rule #1 “Do not drink and then drive a SeaDoo.” But let’s not go there.

Sunday morning we break camp and go to the boat ramp to load the SeaDoo back on the trailer. Again, this involves backing a trailer behind a truck down a single lane ramp into the water with three other trucks and trailers attempting to do it at the same time because everybody’s trying to leave to go home on Sunday morning. Except now, I can’t see the boat trailer at all behind the truck, because it doesn’t stick up over the tailgate of the truck anywhere, like it did when the boat was on it. You people that do this without a problem, you’re lying, and I hate you.

The wife takes up a position behind the trailer, after beaching the SeaDoo, and then in her sweetest voice says, “Can you see me?” I can see through the sarcasm, that’s for sure.

I start backing the trailer I can’t see, down one of the middle ramps next to a 4 X 4 Dodge pickup that looks like it just came from a monster truck rally with a 30’ trailer behind it. He zips down the ramp, picks up his boat, and starts back up the ramp while I’m still criss-crossing the trailer back and forth between the lanes, not getting very far.

My wife is back there twirling frantically to the left, I think. The next thing I see is the trailer sticking out perpendicular from the side of the truck and the monster truck is about to drive over it. I quickly pull forward and straighten it out.

Now, I should preface this next part with a little description of the scene. There are people everywhere, loading up boats, wiping them down after extraction. There are boats docked or beached waiting to be picked up. And all of these people are watching a little red truck with a tiny white SeaDoo trailer try to back down a boat ramp, because that’s entertainment. After the third attempt and subsequent jackknife of the trailer, I jumped out of the truck and screamed back at my poor wife, while twirling my index finger high over my head to the right.

“WHAT THE FUCK DOES THIS MEAN?”

Then I started muttering, “I can’t fucking see it. How am I going to back it up? I can’t fucking see it.”

I got back in the truck and started back down the ramp one more time. Same result. The blood pressure went ballistic. I jumped out of the truck, unhitched the little SeaDoo trailer and walked the son-of-bitch down the ramp into the water. Then I walked back, got in the truck and backed it down and hooked the trailer back up. The crowd watching truly enjoyed this.

It’s been described to me that the best way to back up a trailer is to put your left hand at the bottom of the steering wheel and move your hand in the direction you want the trailer to go. I tried that, but you have to see the trailer in order for it to work anyway, and it doesn’t work all that well because I’m not left-handed. You can’t put your right hand on the steering wheel, because you have to turn around in the seat to see the boat trailer jackknife. Most of you that have ever attempted to master the art of backing a trailer, know what I’m talking about. The rest of you that have no problem doing this, we hate you.

So the next weekend, I came prepared with removable flags for the corners. I found some of those flags they put on ATVs with those 6’ fiberglass poles, and I screwed them on with a bolt and wing nut to each of the back corners of the trailer. It looked pretty stupid but it worked great. I could see the flags over the back of the tailgate and know where the trailer was while I was backing it. Although, once I got the trailer in the water, I had to take them off before I could load the SeaDoo. This, of course, involved underwater removal. The crowd around the boat ramp still found it all pretty entertaining.

Two years and a lot of underwater removal later, I accidentally left the tailgate down on the truck before I started backing up the trailer. Do you know what I could see clearly through the open tailgate? Yep, the trailer!

Hand-Me-Down Betsy

2008-09-23T12:08:00.000-07:00

My first car was a Ford truck, a 1939 two-tone green, flat-four, double-clutching, Ford pickup. The paint job was done with a brush, a kind of Kelly green with avocado accent. The rear fenders were bolted on with steel straps mainly to hold them together, and to the truck, because they were rusted out and the sheet metal was split. No plastic on this truck.

Double-clutching, for those of you unfamiliar or who have never even driven a standard, involved stepping on the clutch to bring it out of gear to neutral, then stepping on the clutch again to drop it into the next gear. If you didn’t double-clutch you ground the gears, particularly in a down-shift situation. As you got better at driving the truck, you could kind of know the right spot, kind of feel the gears mesh and get the up-shift without the second clutching, but you had to be good. If you wanted it in “compound low” you lifted a lever with your thumb on the side of the stick shift and, double-clutching, moved the lever up and over to the left. The truck would then crawl like a tank. So in effect, the Ford was four on the floor.

The truck was a hand-me-down. My sister drove it first until she bought her 1955 Willey’s sedan. Yep, the jeep company made a car. It was ugly, but then I thought my sister was ugly at the time too. I’d say she was still ugly, but then she might see this at some point and that wouldn’t be nice. True, maybe, but not nice. She drove that car until she bought the 1965 Mustang. The Mustang was four on the floor, not. It was an automatic, and she blew the engine on it driving to Washington State. She was going to school up there.

The gas gauge didn’t work on the Ford. You used a stick that we kept on the floor behind the seat. You sent it into the gas tank to see how much gas you had, or you could drive it up High School Hill and if it stalled, you needed gas. Of course, you had to roll it backwards down the hill to get it started and head in the direction of a gas station. I only ran out of gas one time that I remember though.

My father bought the truck as a mountain truck, something to sacrifice driving up to Coffeen Park, the trail-head for the wilderness area where we went backpacking and fishing. It had a camper shell of sorts on the back with a small cab-over that my father built. He paid $75 for the truck I think.

Helping him build that shell is not a particularly happy memory. It was my job to hold the folded end of the aluminum skin making up the roof. The drill he was using to put this on had a short or something. So every time I would hold the aluminum for him I would get a horrible shock, so I would let go. He’d yell at me, and I would hold on again until he started drilling. I would feel the current again, and let go. Took a while for him to agree that I was getting shocked from the damn thing, although to this day, I don’t think he believed me. He must have been grounded somehow, because he could hold it just fine.

The truck wasn’t anything you would drive any great distance out of town in for sure. There was a free swimming pool in Buffalo that we would frequent in the summer. It was twice the size of our pool and, well, it didn’t cost the 35 cents we had to pay to swim for two hours. We would load up the truck and drive about two miles out on the interstate and park on the shoulder. Then we would thumb a ride into Buffalo, about 30 miles southeast. When we were done swimming (we weren’t swimming, but we won’t go into that here) we would thumb our way back to the truck, cross over the median and drive home. Worked every time except once, when the guy that picked us up insisted it made more sense to drive us the two miles back home, than the 30 miles down the road if we were having car trouble, which is what we always claimed. We’d say that the old girl was overheating and she’d be fine if we let her set and came back.

I tried once to sneak a whole pack of my friends into the drive-in movie hidden in the camper shell on the back. We got six people stuffed back there and then paid the admission for the two of us up front. Just as a side note, two up front was all you could get, so you can imagine the cramped quarters the six in the back were enduring. The lift up gate on the camper shell was fastened with a couple of slider locks on both corners. Those slider locks were in place as we pulled up to our speaker.

Every time we would get out of the truck to let the sweltering, claustrophobic group out of the camper shell, the manager seemed to be within view with his flashlight. I tried several times before the movie started and each time I was forced back in the cab by the manager and his light. The group in the back started pounding on the wall adjacent to the cab. The movie started, “Midnight Cowboy,” and the two of us in the front kind of forgot about the prisoners in the back.

I tried once more, in a guilty moment, to unlatch the locks from the camper shell, but the pesky manager was right there waiting for the extra fares he was certain would emerge. I walked to the bathrooms, like that is what I intended to do all along and went back and finished the movie. It was a hot and humid August night, with no breeze whatsoever.

As we were leaving the drive-in I started hearing bangs. I should add that there were no glass windows in this camper shell, just small peep holes on both sides, like you see in the gangster movies where they look out the door to see who it is and ask for the password. “Joe sent me.”

I’d have to say that was the maddest six people I have ever seen from that day since. When we finally let them out, a ways down the road from the drive-in exit so as not to be caught, they acted like they had just been released from a coffin. Kicking, screaming, and chasing me around. Worse part is we were trying to save them a whole 35 cents. That was a lot of money back then for a teenager without a job.

Needless to say, the next time we tried that, we left the locks open on the back of shell. They still caught them as they were climbing out of the back. I pretended I didn’t know they were there. Like that worked.

I drove the Ford for two years in high school until I graduated to my very own 1956 Chevy Wagon. It wasn’t one of those ’56 Chevy’s you see restored now with the big V8 power plants and the four on the floor. It was a red, white and green, straight six, with a column shift. It was partially green because an old lady came around the corner and ripped my left front fender clean off as I was pulling from the curb. I picked up the green replacement at the local junk yard. The car was in mint condition until then, and I paid $150 for it right off “Locke’s Used Cars” lot. I paid more for the mini-bike I had with the three and half horsepower Briggs and Stratten.

I miss the Ford truck though. Her name was Betsy. I'm not really sure what happened to her. I’m sure my father sold it after a time. I was long gone from home by then, and I’ve stuck with Ford trucks all my life.

That is until I bought the metallic blue 2007 Tundra Limited with the GPS, and the voice actuated controls, and the 10,000 pound towing capacity, and the big V8. I put my first dent in the brand new truck over the weekend. I almost cried, but I swore at my wife, and threw my keys instead. Not cool for a grown man to cry about a dent in a $32,000 truck, but some of you might grant me immunity. Not really a dent, more like a crease in the side wall of the bed from the weight of the fifth-wheel trailer resting on it while I was trying to pull it into a pull-through space at the storage yard that would have taken a vat of vaseline to get into.

Still, I pay over nine times the amount every month for the Tundra, than my father paid for that most reliable of transportation. She didn’t have a GPS, a radio even, the gas gauge didn’t work, no heater to speak of, the fenders were bolted on and the truck was hand-painted with a brush. Betsy would start up on the coldest of days, and refuse to blow her top on the hottest. Everyone knew she was my truck too. At least for a time.

Catch a Tagger By His Trail

2008-09-22T14:55:00.000-07:00

A neighbor on the corner has a long, whitewashed, six-foot picket fence, which is a blank canvas too hard to pass up to a few wanna-be graffiti artists. The fact that we call them “artists” doesn’t sit well with me anyway, but I call them wanna-bees because they just aren’t up to the “standards” of a real graffiti artisan. What I don’t get is why the guy keeps painting over the graffiti fence, and then two to three days later, the tagger strikes again on a fresh canvas. I think I’d be sitting in wait for them with a shot-gun loaded with rock salt.

I remember Johnnie Mayer got a full load of salt in his ass when he was trying to steal a watermelon from Mr. Beachum’s field. According to the story, it hurt like hell, and he never went into Beachum’s field again. The truth is, the only thing that probably happened to Johnnie was Mr. Beachum scared the shit out of him. The barbed-wire fence where he left most of the seat of his pants hanging, probably did more damage then even a close-up load of rock salt. But I saw the scars when I was a kid, so I’ve always thought it might be a good non-lethal way to catch the little sons-a-bitches in the dark with their spray cans. Might straighten them up, and you’ll probably get sued.

And another thing; I believe The Home Depot advertises that they can match any paint color exactly, so why do all these paint-overs look worse than the original graffiti? There is also a product I know of, called Graffiti-Melt. Once it’s applied to a surface, graffiti won’t stick. It’s sold as a sacrificial product that you can just use a hose to clean the graffiti off then reapply, or as a surface cleaner that quickly removes the graffiti with just a pressure washer, thus the “melt” part of the name. It’s low-odor, non-toxic, and biodegradable. Sounds like just the ticket to me. That would save a whole lot of trouble for that neighbor down the street.

I don’t sell Graffiti Melt, but I’ll bet they sell it around here somewhere, because we get our share of tagging. How they get on those big signs over the interstate, with no one seeing them, is beyond me though. It might be fun to pick them off with our salt-loaded shotguns as we’re driving by swillin’ our beers.

“I think I nicked that one, Jake.”

I remember seeing a diagram of a tagger and how to spot them in the newspaper when I was living in Tucson. What to do about them after I spotted one, seemed to be the problem. That’s why I always thought lying in wait with a shotgun was a good idea. However, after discovering the actual effects of a salt-filled shell, I’m favoring the “melting” process. I mean, if you have a wall, and I’ve seen several around me, that seems to get hit on a regular basis, let’s look for some alternatives besides whatever paint is left over in the garage. Trust me, it looks worse than the graffiti art to have 50 feet of multi-colored fence on the street-side of your house.

In Arizona, and I’m sure most states now, you have to be 16 or 18 (I can’t remember) to buy spray paint. Although the law was probably put into effect so that the delinquents wouldn’t sniff the stuff, the intent was also to keep the main tool of the tagger off the street. Takes too long to use a brush and can, I guess. The law, as most, doesn’t work though, and it only aggravates those of us who need to buy a can of spray paint that is now in a locked case. You have to find the clerk, usually difficult if you’re not looking for one, and get them to open the case, stand there while you make a selection, and then lock it up again. And, of course, there are the stores, that, tired of the locking and unlocking, have taken to leaving it unlocked. Surprisingly you don’t have to answer a questionnaire about what you intend to do with the stuff.

I used to buy a lot of clear-coat spray paint, and I would amuse myself by telling the clerk, and then the check-out person, that I was going to spray some graffiti on my neighbor’s fence with it. They never seemed amused. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to lock up clear spray paint? I guess it has the same hallucinogenic effects as the colored version though, but less likely to be in the backpack of a tagger in my mind.

I heard somewhere that they actually had a graffiti art exhibit in New York or somewhere, in the 80s. I wonder how they got those walls, train cars, semi-trailers, street signs, and fences into the art gallery?

Although I’m sure you have seen some pretty impressive graffiti, the majority of it is marking territory and just plain vandalism. One of the things they discovered in Tucson was that if you had a mural painted on the side of a building the taggers would respect the art and not deface it. There are a lot of murals in South Tucson, and I never saw one that was sprayed over with the initials, nickname, or symbol of some idiot who wants to see his name in print on what amounts to a billboard.

My favorite graffiti was the large white letters on the highway, both directions, that I would see every day on my commute to and from work. Sprayed on the pavement, like a “stop ahead” or turn arrow, was:
“Slut
is a
Becky.
Jim
Fucked
Becky.”

Read properly from bottom to top as if you are driving across it. I imagine painstakingly painted, in the wee hours of the morning to avoid the oncoming cars, by the unfortunate x-boyfriend of Becky. Like I said, it was in both lanes, so you got the sentiment coming or going. It had to have taken some time to accomplish, especially in the dark.

My most recent exposure to the tagger’s art, was done by a young man by the name of Connor Burton, aged six going on seven. During his August visit to his grandfather’s fifth-wheel at the lake, in the pristine mountains of the Sierra Nevada, young Connor chose to leave his mark.

I didn’t discover it right away. It was on a big flat-faced rock at the base of the campsite. Seen easily from the road by passersby, but generally hidden to me standing at the top of the hill. Three or four weeks after the tagger left the area, I was walking up the path when I saw clearly the name “Connor Burton” emblazoned on the rock face. I couldn’t help but chuckle. Like I said, it had been there a few weeks and the biodegradable “paint” (I assume charcoal from the campfire.) was still holding up fine. Had I caught him in the act, I think a shot in the butt with some rock salt might have served him well. Maybe it’s harder to catch a tagger than I thought.

Sarah Palin's Glasses

2008-09-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve been having a standing argument with my kids for the good part of 25 years about the value or lack of, with name-brand merchandise. My argument has always been that you pay $10 a letter more for name-brand shoes, purses, jeans, etc. when a knock-off or lesser brand is just as good, often made in the same factory, and lasts just as long.

“Not true,” I’m told by my son. “Nike shoes last longer than Addidas Shoes.” Funny, since I tell him that they’re both made at the same plant in East Asia. He doesn’t believe that. He thinks Nike’s are made in Beaverton Oregon. Nike isn’t even incorporated in Oregon, they’re incorporated in Washington State.

I’ve still got a pair of Converse that I’ve worn almost every day, for four years, and they’re still as good as any Nike’s I’ve owned. I paid $19.95 for them. I just learned that they were bought out by Nike in 2003 for $305 Million, so now Converse is really Nike anyway.

When I was growing up, there were only two kinds of “tennis” shoes, Converse and Keds. We wanted Keds because we could jump higher and run faster, and not just because we saw that on TV.

Right now I’m wearing a pair of LA Gear. My theory would tell you that they cost $10 X 6 or $60.00 more than a no-name pair of running shoes, but that argument started in the 1990s so using a cost adjustment it would now be $16.34 X 6 = $98.04 more than a no-namer. However, I got them at a “buy one get one at the same or lesser value free” sale at a Big 5. All Nike, Addidas, LA Gear, and other assorted name brands, which tells you, if they can give them away free, that my mark-up theory might just be close.

Someone tell me who in the hell is Dooney and how did he meet Bourke, and why does every woman in America want their handbags? I found out that Peter Dooney and Federic Bourke launched their company in 1975 in South Norwalk CT. They started out making belts and suspenders. Then they came up with their All Weather Leather bags made from, yes, cow stomachs. Dooney and Bourke are very expensive designer bags, which is why knock-offs of D&B are so popular. When was the last time you asked a woman if her hand bag, emblazoned with those initials, was really a $195 Dooney and Bourke? Funny how that works out to almost exactly $16.34 x 12 = $196.08. Next time you see some woman shouldering a D&B ask her if she knows that they make them out of cow stomachs.

Coach is another auspicious entry into the purse business. Coach Leather was established in 1941 though. One of my co-workers has a “Coach” but it’s really not, it was made in Korea and is a knock-off. I asked her if anyone has ever noticed that she had the fake, and she said that most everyone says “Look at you girl, a Coach.” I couldn’t tell a Coach from a WalMart.

Coach has a hallmark clasp, a silver toggle, that Bonnie Cashin came up with from the latch on her convertible sports car roof. Let’s see what these go for…..Anywhere from $348 to $1,000 on their website, and frankly the purses all look the same to me except they’re different colors. I still ain’t paying $1,000 for a purse. I hope my wife doesn’t either.

One of my favorite stories about the designer label culture, is when my son bought himself a Rolex from a “rich” guy at the golf course where he worked. He paid $50 for this Rolex and he was ecstatic about his purchase. He had, what I termed, a “watch fetish” at the time. He spent any money he earned on Gucci watches. If anything stands out though, it’s a Rolex. Fifty bucks seemed like a good deal even to me, or a very “hot” to the touch item. So I asked to see it. He reluctantly let me touch it.

“Nice watch,” I said, “You got a real deal here too, because it has an extra ‘l’.”

His Rollex probably got more ah’s and oh’s than questions about the extra “l” anyway. I still have the watch and I chuckle every time I see it. How I got the watch is a whole ‘nother story.

Now we have a fashion crazed public wanting a pair of the Kawasaki’s on Sarah Palin’s nose. I heard that the company has sold more of the frames in the last month than they did in all of last year. “Frames” is kind of a misnomer because they are “frameless” glasses. You would think, logically, that would make them cheaper, but no, they retail upwards of $700.

Kawasaki, who also had a hand in designing an artificial heart (don’t see the connection), hopes that we Americans vote for Palin for her accomplishments and qualifications and not her fashion sense. He’s not the motorcycle guy, by the way, but he might be related.

I want you to know I’ve been wearing a pair of designer “frameless” glasses for the past four years. Made by Marchon, they are the Airlock2 model. The most expensive frames in the Optometrist’s office, I was told, which figured. But they’re FRAMELESS so how can they cost more than frames that actually are made of something, like titanium? And how do you design a frame that really isn’t there?

I’m just proud that I was on the leading edge of current fashion. I still wish I was the one who thought up the pet rock though.

DMS

2008-09-18T10:23:00.000-07:00

Wednesday night is league. For the uninitiated, that means I bowl on Wednesday nights, six -thirty, or there abouts. I say that because we rarely start on time. So when someone says, “I can’t do it on Wednesday night, I have league,” you know what they’re talking about, if you didn’t already know.

League, for me, translates into an excuse to drink. Jack and Coke. Five fifty a pop, plus tip, at the bowling alley bar. Julio, the bartender, knows me and has the drink ready for me when I walk up. Kind of a Cheers-like thing. Tall glass. Slice of lime. Double, if I don’t care how I’m going to bowl, which usually means a double. I pretend to care how I’m bowling during the game, but I don’t think anyone really buys into it. I get unduly pissed about missing a seven-pin pick up, but, in fact, more pissed that all the pins didn’t go down in the first place.

“That ball was right in the pocket, for chrissakes! I can’t buy a strike tonight!” And, frankly, I would buy a strike if they sold them. It would make the whole thing a lot easier, but as you can see, I talk a good game.

And, yes, I drive home under the influence, DUI, but I don’t drive while intoxicated DWI. They should never have changed that.

A reduction in the number of Jack and Cokes (It’s really Pepsi at the bowling alley bar.) might improve this missing right in the pocket, but probably not. Probably not, because the ball really wasn’t “in the pocket” in the first place. A pocket strike, as published by the USBC, occurs at board 17 to 18 with an entry angle between 4 to 6 degrees. That would be a 4 to 6 degree angle to the right of the head pin at the correct speed and revolution of the ball. You can imagine that I have probably missed one or more of these necessary components in my missed pocket strike.

The team is made up of myself, my wife, a friend, and his wife. The friend is Denny and his wife of one-year, is Mia. Our team name is DMS. We went a whole year not telling anyone what it meant, which was an inside joke. There were a lot of guesses. DMS stands for Doesn’t Mean Shit, and, believe me, most especially in league bowling, it doesn’t.

All these macho bowlers in a “fun” league throwing 232s so they can get their names on the leader board every week, don’t get it. That 232, being on the leader board, being in first place, bringing in a ringer at the last hour, doesn’t mean shit. Actually that part about bringing in a ringer generally matters because it really pisses me off. When you roll a 232, a team member will go over to the front desk and they’ll announce your accomplishment like this:

“Congratulations to Joe Blow on lane 12 who just bowled a fabulous 232!”

Sometimes there will be some applause, mostly from his or her own teammates, and then we bowl on. If anyone on our team bowled a 232 we probably wouldn’t bother going over to the front desk to have it announced. We’d go over to the bar instead to have a smoke and get another drink. The reason: it doesn’t mean shit.

Though somehow, the combination of booze, missing the seven pin several frames in a row, and the asshole on lane 10, suddenly made the “shit” matter. And the shit started when the asshole on lane 10 said, “Guess you can’t get them all, huh?” when I missed the seven pin for the fourth open frame in a row. He said it in a relatively innocent manner. Lane 10 was sitting at five strikes in row at the time. Known in the parlance as a “five-bagger,” going for a “six-pack” if he gets the strike in the next frame. I’m sure you care.

“What the fuck do you mean by that?” It came out of my mouth before the mental censors could use common sense and close off the vocal chords. Comments like that can escalate in league pretty darn quick.

To Be Continued…….

Looking in the Eyes of Dragonflies

2008-09-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve always loved dragonflies. They are one of the most beautiful and most ancient of living creatures. Some of them have these incredible wingspans, hover low over the water, and then they seem to vanish in an instant. The hover and dart routine, I know you’ve seen it.

I find myself watching them sometimes if I’m not doing much of anything but sitting on the bank of a creek or a lake, mainly because I hear they sting. I haven’t figured out what they’re doing while they hovering and darting. Sometimes they just dart in front of your face, hoover for a second or two and then dart away. I suppose they’re feeding, but it might interest you to know, that whatever they’re doing, they only have 4-6 weeks to do it. Pretty short life span. Common in the bug world, I guess. It’s just hard to imagine with all the effort to metamorphise and learn how to fly like a helicopter and then fly off doing whatever it is you do, that you’re going to pretty much be dead by the end of the month. It didn’t surprise me, then, that the majority of their time, I found out, is spent looking for female dragonflies to mate with. Seems like we spend a good majority of our life doing the same thing.

Scientifically, and, right, who the hell cares, they’re called Odonata and the Suborder: Anisoptera (dragonflies) and Zygoptera (damselflies). There are subtle differences between the two, the biggest of which might be the placement of the eyes. The dragonfly’s eyes almost touch on the top and make up most of the head. The damselfly’s eyes are noticeably apart. So now don’t go around ponds, lakes and streams looking in the eyes of dragonflies to see if they’re Zygops or Anisops because, again, who the hell cares and they might sting you.

Odonatas start out their lives as larvae and breath through gills then they actually metamorphise into the adult flying version. Of course, they’re fish food for most of the time, so survival is a pretty good trick. Once they emerge, they fly away from the water and hide out in the near-by countryside so they can mature sexually. I’m not making this up. They also are taking precautions that the water supply that they were living in might dry up, so they can scout for new locations if the need arises. And that need to go back to the water arises when they reach their sexual maturity and are looking for dragonfly chicks.

Now this is the part I like. It’s going to sound real familiar. When a male encounters a receptive female, he uses the appendage at the end of his abdomen to grab her by the back of the neck and hangs on. (Okay so far?) Then both partners will curve their abdomens so that the female’s genitalia engages with this accessory organ on the male that has been personally stocked with sperm. This then forms the characteristic “wheel position.” Yeah, that’s right they have a “position.” This mating, depending on the specific species, can last from a few seconds to hours. (I know what you’re thinking.) Now this part is going to gross you out. Before the male ejects his own sperm into the female, he will sometimes remove any that may have already been deposited.

Let’s take that step by step. Okay, let’s not. We’ll just leave it that….females of the Order Odonata Anisoptera, sleep around. When she’s done with the egg laying, which she gets too as long as she doesn’t run into another male that she likes better, she flies off away from the water and doesn’t come back until she’s ready for more. That can only be a good thing, right?

Well odonates have been around for more than 325 million years. Makes you wonder how they pulled it off. Seems that the best thing about them is their resilient body shape. They have 3 pairs of legs which probably helps. They breath through their abdomens in the flying stage. That allows for some extreme adaptation to the environment as it changed over time, I guess. But Darwin also maintained that a species had to find a niche…..Odonates are aerial hunters like no other and no other species has tried to take over their niche successfully.

Now why did I tell you all that stuff about Dragonflies? Do a little useless survey around the office. Ask people if Dragonflies can sting you. I’ll bet it runs 10-1 or better that they say they don’t know or that they can sting you. I went around for 42 years believing my mother, who said that Dragonflies can sting you.

They don’t sting. They don’t do anything to otherwise bother humans except maybe hover in your face occasionally.