The Road Worrier

Sorry, other things have kept me distracted for the past couple of days, so I kind of got off my posting schedule, but I hope to get back into the swing of things.

At any rate, herewith Chapter 2 of what is currently called Jewel Box (I'm not wild about that title). Chapter 1 is here, for your reference.

Chapter 2: The Road Worrier

The rain stopped at precisely 8:47 am. Carol Munch knew that because she had been perched in front of the window, staring out at the pouring rain, a clock on the window sill next to her. She would be extremely late for work, but she absolutely refused to drive when it was raining. For some reason, was her thinking, Southern California drivers were incapable of comprehending the concept of water falling from the sky and the freeways became free-for-alls and were even more nightmarish than they normally were.

So for the past three hours, Carol had sat in front of the window, silently cursing singer/songwriter Albert Hammond, whose 1973 top five smash “It Never Rains in Southern California” was one of the things that had drawn Carol and her husband to the South Bay town of Mall Beach nine years earlier. After the first year, when much of the month of December made a liar out of Hammond, Carol’s then-husband Edward simply shrugged and said “I guess songs can be wrong. Who knew?”

But by then Edward had been completely absorbed in his work. A comparative zoologist by training, he had accepted a professorship at Mall State, a small Southern California college located in downtown Mall Beach.

As the rain ended, Carol quickly began getting ready for work. As she bustled about her bedroom, she grabbed a locket from her dressing table. A gift from her sister back east, it had come in the mail only a day earlier and had been sent to celebrate what would have been Carol and Edward’s 15th anniversary. Within the locket was a picture of Edward. It wasn’t actually a photograph; Edward actually hated to have his picture taken, so all anyone in the family had to remember him by was a caricature that had been drawn one Friday night on the Santa Monica pier. In the picture, a big-headed Edward wore a bib, had a knife in one raised hand, a fork in the other, and, with a huge goofy smile, was about to dig into a large supine lizard reclining on a bed of salad greens.

The caricature was a playful reference to Edward’s chosen field of study.

Dr. Edward Munch (no relation to the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch) had been a pioneer of—and, in fact, the inventor of and, well, sole researcher in—the field of gustatory taxonomy. Dissatisfied with the system of classifying animals and plants that had been devised by Carolus Linnaeus in the 18th century (grouping animals and plants with similar physiological characteristics into phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, and species), Dr. Munch sought instead to classify animals and plants according to how they tasted. Ultimately, he desired to answer a question that had been eating him (as it were) his entire scientific career: how many animals actually do taste like chicken?

Needless to say, such a system required a not insubstantial amount of empirical evidence—which is to say, eating. So, for several years, Dr. Munch traveled the globe, sampling as many creatures as he could, and his life’s work—the immense A Concordance of World Organisms: Encyclopedia and Cookbook—was coming together nicely. His monograph, “Functional Morphology of H. hydrochaeris With and Without Pork Gravy,” was a smash hit at that year’s National Zoological Conference and had even led to his helping found a new cable channel, a joint venture between the Discovery Channel and the Food Network.

But, alas, it was all to end too soon. While in the Amazon rain forest, he had no sooner taken a bite out of a large, brightly colored—and, unbeknownst to Dr. Munch, poisonous—tree frog, than he uttered what were to be his last words (“needs paprika”) and, according to one witness at the scene, did a remarkable imitation of his Norwegian namesake’s most famous painting. He then fell face first onto the frog, and a brilliant scientific career ended just as it had begun: with Dr. Munch wearing a lobster bib.

As Carol continued to be haunted by the loss of the one great love of her life (especially after she had finally forced him to accept that she would pick the romantic dinners) she smiled forlornly. She clasped the locket around her neck and reflected on what was the great irony: at the same time that Edward was digging into his fatal frog, back in Mall Beach, his research assistant Claude Linguette had just perfected the LickMaster 3000 Electronic Tongue which could analyze the taste of any object placed in it and correlate that taste with a database of more than 180,000 individual flavors.


The rain gone and the sun finally muscling its way through the cloud cover, Carol turned the light off in her bedroom, padded out to the kitchen, and grabbed her car keys from the counter. Distracted as she was by the terror of the thought of having to drive for 90 minutes on the 405 Freeway, she didn’t get a good grip on keys and they fell to the floor. She looked down and stared at the keyring on the floor. She had five keys, her car key was in the middle and it was so much larger than the other keys that it looked to her like her keyring was giving her the finger. Figures, she thought. And that pretty much summed up the way she perceived the act of driving in L.A.

She picked up her obscene keys, took her umbrella from a coatrack by the front door, opened the door, and stared outside at her car in the driveway. She took a deep breath, and out she went.

It should be noted, in the event it hasn’t been made apparent, that Carol hated driving. Well, not so much driving per se, but rather other drivers.


The town of Mall Beach, California, had been founded in 1773 by a Jesuit priest by the name of Father Carmelo Jello (pronounced “Hay-yo,” it should be noted). One of the original Spanish missionaries to settle in the area, the town, like so many in California, was originally centered around Father Jello’s mission, named San Serrif, notable for a peculiar unadorned style of architecture. The mission was distinguished from others of the period by Father Jello’s policy of not exterminating the indigenous peoples if they failed to wholeheartedly accept Church dogma. In fact, Father Jello was known as quite the humanitarian, and even after his passing and the mission was abandoned, he remained quite the hero and the remains of the mission had remained intact for over 200 years. In the 1960s, it was converted into a shrine to a period in pre-colonial history that people weren’t actually ashamed of. Unfortunately, in the early 1990s, the mission was torn down to make room for a shopping mall—indeed, the mall that gave Mall Beach half its name.

The other half wasn’t really a beach per se; the town fought with the county and neighboring towns to give San Serrif at least some oceanfront. It was Southern California, after all. The others relented, and it was agreed to redraw San Serrif’s borders so that a one-inch-wide strip of land was allowed to stretch from landlocked San Serrif through five miles of coastal Flako del Mar, and reach the Pacific Ocean. And thus it was that San Serrif changed its name to Mall Beach, hoping to lure tourists as well as local Southern Californians to take advantage of its immense mall as well as its “exclusive” oceanfront property, although taking advantage of Mall Beach’s beach was only possible if you were no larger than a small tree frog.

Carol pulled out of her driveway onto Beech Street and made an immediate left onto Beech Road, which merged onto Beach Drive and intersected Beach Boulevard two lights down. She had just missed the green left turn arrow and sat back and waited the 20 minutes it would take for the seemingly endless series of light permutations to cycle back to her lane. In a way, she was glad. She was in no hurry to hit the freeway. Her boss would probably be mad that she was so late, but tough. It was the company’s own damn fault for moving. When the company had been located two blocks from Carol’s house, she walked to work and was early or at the latest on time every day. When they decided to move the company 90 miles south to Rancho Bastardo, she was upset—for reasons you can pretty much fathom by now.

The left-turn arrow finally turning green, she turned left into Beach Boulevard and headed north toward the 405 Freeway. Traffic was still heavy, even at this relatively late hour, and she inched her way toward the freeway on ramp. She pulled up to the metering light and, as it turned green, she closed her eyes and gunned the engine. Pulling onto the freeway always reminded her of a airplane taking off. The surge of the engine, the g-forces pushing her back in her seat, her heart in her throat, he knuckles white with terror. She successfully merged into the freeway without much incident. Now, she had to get over a lane or two as the rightmost lane would abruptly vanish one exit later—a phenomenon that took her completely by surprise the first time she had ever driven this route, since there was no warning that the lane was going to do any such thing.

Traffic remained heavy, yet everyone was cruising at about 75 or 80. Naturally, everyone tailgated. She clutched wheel tightly in her hands, and went with the flow. In her rearview mirror, she saw a pair of SUVs pinballing from lane to lane on opposite sides of the highway. Exploiting the slightest opening between cars—be it two car lengths or one Ǻngstrom—they shot forward like it was the Indy 500. As they both simultaneously loomed up quickly in the rearview mirror, Carol knew for sure they were going to hit her. She couldn’t imagine how they could not—but, miraculously, they shot by. (Unbeknownst to Carol, 10 miles up the road they would miscalculate their trajectories and collide with each other, eliciting an inappropriate yet satisfying round of applause from many of the other drivers who had been terrified by them.)

As she espied more hellbent drivers approaching at multiwarp speeds behind her, Carol could feel her heart pounding in her chest. Oddly, it was accompanied by the sensation of some other object—hopefully not an internal organ—pounding on her chest. Whatever it was, it was radiating some kind of heat—not a searing, painful heat, but rather a calm, soothing heat. She was too busy being terrified of the traffic to pay much attention to this strange sensation, and as she saw a sports car shoot over four lanes and attach itself, leechlike, to her tail, a very strange thing happened. Her car started to rise.

“What the hell?!” she exclaimed, as, indeed, her car moved vertically, until she was moving at the same forward speed, but only 100 feet above the freeway.

Now her heart was really going, but the other pounding sensation, and the accompanying heat, had abated. Now she had to deal with the fact that she was also terrified of heights. There was what sounded like a sigh that came from her chest, and the heat and external pounding started again. Her car descended and she landed in a clear spot of freeway. At the same time, every other car on the freeway rose 100 feet above the road surface. They all stayed in their lanes, and they all followed the curve of the highway and it wended its way southeast. In fact, all the cars behaved exactly the way they would if they had been on the ground—the only difference being that they weren’t. Carol was surprised—to say the least—but she was happy. There were now no cars around her to terrify the life out of her and for the first time in her life, she enjoyed the drive to work.

When she pulled off the freeway 65 miles later, all the other cars were restored to the road surface.

True, her boss berated her for being late, but she didn’t mind—and soon, no one else minded her lateness. Given how happy her mood was, they all felt that whatever the reason for her lateness, it was worth it.

Carol didn’t ask questions, like how it happened, but she was inordinately happy to discover, when she started her trek homeward at 5:00, the same thing happened.
When she read the L.A. Times the following morning, she discovered that Steve Harvey’s “Only in LA” column was entirely devoted to the incident.

Insomnia

A couple years ago, a consequence perhaps of a combination of reading too many Philip K. Dick novels back to back and insomnia, I sat down at the computer at 3 a.m. and in one marathon session, turned out 50 pages of the beginning of a science-fiction novel about a normal guy suddenly finding himself in the midst of odd, supernatural forces. Every now and then I come back to it and add a few things, but was never able to recapture the original momentum, although I think I'm finally getting a handle on where it's going. It doesn't really have a title, but the Word file is called "Living Ghost" so I guess that's what I originally wanted to call it.

So anyway, here is the first chapter of Living Ghost.

1.

As was his usual habit when he worked late into the night, Tom Graves fell asleep in medias res. He always fell asleep at the computer and would invariably awake several hours later with an impression of the keyboard stamped into his face and 200 Microsoft Word pages containing the letter “g.” He feared that some morning, the impression of the keys wouldn’t rub out and he would end up walking around looking like the Human Keyboard Face. Or even worse, that he’d drool into the keyboard and electrocute himself in his sleep. True, to solve the problem, he could buy a new computer, one that used voice-recognition input technology. After all, keyboards were pretty quaint anachronisms these days. But as a professional writer, Tom Graves found it easier to work through the tactile act of typing rather than speaking.

He awoke with a start. He groggily lifted his head and his hand went automatically to his cheek to begin de-keying his flesh. He was mildly surprised to find that his cheek was perfectly smooth. He felt the other cheek, then his chin, then his forehead. None of the usual bumps. He shrugged, assuming he had somehow broke with tradition.

He looked down at the desk. That was the reason why he didn’t have keyboard marks on his face: there was no keyboard there. Where was his keyboard? There was a small, 10x10x4-inch silver box in the corner of the desk. He recognized the prominently-located holes of the sound input mike on the front of the unit. The flexible roll-up display mounted on the wall above the desk used the wireless monitor connection that Cliff was always going on about. This was a new computer—certainly not his old ungainly tower unit that, at eight years old, was certainly showing its age.

He looked down and realized that this wasn’t even his desk—rather than the old falling-apart balsa-wood desk he had been using for the past decade, this was a gleaming new Hi-Strength Polymer desk—one of those desks that is incredibly light and portable yet can support up to 500 pounds. Even the chair he found himself in was of the latest design he had seen touted in office furniture catalogs, but certainly didn’t own. What the hell was going on?

He cast his gaze around the room. It was later than he thought: the digital alarm clock next to the bed read “10:13.”

Wait: why was there a bed in his office?

He looked around some more: this was not his home office. In fact, it wasn’t his house. It wasn’t even his work office. Where was he? And how did he get there? Tom didn’t drink and he never had any history of somnambulism, so he couldn’t think of any reason why he would mysteriously wake up someplace other than where he remembered falling sleep.

As he took in the décor, he could only conclude that he was in a college dormitory room. A girl’s dormitory room. Why he would be in a girl’s—or really any—college dorm room was a damn good question.

Whatever the explanation, he knew it would have to wait. His first order of business should be to get the hell out of there, and quick.

The scream that came from the door was what gave him the impression that it was too late.

“Who are you?” said the girl, obviously terrified. She stood in the doorway, dressed in an orange sweatshirt and matching sweatpants, carrying a bookbag slung over her shoulder. “What are you doing in my room? Get the hell out of my room!”

“Look, I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Tom Graves—where am I?”

“How did you get in here? What do you want? I’m calling Security.” She removed her cell unit from the holder clipped to the front of her sweatshirt.

“No, wait. Look, I’m not going to hurt you. I just…woke up here. I have no idea how or why. Just tell me where I am and I’ll leave.”

“Mel, is everything all right?” asked a male voice that was approaching from the corridor.

“There’s some weird guy in my room.”

A young male came into view behind her. He looked into the room. He also wore an orange sweatshirt, as well as a pair of baggy jeans.

“Dude, what’s your problem?” he asked.

“My problem is that I have no idea where I am or how I got here.”

“I locked that door when I went to my 8:30,” said the girl, holding up and staring at her keycard. “Unless Kyoko didn’t lock it when she left. If she didn’t, I’ll kill her.”

“Didn’t you just unlock the door?” asked the boy.

“Yeah, but he could have locked it after he got in.”

“I didn’t get in through the door, that I know of,” said Tom, realizing too late that that was probably wasn’t the best thing to say.

“We’re on the fifth floor, man. What—did you just crawl up the outside of the building like Spider Man?”

“That’s a damn good question. Another damn good question, which I’d really like to answer is, Where am I?”

“Room 503,” said the girl impatiently.

“Of what?”

“Brewster Hall,” said the boy.

“Keep going…”

The boy and girl looked at each other. “Uh…Syracuse University?” said the boy.

Tom sat back in the chair, even more confused.

“Syracuse University? As in Syracuse, New York?”

They looked at each other again. “Uh, yeah. You have to have heard of it. We won the NCAA basketball championship two—”

“Mark, could you please not talk sports with creepy guys who turn up in my dorm room?”

“I know where Syracuse University is,” said Tom. “I spent four years there. Here. Whatever. Anyway, that was more than 20 years ago. As of 1:30 this morning, I was in Redondo Beach, California, which is where, by all rights, I should be right now.” He looked out the window. That was Downtown Syracuse all right. Even after 20 years he could still identify the MONY towers—if they were even called that anymore. “I know it was 1:30 because I made a call to a colleague’s voicemail.” His cellphone was still clipped to his belt. He flipped it open and checked the Dialed Calls log. “Yes. Here it is. ‘Cliff at Work, 1:28 a.m., 10/2.’ It is October 2, right?”

Both Mark and Mel nodded, gradually getting more confused.

“Where’d you get that phone—an antique store?” asked Mark.

He snapped the phone shut. “So if it was 1:28 a.m. California time, it would have been 4:28 a.m. Eastern time. If it’s 10:13 now, even if I had somehow gotten on a plane, it’s at least a six-hour flight from L.A. and I’m assuming there are no flights directly to Syracuse anyway. So how would I even have had time to get here?”

“Wow—that’d be like a great question to put on the SATs,” offered Mark.

Mel slapped his arm. “Could you be serious even for one second?”

“You have to admit that this is pretty fucked up,” said Mark.

“Well, yeah,” said Mel. “But I’d feel a lot better about it if he had turned up in someone else’s room.” She checked her watch. “Look, I have class in 20 minutes, so get out.”

“With pleasure,” said Tom. “Now I just have to figure out how to get back to L.A.”

“Need a ride to the airport?” asked Mark.

Mel slapped his arm again. “What’s the matter with you?”

***
“See? I was right. The quickest flight from Syracuse to L.A. is nine hours and 45 minutes, with two stops.” They had logged onto InstaRez from the computer in Mark’s dorm room just down the hall. He felt self-conscious speaking all the commands, but he had to admit pointing and scrolling on screen using his index finger was a lot more convenient than using a mouse. He could probably get used to this…

“And most flights take more than 10 hours,” he continued. “I would imagine the same would be the case for flights to Syracuse. Wow—it’s cheaper to buy a round trip ticket and just not use the return than to buy one way.”

He made reservations for the 1:45 p.m. flight. A frisson of terror shot down his spine. “Damn!” he instinctively yelled.

“What?” asked Mark.

Tom’s hand went to his back pocket. The fear abated. He sighed contentedly.

“I’ve still got my wallet. I’m glad I fell asleep with it still in my pocket. That’s a relief. I don’t know how I’d get home without it—no money, credit cards, I.D….”

“Credit cards? Why don’t you just get a Flash ID chip for your cell.” He unclipped his cell unit from his shirt and flipped open the top. “See? Picture ID displays on the screen, or I can beam credit account info to the checkout kiosks they have at most stores now. And they finally fixed the interface problem with the Flash ID chip and the USB 4.0 ports on most computers so you can actually use it to buy shit online.”

“Yes, I am aware of Flash IDs,” he said with a touch of irritation. “I’ve just always used credit cards and photo IDs and I haven’t gotten around to upgrading yet.”

Tom finished up his online transaction and logged off.

“You know, Mark, I can’t thank you enough, for your help. I mean, a strange guy turns up in your girlfriend’s dorm room going on about how he doesn’t know how he got there. That’s pretty unusual—and, as she put it, ‘creepy.’ If it was my girlfriend, I’d probably be pissed as hell.”

“Nah, Melinda’s not my girlfriend. My girlfriend lives up in Flint. Mel’s just a friend. You know, completely platonic.”

“I know very well.”

“Come on, I’ll give you a ride to the airport. I just remembered I’ve got a Psych test at noon.”

As they headed down the hallway toward the elevator, Tom looked around. “You know, I think I lived in this dorm my freshman year.”

“Twenty years ago you said, right?” said Mark.

“Yeah.” He paused thoughtfully. “Tempus fugit.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Tom smiles. “Or, as they say in Brooklyn, tempus fuggeddaboutit.”

“Yeah,” said Mark.

“No one ever laughs at that.”

“And for good reason.”

***
“What’s that smell?” asked Tom as he and Mark hurtled up I-81 toward the airport in what appeared to be an ancient sedan. It was still entirely terrestrial and seemed to even date from a time before magnetic lane adjusters were standard auto features. It even had an old gas-hybrid engine. Mark didn’t appear to have the latest and greatest of everything.

“That’s a good question. Cindy asked me the same thing last night. I think it’s under the back seat but I’m not sure. It could be leftover pizza mixed with gym socks.” He shrugged. “Could be anything really.”

Tom grimaced. “I’m sorry I asked.”

“I get that a lot.”

“So you live in L.A., huh? Are you like in the movie or streaming business? I’m thinking of transferring into Newhouse next year and maybe taking streaming video production or something.”

“It may surprise you to learn that not everyone who lives in Los Angeles is in The Industry. No, I’m market researcher. I work for a company that conducts surveys on a variety of consumer technologies. We analyze past and present usage, determine current trends, and project where the market is headed five, seven, sometimes 10 years down the road.”

“Huh.”

Well, Tom had to admit, it doesn’t sound very exciting—certainly not to an 18-year-old who dreams of being in show business.

“It’s really not as dull as it sounds," he lied. "For example, I’m currently working on a big market survey report on the future of holographic cameras. We’ve surveyed several thousand consumers and we don’t see a great future market for them.”

“Dude, I could have told you that. Everyone I know uses the holo chip built into the new cell units.”

“Well, the companies that commissioned the study like to see a tad more quantitative data to back that up.”

“So basically you have to provide evidence to show what everyone already knows.”

“That’s my entire career in a nutshell, but yes.”

They drove in silence for a while.

“So you just woke up in Mel’s room?”

Tom thought for a moment. “Yeah.”

Mark shook his head and smiled. “That is like so totally whacked. It’s like the Twilight Zone or something. What do you think happened?”

“I have absolutely no idea. It defies basic logic.”

“Maybe someone’s playing a joke on you. Trying to freak you out.”

“Playing a joke on me?”

“Yeah, like a few weekends ago, this guy on our floor—Jeff—scored an invite to a Delta Tau Delta party. While he was out, me and his roommate turned everything on his side of the room upside down. He was pretty fucked up when he got back and he freaked. So maybe someone’s doing that to you.”

“How would someone even do this? I mean, we’re talking basic violations of the space-time continuum here.”

“Don’t know, man, but there’s got to be an explanation. Unless you’re just making all this shit up.”

Tom did have to concede that point.

***
Mark dropped him off at the terminal. Tom again thanked him effusively, and watched as Mark sped off. Tom wasn’t entirely certain if Mark was just a kind-hearted kid by nature or if the circumstances surrounding his abrupt appearance in Syracuse appealed to some innate sense of adventure. Tom had to admit, if he were Mark, the most likely conclusion he would draw was that he was in fact “making all this shit up.” But he got the sense that Mark took everything at face value and got wrapped up in the mystery of it all.

Suddenly realizing that, temperature-wise, October was very different in Syracuse than Los Angeles (and he was dressed for the latter), he dashed into the terminal.
After he checked in at the ticket counter, he unclasped his cellphone and called Cliff.

“You’ll never guess where I am,” he said.

“The beach?”

“No, I’m—” he paused a moment. “Why would you immediately say ‘the beach’?”

“Well, the way you asked the question, I assumed it would be the last place I’d expect you to be.”

“And that would be the beach?”

“Well…yeah.”

“Okay…”

“Tom, you’ve lived in Southern California for eight years, and at least as long as I’ve known you—which is, oh, about eight years—you’ve never been to the beach.”

“I see.”

“You’re the only guy I know who can live in L.A. and still keep a fishbelly-white complexion.”

“Cliff…”

“I mean, even I get to the beach once in a while, and I tend to burn like a son-of-a-bitch.”

“Cliff…”

“Even Ally—”

“Cliff! Stop talking now!”

“Right. Sorry. Your original question. Where are you?”

“I’m in Syracuse.”

“Where?”

“Syracuse.”

“As in New York?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you in Syracuse, New York? When I last spoke to you—at 5:30 yesterday—you were at home in Redondo and were planning to get Section 3 of the camera study done by this morning. You said nothing about going to Syracuse. Is it Homecoming Weekend or something?”

“No, it’s not… Well, I don’t know. I don’t think it is. Wait, it’s Tuesday. So, no, it’s not Homecoming Weekend.”

“Which brings me back to my original question.”

Tom paused for a moment. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“I don’t believe half the things you tell me, but go ahead.”

“I appeared here.”

“You what?”

“I appeared here. Mysteriously. I fell asleep at my computer in Redondo last night sometime after 1:30 and when I woke up this morning I was in a college dorm room in Syracuse.”

“Coed dorm?”

It would figure that would be the first thing on Cliff’s mind.

“As it happens, yes. It was.”

Cliff erupted in a kind of fratboy whooping. “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy. Whatever did you get yourself involved in? This is so unlike you. I’m glad to see you’re finally coming out of your shell—and at age 41. But better late than never, I suppose. Who is she?”

“Stop that. It wasn’t anything like that at all. I have no idea who she was, and she seemed quite horrified by my abrupt presence in her dorm room. And I can’t say that I blame her.”

Tom spent some time carefully describing the situation to Cliff. It took some effort, but eventually Cliff came to accept the mystery of it all.

“Wow, it’s like an adventure,” said Cliff. “It’s kind of cool when you think about it objectively. Don’t these kinds of things happen to other people?”

“Cliff, these kinds of things don’t happen to anybody.”

“That’s a fair point.”

“I mean, I’d like to be caught up in the adventure of it all, but it’s really more of an irritation. Not only is this little brush with the supernatural wasting an entire day, but it’s costing me $700 in airfare!”

“$700 from Syracuse to L.A? Round trip? That’s a pretty good rate.”

“Cliff!”

“Sorry. Anyway, when are you going to be back?”

“The flight gets in at 8:56 p.m.”

“I suppose you’re going to ask…”

“If it’s no trouble.”

“It’s no trouble. I’ll pick you up. And remember we have that meeting with Tony’s people first thing tomorrow morning. Where do we stand with Section 3?”

“I had most of the charts and tables done. When I get back tonight I’ll whip up some commentary so it should be in decent shape by morning.”

“Assuming your flight’s on time, you probably won’t get home til 10, and you’ll probably be jetlagged as hell. That’s cutting it pretty close.”

“Well, that’s the best I can do. Whatever supernatural force hurled me 3,000 miles neglected to transport my computer with me.”

“Well, don’t let The Larva hear about that. Sally says she’s going to want to see a final section, if not at least a preliminary run-through of Section 4. Tell Sally you had computer problems, or a family crisis—or, hey, Duh. Blame it on the earthquake.”

“Earthquake?”

“Yeah. Last night, about quarter of two. Nothing major, but it woke me and Ally up. Didn’t you feel it?”

“No, I—” He paused for a long while.

“Tom? You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you cell lost reception.”

“No, I was just wondering if the earthquake had something to do with my…experience.”

“Tom, I’ve heard of earthquakes moving furniture maybe a few inches or even a few feet, but never moving people 3,000 miles.”

“True.”

“Anyway, I have to go. Marv just walked into my office and he doesn’t look pretty. Not that he ever does, of course.”

“I’ll see you at 8:56 tonight.”

“Thanks, Cliff.”

He clicked the End button slowly and headed toward the gate.

The Life of Death

This short story is an old one. I had the idea for this at least 15 years ago, probably after watching The Seventh Seal, and after having a conversation with someone (Steven H., probably) where we one of us posed the question: "what if someone killed Death?" The trouble is, how do you get an actual story out of what is essentially a one-liner? Well, part of the challenge is you have to invent your own theology (or necrology, I guess would be the better term).

A couple years ago, after having completely forgotten about the couple of paragraphs I had written, I decided to dig into it and see what I could do with it, because I still liked the idea. And, in a flash of inspiration (if that's what you want to call it) I chugged onward in one go until...I couldn't think of the ending (reminding me of the Groucho/Chico routine from Animal Crackers: "Chico (after a long, monotonous piano routine): I can't think of the ending. Groucho: I can't think of anything else.)" Anyway, as I was re-reading it last weekend, I a decent ending came to me, so now I just have to write it. So, I am going to serialize this in three parts and hopefully it will be done by the time I have to post Part 3.

So, without further ago, I give you:

The Life of Death (Part 1 of 3)

I got the call at three that morning. I have no need for Caller ID—I pretty much know who it is, especially when the phone rings at three in the morning. What I was unprepared for was the content of the call.

“Watson, come here, I need you.” He never tired of that one, although there was much less of a playful tone in his voice than there usually is.

“Dave, it’s three in the morning,” I murmured, not quite used to the idea of consciousness just yet.

“Look, it’s really important.”

“Just squish the spider.”

“It’s not a spider this time. It’s…a bit bigger.”

That jolted me awake.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Just get over here.”

“Can you at least give me a hint.”

A shortish pause. “I killed Death.”

“Huh?”

At that point the line went dead--so to speak.

I’m not sure what to make of a line like that. “I killed Death.” What the heck is that supposed to mean? I hoped it wasn’t just another one of his silly existential crises. Dave was my best friend, but he was far too bookish for his own good, and tended toward moroseness, which wasn’t helped by his tendency to read philosophy. I recall once in college he read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music and was near suicide for weeks. I have no idea why. And Kierkegaard! I had to forcibly wrest The Sickness Unto Death out of his hands and hide it. Unfortunately, he had taken it out of the library, and the overdue fines—when it was finally returned—depressed him even more.

So, at any rate, my assumption when he said “I killed Death,” was that he had read something he shouldn’t have. But, dutiful friend that I am, I immediately threw on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, ran outside and grabbed a cab downtown.

Despite his moroseness, Dave had made some wise economic decisions in his life, despite his having been an ardent socialist in college. Ten years later, he lived in a beautiful brownstone on West 11th Street. He owned no furniture to speak of, save for a futon and walls and walls of bookshelves.

He buzzed me in; well, at least he hadn’t tried to kill himself again.

He was waiting on the second floor and quickly ushered me into the living room. He was white as a sheet and pointed to a black cloak on the floor. A scythe lay next to it. Strangely, a completed game of Scrabble sat nearby.

“What the hell have you been up to?”

“I killed Death.” He seemed completely terrified.

“You wanna take this from the top?”

He lit a cigarette and paced as he struggled to coherently describe the events of the recent past.

“I was reading Nietzsche again, and you know how I get. Anyway, I was consumed with the thought of killing myself, and had actually plotted out my demise.”

“David…”

“No, it gets weirder, believe me. Anyway, as I was doing so, it appeared.”

“‘It.’”

“Death.”

“I see.”

He could tell I wasn’t buying it, but decided to press on anyway. “He materialized in that far corner over there by the window, exactly as you’ve always seen him described. You know, the black hooded cloak, the scythe. Although, he was much shorter than I would have thought. Well under five-foot-five. Anyway, he said he was tired of my playing games with him, that I should either kill myself or not. But that I should do one or the other, because he was getting sick of coming all the way out here only to have to turn around and go home again.”

He paused to light another cigarette. I decided to save any comments until the end.

“I said I can’t do that, I’m plagued with indecision, and sometimes life is bliss, sometimes it’s a vale of tears. You know. So, he said, ‘You want to play games with Death. Okay, let’s play a game.’ I suggested the more traditional chess, but he was keen on Scrabble. Go figure. So the deal was, if Death wins, I die, but if I win, I live. I said that it sounds like I can’t possibly win either way, so I made a suggestion that if I win, Death has to join the living. And, to make a long story only slightly longer, I won. See, he goes for the long, showy words, but the secret is in the smaller words that add up in multiple directions simultaneously.”

“Dave!”

“Oh, right. Anyway, there was a puff of smoke, and his cloak fluttered to the ground, the scythe clanged rather noisily to the floor, and he was gone. In sum, then, I killed Death.”


“But if he’s Death, how can you kill him. It sounds like you made him alive.”

“Well, whatever, whatever! Whatever the opposite of whatever he is, he’s now that.”

I had reduced him to babbling inanity. I’ve never done that to him before. Of course, I don’t know if what he said had happened truly happened, or not, but he certainly was agitated.

“What am I going to do?”

“Look, you’re just having an existential crisis.”

“Well, duh. I’ve killed Death—or whatever—and you tell me it’s just an existential crisis? This goes beyond mere moping.” He looked at me forlornly. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Well, you have to admit, it’s more than a tad preternatural. Look, just get a good night’s rest and I’m sure things will be better in the morning.”

I don't know what kind of advice that was supposed to be; it sounded more than a little insipid. Then again, what advice does one give to a friend who insists that he has killed Death—or whatever?

I gave him a tranquilizer and put him to bed. After he dozed off, I let myself out and grabbed a cab back uptown. It was by now four in the morning, and I had a tennis lesson at nine.


For whatever reason, I didn’t hear from Dave the following day, which made me more than a little nervous. I tried calling him before I left for my lesson, but he either wasn’t in or wasn’t answering. I was kept busy most of the day, but ran into his next door neighbor on Broadway. Apparently, Dave had been seen alive and well, rushing about earlier that day. So at least he was okay.

That evening I had to go up to Albany for a business conference the next morning. It wasn’t until I got back three days later that I noticed things getting a little strange.

To be continued....

A Tolkein of My Esteem

A couple years ago, after having read The Lord of the Rings (and then watched the movies) I
started thinking about enchanted jewelry (and don't we all, really) conferring special powers on its wearers. And thus I began my own mock fantasy epic (though there is greater comic potential in more prosaic settings than Middle Earth) which is yet untitled, but the file is called Jewel Box, so I guess that's what it's called. For now. It was originally conceived as a sequel of sorts to Virus! and was to feature Zev Zyzzyx and Eep as a kind of extraterrestrial Nick and Nora Charles (if only so as to give them a pet named Astra), but that idea was fortunately abandoned pretty early on.

So, here is Chapter One, for your Tolkein-esque pleasure.

Book I: A Change in the Weather

Chapter 1: Heavy Petting

It was just after midnight when the snow started. By three a.m., six inches had already piled up in the upstate New York town of Schuyler Falls. More to the point, however, six inches had piled up on Harry Merton’s pickup truck. By six a.m., two more inches had fallen, and Harry’s Toyota Tundra could very well be confused with its namesake. Harry, still being asleep, was blissfully unaware of the digging out he was going to have to do in approximately 25 minutes. When the time came to clear the snow off the truck, he would be far too aggrieved to savor the irony that the reason his truck wouldn’t fit in the garage was that the snowblower was in the way.

In Harry’s bedroom, the clock radio clicked on, and a blast of Van Halen jolted Harry awake.

“Dah!” he shouted, startled. “Did war break out?”

His wife—who actually had once slept through a loud explosion—barely stirred next to him.

Happily for Harry, the song ended almost as abruptly as it had sprang on. Well, Harry at first thought it was a good thing.

“Hey!” said an overly exuberant disk jockey, “This is the X98 Rock Bottom Morning Zoo, and I’m Sleazy!”

“And I’m Cheesy!” chimed in his partner who, Harry thought, had the exact same voice.

“And this morning we’re your Blizzard Buddies, we’ve got eight inches—”

“And you better believe it, ladies!”

“Yes, eight inches of unexpected, fresh, virgin snow out there this morning, and you know what that means!”

“Well, Sleazy, it means we get to say ‘virgin snow’ as often as possible!”

Harry grunted.

“And, Cheesy, it also means it’s ‘Let’s write our names in the snow time’!”

Over the radio came the sound of what sounded to Harry like a herd of asthmatic water bison choking to death in a vat of Jell-O. Actually, as it turned out, it was just the guffawing of the DJs.

“Don’t radio stations play music anymore?” grumbled Harry. His wife stirred.

“Right you are, Sleazy, and we’ll be going outside to violate the virgin snow right after we find out today’s Painful Extraction.”

Sleazy took it from there. “As you know, this is the part of the show where we call local emergency rooms to find out the strangest objects people have had to have removed from their—”

Harry leapt up and slammed down the Snooze button on the clock radio. He pulled the cord from the wall and tossed the clock-radio across the room. His wife, more or less awake, looked over at him.

“You know, you do this every morning. And that’s the fourth clock-radio you’ve destroyed in as many months. Why do you set it to that station if you hate it so much?”

He smiled at her. “Because if I set it to something that didn’t absolutely appall me I’d never get out of bed.”

She laughed. “Oh, Harry.”

Suddenly, something hit him.

“Damn! Did those zoo animals say there were eight inches of snow?”

He dashed to the window and pulled open the blinds. “Ahh!! They were right. And we open at eight today.”

“Harry, if there are eight inches of snow on the ground, I don’t think anyone is opening at eight.”

“You want to make a bet? Last year when we had that blizzard I was 15 minutes late and Roger docked me an hour. This job only lasts six weeks out of the year; I have to make every hour count. It’s our winter getaway money.”

Harry Merton had been a chemical engineer for more than 40 years until he retired two years ago. Although he built up quite a little nest egg for himself and Martha, and Martha still worked as a real estate agent, every Christmas season, Harry played Santa Claus at a local retail store. The mere pittance he made as Santa was what he claimed finances his and Martha’s January-long trips to Fort Lauderdale. In point of fact, it wasn’t.

Harry was built for the part of Santa—a tad on the stout side, gray hair, long, white beard, and the unnerving tendency to smoke a corncob pipe. Despite his physically fitting the part, the only Santa role he could get this year was for the local Pets, Etc., which was starting a holiday gimmick, “Have Your Pet’s Picture Taken With Santa.”

“Even if you open on time,” Martha was continuing, “how many customers are you likely to have?”

“I’m hoping none,” said Harry, still gawking out the window at the snow. “The whole ‘Have Your Pet’s Picture Taken with Santa’ sounded like a cute idea. I like animals. But I’ve been scratched, bitten, and peed on more times in the last three weeks than…well, I can’t remember when.”

“How many chemical engineers are ever scratched, bitten, or peed on?”

“Oh, there have been some meetings…. Anyway, it’s bad enough when the customers bring in dogs and cats, but the loonies are starting to some out of the woodwork. Let me tell you something—the sensation of having a gerbil stuck in your beard is not one I would recommend.”

“I’m happy to say I can’t imagine ever experiencing that—for a whole host of reasons.”

“I wanted to draw the line at the boa constrictor, but, no-o-o. Roger insisted, ‘You pose with the snake and you’d better be jolly about it.’ I’d like to know who in their right mind can be jolly with a ten-foot snake coiling around their torso.”

“I’ll bet that crocodile hunter guy could.”

“Well, let him play Santa.”

“That would certainly be interesting,” said Martha.


Within 15 minutes, Harry had got the snowblower fired up and was clearing the driveway. By seven a.m., the truck was clean and it even looked like the snow had stopped. He went back in the house, showered, and changed into his Santa suit. By that time, Martha was up and preparing breakfast.

“Are the roads clear, did you notice?” Martha asked.

“Looks it. One thing you have to say about a town like Schuyler Falls, the Department of Public Works is run with an almost military precision.” He crunched into a slice of toast. “You’re not thinking of going anywhere today, are you?”

“We need food. I wasn’t expecting a storm, and there’s nothing in the house to eat. You’d never believe what I had to scrape off that bread to make toast.”

He froze, the slice of toast midway into his open mouth. He dropped it to the plate.
“Martha…” he groaned.

“Well, look at it this way. Think of all the bacterial infections you’ll stave off.”

“I think I’ll grab a doughnut on my way in,” he said. “Make a list of what we need. I’ll stop by FoodTrough on the way home.” He put on his trademark red fur-lined coat and fastened the enormous black belt.

“Ho, ho, ho,” he boomed, and strode out of the kitchen into the living room.

“Arf! Arf!” barked Martha, following him.

“Yeah, I hope all I hear is ‘arf arf.’ One more psychotic parrot and Santa’s gonna have two hands full of bloody stumps where his fingers used to be.”

“Oh, before you go, why don’t you wear this?” There was a glass tschotschke bowl on the coffee table. She reached into it and pulled out a small, red object. She handed it to him.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a Santa Claus pin.” He examined it. Yes, it was indeed a Santa Claus pin. A big, ruddy Santa face, mouth erupted in a disturbingly jolly smile.

“This is pure nightmare fuel,” he said.

“Oh, it’s festive. And look, see? If you press the beard the nose lights up.”

He did and, sure enough, it did.

“Where on earth did you get this?”

“I found it at that antiques show in Bouckville last summer.”

“Figures. Did you settle for this? I mean, was the eight-foot-tall Betty Boop statue sold already?”

“Oh, cut that out.” She slapped his lapel playfully.

“Okay, okay.” He clipped the pin to his coat. “Happy?”

“Now you look Christmasy.”

“Beautiful.”

They kissed, and he ventured out into the snow.


The roads were plowed, but still slippery so Harry inched his truck along Route 6Z, barely able to stop for the red light at the intersection of Route 6X. In Schuyler Falls, every state highway was numbered “6”; back in the 1940s, the public works commissioner in charge of the regional state highway numbering system was terribly innumerate, having graduated from the local community college with a degree in English and having failed—and quite spectacularly at that—every math class he ever took. Thus, every highway he had to specify used the same number—6—followed by a different letter. The locals were used to it, but out-of-towners were naturally confused, and the question “Where is Route 6?” would inevitably yield the response “Which one?” which just led to even more confusion.

The light changed, and Harry hit the gas. A car ran the light and cut Harry off. Harry had to hit the brakes and the truck miraculously stopped short, although Harry’s head smashed against the steering wheel. Oddly, he didn’t feel any pain; he examined himself in the rearview mirror and didn’t notice the slightest mark on his forehead, even though he had struck with a not insignificant amount of force.

“There’ll probably be quite a bruise later,” he groused.

He shook it off and proceeded into the heart of town, passing the spot that gave the town of Schuyler Falls its name. No, not a waterfall, but rather a spot on the sidewalk where Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler took a tumble one winter day after slipping on a patch of ice. Every February, there’s a weekend of special events to commemorate the event, with many of the locals taking their own spills on the ice—not all of them deliberate, it should be pointed out. Tourists came from miles around to attend the festivities, and the Broken Coccyx Inn on Route 6V has its one big weekend of the year.

Harry pulled into a strip mall and parked some distance away from the entrance to Pets, Etc. The store owner, Roger Spaniel (yes, his real name), had very strict prohibitions about employees parking in spots that customers would find convenient, and he used his connections in town to have this policy enforced by having his employees’ cars ticketed and or towed (depending on the extent of the foulness of his mood) if they violated it.

Harry entered the store and was greeted by the blast of both warmth and pet urine, combined with cedar chips and some kind of heavy, industrial strength room deodorizer that Harry could have swore could be used as a chemical weapon, if not first banned by the Geneva Conventions.

“You’re late,” said Roger, as Harry clomped the snow from his boots. Roger emerged from the back room with a Chihuahua tucked under each arm and an iguana perched on his shoulder. On his head was either a Scotch terrier or an even more ludicrous toupee than Roger was normally given to wearing.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but we had eight inches of snow last night,” said Harry.

“No, I hadn’t noticed.”

Roger actually did live in the store, although Harry never knew exactly where. He was suspicious after, one morning, he noticed that the cage next to the St. Bernard was filled with empty potato chip bags.

“Well, I can’t imagine we’re going to get very many customers today. Everyone’s going to be too busy digging out or resolutely refusing to dig out until April.”

“UPS is going to be delivering several boxes of gerbils later on,” said Roger. “I’ll need your help stocking them.”

Roger didn’t buy his gerbils from a very reputable pet supplier. The boxes were always labeled “Tennis Balls.”

“Hey, I’m just here to be your pet Santa. I’m not the stockboy. Where’s Josh?”

“He called in sick, although I had trouble hearing him over what I can only assume was the snowmobile he was riding at the time.”

Harry grumbled.

“Look, I’ll even pay you, if it’s that important to you,” said Roger. The iguana stared intensely at Harry, who quickly relented.


There wasn’t much to do for the first few hours, except watch Roger obsessively straightening things: the bags of pet food all had to be facing the same way, the containers of fish food on the shelf all had to have their labels out, all the pet toys had to be arranged, first alphabetically by type of animal and then alphabetically by type of toy. Roger even spent an inordinate amount of time in the aquarium aisle trying to get all the fish to swim in the same direction. Whether it was from sheer force of will, or some Aquaman-like ability to communicate with them, they inexplicably obliged, and Harry was mesmerized by the sight of 20 aquaria filled with fish all swimming in sync with each other. Roger then glared at the snakes; they all looked at each other and coiled in the same direction on the small treelets that occupied their cages. Harry just shook his head. It was Dr. Doolittle meets Monk.

At around eleven, the UPS truck pulled up outside, and the driver carried in two boxed marked “Tennis Balls.” Roger was in the back, so Harry signed for them. As the UPS guy left, Roger emerged from the back, a brace of ferrets draped over his shoulders.

“Ah, good, they’re here,” he said. “Harry, please unload these boxes and place the gerbils in those eight empty cages in aisle seven. There should be 24 gerbils, so that will work out to exactly three per cage. Please try to make sure all the gerbils in each cage are roughly the same color.”

“Aren’t gerbils all generally the same color? I mean, there aren’t any hot pink or fluorescent green gerbils in the world, are there?” Actually, Harry had to admit that he wasn’t entirely certain.

“Just humor me.” He handed Harry a box cutter. “You’ll need this. Be careful slitting open the boxes. We don’t want to end up with a number of gerbils that isn’t a multiple of eight.” He adjusted his ferrets and walked off.

Harry shrugged and looked at the boxes. As he was running the box cutter slowly along the top of the box, there was a loud crash from the back of the store as a lemur that Roger was trying to feed escaped from his cage and swung himself across the store and knocked over the stack of Math Puzzles for Dogs books. Startled by the noise, Harry lost control of the box cutter and it slipped, the blade plunging straight into his thigh. Except that instead of piercing first his red flannel Santa pants and then his flesh, the blade snapped clean off and clanged to the tile floor. Harry looked at it curiously.

“What a cheap box cutter,” he said, although he had to admit that he was a little relieved.

He instead used his keys to open the boxes and successfully stocked the gerbils in their mathematically appropriate cages.

There still being no customers, he wandered to the back of the store, where his Santa throne was set up. He sat down and reached under the chair, pulling out a paperback book he kept secreted there to read during the inevitable downtime.

Which didn’t last long.

As he was absorbed in his book, he didn’t notice a figure approaching.

“Oh, Harry Potter, you Satanic little scamp,” he said, turning the page. Then he looked up and started. “Hi…I mean, uh, ho, ho, ho.”

“Mr. Claus, I’d like to have my pet Alistair’s picture taken with Santa.”

It was difficult to argue with the man, as he was easily seven-and-a-half feet tall. His head was completely clean shaven—which has that odd effect of making people look even more menacing. His face was heavily scarred, as if he had been in a knife fight, or had at one time been the goalie for a darts team. He was dressed completely in black leather. In a word, he scared the crap out of Harry.

“Alistair,” Harry could barely say. There didn’t appear to be anything accompanying him. “Um, Mr….”

“Mennis. Dénis Mennis. Yes, Alistair.”

He opened his black leather trenchcoat and a large, dark brown shape flew out directly at Harry.

Harry screamed.

“That’s Alistair. He’s what’s known as a False Vampire Bat, or Spectral Bat—Vampyrum spectrum. Native to South America, the False Vampire Bat is able to reach a wingspan of three feet. Just like Alistair here.” He beamed with pride.
Alistair had attached himself to Harry’s beard and stared at him—presumably not discerning a great deal. He squeaked.

“What does this thing eat?” Harry didn’t really want to know but asked anyway.

“Birds, small mammals, things like that. They kill their prey by biting its head and crushing its skull.”

“Charming. And it’s just the thing to have flying around a pet store.”

This aggrieved Mr. Mennis. “He’s not a thing. He’s my Alistair. And your precious birds and hamsters are perfectly safe. Alistair is a perfect gentleman.”

“I see.”

“So, please keep your bat-phobia to yourself and just snap his picture.”

“Fine.” Harry reached down and picked up the remote control for the digital camera, which was mounted on a tripod a few feet in front of the Santa throne.
Mr. Mennis walked over and adjusted Alistair so that he was hanging upside down from Harry’s beard and facing the camera, his claws grasping tightly the thick gray hair. Despite Alistair’s weight, about seven ounces, Harry could feel no pain—though it could not be said that he was even remotely comfortable.

“Ready?” asked Harry, aiming the remote control. He pressed the exposure button and a blinking red light on the front of the camera counted down 10 seconds. “Say ‘freakish.’”

“Spread your wings, Alistair!” exhorted Mr. Mennis.

The immense bat obliged, and the flash went off.

“All done,” said Harry.

“See?” said Mr. Mennis. “Didn’t he behave perfectly?”

Harry had to grudgingly agree.

Mr. Mennis held open his coat. “Here, Alistair!” Alistair detached himself from Harry’s beard and flew into Mr. Mennis’s coat. He closed it over him.

Harry rubbed his beard. “God, I hope this picture came out,” he said to himself.

He walked around to the back of the camera and brought the picture up on the LCD—happily, it was perfectly exposed. He showed it to Mr. Mennis, who was pleased. He printed the image to the attached photoprinter and handed the print to Mr. Mennis.

“You can pay up at the front register,” said Harry.

“Thank you very much. And Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas to you…and to Alistair.”

Mr. Mennis smiled approvingly and departed. Harry collapsed on his Santa throne and closed his eyes for a good long time.


What began to concern Harry was the complete lack of pain he had been able to feel all day. First the blow to the head in the truck—which didn’t even leave a mark—then the box cutter, then having a half-pound bat hang from his beard—normally, these things would hurt or at the very least leave some kind of mark. And yet as he examined his forehead in the men’s room mirror—and then checked the thigh he had hit with the cheap box cutter—he could detect not even the slight bump, bruise, nick, or soreness. Not that he was complaining, but it sure was peculiar.

Later that afternoon, as the roads got better and people began to venture out, business started to pick up and get back to something akin to normal. Roger’s staff actually showed up, so Harry didn’t have to handle every customer himself.

“Are you Santa?” came a voice from behind him. He looked around the back of his Santa throne and beheld a small, well-past-middle-aged woman. Her face was pulled taut, obviously the result of a facelift, but it looked more like her face had been caught in some kind of industrial accident. Her hair, which should by all rights have been gray, was dyed some weird shade of red that made it look like a Bozo the Clown wig. She had the rough, gravel-strewn voice of someone who had smoked for at least 500 years.

“Yes, yes, I am,” said Harry, resisting the urge to make a sarcastic comment.

“Take Pookie’s picture.” She presented him with something that looked like a giant, white, furry millipede but was apparently a dog of some kind. It even had a little red bow in its hair.

“Pookie,” said Harry. “Is she a dog?”

“Yes, she’s— Of course she’s a dog, you idiot. What else would my precious be?” She kissed the dog’s head for emphasis.

“I don’t know. I missed that Empire of the Insects special on PBS last night.”

Suddenly Harry missed Mr. Mennis and Alistair.

“Sure, let’s get to it,” he said.

He sat down on his throne and the woman placed Pookie on his lap. The dog kept squirming and yipping. He tied to pet her and make soothing sounds to calm her down, but Pookie would not stop moving.

“I need you to keep her still, otherwise the picture’s not going to come out,” said Harry, as the dog’s yipping got more insistent.

“If you’re going to run this business, the least you could do is know how to handle pets.”

“Lady, for the past three weeks I have been handling pets that would literally make your skin crawl. Come on, Pookie, there’s a good doggie. Sit still.” He cooed softly and stroked the dog behind the ears. This did not please Pookie and she whipped her head around and sank her teeth into Harry’s wrist. Except that the teeth did not sink into Harry’s flesh, as Harry and Pookie were clearly expecting them to. In fact, not only wasn’t there a mark on Harry, but several of Pookie’s teeth broke off and fell into Harry’s lap. Pookie began yipping and yelping until her owner picked her up.

“What did you do to her?” asked the woman, distraught. “What did you do to my Pookie?”

“I didn’t do anything—she tried to bite me, and it didn’t quite…work.” Harry was just as bewildered as anyone.

“I’m going to report you to your manager, and then to the Humane Society.” She and Pookie stalked off.

Harry stared at his wrist. There wasn’t even a mark where the dog tried to bite him.

Harry was so focused on his wrist that he never even noticed the Santa pin on his lapel. The nose was glowing bright red.

Don Boing: Beneath the Music

I was going through my archives and came across the following, which began life as a column in Micro Publishing News before I expanded it. It needs work, but I still think it's pretty funny.

Don Boing: Beneath the Music

This month, Loss Leader Music Ltd. will release “Any Kind of Pain: The Don Boing Anthology,” a six-disc collection of alternative takes, lost recordings, and the greatest hit of the seminal folk-rock singer/guitarist/songwriter/plumber, whose albeit brief career renaissance in the late 1980s came about completely in spite of his exploring new musical technologies. In a music career that has spanned nearly 30 years—give or take a few—Don Boing has seen it all: the dizzying highs, the crushing lows, the humdrum middles. He’s had to fight to make the music he wanted to make, and in the process has been caught in battles with bandmates, embroiled in lawsuits, crippled by contractual disputes, and menaced by otters.

Donald Quincy Ezekiel Boing—pronounced like the aircraft manufacturer, not the silly noise—was born in London in 1940, and again three years later in Los Angeles. Music critics have for years been unable to explain this, but one thing remains clear: Boing was born to play and sing music. Or something. In fact, it is believed that he was even heard humming while still in utero, but such a story may in fact be apocryphal, if not downright silly.

Boing first started playing guitar at the tender age of 33. In interviews, he has said that it was Dylan’s Self Portrait album that first made him want to write songs. He also credits first hearing Paul McCartney & Wings as further cementing his desire to make music. “McCartney has influenced so many musicians,” Boing once said. “I suppose it’s no surprise that I wasn’t any different. The way his bass guitar works with the drums to form a basic rhythm underneath Denny Laine’s guitar playing—brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. That’s why McCartney was hailed as a genius.”

In 1973, he quit his career as a successful plumber and moved to Greenwich Village where he began playing acoustic guitar in subway stations. After only 20 minutes, he was beat up and his guitar stolen. The “Anthology” opens with a home recording he made shortly after the incident. “Bleeding From the Ears” has the raw, pained vocal that would become Boing’s hallmark.

He played this recording to Burton Splunge, the owner of Loss Leader Records, whom he met one afternoon while unclogging Splunge’s sink. Loss Leader, many years from becoming the industry juggernaut it is today, was at that time a small, independent record label whose biggest act was Arthur Hoover and the Vacu-Tones, a four-piece band in which each member played some configuration of vacuum cleaner. Although the Vacu-Tones had a small cult following (they had the number one selling album among the deaf), Splunge had no illusions that they were destined for mainstream commercial success, and he saw in Boing the opportunity to hit it big, or at the very least keep the electric company from turning his power off.

So in 1974, Boing’s debut album—“In Love with Leeches”—was released to almost complete disinterest. In retrospect, Splunge believes that it was simply a question of timing. “1974 was not a year for angst-ridden folk music,” Splunge writes in the liner notes to “The Don Boing Anthology.” “It was really a time for angst-ridden art rock. Had ‘In Love with Leeches’ come out three years earlier, this Anthology would probably be twice as long as it is now. So consider yourself lucky.”

One song from “In Love with Leeches”—the up-tempo folk-rock track “Eating Lumber”—made a slight impression on the underground music scene. The song’s comparisons to Big Star led Alex Chilton to remark, “What? You’re kidding, right?” Actually, it turned out that everybody was, and the song soon sank without a trace. It appears on “The Don Boing Anthology” in three different versions, the original all-acoustic demo, the full-band version, and a version that Boing sang with his mouth stuffed with spaghetti.

It was at that point that Splunge had a brainstorm. Going over the sales figures for both “In Love with Leeches” and “That Which Sucks Merely Blows from the Opposite Direction,” the most recent Vacu-Tones release, as well as what it cost to put out two separate records by different artists, he hit upon the idea of merging the raw folk sound of Boing with the “quasi-techno” sound of Hoover’s Vacu-Tones. The only roadblock was Arthur Hoover himself, but since he was actually only a department store mannequin, he was easily deposed as leader of the group. (Hoover ended up in San Francisco and went on to record several albums for Ralph Records in the late ’70s.)

Discs 1 and 2 of “The Don Boing Anthology” highlight Boing’s work with the Vacu-Tones, including the first fruits of that collaboration, 1974’s “Coat Me With an Ointment,” perhaps the best melding of Boing’s stark vocal and gentle acoustic guitar with the high-pitched whine of industrial vacuum cleaners. It was reminiscent of the drone experiments of the Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed himself was heard to remark, after having heard it, ”What the hell was that?”

The highlight of the “Anthology,” for Vacu-Tones fans, is the extended excerpt from the long-lost “second” album (it was actually their fifth). Recorded in 1974, it was very much a product of its time, that time being 11:58 p.m. on December 17, 1974. The 45-minute album was written, performed, and recorded in 36 minutes, no mean feat, yet was deemed by Splunge to be “far too wretched to be released.” Missing for nearly 25 years, the original tapes surfaced in 1998 when Splunge cleaned out his garage and found them stuffed inside a moosehead.

The centerpiece of the ill-fated album, which appears on Disc 2 of the “Anthology,” is what is believed to be Boing’s first—and mercifully last—attempt at a rock opera, “A Quack One.” The basic plot is convoluted and most of the time is completely incomprehensible, which puts it on the same level as most rock operas. It appears to be about one woman’s quest for the perfect duck—whether for food or amorous reasons is never really made clear. What is important about “A Quack One” is that if you listen to the CD version of the song closely and keep an eye on the counter, at 9:34 you can hear in the background the sound of a Xerox 6500 color copier, which had been introduced a year earlier. Coupled with the repeated refrain “Color my world/I’m so much older/Color my world/How much is toner?” it marks the first appearance in Boing’s work of modern technology, which Boing sought to use more of in his recordings.

This caused tension between Boing and the other Vacu-Tones. Where they were content to build on their by-now outdated vacuum cleaner technology, Boing wanted a more contemporary sound. In particular, he wanted to incorporate keyboards into the Vacu-Tones’ sound.

“Two years ago, IBM introduced a self-correcting version of its Selectric typewriter,” said Boing in a 1975 interview for Rolling Stone magazine, “and it just sounds terrific. Redactron recently came out with a cassette-based word processor which, with a little vibrato dropped onto it, sounds fantastic, especially at 75 words per minute. Multi-terminal video editing systems are coming out—my goal is to start building our new sound around these new technologies.”

So without consulting the other members of the band—or even Splunge—Boing hired three keyboardists from the Loss Leader steno pool, and began work on a new Vacu-Tones album—without any of the Vacu-Tones invited to play on it.

So in mid-1975, the original Vacu-Tones officially left the band, and a long legal battle was to ensue.

“We were the original Vacu-Tones, we had been using that name before we ever heard of Don %@!$#%& Boing,” said bass Hooverist Melman Sklenko in a 1978 interview in American Lawyer magazine. “And we thought that everyone associated the name Vacu-Tones with commercially unviable, tedious, appliance-based industrial noise. So we sued to force Boing to have to keep recording under the name The Vacu-Tones.”

“That whole period in the mid-70s when all the Vacu-Tones were suing Boing, what a nightmare that was,” Splunge’s liner notes explain. “It was a real firefight. I accidentally walked into what I thought was an empty office and was hit by a flying lawsuit. It cost me 10 grand in legal expenses just to walk out of the room.”

All the lawsuits, however, eventually petered out into nothingness when it was discovered that none of the attorneys hired by the Vacu-Tones had ever passed the Bar.

To which Splunge quips, “I don’t doubt for a minute that they ever passed a bar. I’m sure they strode up to and drank lustily from each and every one of them.”

His past behind him and full of new ideas and approaches to music, Boing took the tapes of the album-in-progress and embarked on a solo career, his intention being to release it as his first post-Vacu-Tones solo album. But it was then that tragedy struck.

Among Boing’s many problems in the mid- to late 1970s—such as chronic insomnia and his habit of talking to squirrels—was his increasing drug use. Thus his first solo contract with Loss Leader Records was signed while under the influence of allergy medication, which could account for some of its bizarre clauses, such as Boing’s forfeiting any share of the earnings from his albums, being placed on a fixed hourly wage of $2.50, and agreeing to have his mouth filled in with cement. Even more seriously, one of the terms of his contract was that he not actually record a single note for 10 years.

By the time his contract was up in 1987, a lot had happened in music—disco, punk, new wave, Donny and Marie, even a Boston album. Fortunately, Boing had missed all of it, another clause in his contract requiring him to be exiled to a small tropical island in the South Pacific. While there, he befriended the only other occupant of the island, who ran a copy shop and office supply store. This chance meeting would reflect itself in the music Boing would attempt to make when his contract was up and he was allowed to return to civilization. For, as there were no actual customers on the island, Boing was given free rein to play with the shop’s equipment. In particular, Boing was captivated by first the IBM PC keyboard in 1981 and the Apple Macintosh keyboard, introduced in 1984.

“And with the mouse,” said Boing in an 1992 interview for Sheet Metal Worker magazine, “you can get a great maraca sound, especially with the three-button variety.”

“I always wanted to have the latest and the greatest copying, imaging, and desktop publishing equipment,” writes Wendell Xavier Glubb, sole proprietor of Desert Island Copies, in the “Anthology”’s notes. “After all, you never know when an ocean liner or cruise ship—maybe even an oil tanker—is going to come by and need copies or maybe even color graphics for a presentation. Personally, I think our strategy of catering to the passing ocean liner market was a sound one. And I continue to stand by it.” Nevertheless, Glubb’s advertising and marketing strategy of spelling out “Copies 10¢” in the sand with coconuts did not meet with resounding success.
Glubb eagerly began to collaborate with Boing, and confessed to being happy to have someone to talk to and have something to do with his time other than, as he put it, “xeroxing toucans.”

Disc 4 of the “Anthology” highlights some of the material that Boing recorded with Glubb on the island. He got around his contractual no-record clause by simply writing down what he wanted Glubb to play, and having Glubb do the actual playing and recording. Thus it was that Boing’s vision was realized while also not recording a single note himself. It was crafty and, as the selections on Disc 4 show, utterly pointless.

The rest of the “desert island tapes” were sadly lost, and in a controversial manner that still rankles Boing today.

“Around 1986 I was looking for the material we had recorded,” recalls Boing, “and discovered half the tapes were gone. I confronted Glubb, who said that they had been carried off by a pack of roving tortoises.”

It was eventually learned that, short of food during the 1985 monsoon season, Glubb ate the tapes.

In 1987, Boing was clean and sober and glad to finally get off the island. “Glubb ate my tapes!” Boing said in a 1988 interview for Printing News magazine. “The greater part of 10 years’ work—down his gullet. What I was able to recover was completely unsalvageable.” And the less said about that the better.

Boing promptly signed a proper contract with Loss Leader, and decided to try to work with the material he had recorded with the Loss Leader typing pool before his exile. But, alas, those recordings had also been destroyed.

“I’m to blame for that mess,” Splunge confesses in the “Anthology”’s liner notes. “I was in the studio late one night in 1981, and the radio was on. There was this song I really liked at the time—I can’t remember what it was called or who it was by, but it had something to do with cars, and it had this cool synth sound. I really loved it, and I couldn’t at that time afford to buy the record, so I kept waiting for the radio to play it so I could tape it. Well, it came on, and I discovered to my horror that I didn’t have any blank tape. All I could grab in time was what was lying around, which happened to be Don’s album. I really only intended to record—what?—a mere three minutes right up front, but the phone rang, it was my divorce attorney, and by the time I got back to the studio, the tape had been completely recorded over.”

Splunge never told Boing what really happened, opting instead to blame it on a fire in the studio.

“It was certainly more convincing than roving tortoises,” writes Splunge. “But when he reads this and finds out the truth, he’s probably going to kill me.”

Discouraged that more than 10 years of work had been destroyed, Boing turned to drink, spending all his days and nights in a Nyquil-induced haze. After three days, he picked himself up, and checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic.

“Unfortunately,” writes Splunge, “he was so out of it at that time he couldn’t see straight, and actually moved into the Bethany Ford Automotive Service Center in Peekskill, NY.”

Peculiar stares from the mechanics aside, Boing was able to dry out, and found that he had the clearest sinuses he’d ever had. Completely energized, he immediately charged back into the studio and in one marathon session wrote, rehearsed, recorded, turned on the equipment, recorded, accidentally erased, re-recorded, and mixed his first actual album in more than 15 years—“Liquid Sponge.” In a complete about face, Boing dispensed completely with the sounds of household appliances and office equipment, relying instead on traditional folk-rock instrumentation, most prominently his guitar. After hearing a test pressing of the album Burton Splunge was heard to remark, “Holy shit—it’s listenable.”

Working with noted session musicians Boing had found loitering at the bus station, he included them on the hard-rocking “Pelted with Scones,” a track that was played heavily on alternative and college radio stations in fall 1988. The lyrics were the most personal he’d ever written: “I walk down the street and see through my bones/I often find myself pelted with scones/No no, no more muffins for me/I can see there’s something forming.”

An important song in the oeuvre of Don Boing, Disc 5 consists entirely of alternate takes of “Pelted with Scones.” The first five versions were recorded by Boing at home a capella in the shower. Versions six through 10 show Boing experimenting with different instrumentation, from electric guitar, to flute, to flugelhorn, to accordion, to bagpipes. Versions 11 through 15 show Boing settling on electric guitar and actually learning the chords to it. Version 16 features Boing backed by the London Symphony Orchestra, a take that Boing eventually discarded as sounding “too lush.” Version 17 is the version that was released as a single in Zimbabwe, while the remaining 10 tracks are the various live versions he performed over the years, including one “special version” he sang to his cat.

High on the success of “Pelted by Scones” as well the album, Boing hit the road and went on his first concert tour—ever, really. He took with him his backing musicians and, in a bit of self-deprecating humor, christened the road band “Don Boing and the Roving Tortoises.”

Splunge describes the tour, for which he was recruited as road manager. “I had the brilliant idea of saving money by simply playing at bus stations,” he writes. “That way, we can take a commercial bus line—which is cheaper than chartering our own—and we can avoid travel expenses to a particular venue. All things considered, it worked out great. Except when we tried to go overseas.”

Boing’s tour of bus stations around the country was deemed to be a success, and Boing and company were buoyed by the large crowds that would turn up.

“I didn’t think we had a big following,” admitted Boing in a 1992 interview in Bus Driver magazine. “But the crowds that were turning up were phenomenal. I remember one show—it was on a Friday night before Labor Day, the place was packed. Definitely standing room only.”

Toward the end of the tour of the 48 contiguous states, Splunge decided to try to send Boing and the Roving Tortoises overseas, and several dates were booked at the Budokan in Japan. But the tour would never get that far, and again tragedy would strike Boing’s career.

The first overseas stop was, Splunge later admitted, “a complete miscalculation. Somehow, we never purged our database, and this place was still in it.” It turned out that Boing’s first overseas concert was on the same virtually deserted island he had only recently left.

“Why we were sent there, I have no idea,” said Boing in a 1994 interview in Aircraft Machinery News magazine. We had no fan base there at all. The only one there was Glubb, and he hated rock music and left after the first song. We ended up playing to a family of otters.”

The Roving Tortoises’ bass player, Bonzy Carmichael, grew increasingly frustrated at having only a small, fur-bearing audience, and stormed off the stage. The rest of the band, too, didn’t see the point in continuing. Unfortunately, that set off a riot among the otters, who wanted to see the rest of the set. The otters charged the stage, and a bloody fight ensued. When it was over, Eddy Clankenboomer, the drummer, was dead. The rest of the tour was cancelled, and Boing and Co. returned to the States in defeat.

“If only…” Splunge would lament in a 1990 interview in Pig Farmer magazine. “The tour was going great. The domestic leg couldn’t have gone any smoother. But, we did one foreign date, the drummer was killed by otters, and it just fell apart. I blame myself, I should have known that a deserted tropical island is no place for a rock band.”

Several live recordings from the domestic tour appear on Disc 5 of the “Anthology.” Splunge regrets the poor sound quality of most of the live recordings.

“Loss Leader at that time did not have a mobile recording unit,” Splunge writes in the “Anthology”’s notes, “nor were we able to make any soundboard recordings. Basically, we had a guy standing at the back with a Dictaphone. We had to reuse some microcassettes, which is why if you listen to the quiet songs closely—like ‘Call Me Moist’ or ‘Slivers of Yams’—you can actually hear someone dictating a letter.”
Boing retired from music after the ill-fated tour and turned to acting. He has appeared on many television programs over the years, primarily crime dramas.

“Basically, whenever a cop show needs someone to play a dead body, they give me a call,” says Boing proudly.

The finest testament to his acting ability was his appearance as a dismembered corpse in an episode of “Law and Order.”

The final disc of “The Don Boing Anthology” comprises various home recordings Boing made over the years, such as demos of songs that were never recorded, spoken-word poetry, himself typing long letters, and various answering machine messages he has recorded over the years.

“The Don Boing Anthology” was digitally recorded, then immediately erased and re-recorded on Burton Splunge’s voice mail.

Thursday Thousand

I have decided, after gradually becoming more and more dissatisfied (to put it politely) with my "chosen" career path over the past couple of years, to put more of a focus on my creative writing, which I should have done 10 years ago. Anyway, it's all water under the bridge that you can use to make lemonade (or however those cliches go).

Thus, I will be using this blog more and more to try out ideas and experiments--some will be good, some will be bad, but the effort and the discipline will do me good. It may also be entertaining, at any rate. Hopefully I will keep it up...

The centerpoint will be what I will refer to as the "Thursday Thousand"--that, regardless of what nuisances happen during the week, I will write a 1,000-word story and post it here. And below is the first entry, inspired by a short story writing contest in the December issue of Writers Digest magazine, whose prompt is, "A dairy worker develops the uncanny ability to communicate with livestock." I missed the contest deadline (but perhaps that's a good thing) but it was a fun exercise.

This is by no means a final draft and is more or less a quick "stream consciousness," written in roughly the amount of time it took to type it, with minimal (or no) editing and revision, save for the correcting of typos. Enjoy!

Bossy

I was awakened suddenly by the insistent ringing of the phone. My wife reached over and slurred a groggy greeting, then I felt her jab me in the small of the back with the stiff plastic antenna of the cordless handset.

“It’s for you,” she said. “It’s the cow again.”

I sighed and grabbed the handset.

“What?” I demanded. Yes, as I suspected, it was the usual complaint. “I know the barn is cold. That’s because you always leave the door open. What…were you born in a barn?”

I then got an earful.

“It was a rhetorical question,” I rejoined. “Put on a sweater if you’re cold."

“Or a leather jacket,” I heard my wife mumble.

I hung up abruptly and went back to sleep.


Let me explain. It was only a couple of years ago. I had been working on Wall Street as an investment banker and, not to brag, but I had made rather a killing and, it being one of your more stressful jobs, decided to get out before it killed me. Helen and I drove around upstate at random one spring afternoon and found an old dairy farm for sale. I knew then that I had to have it.

“Honey,” my wife reminded me, “you have never been on a farm in your life. You don’t know anything about farming.”

“Mankind has been farming for millennia. How hard could it be?”

This tended to be my attitude going into any new endeavor and it had always stood me in good stead. Call it the power of positive thinking, if you’re into that kind of thing, but I’ve always found that you really can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it and do enough research.

So within a month, we had left New York City and were ensconced in a pleasant rural paradise only a few hundred feet away from a half dozen cows.

“Have you ever milked a cow?” my wife asked me over our first dinner in the new farm. It wasn’t a beef dish, I hasten to add.

“Of course not.” I said. “But I’ve seen it done and About.com describes the process fairly clearly.”

“Oh, this is going to go well.”

“Besides, I’m sure the cows will tell me if I’m doing it wrong.”

She looked at me oddly. She was used to my blithely ignoring whatever obstacles may exist in whatever path I was set down, but this seemed to flummox even her.

“What do you mean, ‘the cows will tell you’? Are you Dr. Doolittle all of a sudden?”

“Well, I don’t mean in English. I imagine they’ll moo a bit.”

She shrugged and focused intently on her lamb chop.


The next morning, I awoke, if not with the chickens, then certainly with the cows, who were waiting for me. I had my archetypal wooden stool and galvanized bucket, and sat myself down and grabbed a handful of udder. I had seen some videos online of how this was done and thought I was doing it correctly. The only fly in the ointment was that no milk was coming out.

“What do you think you’re doing?” came a voice from above me.

I looked around, and there was no one there. There was just the cow, which animal was indeed the source of the voice. She was looking at me with a bemused expression.

“Honestly, you city folk,” she said.

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked.

She then talked me through the process very carefully and clearly and in a short while had dispensed a decent quantity of milk.

“Thank you,” I said. “I am much obliged.”

“Can I go out now? I’m starving and the grass smells good this morning.”

“Hum,” I said. “Don’t you all usually amble out together once I’ve milked everyone?”

“Oh, why be a slave to routine?” she said. “Let’s live dangerously.”

I thought, then shrugged. “That’s a fair point.” So I opened the door and let her out.
Thanks to my bovine friend’s hands-on tutorial (as it were), I was able to make short work of the rest of the milking.


And thus began my initial foray into dairy farming. I should stress that I had no intention of making a business out of it. With the small herd we had, I was able to supply fresh milk for ourselves, our son and his family, and a few of our friends. That was perfectly fine with me.

The morning milking ritual resulted in my bonding, after a fashion, with the cow who was kind enough to instruct me on my maiden voyage. Her name was Camilla, as it turned out, and while she was of a cynical and sarcastic temperament, she eventually began to warm to me, and we began to converse in the most pleasant manner each morning. Curiously, she was the only one of the herd to speak to me, the others I guess being of a more timid disposition.

One morning, my wife came out to the barn while I was in the process of milking, and I felt I had to introduce her to Camilla. I had yet to tell my wife about our budding friendship.

I felt it only polite to formally introduce them. “Camilla, this is my wife Helen. Helen, this is Camilla. The cow.”

What I heard Camilla say was “Nice to meet you.” What I later found out was that Helen had merely heard “Moo.” Which could explain why Helen simply stared at me with that expression she so often gives me that seems to suggest “I’ll draw up the commitment papers.”

“Don’t forget we have that appointment with Alan Chambers at noon.

“I won’t.”

She then left, a tad more briskly than I seem to recall her moving normally.

“She’s not very sociable, is she?” asked Camilla.

“It takes her a while to warm up to people,” I said unthinkingly. “Oh, and cows, too, I would imagine.”

“Damn rude if you ask me.”


Over the next several months, my relationship with Camilla began to change—and not in a particularly good way. Camilla had always been somewhat demanding—disgruntled about this, that, or the other thing—and early in my tenure I accepted it as part of the dairy farming process. But as I gradually began to settle into a routine and develop a higher level of competence and confidence, I began to resent being what amounted to a slave to this cow. I had made the mistake early on of acceding to her demands to have her own cellphone, the result being that I was on call day and night. Unfortunately, this also began to gnaw at my wife who was getting tired of the phone ringing in the middle of the night.

It was early January when things came to a head. We had been down to the city at a party hosted by a friend of ours and had returned rather late. My wife was, shall we say, in her cups, and was eager to sleep. As soon as the lights went out, the phone rang. (The phone had since been moved to my side of the bed.) I quickly answered it before Helen could be overly aggrieved by the ringing. (Too late, as I heard her unleash a string of lurid profanity and references to beef.)

“Where have you been all night?” Camilla insisted.

“The Caravellis threw the most excellent party down in the City. You should have come.” I rarely look for a fight and was trying to be amiable.

“Oh, that would have gone over well,” the cow replied.

“You may have a point,” I said after a moment’s consideration.

At that point, my wife rolled over with the speed and force of industrial machinery and grabbed the phone from my hand. She paused for a moment, then said in the sweetest voice she could muster, “Camilla, this is Helen. I think we need to have a long talk to work out some issues. We would love to have you for dinner tomorrow evening—say, six?”

There was apparently some form of reply.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ I’ll see you then.”

Helen then hung up.


I won’t dwell on what happened next. I suppose I should have been more upset, or perhaps have interpreted my wife’s invitation to Camilla more carefully. When I came home from running errands, dinner was just coming out of the oven, but there was no sign of Camilla. Or so I thought.

While it’s true that Camilla had worn out her welcome, she was actually quite tasty.


The following summer, I decided to build my own henhouse and buy a couple of chickens for the purpose of supplementing my fresh milk with fresh eggs. One morning, a few days after acquitting our poultry stock, as I was walking past the henhouse, I heard a voice call out, “A little help in here!”

Don’t tell my wife.

World's Most Unexpected Headline...

Amtrak train was speeding

Not something one sees every day.

iPhone Therefore I Am

Last weekend, while down in Corning, I lost my cellphone. As you could well imagine, I was distraught for well over a nanosecond. Now, I liked the basic idea of the BlackBerry, but the device itself was not well designed and I never really did like it all that much, despite the fact that I relied on it heavily for mobile e-mail access, even if it was a really crappy cellphone (or, in other words, a cellphone).

So Friday morning I went down to Crossgates Mall to the Apple Store and splurged on an iPhone. Leave it to Apple to get me to like a cellphone. It is everything the BlackBerry should have been. It synced up both my e-mail accounts (and uses basically the same Apple Mail application I use on my laptop. It connects to the Internet through an available Wi-Fi network or, if there isn't one, it uses AT&T's network. The Web browser is basically Safari and accesses most Web pages identically to how pages are accessed on a computer. It's a tinier screen, of course, but the zoom feature works pretty well, and if you turn the iPhone horizontally, it automatically flips the display to widescreen. AT&T gets a bad rap, but the people in the AT&T store in Crossgates couldn't have been nicer and more helpful in setting up an account and porting my mobile number over from Sprint. I have had no problems accessing the AT&T network and saratoga appears to be well covered. I was easily able to surf the Web while on the bus, or out at Happy Hour (we were trying to find out what restaurants were participating in Restaurant Week and I was easily able to access the appropriate site.

My only gripe is the onscreen keypad which requires fingers the size of a two-year-old's. But I am getting better at it. In fact, this post was created on the iPhone, and wasn't too onerous at all

In sum, I love my iPhone--losing my cellphone was probably the best thing that ever happened!

EZ Does It

A friend of mine forwarded this e-mail letter to me, which smacks of hoax:

Subject: EZ Pass alert

New York State started a pilot program upstate north of Albany on the Northway to catch speeders using the Easy Pass system. Recording devices were installed at intervals along the highway. Once an Easy Pass equipped vehicle passes, the device registers the account number and the time. Same is again registered at the next "check-point". Based upon the distance between the register points and the posted speed limit, the state is sending speeding tickets in the mail to the guilty persons.

Because every driver does not have Easy Pass , the State is "perplexed" as what to do to impose the system state-wide. The solution has been found. Soon all new vehicle registration stickers will have a metal strip or chip imbedded in same. This will take the place of the Easy Pass system as stated above. When a vehicle passes the registering device, the strip will relay all the information.

This is not fictional. New York State contracted with VERIZON to install the system. The system has already been installed and the entire Bronx River Parkway in Westchester County has been "wired" for when the new system begins. Once the State makes the new program public and advises all motorists of the potential for numerous speeding tickets, it will also reveal that the system has already been installed.

Another reason that will be given for the new system is to enable the authorities to track stolen vehicles, to trace kidnap victims, to monitor and trace suspected criminals and terrorists, etc.

BIG BROTHER IS ALIVE AND WELL.

Pass this along to every one you know.

A Google (and Snopes) search turned up no serious debunking, but certain points make me suspicious:

First of all, they spell out "Easy Pass" when the system is called "EZ Pass"--OK, hardly damning evidence, to be sure, but still...

Second of all, "upstate north of Albany on the Northway" is I-87, which runs from Albany to Montreal (though the route number changes at the Canadian Border). However, there are no tolls on the Northway, and while the point of the system cited in the letter is to catch speeders and not collect tolls, you tend not to find very many people north of Albany who have EZ Pass tags (that is, why would they have them--decoration? status?), so why the state would pick this particular place to launch such a pilot program is a mystery.

And third of all--"New York State contracted with VERIZON to install the system"--I have Verizon (and have endured Verizon Wireless) and they have yet to master basic telephone service, so I'm not confident that any Big Brother technology they could come up with would work anyway.

This is not to say that EZ Pass can't be used to catch speeders. In fact, that very thought occurred to me the minute I heard about electronic toll systems. (I remember this discussion coming up when they started introducing electronic toll roads in Southern California in the 1990s.) And it's a bit less egregious than London where omnipresent cameras photograph your license plate, which is scanned optically, and mapped to a database and if you are caught parking illegally (or not paying the Central London Congestion Fee) you receive a ticket in the mail (which has actually happened to my London friends).

But then again, all license plates are photographed when cars go through New York State tollbooths (which is why the signs say "EZ Pass can be used in any toll lane," and even if you don't get the green light you still get charged--this has happened to me, so I called EZ Pass and asked) so if the state wanted to start issuing speeding tickets based on how fast a car has gone from one tollbooth to the other, they don't need EZ Pass to do it. (Fortunately, at my age, I need to make regular pitstops when taking the Thruway anywhere, which renders this process fairly useless in my case, no matter how much I speed, since the rest stop probably takes more time than I would save by driving fast, throwing off their complex mathematical calculations.)

Of course, the truly paranoid can simply just not speed.

As for the whole "Big Brother" thing--it's really not high on my list of worries. All I can say is that anyone who has the inclination to pry into my life had better stock up on No Doz. I would imagine the same applies to 99% of humanity.