Wherefore this blog?
June 21, 2009
I have decided to blog my new novel, Tecopa Cocoa, in the hope of gathering both helpful feedback and, with any luck, some real ink-on-paper publishing interest.
Then, of course, there is the existential question: if no one reads and reacts to this work, does it really exist? Yes, I suppose there is some of that.
In any event, I have so far added nineteen chapters—all but the final chapter, the denouement, if you will, which will be added as soon as I am finished with it. I do hope someone notices. I hope even more that someone cares to comment, even if it is only to point out typos.
Pay no attention to the dates. I had to lie to my computer in order to present the chapter sequence to you, the reader, in the correct (that is, ascending) order. You may like to know that my computer has already forgiven me for this little bit of mendacity which I carried out solely to make the reading experience a little more people-friendly (computers don’t really care).
Thank you for your time. Please enjoy your reading.
~ Peter R Jacoby
P.S. All materiel found in this blog is © copyright 1997-2009 by Peter R Jacoby. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
June 21, 2009
Chapter One
Who could have known he would show up again? Or that I would go from a pudgy, begoggled, unevenly-legged, fully-parented teenager to an orphan to an adult acolyte to a species other than human? Or that I would miraculously gain perfect eyesight, only to have nothing to see? Who could have known that I would lose my best friend to an Oldsmobile and Omaha, and lose my love to the only accurate pass a high school football quarterback would ever throw, and then to a lead box? Who could have known that it would all start and end in the dark, or that I would apprentice as a mortal air breather free to roam, yet serve as an immortal sea creature confined to just a couple of arid acres (at most!) in the middle of the desert? Who could have known that I would be useless with my senses intact, a non-speaker in a listening world, invisible in a looking world, anachronistic in a modern world, silent in a noisy world, an apologetic apostle, a muted messenger with a gospel I don’t fully grasp, its meaning encased in a befuddled brain, while that same befuddled brain—along with the rest of my biological self—is literally encased in a rock-hard shell like a giant Galápagos tortoise?
Who could have known it would come to this? Again?
Who, indeed?
As unassuming and inconsequential a place and time as it may now seem, the truth of the matter is that my first truly transcendental experience concerning the desert occurred on a lazy late Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1957, anno domini—hundreds of thousands of days (and nights), hours, minutes, and seconds ago in what whoever is left may still consider to be normal time, but certainly not more than a quick catnap in star time—at the Glebe Theater in Arlington, Virginia, then a quiet suburb of Washington, D.C., during my thirteenth consecutive year on this planet. Washington, D.C., used to be the capital of what used to be the country called the United States of America.
It was a long, long time ago, but I remember it as if it were still happening. Bobby Sue Bessemer and I were sharing a large container of popcorn with “butter” as we watched Fred MacMurray, Dorothy Malone, and Michael Ansara in the new movie western Quantez. While I stared transfixed at the screen, optically absorbing one scene after another filmed in one desert or another in the southern part of what used to be the state of California, our hands, by now generously covered in the liquefied lard they billed at the snack bar as “butter,” met now and again, sending small but distinct electrical impulses through my wrist, up my arm, and straight to the center of my thoughtlessly indiscriminate medulla oblongata. From there the signal was intensified to a level slightly below that of a dentist’s drill just touching an undeadened nerve, and split into three signals which went, in increasing order of intensity, to my conscious brain, my gut, and my groin.
Bobby Sue Bessemer had been the object of what I thought then was my purely hormonally focused desire since I met her in Mrs. Harm’s sixth grade class just ten months earlier. I, on the other hand, had never even once appeared as even a fuzzy little blip on her heat-seeker scope. Our sharing popcorn with “butter” in the Glebe Theater wasn’t a date by the wildest stretch of anyone’s imagination, except mine. And at that, I had to stretch my imagination pretty far.
If the truth be told—and it might as well be, the way things are going now—it was just blind, dumb luck. A trick of Fate; and if I have learned anything, Fate is quite the trickster. I had actually gone to the Glebe Theater to see the movie with my best friend who lived across the street from me, Buzz Westerman. We had been driven to the movie by Buzz’s mother in her brand new Oldsmobile—called by her and almost everyone else at the time an Olds, an odd name I thought then for a new car—which was, as I remember, more chrome than good sense, and which, along with Mrs. Westerman, would have benefited greatly from my uncle Henry’s Big Invention…. That is, if Mrs. Westerman’s Olds had lasted another fourteen years, which, of course it didn’t, in part because my uncle Henry hadn’t come across his Big Invention in time to save both the Olds and Mrs. Westerman from Fate’s designs, and in part because the Olds was, fresh from the factory, a piece of junk. It was also pink and chrome—of course, every automobile back then was something and chrome, much to the delight of a few privileged people in the country of Rhodesia, where most of the world’s chromium came from—when it arrived, fresh from the factory, in the dealer showroom, a day before Mr. Westerman took delivery of it and drove it home to generously give to Mrs. Westerman as her car. That was the first and last time he drove the Olds, which is just as well because someone who smokes cigars constantly should never drive a pink car. Nowadays, it’s illegal in most nations to smoke cigars when you do anything. Anyway, my uncle Henry’s Big Invention wouldn’t have been able to do anything about the Olds being pink and chrome, no matter when he came up with it.
Buzz and I made sure his mother dropped us off at the corner, not right in front of the theater, and early enough so we could just hang around the curb doing our very best invisible act until the pink and chrome Olds disappeared, which takes some time, given that there is nothing at all invisible about something that large, pink, and chrome-covered. We also wanted to make sure we had time to load up on popcorn with “butter,” Coke, Milk Duds, Whoopers, Jujubes, Junior Mints, and as many napkins as we felt we could coax out of the little spring-loaded box without drawing too much undue attention.
Loaded down with enough sugar and lard to power a small space probe for three centuries, or to make a significant contribution to the latest food drive going on right now in the area which now calls itself the country of Bison—an area which includes much of what used to be known as the states of North Dakota and Montana (even though the only bison seen there in the last 40 years have been photographs)—and having miscalculated our timing just enough so that the auditorium itself had gone dark, we made our way down the left aisle looking for a pair of seats in that magic zone between so close to the screen that you couldn’t see the whole thing at once, and so far back that you might as well be home watching television, except that television was only in black and white then, and the food wasn’t as good, and at the movie theater you didn’t have to clean up afterward. Straining to look over the near-mountain of popcorn with “butter” and other things piled up in a flimsy cardboard tray he carried in front of him with both hands, Buzz saw two seats right in the middle of the magic zone and told me to follow him. He didn’t know it, but his Coke was spilling and napkins were slipping out of his back pocket where he had so haphazardly stashed them, so that he was leaving a trail behind him which was, in essence, trying to clean itself up. Thinking about it now, it reminds me of another one of my uncle Henry’s inventions, a minor one, which, in the end, was nowhere near as successful than his major one, the Big Invention, not to mention his Great Discovery. His Great Discovery worked really well—really, really well—and left me where and how I am today. But then, unlike some of his other inventions and discoveries, it was never meant to be a commercial success; more of a spiritual one, I think. Oh, well….
It was fortunate, for me at least, that Buzz was leaving this Coke and clean-up combo trail for me to follow, because I couldn’t see over my tray of food and drink very well at all, and I had terrible eyes back then for which I wore four-and-a-half pound glasses that kept slipping down and, sometimes, even off my nose, rendering me visually impaired if not virtually blind as the proverbial bat.
* * *
My uncle Henry had always fully comprehended the inherent flaw, the basic contradiction in the concept of popcorn with “butter.” It was that insight, really, which made his Big Invention possible and, in a way, his Great Discovery. The inherent flaw in my uncle Henry, genius and loon that he was, was that while he saw the connection between popcorn with “butter” and his Big Invention—and later his Great Discovery—from a societal and cultural point of view, their real power was and still is spiritual, and he wasn’t always good at marketing that. That tragic, perhaps even Shakespearean flaw is what ultimately doomed his Great Discovery, him, and, therefore, me.
Unless, of course, he knew all along and just wasn’t telling me, which he didn’t, and which I may never know. And to me, like to the stars in heaven, “never” is a very long time.
Of course, there aren’t any movie theaters now, and haven’t been since the turn of the millennium; just intimate little viewing rooms where you have to clean up after yourself. They used to be called dens or family rooms. All you can eat in them are carrot sticks and water, and you can’t talk. But you can still neck.
Popcorn with “butter”—liquefied lard, vegetable oil, partially hydrogenated transmission fluid, or even real butter—hasn’t been seen for about thirty years now. It went the way of cigars and pink and chrome cars. Jujubes are still around, but mostly from cases of Jujubes produced in huge quantities for movie theaters during the last century, which was also part of the last millennium. They are movie theatre whatnot that may never go away. Like lizard tails in the desert.
Following Buzz down the darkened left aisle of the Glebe Theater had its advantages and its disadvantages. The major disadvantage was that, as he spilled more and more Coke and napkins, and as the napkins soaked up as much Coke as they could in a desperate attempt to clean up the mess, I had to walk through a trail of sticky napkins, many of which adhered to my orthopedic shoes and would let go only when another was ready to take its place. Orthopedic shoes are particularly vulnerable to this sort of outright assault simply because they are so plain. They have smooth, flat soles and unadorned uppers—perfect surfaces for sticky napkins intent on hitching a ride. The orthopedic shoes weren’t for both feet, but they were only sold in pairs, and it would have looked pretty dumb to wear one plain, black orthopedic shoe and one loafer or Keds Hi-Top or whatever. And since I had to wear one orthopedic shoe, I chose the safer, less embarrassing option and wore both of them. The one that I had to wear was to make up for the fact that my left leg was a couple of inches shorter than my right leg, the result of a childhood bout with polio. The Great Polio Battle ended in a draw during my third consecutive year on the planet: I got to continue to walk, but it made me walk funny. Without the orthopedic shoe with the built-up sole, the doctor explained to my mother, I would, as a result of my leg length disparity, end up spending most of my time walking around in circles to the left. This made him chuckle. It made my mother chuckle, too, but I think that was just because she was so relieved that I would be able to walk at all, even if it was only in circles. Anyway, that’s why I ended up wearing orthopedic shoes until I moved to the desert. Not that it makes any difference now.
The main advantage to following behind Buzz down the darkened aisle of the Glebe Theater was that we were heading toward two first-rate seats, one on the aisle and the one next to the one on the aisle. With Buzz leading, he would end up with the second seat and I would end up with the one on the aisle, a distinct advantage when someone ten times the size of a normal human being (perhaps as large as a bison), ends up sitting in front of me, which almost always happens.
But Buzz didn’t do that. He stopped in the aisle next to the row of seats just in front of our target row, turned completely around, spilling Coke on someone while unintentionally but kindly also leaving them two napkins, and motioned for me to sit in the seat next to the seat next to the aisle. I didn’t know then if he was just being selfish, or if he had finally figured out he had been one of the Glebe Theater’s largest Coke-and-napkins-in-the-aisle distributors and was mad because I hadn’t told him about it and now he’d have to go buy another Coke if he had enough money—or if he had secretly noticed some bison loitering around the lobby and feared the worst. Whatever the reason, there he stood, his back to the screen, his “butter” oozing onto his box of Whoopers, staring at me, and shaking his head like he was actually trying to make it detach from his neck and fly into the lap of some unsuspecting moviegoer sitting near the right aisle of the Glebe Theater, thus crushing his or her container of popcorn and “butter” and probably causing them to never order it again.
Of course, just like the pink and chrome Oldsmobile, Mr. Westerman’s cigars, and the catastrophic Coke spill which had now fouled the entire left aisle of the Glebe Theater, and would no doubt have consequences lasting for years—consequences which would, in time, spell the doom of the Glebe Theater and all who worked there, because walking up and down the aisle ultimately became impossible for even the strongest and most intrepid—this was a situation way beyond Buzz’s control. He didn’t know it at the time, and, unlike me, may never have known it, but Fate was in charge, not Buzz. Fate put me in the seat next to the seat next to the aisle, just as Fate put Bobby Sue Bessemer in the seat next to the seat next to the seat next to the aisle.
The Glebe Theater got its name from the fact that it fronted on Glebe Road, one of the main north-south streets in Arlington, Virginia. For some time, I had wondered just what the word “glebe” meant. For an even longer time before that, I didn’t care. And when I say “long time,” I mean what was thought back then by young adolescents to be a long time; a mere temporal trifle, now.
Glebe Road was originally a horse and cart path which connected two churches—North Church and South Church, appropriately (if unoriginally) enough—in ancient Arlington, Virginia, back in the time of trees and churches, but before revolutions. Before that it was a footpath through the tree-choked almost-wilderness. A plot of land granted to a clergyman as part of his benefice, and hence the church grounds, for reasons no one in Arlington, no matter how old or how religious they were, could ever tell me, were called glebes.
A few years later, sitting in my uncle Henry’s trailer in the desert, I looked it up. It came from the Latin, globa, which meant clod. Different times produce different perspectives.
* * *
So this little swath of ruts and rubble and dirt path whatnot through the forest connected the two glebes, North and South. If only the combatants, North and South, in The American War—the name to which the Civil War of 1861-1865 has now been changed because everyone eventually gave up trying to come to terms with the inherently oxymoronic nature of the term “Civil War”—had had more Glebe Roads leading to more glebes with churches on them, things might have been different. Probably not, though. Wars are amazingly strong and independent organisms; if they really, really want to be fought, they will be, no matter what.
In the southwesternmost part of what used to be called the state of California, in a city named San Diego after a big-time sixteenth century, anno domini, political contributor in what used to be a country called Spain who had never set foot in the city called San Diego and never would—in fact, who had never in his life left Spain—there used to be a street called Good Karma Lane. Maybe more of those and fewer glebes could have eased some of the trauma of The American War. Maybe not. Anyway, decades ago, in another not quite so violent and lethal nod to political necessity, Good Karma Lane was renamed James Watt Avenue. Regrettably, political necessity rarely takes good karma—in whatever form it may be manifesting itself at the moment—into account.
Reflected off the screen, the high noon brightness of the desert scene from somewhere in the southern part of what used to be called the state of California was more than enough light to startle me down to the uneven soles of my orthopedic shoes, because as I sat down, trying as hard as I could not to add to Buzz’s tide of Coke washing the floor of the Glebe Theater, which was now becoming as strong a glue as any used to lay linoleum tile for all eternity, I naturally looked to see if I was plopping myself down, food and drink wobbling, next to a bison or a bully or a normal person or what, fearing that a jostled elbow might make an instant and everlasting—and overpowering—enemy.
But the profile revealed to me by the warm desert light was none other than Bobby Sue Bessemer, and it was the most frightening moment of my life up to that point, more frightening than any bison or bully or both put together. Here, not more than the length of a regular box of Jujubes away, was my most fevered fantasy, the object of more daydreaming than that conjured by an entire generation of Late-1950’s, anno domini, thirteen-year-old boys for Marilyn Monroe, who was also a favorite of an Early-1960s, anno domini, president of the country that used to be known as the United States of America. Here beside me the reflected desert light etched and defined that perfect, peachfuzzed, pimpleless profile I had memorized so well and seemingly so long ago in Mrs. Harm’s sixth grade class. Needless to say, I was frozen, mouth agape, my ego burning in Hell, and my mind racing through a sudden litany of fervent wishes.
I was wishing I didn’t have to wear glasses that weighed more than my large Coke; that both my feet could reach the floor at the same time; that orthopedic shoes could look like high-tops, or at least loafers, and not like one foot had stepped in setting tar and had not been cleaned off yet; that I could grow four inches taller in the next twelve seconds, and lose some chubby fat at the same time; that my parents—my mother, really, because my father always said “Yes, Dear,” to whatever she said, and might even have said “Yes, Dear,” if she told him to go kill himself, which he sort of did just two years later—didn’t think I would look cute with a flattop haircut; that my hair had at least one single wave in it, which it didn’t; that I owned a pair of jeans; that I could think of something to say; that Bobby Sue Bessemer would—please, please, please, oh, please—remember my name, which I don’t think she did at the time, and didn’t even many years later.
Oh, well…
It’s difficult to remember something you never knew in the first place.
Because he didn’t have the faintest clue that he wasn’t in control at all, and that Fate had scripted everything that would happen in the Glebe Theater that afternoon, and not even realizing I was now sitting next to Bobby Sue Bessemer—it was only a bit later, when he did realize who was in the seat next to me that it began to dawn on him that someone had played a very dirty, underhanded trick on him, namely, me, because he, too, like every male member of Mrs. Harm’s sixth grade class, would have walked barefoot across broken glass, or even spilled Coke that had set to the point that it would tear your skin off if you touched it, just to stand next to Bobby Sue Bessemer—Buzz didn’t realize that his startling next move would simultaneously break my wishing spell, turn Bobby Sue Bessemer’s achingly beautiful face directly toward my achingly pudgy and puerile one, and, following several intervening decades, change the course of a few histories.
As has been known by some for millennia, Fate is a real trickster. But, like most everyone else ever to draw air on the planet, I had to find this out the hard way. Without knowing it, Bobby Sue Bessemer and Buzz, serving as Fate’s teaching assistants, were about to educate me, and, at the same time, weave the desert into my heart and my soul from that afternoon so long ago and for the rest of my life. The coup de gráce began, innocently enough—if anything being so absolutely and minutely controlled by Fate and so obviously intended to have a lifetime effect, as this was, is ever truly innocent—when Buzz realized that his involuntary Coke redistribution had begun to take a toll on his Junior Mints.
Such an immediate and potentially disastrous threat to his Junior Mints was probably the only thing that would divert him from his fuming and festering hatred of what he surely saw as a plot hatched by me as we entered the auditorium of the Glebe Theater, a plot enabled by the acute vision my oversized and overly-thick glasses surely must have given me (he perhaps thought), allowing me to spot Bobby Sue Bessemer from behind and forty rows away in the dark, and then with diabolical cunning, flawless planning, and the timing of a good Swiss watch, guide him with such a subtle manner that he never knew he was being guided—by his up-to-that-moment best friend—to the seats next to Bobby Sue Bessemer, all the while using some unknown to him kinetic power I had over Coca-Cola, causing it to begin a seemingly unending process of spilling, diverting his attention from what was really going on: keeping him from sitting next to Bobby Sue Bessemer.
I could see his point. If I could have done it that way, I would have. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t. Such powers were totally out of reach to me until just recently.
However fanciful his thoughts of plotting and skullduggery may have been, his sudden awareness of a very real and pressing threat to the continued integrity of his Junior Mints was quite real. So real, in fact, that his realization that the Coke tidal surge had already begun to soften the mostly white and green cardboard Junior Mint box, and his fear that it could actually penetrate the inner wax paper and reduce the fat little circles of a white, minty substance and thin but rich dark chocolate to a inedible slurry with possibly toxic consequences, actually caused him to jump to a fully standing position while yelling “Whoa!” as he frantically tried to rebalance the now soaking and partially dissolved tray which held what was left of the entirety of his weekly allowance.
As chance would have it—if “chance” is ever really a factor in these sorts of things—just as Buzz stood to his full 5ʹ2ʺ height, yelling “Whoa!” at what I think was the top of his lungs, lungs filled with surprise, hate, envy, and fear all at the same time, up on the screen Fred MacMurray was attempting heartily, though silently, to rein his horse to a stop, in close-up. Not being entirely certain myself what terrible battles with Fate Buzz was fighting, and being totally unaware of the imminent danger facing his Junior Mints, I, along with Bobby Sue Bessemer, Bobby Sue Bessemer’s best friend, whose name was Sally, or Susie, or Sissy, or something like that, and almost everyone else in the Glebe Theater that afternoon, thought Buzz had a knack for prescience, or at least a strong premonition of some sort of impending danger to Fred MacMurray, and was urgently helping him as best he could to get his horse stopped before all Hell broke loose. His rising was so sudden, his almost-barked “Whoa!” so sharp, that it caused me to leap back in my seat, if one can leap back while sitting. My sudden move caused Bobby Sue Bessemer to sort of jump—really, it was less a jump and more like the physical motions a body goes through when experiencing an enormous and unexpected hiccup; sort of like a 13-megawatt tic—which not only caused Sally or Susie or Sleepy or Sneezy or whatever her name was to lean far to her right and spill at least a third of her orange drink on the seven-year-old male member of the family sitting next to her and start him on a five-minute crying binge, but, more importantly, Bobby Sue Bessemer’s gargantuan hiccup sent her entire large serving of popcorn with “butter” arcing about twelve feet up and eight feet forward, the once fluffy but now rather soggy, long-since-popped kernels of corn adding an amazingly lifelike three-dimensional effect to the close-up shots now on the screen of the horse’s hooves sending sand, dirt, pebbles, lizard tails, and other desert whatnot flying as the horse frantically tried to obey both the cowboy’s silent and Buzz’s booming commands to stop instantly, and causing several people three or four rows ahead to think they, on a lazy late summer afternoon, were experiencing the first moment of the next level in motion picture audience involvement technology, right there in what was then the Glebe Theater in what was then Arlington, Virginia.
Of course, no such thing was happening, and their fairly quick realization of the more mundane, if somewhat unexpected turn of events, caused quite a buzz for a few moments in what was then the Glebe Theater in what was then Arlington, Virginia. Not even the movie moguls and other contract magicians in Hollywood (in the southern part of what was then the state of California) were to realize this was the next significant advancement in motion picture audience-involvement technology.
Speaking of causing quite a buzz….
I’m usually pretty good at remembering things.
I’ve been on the planet for just over 110 consecutive years now, and many of those years I’ve had plenty of time on my hands—figuratively speaking, of course—and now it looks like I’ll have much, much more time, and I already have more hands, if you can call them that. So I’ve been able to think back on everything again and again. But for the life of me, which may be a moot point now, I can’t remember what Buzz’s real name was, the name Mr. and Mrs. Westerman must have given him at his birth (for they surely must have given him one other than “Buzz”). And it’s very hard for me to believe his real name was Buzz, although that’s the only name I remember anyone ever calling him, even the Westermans, and they were his parents and they should have known.
Maybe his name was Edward, or Thomas, or even Papuatu, although that isn’t very likely. Not back then. On the other hand, it just might have been Buzz. I mean, Mr. Westerman did buy Mrs. Westerman a pink and chrome Oldsmobile the size and weight of a small, workable farm, and Mr. Westerman did drive it once while smoking a cigar. Perhaps his name really was Buzz. That’s what they called him all the time whenever I spent the night at his house, which was only twice, but those couple of times gave me some insights into a few of the more intimate details of their lives as a family. His parents had more than one chance to say, “Good night, Papuatu,” or whatever. But it was always Buzz. Not even Buzzy. Just Buzz.
Things like that happen, even with relatively clear if somewhat dull-thinking people like the Westerman’s. “Oh, Dear,” Mrs. Westerman says to her husband—that’s all I heard him called, so maybe that was Mr. Westerman’s name: Dear—as she cradles her newborn and thumbs her way through the phone book looking for ideas, “Someone just pushed the door buzzer. Maybe we should call him ‘Buzz’.” Or: “He looks so much like a cute little bee, Dear, with his cute little antennae and stinger and black-and-yellow stripes and compound eyes, what do you think about calling him ‘Buzz’?”
I may never know, since Mrs. Westerman and the pink and chrome Olds left the planet simultaneously in a huge ball of flame shortly after Mr. Westerman had choked his way off the planet on an unlit cigar in front of Buzz and Mrs. Westerman and me at the breakfast table, and Buzz, in his wandering around the planet delivering the gospel, surely must have left the planet by now, his trek having started so many decades ago.
It didn’t take long for Buzz to notice that, for the moment, he had a larger and much more attentive audience than the movie did, at which point he did exactly what I would have done under the circumstances, and I have to admit I gave it serious consideration, even though it was Buzz’s audience and not mine: he attempted to shrink his standing 5ʹ2ʺ frame into a fetal 2ʹ5ʺ frame in his now folded-up seat, pulling the Coke-sogged cardboard food tray over him, hoping he could forage on Jujubes and whatever dry Junior Mints he could find until everyone in the Glebe Theater had left and had either moved to another time zone or left the planet altogether. Having somehow contorted himself into a position which achieved most of his immediate goal, I was left to deal with Bobby Sue Bessemer, whose entire attention I now enjoyed by default, entirely on my own.
Since all her popcorn with “butter” had been offered up as special effects for the movie, and since all my money had already been invested in the cache of food precariously balanced in my lap, there was only one thing to do—I just didn’t know how to do it: I had to speak to Bobby Sue Bessemer, and offer to share with her my popcorn with “butter.” It was frightening beyond belief. She wore a crisp, wide, pink (but chromeless) skirt. I wore a plaid flannel shirt my mother had bought for me, probably while I was sleeping, that was buttoned all the way to the top. She wore saddle shoes. I wore orthopedic shoes, one roughly the size and weight of a saddle. She had long, golden blond hair (that actually seemed to glow on its own) done in a long pony tail. I had a piece or two of her popcorn with “butter” skewered on the spiny points of my flattop hair. She had large, golden, almost sand colored eyes which, as they looked at me, widened as they were by the recent surprising events, reflected the golden desert scene of the movie. My eyes cowered—and tried desperately to focus simultaneously—behind glasses that seemed better suited to wielding a welding torch than simply seeing. She was two inches taller than I was, even sitting down.
* * *
Genuine moments of truth, those moments which measure your character and the strength of your soul, come rarely in anyone’s life. Perhaps an even half-dozen is all that anyone is ever really allowed or given. And I knew, even at the very tender and sometimes sore age of thirteen, I knew from my brain to my bowels to my pudgy fingertips that this was one of mine. I knew that what I said and did in the next few seconds would make a difference in the rest of my life. Looking back on it now, 98 years later, I was right. If I had known then what I know now, it wouldn’t have made one iota of difference, probably because there are things that are meant to happen in only one way, no matter what. My uncle Henry said that, and he believed it as much as he believed anything. That’s why, in the end, his Great Discovery “happened,” according to him. Because it was supposed to happen, no matter what. What made the difference in his life—and in mine!—was what he did with his Great Discovery after it “happened.” I suppose if I had known my uncle Henry at the fateful moment I faced Bobby Sue Bessemer, it might have helped. It wouldn’t have made any difference at all, but it might have helped.
* * *
I cleared my throat, wiped my “buttery” lips with one of Buzz’s fluttering napkins which I snatched out of the air quite near my face, looked at Bobby Sue Bessemer’s empty popcorn with “butter” container, and then at my close-to-full one, and said in a voice that had roughly the same natural timbre as hers, “Would you like some of mine? We could share.”
“Sure, thanks,” she said, and her exquisite, delicate hand reached into my large popcorn with “butter” container and lifted out several popped kernels, the shimmering desert scenes on the screen sparkling on a bit of “butter” and, if I remember correctly (and I do!), a fingernail. Instantly, the entire universe—or maybe it was just two seats in the Glebe Theatre, but what was the difference?—went into slow motion. I watched forever as her now glistening hand lifted the popcorn with “butter” to her full-lipped mouth, as just one sweet, slender finger was used to push kernel after kernel past those full lips and the beautiful white teeth to be placed on a tongue I could only dream about (which I did for years). She leaned over to her friend and whispered something to her, and the two giggled. Then she turned her focus to the movie. That’s when the electric shocks began, every time our hands “accidentally” touched as she sought out more popcorn with “butter” and I timed my moves to match hers perfectly.
We both watched the movie. In fact, she never looked at me again until the movie was over and she and Snoopy or whatever her name was got up to leave. She looked at me and said, “Thanks for the popcorn.” Then she left, her crisp, full pink skirt swishing across the row toward the right aisle of what would forever after be, in my mind, the Glebe Theater, no matter what social, cultural, and economic evolution and revolution—and an eons-old sticky slurry of spilled Coke and candy—later did to it.
I had spent the entire movie getting electrical Bobby Sue Bessemer impulses through my hand, and desert images through my eyes. During those two hours on a lazy summer afternoon in what used to be the Glebe Theater in what used to be Arlington, Virginia, 98 years ago, the desert and I were galvanized, bonded together forever. From that day forward, whether in fantasy or reality, the desert would continually deliver minor to major Bobby Sue Bessemer electrical shocks to my medulla oblongata to be then distributed evenly throughout my ever-evolving body and mind. That’s why it came as no real surprise that I should eventually end up in the desert. Or why it was no surprise that my metamorphic heart nearly stopped ten years later.
“Thanks for the popcorn,” she said, and was gone. For a long time, as I stood on the sticky floor of the Glebe Theatre and watched her disappear into the exiting crowd, I wondered if she had noticed the “butter.”
I also wondered if she had even the slightest inkling of what was only just then beginning to unstick itself from my long dormant brain stem—my heretofore little heard from medulla oblongata—and drift up into the more aware and awake areas of my brain: that at the tender (and still underdone) age of thirteen, I was hopelessly in love with Bobby Sue Bessemer.
Chapter 2
June 20, 2009
* * *
Fate couldn’t leave Buzz alone, either, and must have had urgent need of Bobby Sue Bessemer elsewhere, for while Buzz’s life went forward with lightning-like and horrific leaps soon after his inadvertent introduction of new levels of movie and audience interaction at the Glebe Theater, Bobby Sue Bessemer seemed to simply go on hiatus and quite literally disappear from my real-time sensory—as opposed to imagination-fed—life. At least for the time being. That may have been due, in part, to my parent’s belief, or at least my mother’s belief, that I would be better off in later life if I were to receive the high caliber, disciplined education then only available from a private school. A Presbyterian private school. An all-boys Presbyterian private school. So, in the fall of 1957, anno domini, in another part of what used to be the state of Virginia, I started classes at St. Stephen’s Presbyterian School for Boys, although I doubted from the outset that St. Stephen ever had any such scholastic structure in mind in his entire life. Nor was I certain then, nor am I now, that he had sainthood in mind either; not that he had anything to say about it in the end.
Although it was far away by the standards of an almost fourteen-year-old who couldn’t yet legally drive and was dependent on caring but careless adults for daily transportation, St. Stephen’s Presbyterian School for Boys was a day school from which I returned home each afternoon and from which I stayed away entirely every weekend. And it was on one of those weekends during my second consecutive year at St. Stephen’s Presbyterian School for Boys (well into my fourteenth consecutive year on theplanet) that Buzz and I discovered the power, thrill, and fun of political activism—specifically, attaching candidate bumper stickers to every unattended car we came across. These were no ordinary, everyday, inexpensive bumper stickers, because the candidate was no ordinary, inexpensive politician. He was the founder and chairman of a chain of furniture stores which sold pretentiously overpriced furniture to equally pretentious customers throughout several counties in the northern part of what used to be the state of Virginia. So his bumper stickers were designed to be noticed, emblazoned as they were with bright pink lettering and chrome highlights on a deep blue background, all backed with a glue which made sticky Coke on a theater floor seem watery by comparison, and made welding and riveting seem obsolete. The steel girders and iron plating of bridges, boilers, and ocean liners could have been held together with these particular bumper stickers and, if they had been, they would still be together today, well into the third millennium, anno domini.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, and wouldn’t for another year, that extraordinary glue on the very bumper stickers Buzz and I were using to permanently alter the aesthetics of several unsuspecting owners’ cars was my uncle Henry’s first Significant Invention—significant in the sense that he actually made money from it, tons of money. Sitting hour after hour hunched over a small bench in one end of his tiny aluminum house trailer parked on the edge of the minuscule “town” called Tecopa, California, in the Mojave Desert, just southeast of what was then Death Valley National Park, my uncle Henry had discovered that a slurryof the seeds, young leaves, and root tips of agave (Agave utahensis), yucca (Yucca schidigera), and smoke tree (Dalea spinosa), after being ground as fine and soft as pre-packaged pepper and mixed in particular and specific proportions to one another, with just a bit of natural hot spring water taken —without permission, I have always suspected—from the concrete blockhouse which served as the “bathhouse” at nearby and even tinier Tecopa Hot Springs, and then left—forgotten, everyone thought, not knowing that Fate was in charge of timing it—in an authentic pre-Columbian Shoshoni Indian clay pot to both sit and set on the aluminum roof of his house trailer for approximately 172 hours, created the strongest glue the planet had ever seen since love itself.
Not everyone in Tecopa was surprised by my uncle Henry’s new glue; almost all twelve residents of Tecopa had known my uncle Henry for years by this time and they had all been waiting, some patiently, some apprehensively, for him to invent something earth-shattering, or earth-ending, or just plain silly. But when my uncle Henry was able to instantly, almost effortlessly, and quite securely reattach the entire front left fender of Tom Twoflags’ 1947 Chevy pickup truck with just two drops of the new glue, even the skeptics had to admit my uncle Henry was on to something really big. Little did they know that it would be so big that it would ultimately, if briefly, revolutionize bumper sticker technology, if not bumpers themselves.
At first, my uncle Henry, for reasons thought by some to be patriotic and by others to be nothing more than raw materialism, tried to sell his new glue to what was known then as the United States Navy. His own motives, I learned from him later, were both much purer and much simpler. To him, the United States Navy had more extremely large pieces of very heavy iron and steel and other metals which had to be put together to stay than any other single entity on the planet. He thought it would be an easy, one-call sale. He also used to be a gunner in propeller-driven dive bombers owned and operated by the United States Navy in a World War just over a decade before which, he rather carelessly thought, would help “grease the skids” for him, one of his favorite figures of speech because it inferred mixing up a slurry of something to put on the skids referred to. So he washed his huge, boxy, bumpy Toyota Long Hawser the old-fashioned desert way—which is to say he rubbed it all over with clean desert sand—and put on his best pair of long pants, which was also his only pair of long pants.
The Long Hawser was an early attempt by Toyota, a manufacturer in the country which used to be called Japan of, among other things, motor vehicles of all types, to design a four-wheel drive truck that could successfully navigate the byways, back roads, and non-roads of the world, there being many more miles of those than the smooth, paved, North American variety of roads, and which would eventually lead to the development and successful worldwide marketing of the Toyota Land Cruiser. It also signaled the beginning of a marketing strategy in Japan which involved giving vehicles (among other products) English language names, whether the words actually made any sense or not to native English-speakers. The strategy seemed to work well at home for reasons long debated, though never fully resolved, by scholars of cultures past and present, but required some modification when it came to exporting the vehicles to English-speaking countries.
My uncle Henry put the pre-Columbian Shoshoni clay pot he had come to call his Slurry Pot in the back of the Long Hawser, along with two changes of socks and underwear and a tie that didn’t go with anything except, perhaps, what was left of the original upholstery in the Long Hawser, and checked a map at Frank Wineberry’s store to see how best to get to Long Beach, California, because he had an idea that that was where the United States Navy did most of its ship repairs and it was still within a reasonable driving distance—that is to say, also in the southern part of what was then called the state of California.
When he and the Long Hawser finally arrived at the main gate of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, my uncle Henry soon discovered that talking with someone in charge would be a much more difficult task than he had anticipated, my uncle Henry having by then forgotten how to look at things from a United States Navy point of view. One reason, my uncle Henry soon realized, was that no one really wanted to admit they were in charge, and the other was that it was no walk in the park to even get on the base. For one thing, the old Long Hawser didn’t stand a chance in Hell of being allowed anywhere inside the fence, even though hawsers were an essential part of day-to-day Naval operations. The problem was that, they, the old Long Hawser and the United States Navy, shared a bit of history the United States Navy was not particularly keen on: The Long Hawser had been manufactured in the present-day city-state of Tokyohama, which is in the country that used to be called Japan, and the United States Navy had gone to great lengths to help the Allied Forces—which included in very large measure the United States Navy—do everything under the sun to end the manufacture Long Hawsers, and everything else for that matter. Those lengths included atomizing a sizable portion of what was once the country called Japan.
It seems the United States Navy had been caught with its pants down, so to speak, by the Navy of Japan—the repercussions of which are key clues to why the planet is now, 100 years later, so higgledy-piggledy, nationwise—and the United States Navy had a long memory when it came to things like that.
The United States Navy got caught with its pants down—luckily for the United States, down around its proverbial knees, not its proverbial ankles—when the Navy of Japan sprung a surprise and rather vicious attack on the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor near the city of Honolulu on the island called Oahu in the Hawaiian archipelago, using carrier-based war planes (many of which were called “Zeroes” and were manufactured by Mitsubishi, a company that world conquer the United States with automobiles fifty years later), early on Sunday morning, December 7th , 1941, anno domini, a date which, it has been said, will live in infamy; time will tell. When I say that the United States Navy’s proverbial and collective pants were caught down around their knees, I mean that the main target of the attack, the aircraft carriers of the United States Navy, were not, as the Navy of Japan thought they were, in Pearl Harbor at the time. That major goof by the Navy of Japan was the result of bad intelligence. Nowadays, war itself is thought to be bad intelligence.
While the carriers of the United States Navy were spared, many other ships, planes, property, and people were not, as the fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers of the Navy of Japan wreaked havoc, mayhem, and destruction in and around Pearl Harbor that Fatefully infamous morning. And, as Fate would have it, both my father and my uncle Henry were there, at Pearl Harbor—and, right after the bombing in Pearl Harbor—that morning, as a brand new full-time uniformed employees of the United States Navy. And, as Fate would further have it, as my uncle Henry, who was not yet an inventor but just a dive bomber gunner, saw all the confusion and mixing together of things—liquids, solids, people, machines, sweat, agony, fear, and all sorts of other war whatnot—he began to get some new but still vague ideas, while my father saw the same things and nearly got his head blown off. But my father kept his head and quickly went about the business of saving peoples lives by commandeering a small boat and piloting it through a huge slurry of water and fire and twisted metal and twisted bodies and billowing smoke and whizzing bullets and exploding fireballs that was, at the moment, Pearl Harbor, pulling seamen and captains and still breathing partial seamen and partial captains out of the drink and taking them to shore, saving many lives. Again and again, he took his little boat out into the big, burning harbor to save lives, for which he later received a medal and the undying gratitude of my uncle Henry, who was one of the lives he saved. My uncle Henry was most grateful because, while floating in the harbor slurry, he first turned toward his inventing career by beginning to understand the concept and enormous potential of slurries—his first Big Idea—and he didn’t want to lose it, though he never told my father that. He thought it best to play Big Ideas close to the vest.
My father had a Big Idea of his own, which is not surprising considering he had but moments before narrowly missed having his head separated from his body, which would have no doubt cut his career in the United States Navy somewhat short, but would have also necessitated Fate constructing a new and different path of creation for me inasmuch as I was not yet extant on the planet and heavily dependent on him getting me here. His Big Idea, which he played close to his vest for only a week of so, was to go back to what was called the mainland and be trained as a pilot by and for the United States Navy, because he now knew just how messy and dangerous it got for ordinary, flightless people on the land and in the water when airplanes were involved.
And that’s exactly what he did; within a few short weeks he was at another United States Navy base—the United States Navy had a lot of them—near the town of Pensacola in what used to be the state of Florida and is now known as the State of Croc. After successfully completing his basic flight training, he requested and got further training so he could drive PBY flying boats on search and rescue missions and continue pulling desperate and injured people from the drink.
Unfortunately, not all new United States Navy pilots made the same choice, so most of them were schooled extensively in using different kinds of airplanes to shoot bullets and drop bombs and launch torpedoes, the sole purpose of such devices being to dispatch people from the planet. They thought they were hot shots, until they ended up in the drink, praying my father would fly by in his PBY.
This single, silly, horrible attempt by the Empire of Japan, carried out by their Navy, to intimidate the United States of America—not to mention to paralyze the United States Navy—and keep the United States of America out of action while they, the Empire of Japan, waged war for oil in Indonesia and Indochina, in the end backfired because it actually brought the United States of America into the global conflict that had already begun in an area of the planet known as Europe over two years before and was by then known as World War II, and because it inevitably brought about the atomization of a significant part of the country then called Japan three years and eight months later.
But some people just never give up on what they think is a great idea, no matter how flawed it may be. Less than three decades after two of their major cities had been thoroughly vaporized and instantly mixed together in an atomic and subatomic slurry of concrete, steel, bones, flesh, and blood, and began to glow in the dark for many years to come, Japan had come back to the Hawaiian archipelago—ironically targeting the island of Oahu once again—this time armed not with bombs, bullets, and bravado, but with money, and began buying up most of Oahu without firing a single shot. This gradual occupation of the archipelago would last until the Great Native Uprising of 2024, anno domini, which gave birth to the nation of Humuhumunukunukuapua’a, the first successful political uprising fully funded by a single corporation, Amalgamated TeleTekTronix. In 2024, anno domini, bullets and bombs once again whizzed through the soft air of the Hawaiian archipelago, and this time the winners were all in a large corporate conference room in Rapid City, South Dakota, not an aloha shirt among them.
There had been another huge war on the planet, eventually involving almost everyone and killing or maiming many of them, and which ended only 23 years before the Pearl Harbor Massacre. It was Called “The Great War,” “The World War,” and, somewhat optimistically given any historical perspective, “The War To End All Wars.” By the time everybody was back at it again, “The Great War” became simply World War I, and this new global conflict was named World War II.
This was a dangerous, if somewhat realistic, precedent because, as any child with a bit of schooling knows, you can’t run out of numbers, even when expressed as Roman Numerals, at least not until everyone is atomized, at which moment the point becomes quite moot.
When my uncle Henry showed up at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in his Long Hawser, Slurry Pot and changes of underwear and socks in the back, the United States Navy brass—an odd term for high-ranking officers in the United States Navy, considering their uniforms and hats were covered not with brass but gold braid, sometimes giving those same officers more gold braid than good sense—adamantly refused to meet with or even acknowledge any potential contractor that was not already at least a billion dollars in debt and a year and a half behind schedule. This was not an obligation uncle Henry was eager to take on, so he tried another tack, to borrow a term from his United States Navy days.
From a telephone booth just outside the main gate, he made a telephone call to my father, to see if my father, being both a former United States Navy officer, which uncle Henry had not been, and someone still relatively well connected with other United States Navy officers, might know anyone at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard who might be able to help out. My uncle Henry knew my father wouldn’t ask what it was all about, since he had long ago stopped trying to understand my uncle Henry, and because my mother didn’t want my father mixed up with “that crazy loon.”
As it happened, there was at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard a partial captain, Rupert “Buddy” Blox, whose life my father had also saved in Pearl Harbor, and who felt with all his heart, all of which was still original equipment, that he owed my father any number of favors whenever he cared to ask. My father made a telephone call, and, as if by magic, my uncle Henry had an appointment late that afternoon with the partial captain. The appointment was at a bar in San Pedro, California—the abutting municipality which served as the civilian and commercial Port of Los Angeles—not on the Long Beach Naval Shipyard itself, but that was all right with my uncle Henry, because he could use a beer about then.
This particular partial captain liked to go to this particular bar, small and dark and kind of moody as it was, because there was one particular waitress there, a striking redhead whose hair and eyes sparkled—not sparkled in the “twinkled with delight” sense, but actually luminesced, emitting their own light like perky but petite Fourth of July sparklers—named Thelma Tomato, who was fascinated by the concept of a partial captain and was always trying to find out just which parts of the partial captain were original and which had been added, bit by bit, by the geniuses at various Veterans’ Administration and United States Navy hospitals around the country since the partial captain, who had first become partial as an ensign on the Day of Infamy, had gone through his extensive restoration therapy. Captain “Buddy” Blox had no intention of ever revealing the entirety of his incredible truth to Thelma Tomato—as he later would to my uncle Henry when he retired from the United States Navy and, immediately thereafter, visited Tecopa—but he certainly enjoyed leading her through the guessing game. All he told her, and it took several visits to the bar to tell her this much, was that on the Day of Infamy he was taking an early morning walk along the concrete ramp upon which several PBY flying boats were neatly parked next to the water. A bomb from one of the airplanes owned and operated by the Navy of Japan struck the PBY next to him perfectly, from a bombardier’s point of view, blowing both the PBY and Ensign “Buddy” Blox to smithereens and flinging parts of both in all directions. Most of the parts of Ensign “Buddy” Blox necessary to sustain life were still in one coherent package, no matter how loosely connected, which was more than could be said for the PBY, but in its first and final instants of total destruction—it all happened so quickly—the PBY did offer up to Ensign “Buddy” Blox one small miracle: one of the Mae West life jackets aboard the PBY was tossed aloft in such a way that its trajectory and that of the main section of Ensign “Buddy” Blox met in mid-air about 25 feet over Pearl Harbor, and met in such a way that the Mae West both came to rest in a proper position around Ensign “Buddy” Blox’s neck, and then spontaneously inflated upon impact with the Pearl Harbor slurry, causing that portion of Ensign “Buddy” Blox which was capable of breathing to continue to do so until what was now an Ensign “Buddy” Blox reduced to its most essential form was found by another ensign piloting a small boat in only his underwear and officer’s hat—my father—who was able to pull what was left and still worth pulling of Ensign “Buddy” Blox out of the drink and to relative safety.
No such luck for the PBY.
Sitting in the one and only seat—and a highly modified one at that—of an AD-1 “Skyraider” light attack bomber which belonged to the United States Navy, Captain “Buddy” Blox shot bullets and dropped bombs on soldiers of the paranoid and bellicose—not to mention just recently formed through separation, not unlike cellular division—nation of North Korea, which called itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, demonstrating that when it came to naming things, the marketeers of Japan had nothing on the nation-makers of North Korea.
The “conflict” (a term officially coined by an oxymoronically-named outfit called the United Nations, but coaxed from them by the various political and military leaders of the United States of America, proving that Japanese marketeer had nothing on them, either) was actually a war which got under way a scant five years after the end of World War II. Perhaps it was this unfortunate propinquity of horrors that made United Nations (and United States of America) military marketeers decide not too many people were ready to deal comfortably with an actual war, so they called it a “conflict” and a “police action” (such as arresting a drunk) and never gave it a number. The military marketeers thought that worked out so well that the next really big “conflict”—one that took place in a backwater South China Sea country called Vietnam—didn’t get a number either.
Never mind that in the Korean War about 3,000,000 people left the planet, forever and ever, amen. It was a“conflict.”
Captain “Buddy” Blox served his country—and the Western version of the Common Good—quite well as an AD-1 “Skyraider” pilot, dicing many a North Korean platoon with machine gun fire, toasting others with napalm, and generally scattering things and people into something of a sinewy slurry. But after crashing his expensive and extensively modified “Skyraider” onto the even more expensive deck of a much more expensive aircraft carrier which belonged to the United States Navy as he was trying to land with most of one wing of the “Skyraider” shot full of holes and flapping wildly, as if trying with all its independent might to fly on its own (it wasn’t all just flying along and shooting things, that’s for sure; the things often shot back), he was sent back to the United States of America, put back together once again, and told he would be flying nothing more than desks for the rest of his career with the United States Navy, thus assuring no more crashes on aircraft carrier decks.
Captain “Buddy” Blox and my uncle Henry sat in Captain “Buddy” Blox’s favorite booth, which was against the wall opposite the door, had a small table separating two small benches with old and hard padding covered with old and torn burgundy Naugahyde, and was identical to every other booth in the bar except for its location relative to the door. The two of them hit it off right away, mostly because they were both very interested in putting things together to stay, and in drinking “boilermakers,” an enormously powerful combination of beer and whiskey, and partly because they both found something about Thelma Tomato to be very attractive, even though she not only worked in a bar in San Pedro, but she lived in San Pedro as well. Years later, my uncle Henry told me that, for him, it was the fact that her actually-sparkling eyes had some of the golden colors of the desert in them, and that, in the darkened bar, he could see very light peach fuzz on her face when she leaned over the table to serve the boilermakers, and that she smelled like popcorn. He found that combination to be irresistible in a woman. So do I, not that it matters anymore now.
My uncle Henry knew right away that Captain “Buddy” Blox was kind of sweet on Thelma Tomato, and that she had more than just a passing interest in him. (My uncle Henry had a knack for knowing these things, I was to discover.) He could tell by the way she treated Captain “Buddy” Blox and spoke to him and looked at him that, to her, Captain “Buddy” Blox’s parts, original equipment and replacement, totaled up to a whole and complete captain, not a partial captain. Captain “Buddy” Blox liked that in a woman.
Who wouldn’t?
After several hours, many boilermakers, and five baskets of un-“buttered” popcorn personally delivered to their booth—just like the beer, the concern, the care, and the curiosity—by Thelma Tomato, my uncle Henry had finally convinced Captain “Buddy” Blox that it couldn’t hurt to stage a demonstration of the wonders patiently waiting in my uncle Henry’s Slurry Pot, which itself was patiently waiting in the back of the old Long Hawser out in the parking lot. The two of them agreed that two weeks hence my uncle Henry, two helper/friends of his choosing, the Slurry Pot, and even the old Long Hawser would be allowed inside the fence of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard to participate in a demonstration which would really be a sort of contest. As it happened, the United States Navy would, at that time, be reassembling the four huge, rounded iron side plates of an enormous steam boiler in preparation for the boiler’s reinstallation into the bowels of a large, old, cranky steel and iron destroyer, a relatively large ship of the line then tied up at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, ironically enough, with several long hawsers. My uncle Henry’s team would use the contents of the Slurry Pot to put two of the four main sections of the boiler together, if it could be done, while alongside of them a somewhat larger team of United States Navy boilermakers (sailors, not drinks) would assemble the other two main sections using traditional welding and riveting methods, something the United States Navy team of boilermakers would no doubt be good at because the United States Navy was nothing if not traditional.
The demonstration cum contest specifics having been thus decided, it was time for my uncle Henry to return to Tecopa to find a couple of helpers, and for Captain “Buddy” Blox to return to his quarters—a term used by the United States Navy meaning “housing” which Captain “Buddy” Blox always found somewhat distasteful, considering his personal physical history and situation—inside the fence of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. A problem, though, presented itself in the form of the rather strong and unpredictable effects of alcohol on the human brain: specifically, alcohol tends to kill lots of brain cells and, if enough alcohol has been consumed in a short enough period of time, cause the remaining brain cells to wish they were dead and, as a result, act rather loopy, broadcasting often totally unintelligible signals, which, in turn, cause the entire body—or, in Captain “Buddy” Blox’s case, what was left of his body—to do really loopy and unpredictable things. One of the most disabling effects of all this is the tendency for each arm, leg, eye, and ear to act as if it had a mind, language, and agenda of its own, none of which were in any way connected to the brain, which would be having its own troubles dealing with blitzed brain cells which were falling like a blizzard of dandruff flakes inside the cranial cavity.
In their present separate but very similar conditions, my uncle Henry hadn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell of being able to drive the old Long Hawser out of its parking place, much less out of San Pedro and all the way back to Tecopa, and Captain “Buddy” Blox, though always an excellent navigator before he began flying desks large and small, could have only counted on Fate and blind, dumb luck to get him to within even a half-mile of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. And that didn’t take into account the additional strain placed on his cell-shedding brain by all the pulleys, cables, relays, hinges, and other contrivances that made up all the parts of him that weren’t really him. Fortunately for both of them, as they faced the daunting task of simply standing up, Thelma Tomato, who was herself getting ready to leave since it was closing time at the bar, saw her opportunity and seized it.
Now without order pad and apron, but so naturally retaining her sparkling aura, she approached the two men and attempted to fix her gaze on the unsyncopated eyes of Captain “Buddy” Blox.
“I hope you boys aren’t thinking of driving anywhere right now,” she ventured a bit timidly, still trying to lock on to Captain “Buddy” Blox’s idling orbs.
“Well, that was the idea,” said my uncle Henry, “but I have to admit that gravity has gotten a bit wacky, and this damn booth won’t let go of us.”
“Damn the tornadoes, foul seas ahead!” Captain “Buddy” Blox uttered with an intensity that both frightened and confused my uncle Henry, and seemed to excite Thelma Tomato, though the excitement only revealed itself with a tiny increase of the sparkling and the golden glow of her desert-colored eyes.
“I was going to walk home—I just live four blocks from here….”
“Blox? Blox? I’m Blox! Captain Rupert ‛Buddy’ Blox! READY FOR LUNCH! LAUNCH!”
“He thinks the booth is the cockpit of a United States Navy AD-1 ‛Skyraider’,” my uncle Henry explained to Thelma Tomato, taking about thirty seconds to do so. My uncle Henry was about to show her all the controls, switches, dials, and the extensively modified seat, when Thelma Tomato stopped him, looking back to Captain “Buddy” Blox, whose eyes were now, bird-like, looking far out to each side of him. Whatever he was seeing, though, was coming somewhat erratically from his cell-shedding brain and not from his eyes, one of which was actually an experimental and highly sensitive photoelectric cell.
As her attentions turned to Captain “Buddy” Blox, my uncle Henry turned his attentions back to his table experiment of mixing a slurry of beer, ketchup, finely- ground, pre-packaged pepper, and cigarette ashes in one of the beer glasses. His single greatest problem, an all-consuming one by then, was deciding which end of the spoon would produce the best results as a slurry stirrer.
“That’s it!” Barked Thelma Tomato, taking command; after all, she had been around United States Navy officers and sailors since she had started working in that bar in San Pedro five years before, and she knew when command had to be taken and how to take it.
“You boys are coming with me!”
The flag had been transferred, as they used to say—and sometimes used to do—in the United States Navy.
She gathered them up, each of her two arms around one of each of theirs, and, with difficulty, led them out of the bar, down the street four blocks to her house, and onto her front porch. There she had to let go of them to reach her keys, and there Captain “Buddy” Blox fell like an only loosely connected pile of Erector Set pieces onto the glider on the porch. What with all his mechanical, electrical, and pneumatic parts quickly but finally coming to rest on the wooden glider, the sound he made on that mostly silent night in San Pedro, California, was not unlike a large but only half-full moving van with its load not tied down coming to a quick stop after a high-speed nonstop cross-country haul. And it was on that glider he stayed until the next morning, just as the hypothetical moving van would have stayed wherever it wheezed and clanked and clicked to a stop, no matter how much you might have kicked the tires and turned the key.
Thelma Tomato looked down at the unconscious Captain “Buddy” Blox with an expression my uncle Henry thought to be either exasperation with a fall-down drunk, or exasperation that she would not that night be able to discover any further which parts were original and which parts were replacement. She then led my uncle Henry into her small living room and pointed at the sofa. Without a single word, my uncle Henry stumbled to the sofa, sat, leaned over, and fell fast asleep.
The next morning my uncle Henry woke very early and with an exceptionally clear head, a bit of good fortune he credited to having been able to swig down the slurry he had concocted before Thelma Tomato rescued him and Captain “Buddy” Blox from the bar booth the night before. It was a gray, dreary, thick marine layer sort of morning, with the low, bloated, clouds reaching in from the cold Pacific Ocean as far as they could toward the warm desert, many miles inland. Neither Thelma Tomato, wherever in the house she was, nor Captain “Buddy” Blox, on the glider on the front porch, seemed to be anywhere near awake yet, so the best my uncle Henry could do was write a quick thank you note on a one-dollar bill—it was all he could find to write on—and leave it on the sofa for Thelma Tomato, hoping she wouldn’t take it the wrong way. He had a long drive back to Tecopa before him, and a lot of work to do before the Big Demonstration at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard: not only did he have to mix up some more glue—or, adhesive slurry, as he liked to call it—but he faced the much tougher challenge of finding and convincing two helpers to come along, all within just two weeks.
There simply wasn’t time for sentimental group awakenings. Those my uncle Henry knew would come later.
Chapter 3
June 19, 2009
Chapter Three
The other person my uncle Henry targeted for travel to Long Beach was Toots O’Brian, a blacksmith and the self-professed sole Irish immigrant to Tecopa. My uncle Henry knew the truth, though: that Toots O’Brian was really from what used to be called the state of Idaho, and that Toots O’Brian’s claim of Irish origin was simply a ruse to explain why he spoke with in a contrived but very convincing brogue and drank straight whiskey instead of water. Toots O’Brian drifted into Tecopa and decided to stay when Frank Wineberry asked him to shoe a mule for two dollars, which was the best offer he had gotten in over a year, and when he discovered, by talking with Frank Wineberry in his thick Irish brogue during the mule shoeing, that no one in Tecopa cared how much whiskey he drank or how often, as long as he didn’t hit anyone or tip over any trailers. Loud singing of Irish ballads, he later found out, was also discouraged at anytime of the day or night. He had developed the brogue when he left what was then called Idaho years before, during his seventeenth consecutive year on the planet, because he thought it gave him an edge in the constant battle for the attention of women, and he decided to continue the sham in Tecopa for the same reason. Sad to say, there were at the time only two eligible females in Tecopa, and they could be had without uttering a word, accented or otherwise; they were that desperate. But by the time Toots O’Brian realized this, he was fully committed to his Irish tam and Irish sham, and there was no turning back without dishonor, so he had kept it up for so many years that by the time my uncle Henry got back from his exploratory trip to Long Beach, Toots O’Brian believed his own Irish story completely—lock, stock, and blarney—and honestly believed the brogue was his God-given accent.
My uncle Henry knew blacksmiths didn’t just pick up their anvils and move from anywhere in Ireland to Tecopa, and he was pretty sure he knew the truth anyway—though he kindly never sought to confirm it by confronting Toots O’Brian with his strong suspicions—because of a past and fleeting friendship with a fellow United States Navy dive bomber gunner during World War Two, Spuds O’Brian. For the first few weeks of their wartime friendship, my uncle Henry thought “Spuds” was his fellow gunner’s nickname, since Spuds O’Brian, just like Toots O’Brian, was from what used to be called the state of Idaho, which had emblazoned on its state vehicular license plates “Famous Potatoes,” due mainly to the fact that potatoes, famous or otherwise, were grown there by the jillions. Being somewhat less sensitive about such things back then, my uncle Henry asked Spuds O’Brian over a few rounds of boilermakers one evening what his real name was, only to find out that not only was Spuds O’Brian his real name, but that it also was a very common name in what used to be called the state of Idaho, along with Tater Tott and Toots O’Brian (no relation). This “name ’em after what pays the bills” phenomenon was rampant in many rural pockets of what used to be called the state of Idaho—which is to say, most of it—but, of course, that was way before television, much less cable. This revelation by Spuds O’Brian, who was soon after to be shot down and then rescued from the drink by a PBY flying boat driven by my father, also helped my uncle Henry understand why a state populated presumably by mostly sane people would choose”Famous Potatoes” as a license plate motto.
The area of the planet which includes as its majority portion what used to be called the state of Idaho is now known—though not very widely, even with television and cable—as “Potatoe: Like It or Leave It.” It is inhabited solely by extended but unrelated families of O’Brians now, who are said to be a very man-the-barricades isolationist lot.
The new capital is Twice-Baked.
When it came time to leave for the Long Beach Naval Shipyard for the Big Demonstration of the adhesive slurry, both of my uncle Henry’s chosen helpers were confirmed for the trip; Toots O’Brian just couldn’t pass up the twenty-five dollars my uncle Henry promised him, along with a share of the profits if they made a sale to the United States Navy, which Toots O’Brian dreamed might be as much as two or three thousand dollars, an astronomical sum difficult for him to imagine even under the influence of too much whiskey, which was, in Toots O’Brian’s case, about a case; Tom Twoflags felt a bit better about leaving because Frank Wineberry and Selinia Nevada, a former University of California, Berkeley, anthropology student and now full-time shaman and medicine woman, and the closest thing Tecopa had to a health practitioner, agreed to keep their eyes open for his parents, in case the spirits in and around Tecopa should decide to disgorge them onto the street while he was gone, leaving them to wander, lost and dazed, and no doubt, disappear again if there were no intervention to prevent it.
Every mountain Tom Twoflags saw through the windows of the Long Hawser, all the way from Tecopa to the Cajon Pass, he pronounced to be Spirit Mountain, the place where his parents were being held captive. And every cloud was a sign from, and sometimes even the finger of, one spirit or another, indicating to Tom Twoflags where his parents had been taken, and where he should go to look for them.
Who’s to say he was wrong? If I’ve learned anything in the past 110 years, I’ve learned that there are spirits in every mountain, and that the land does, indeed, swallow people whole, as it swallowed me, holding me captive. And the spirits have always been giving us signs to follow, pointing their fingers for us, in huge and unmistakable ways. We have just always refused to believe it was that simple.
If only we had listened to the Indians, and learned from them…. Instead of killing them.
And now there’s my uncle Henry’s gospel… if I could only preach it. It isn’t easy without a larynx with its customary—in humans, at least—cartilaginous or bony skeleton and the usual elastic vocal cords.
Who would have thought?
Who, indeed.
Late on Big Demonstration Eve the Long Hawser, containing my Uncle Henry, a nervous Tom Twoflags, a sleeping Toots O’Brian, three different sets of changes of underwear and socks, and the Slurry Pot, pulled into the parking lot of Thelma Tomato’s bar in San Pedro. Not knowing anyone in Long Beach, San Pedro, or any of the other few million people in what was geographically referred to as the Los Angeles Basin, except Captain”Buddy” Blox and Thelma Tomato, my uncle Henry’s first thought upon arrival in the area was to find one or the other or, better still, find both. Since it was after normal working hours—normal for the Los Angeles Basin and the Long Beach Naval Shipyard—he thought he just might be able to find them together, in the sense of being under one roof, at the bar, but Fate thought otherwise, and Fate always wins such contests. As it happened, Captain “Buddy” Blox and Thelma Tomato were together, under one roof, but not at the bar.
It was several hours after my uncle Henry had left Thelma Tomato’s house in San Pedro two weeks before that Captain “Buddy” Blox and Thelma Tomato awoke at precisely the same moment, though in separate places, Captain “Buddy” Blox crumpled up on the glider on the front porch and Thelma Tomato in her bed in her bedroom. Their waking at precisely the same moment was the first inkling they each had, no matter how fuzzy, that Fate had synchronism in mind for them and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it… not that they wanted to anyway. As Thelma Tomato put on a robe and brushed out her sparkling hair, Captain “Buddy” Blox was using a small red-and-white can of 3-in-1 Oil to get some of his joints over the effects of a night spent exposed to the cool, damp ocean air. He was definitely feeling the cruel after effects of too many boilermakers and the sloughing off of so many precious brain cells, never to be replaced, and he wondered if the pounding pain in his head was some sort of cellular postpartum agony. He was beginning to wonder if the 3-in-1 Oil might help with that also, when Thelma Tomato came out to the porch to see if he was still there and, if he was, how he was doing and, more importantly, how she might keep him there. She needn’t have worried. Thelma Tomato was resplendent in her freshly brushed red hair and green-cactus-on-brown-background flannel robe. All of Captain “Buddy” Blox’s joints were working silently and smoothly, his gold-braided captain’s uniform was a wrinkled mess, and both his eyes now worked in unison, if somewhat painfully. It was love at first sight.
That was how it came to be that, on that portentous night before the Big Demonstration, as the thick marine layer lowered enough to become fog, my uncle Henry, Tom Twoflags, Toots O’Brian, and the Slurry Pot slept somewhat uncomfortably in a big and boxy Toyota Long Hawser parked in the deserted parking lot of a deserted bar in San Pedro.
Sometimes, Fate does things just for fun.
Chapter 4
June 18, 2009
Chapter Four
The day of the Big Demonstration began about as gray as one of the ships owned by the United States Navy, but that was just fine with my uncle Henry, Tom Twoflags, and Toots O’Brian. The Long Beach Chamber of Commerce, if they had noticed, might not have been very pleased with the pesky and persistent marine layer clouds, but the three desert dwellers found the concept of a whole sky filled with non-rainy clouds refreshingly different; not that they wanted to live under so low and dreary a canopy for more than ten consecutive hours, but it was an interesting change.
From the moment the Long Hawser politely, and with a strong desire to do the impossible and be inconspicuous, drove through the main gate and began threading an ever-changing maze of vehicular impediments the size and nature of large, self-propelled double-door, frost-free refrigerators which were painted United States Navy gray or, rarely, watch-out-for-me yellow, and were piloted by seemingly maniacal and blind seaman, as if they were either angry or overjoyed to have pulled shore duty, the sheer size and constant activity of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard had an almost stunning effect on the Long Hawser’s occupants; it reminded my uncle Henry of the confusion and hysteria of those two hours during that December morning, 1941, anno domini, in Pearl Harbor; it frightened Tom Twoflags into thinking he had actually fallen into one or another Spirit Mountain, which caused him to scan every face for his parents, all the while wondering if The Spirits would actually snatch pious people such as his parents only to make sailors of them—an interesting theological conundrum; and it nearly woke up Toots O’Brian, whose job it had become to remain curled around the half-basketball sized Glue Pot to make sure it wouldn’t spill. Of course, it wasn’t likely to spill in any case, but my uncle Henry wanted to feel Toots O’Brian was really earning his twenty-five dollars, not to mention a percentage of any future sales of the adhesive slurry to the United States Navy; also, wrapping him around the Glue Pot was the closest my uncle Henry and Tom Twoflags could come to finding a useful purpose for the almost instant anesthetic effect the interior of the Long Hawser seemed to have on Toots O’Brian.
When they arrived at the predetermined location for the Big Demonstration—a huge, busy, messy, area cluttered to the corners with everything from welding torches to lathes to scaffolds to air hoses to wrenches the size of Tom Twoflags’ 1947 Chevy pickup truck to thumbprint-smudged papers and blueprints to empty Coke cans to scraps of rusted iron and steel that reminded them of the desert landscape in miniature, all open to the sky and surrounded by enormous cranes, each possibly capable of lifting a fully-loaded cruiser out of the water and shaking all the accumulated barnacles off of it—they were met by Captain “Buddy” Blox, two other captains, an eager lieutenant commander, and a sleepy eyed, bulbous admiral with more gold braid and less stature than any of the others, a condition not altogether uncommon among many shore-bound admirals.
Tom Twoflags nudged Toots O’Brian on the tenth and eleventh left ribs with the full force of his broad, squat, clenched fist while Captain “Buddy” Blox came forward and greeted my uncle Henry through the Long Hawser’s driver’s door window. But since the windows were all closed tightly enough that the Long Hawser was, at that moment, at least as seaworthy, if not as maneuverable in the water, as most of the ships then securely attached to the Long Beach Naval Shipyard by other forms of long hawsers, and because Toots O’Brian was so loudly gasping for both breath and a more awakened state as the result of Tom Twoflags’ nudge, my uncle Henry had a difficult time hearing just what Captain “Buddy” Blox was saying. So it happened that my uncle Henry rolled down the window at exactly the same time Captain “Buddy” Blox was frantically making a gesture with his left arm that closely approximated the act of rolling down a vehicular window, and at that moment realized that Captain “Buddy” Blox’s left arm assembly must have been one of his many replacement parts, because both the Long Hawser’s poorly greased window cranking mechanism and Captain “Buddy” Blox’s wildly rotating left arm made very similar sounds which seemed for all the world like two different sized sets of brake shoes in need of relining trying to harmonize a full octave; at the same time, this alerted my uncle Henry to the fact that the humidity there along the ocean was quite high that morning. He had never tried the adhesive slurry under high humidity conditions; this would be a Big Demonstration, indeed, he thought.
As anxious as my uncle Henry was to talk with Captain “Buddy” Blox—and to get on with the Big Demonstration, for that matter—there was something gnawing away on him like a hungry flea on a sleeping ankle: Where was Thelma Tomato? Since leaving San Pedro two weeks before, he realized, he had never thought of one without thinking of the other. In his mind, the picture, no matter what the setting, was always one which contained both Captain “Buddy” Blox and Thelma Tomato, and was somehow incomplete without the two of them together. Fate’s synchrony obviously had a far-reaching flux field if it could be felt all the way out in Tecopa. But, there was no Thelma Tomato to be seen, not standing next to Captain “Buddy” Blox, not peeking from around a bulbous admiral, not camouflaged in United States Navy denims and holding a welding torch. Nowhere. Not a sparkle in sight.
Because of the physical enthusiasm of the two men, the warm handshake which Captain “Buddy” Blox offered up to my uncle Henry as he got out of the Long Hawser, and which my uncle Henry gladly accepted, caused the various and sundry replacement parts of the partial captain to rattle and clatter as if every one of the pockets on Captain “Buddy” Blox’s gold-braided navy blue uniform jacket and pants had been filled with a combination of quarters and marbles. As everyone else present looked around, nervously trying to determine if they were hearing the first stages of some unforeseen migration of countless unidentifiable spare parts and other mechanical detritus from one end of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard to another, each of them was wondering why they had not been informed that such things took place and whether some sort of safety measures—such as a hasty exit from the area—should be taken. But Captain “Buddy” Blox and my uncle Henry knew; two men don’t share boilermakers for hours, and then sleep, each in their own way and place, at Thelma Tomato’s house without each learning some of what makes the other a unique and special tenant on the planet. And it was at that moment, as the rattle and clatter of the partial captain in rapid movement reached crescendo, that my uncle Henry could clearly see the minute image of Thelma Tomato in Captain “Buddy” Blox’s one real eye—not as if it were being reflected from somewhere nearby, but as if it were coming from within, a thought manifesting itself to the rest of the world by standing in front of the window to Captain “Buddy” Blox’s soul, looking out at the world, and at my uncle Henry. At that moment my uncle Henry cast physical reality aside, as Captain “Buddy” Blox had done so many, many times in the past, and, thankfully, as if now really among friends, realized that Thelma Tomato was indeed there with them to witness the Big Demonstration. The one regret my uncle Henry had just then was that, with the exception of Captain “Buddy” Blox and himself, no one but Thelma Tomato knew she was there.
It was only a small regret, though.
Hanging from gigantic motorized hoists which soared at least sixty feet off the ground, held in precise position by chains the size of fully engorged fire hoses, were four enormous curved slabs of iron, the momentarily separated quarters of what ultimately was to be a massive cylinder—the main body of the boiler-to-be. A gang of boilermakers—professional metalworkers not to be unnecessarily confused with the potent drink of the same name—stood next to two of the huge suspended iron slabs, ready to weld and rivet them together as quickly and professionally as possible on command. My uncle Henry took the Glue Pot out of the Long Hawser and coaxed his helpers into place along with him beside the other two huge, curved iron slabs.
Toots O’Brian climbed the scaffolding next to the slab on the right, as seen from where the United States Navy officers were, approximately half way up the full height of the suspended slab. Tom Twoflags did the same on the scaffolding next to the slab on the left, and while there took advantage of his increased altitude to scan even further, wondering now if catching a glimpse of his mother and father wearing little white sailor hats would please him or scare him right off the scaffolding. My uncle Henry rigged himself in a bosun’s chair in which he could raise and lower himself easily right along where the two slabs were now almost joining, and he wedged the Glue Pot in the bosun’s chair next to him. Thus in place, these three unlikely boilermakers also awaited the command to begin.
The Big Demonstration began when the admiral either gave a signal with his handkerchief, or blew his nose. Complete enough records weren’t kept to be sure what exactly the admiral had in mind… or in his nose, for that matter.
Sadly, history will never be certain of the admiral’s intent for the handkerchief movement, for only fourteen hours after he officiated over the Big Demonstration, and before he had made any detailed comments on it, including exactly what signal he used to begin the action, so shaken and, presumably, preoccupied by the results was he, his basic shape was changed from bulbous to flat in the blink of an eye by an either miserable or elated, and most likely blind, seaman maniacally driving a United States Navy gray vehicle approximately the size and weight of a double-door, frost-free refrigerator.
Before the team of United States Navy boilermakers could prepare their first rivet, or even light a welding torch, my uncle Henry had hoisted himself and the Glue Pot to the top of the two slabs, swirled the old Craftsman two-inch, nylon bristle brush around the inside of the Glue Pot three times, and then had gently lowered himself to the bottom of the slabs, coating the edge of one slab from top to bottom with a thin layer of the adhesive slurry. By the time the United States Navy boilermakers started to warm the first rivet and, at last, got a welding torch lit, my uncle Henry had repeated the process, this time applying adhesive slurry to the edge of the opposite slab. Once on the concrete and everything else imaginable floor again, my uncle Henry directed Tom Twoflags and Toots O’Brian to push the two slabs together, being careful to align the edges precisely.
Though they might have been able to do it under any circumstances—the two men were nothing if not extremely strong—it was really as easy as sliding a shower curtain closed because of the way the two gigantic slabs were suspended; my uncle Henry made careful mental notes of the movable hoist and multiple chain arrangement, feeling it might come in handy on some other project. After mating the two thick, curved iron wall sections, Tom Twoflags and Toots O’Brian, iron slabs in hand, merely pushed against one another for about fifteen seconds until the adhesive slurry set.
Thus, in less time than it took for the United States Navy boilermakers to do their first rough alignment, and for the lead welder to get his protective hood in place, my uncle Henry, Tom Twoflags, and Toots O’Brian had finished the job. The humidity lengthened the setting time for the adhesive slurry by about twelve seconds, but the entire process took less than three minutes and the resulting halfboiler was as strong and solid as if it had been cast from one piece. At first, none of the United States Navy observers even noticed that they now occupied a significant moment in history; they thought the three lunatics from Tecopa were taking a break and trying to figure out what to do, so when my uncle Henry approached the group, they all—except Captain “Buddy” Blox, who, because of a long discussion one evening two weeks previous over several of the kind of boilermakers one drinks, was at least willing to expect almost anything—thought he was coming over to ask some typical United States Navy contractor question like, “Can I have some more time?” or “Can I have some more money” or both. All my uncle Henry said when he neared them was, “Done.”
Captain “Buddy” Blox, even though he was willing to expect almost anything, was flabbergasted, and he began to come apart, literally, though that posed no more problem than personal embarrassment, considering how many times he’d come—or been forced—apart and been put back together again in the past; the other two captains were skeptical, and decided to withhold opinion until the effects of the adhesive slurry could be more closely examined—that is to say, they didn’t want to express any opinions in the presence of an admiral; the lieutenant commander was straining to see what had happened, popping up and down like an overwound jack-in-the box and seeming to appear, if only for an instant, in two or three places at once; the bulbous admiral who, in just fourteen hours would be a very flat admiral, was simply flummoxed, a condition not altogether uncommon among many shore-bound admirals.
The main problem with saying good-bye to someone who is leaving by ship is that it takes so long. Once the departing person boards the ship, the mind of the one left behind perceives that person as being gone, but one look up at the deck railing and the mind is washed with contradictory information: There they are, just a few yards away, yet they are gone. And once the hubbub and hullabaloo of ship departure is completed and the long hawsers no longer hold the ship to the pier, it still takes forever; it can be another hour before the person leaving is no longer recognizable, and several, hours before the ship itself is out of sight. What should have been a quick, clean, and almost bearable “Goodbye,” becomes a tortuous “Gooooooooooooooooooooooood byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeee…” It works in reverse, too: When someone goes down to the dock to meet someone else arriving by ship, there is an agonizing “Hellloooooooooooo” before there are any actual hugs.
Having quite a bit of experience in casting off long hawsers and sending ships to sea, and retrieving a nearly equal number of ships, the United States Navy had developed an understandably excellent ability to drag out anything, sometimes almost to the edge of time itself, and consider it standard operating procedure, or SOP.
Which, of course, is exactly what happened with my uncle Henry and his adhesive slurry. Following the unexpected outcome—unexpected by all except my uncle Henry, Tom Twoflags, and Toots O’Brian—all sorts of quiet, introspective Hell broke loose in that small area within the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. Captain “Buddy” Blox saw and understood the implications immediately, and grieved for my uncle Henry; the admiral harrumphed endlessly while shaking his head, finally muttering to himself, “This will never do, this will never do…” The two other captains looked long and hard at the admiral and then at each other before beginning what sounded like the chanting in unison of a well-rehearsed Greek chorus from a play by Euripides expressing the widely held beliefs of the ruling gods of the moment: “Tradition is the anchor that holds the chain that secures the hull that supports the decks that carry the weight of responsibility to uphold the welds and rivets of timeless certitude through the raging seas of the tempest of congressional appropriations; even into the ravaging skies on the masts and yardarms of glorious yesteryears and dubious tomorrows do climb the brave and gallant sailors of a United States Navy, born of conflict, bred for conflict, embroiled in conflict—”
“Oh, shut up!” harrumphed the admiral, as the lieutenant commander popped up around him like some kind of carnival midway target that the shooter is never intended to hit. As the other captains fell silent and Captain “Buddy” Blox continued to fall apart, the admiral, with the lieutenant commander bobbing around behind him like a punch-drunk prize fighter trying to score at least a TKO in a shadow boxing exercise, turned to my uncle Henry, attempted to clear his throat of what must have been an old rag last used to clean oil off of crankcase seals, and said, “Very impressive, young man. Very impressive.”
“Thank you,” my uncle Henry said more calmly than he felt. “Glad you liked it. I really liked the bosun’s chair.”
“Naturally, we’ll have to run some tests…”
“Naturally.”
“We have to know not only if it works as well as it, well, seems to now, but, more importantly, just where this fits into United States Navy operations and, well, er…”
“Procedures?” volunteered the other two captains, in unison.
“…procedures,” continued the bulbous admiral.
“You boys live in the desert, you say?”
“That’s right, admiral,” said my uncle Henry, “Tecopa.”
“You’re welcome. As you know, we don’t have many viable naval operations in the desert. Too hard on the ships.”
“Uh, huh…” My uncle Henry was momentarily distracted by the young lieutenant commander who was, by now, swinging in front of the Big Demonstration area from a loose chain, like a pendulum, the United States Navy boilermakers, who were now on a self-assumed break, eyeing him warily, as if he were about to pounce on some unsuspecting prey.
“So what I’m trying to say here, is, uh… Help me here, captains,” he said as he turned to address all three captains, including the anatomy-shedding Captain “Buddy” Blox, whose attention was more focused on not losing the errant set screw or pulley cord than the admiral’s dilemma with commitment and decision making. The two other captains looked at each other, then at my uncle Henry, and said in unison, “We’ll get back to you.” Then they looked at the admiral.
“My staff speak as one, sir,” the admiral said to my uncle Henry, pleasing the other two captains no end.
Just then, and quite noisily, the lieutenant commander, misjudging the momentum and trajectory of his swinging arc—he had not attended the almost universally difficult and strict United States Naval Academy, which taught extensively on subjects such as physics and ballistics—smashed with considerable force into the half-boiler my uncle Henry, Tom Twoflags, and Toots O’Brian had just joined from two separate pieces. The collision didn’t effect the half-boiler a whit because it was, except for a small seam of now set adhesive slurry, solid iron, and the adhesive slurry was even stronger, with a useful life expectancy my uncle Henry later figured out to be 42,094,946 years, ± 1,000 years.
The combined impact of lieutenant commander and chains against such a large semi-cylinder of thick iron caused a deep-throated “clang” that mimicked a deep and sonorously-voiced Big Ben and knocked the lieutenant commander senseless, which the United States Navy boilermakers thought he was all along. It also raised the specter that great bodily harm, or at least significant anatomical realignment, had been done to the now unconscious lieutenant commander who hung limp from the gently swaying chains. Naturally, Captain “Buddy” Blox, being of the group gathered for the Big Demonstration the most experienced in massive skeletal and tissue damage and its potentially far reaching repercussions, was anxious to attend to the lieutenant commander as quickly as possible, but was thwarted by his inability to allen-wrench his ankle back together more quickly.
“Get him down from there!” Captain “Buddy” Blox yelled to the United States Navy boilermakers, but they were initially slow to follow even so direct an order inasmuch as they were on break, self-assumed though it might be. But the lieutenant commander wasn’t in any danger of becoming a permanent display concerning the dangers to be found lurking in almost every nook and cranny of a naval shipyard. Tom Twoflags ran as fast as his squat legs could run, which was incredibly fast—during this, his forty-sixth consecutive year on the planet, he could still run the 100 yard dash over obstacles, with which the desert floor was always littered, such as rocks, cacti, and kangaroo rats, in less than four seconds—grabbed the chains and, like Tarzan on a vine, climbed to the entangled and limp lieutenant commander as if the laws of gravity had been momentarily reversed. Getting the lieutenant commander down—he was nearly twenty feet above the concrete and almost everything else floor—was just as easily done; Toots O’Brian was now waiting directly below, his huge anvil-carrying arms outstretched, so that once Tom Twoflags had loosed the lieutenant commander from the chains he simply dropped him, like a sack of so many potatoes—an image not entirely lost on Toots O’Brian—into the blacksmith’s capable grasp.
It was all over in just moments; the rescue was so speedy, in fact, that the United States Navy boilermakers never really came off break. Captain “Buddy” Blox, having finally reassembled enough of himself to be able to stand and move, no matter how unsteadily or noisily, ran to Toots O’Brian who now held the lieutenant commander in his arms with as much ease and reverence as a school child might hold his or her first brand new, full-length unsharpened number-two pencil. The admiral, to his credit, ordered one of the other captains to immediately go and call for medical aid, thus allowing my uncle Henry his first opportunity to experience the other two captains not only separated but with one still and one in motion, thus dispelling any thoughts he may have had—and they were beginning to form—that the other two captains were actually loosely connected Siamese twins.
The medical emergency team arrived quickly and received the lieutenant commander from Toots O’Brian with professionalism. After they pronounced that his only problems were a fractured ankle, unconsciousness, and being a lieutenant commander, they took him away for treatment which, if it were to be complete, would probably have to include a promotion, the admiral, who was unknowingly staring down Fate’s massive gun barrel himself, turned back to my uncle Henry.
“Sorry about that. He isn’t usually like that. He’s never gotten that high before.”
“No problem, admiral. I’ve seen men under stress before.”
“Pearl survivor… No doubt you have. I was states-side that morning. Playing golf. Broke par. But I was sure with you in spirit. How did you handle it?”
“A little over par,” replied my uncle Henry, who was nothing if not a gentleman.
The admiral took hold of my uncle Henry’s arm just above the elbow and began guiding him toward the Long Hawser.
“Look here… very impressive demonstration. Remarkable glue—”
“Adhesive slurry,” corrected my uncle Henry.
“Whatever… Remarkable, and we’ll study not only this fine piece of work, but what it means to the United States Navy overall as well.” He looked around to find Captain “Buddy” Blox who was limping up just a bit behind. Captain “Buddy” Blox would, no doubt, be spending the rest of the day going back and forth between the Naval hospital and the Long Beach Naval Shipyard machine shop just to get back in shape.
“Captain Blox, I’m glad you brought this amazing discovery to my attention.” The admiral turned back to my uncle Henry just as they were nearing the side of the Long Hawser. “We’ll let you know how we want to proceed. Until then, not a word to anyone.” He held his right index finger vertically against his somewhat pursed lips. “Shah… Not anyone.” He raised his voice but did not look away from my uncle Henry, and barked, “Captains?”
The other two captains, having now rejoined, said in unison, “Yes sir!”
“You know where to reach these gentlemen?”
In unison: “Yes sir! Tecopa!”
“You’re welcome.” He shook hands with my uncle Henry. “The United States Navy is grateful to you, sir. How much did you say you would be willing to sell this stuff—this adhesive slurry—to the United States Navy for?”
My uncle Henry answered as he climbed into the Long Hawser—no small feat. “I didn’t. But I was thinking about four or five dollars a gallon.”
The admiral began a sputtering fit that sounded to my uncle Henry like the noises his old dive bombers were known to have made just before running out of fuel somewhere over the vast Pacific ocean.
“Four or five dollars a gallon? (Sputter.) No one. (Cough, wheeze.) Not a soul. (Sputter.) Don’t tell anyone.” He looked around a bit nervously, then leaned in through the open window. “You have my undying gratitude.”
Little did the admiral know.
As the admiral walked off to confer with the other two captains, and as Tom Twoflags and Toots O’Brian boarded the Long Hawser, Toots O’Brian immediately wrapping himself around the Slurry Pot and going to sleep, Captain “Buddy” Blox approached my uncle Henry and just stared at him for a long moment. My uncle Henry could see Thelma Tomato in Captain “Buddy” Blox’s good eye, looking out at him and smiling, eyes and hair sparkling, giving him a thumbs-up sign, as if to say: Job well done.
“Great job,” he said in a low voice, “but I’ll bet it’s no sale. I know the United States Navy. Of course, you never know… I just don’t want you to get your hopes up too far.”
“I won’t. It was just an idea. Anyway, it was fun.”
“I’ve got a little secret for you,” confided Captain “Buddy” Blox. “I’m mustering out of this man’s United States Navy soon. Retiring with a full captain’s pension.”
“Good for you. You could use a rest. You could use a tune-up.”
“I could use a change of pace and place. You wouldn’t mind if we…” he blushed just a little, but only in very selected places on his face, “…if we came out to visit, would you?”
“Not at all. I think you should both come, certainly, and plan to stay for a while. You’re gonna like it.”
“That’s terrific,” said Captain “Buddy” Blox. “It’ll be soon, and I know where to find you: Tecopa.”
“You’re welcome,” said my uncle Henry. “And give my best to Thelma Tomato.”
“I will, but it couldn’t possibly match mine,” said Captain “Buddy” Blox with a wink of his experimental and highly sensitive photoelectric eye.
He turned and walked, rattling and limping a bit, toward the other officers, leaving only the gang of United States Navy boilermakers to witness the departure of the Long Hawser and its occupants from the scene of the Big Demonstration, and they were still on break, self-assumed as it was, and probably didn’t notice. Anyway, one of them had soon to report to another part of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, having received orders earlier that morning that his duties were being changed to driving one of the fast little gray or yellow vehicles, each approximately the size and weight of a double-door, frost-free refrigerator, that sped all over the Long Beach Naval Shipyard doing Heaven knows what. He didn’t think it was a proper job for a boilermaker, and he wanted to tell someone so.
Fourteen hours later, he would.
Chapter 5
June 17, 2009
Chapter Five
The connection between my uncle Henry’s Big Demonstration of 1957, anno domini, in Long Beach, California, and Buzz’s and my political activism of 1958, anno domini, in Arlington, Virginia, which took the form of unsolicited bumper sticker distribution, was simple and direct. The extraordinary adhesive on the backs of the bumper stickers which made them, once applied, an integral and everlasting part of the afflicted automobile from the moment of being affixed forward was a commercial application of the very adhesive slurry my uncle Henry had attempted to sell to the United States Navy just the year before. Great ideas, not to mention Significant Inventions, sometimes don’t take long in reaching the masses, even if not along the path originally intended.
When it came to my uncle Henry’s adhesive slurry, Fate was, as usual, at the wheel, so the adhesive slurry’s arrival on the scene, not to mention in my hands, at just that moment was swift and certain. But since it was Fate doing the driving, who could have known?
Just as Captain “Buddy” Blox had so cynically yet accurately predicted, the United States Navy was not interested in totally revamping the way it went about its business, especially when it came to putting ships, careers, and overstuffed contracts together. There was simply too much tradition to overcome, and too many “mutual benefit” conduits in place and at full flow. As the once bulbous and now forever flattened admiral, who certainly knew of such things, being an admiral, had muttered to himself in such an uncharacteristically unguarded way, “This will never do, this will never do….”
My uncle Henry did hear from the United States Navy about his adhesive slurry a few short weeks following the Big Demonstration in the form of a letter from the recovering lieutenant commander, a letter that was, probably characteristically, simultaneously drafted on a typewriter, and in pencil, and in crayon, and in something else my uncle Henry had a difficult time identifying—and reading—but which he suspected was ordinary yellow mustard. The letter thanked my uncle Henry for considering the United States Navy, but explained that the United States Navy had no immediate plans to make any significant changes in their ship repair procedures in the foreseeable future, blah, blah, b(glop), so that they would have no need at the present time for my uncle Henry’s adhesive slurry, blah, blah, blah, in town again (glop)all, sincerely yours, Lieutenant Commander Me(glop)r, United States (splat).
“Well,” thought my uncle Henry, “at least he wasn’t promoted.”
For a couple of months after receiving the lieutenant commander’s (glop), my uncle Henry set out from Tecopa in the Long Hawser with Tom Twoflags and Toots O’Brian—by then they worked together like a fairly well-oiled machine, so why change?—and the Slurry Pot, attempting to demonstrate the potential of the adhesive slurry to some small manufacturers, a couple of general contractors, and a shoe company in Fresno, a city in the middle of the biggest, most productive, and most artificial vegetable garden on the planet at the time, the San Joaquin Valley.
Though he was having no luck in selling the adhesive slurry to anyone, he and Tom Twoflags and Toots O’Brian were beginning to enjoy their little trips afield in the Long Hawser: they gave Toots O’Brian an opportunity to sleep a great deal, and, for him, any time spent sleeping was time he did not have to attend to the details of his Irish façade, or deal with a whiskey hangover; they gave Tom Twoflags many more chances—fruitless as they always turned out to be—to search for his missing parents, though he was becoming more and more fearful of finding them as cobblers or vegetable farmers or something else equally inexplicable theologically; and they gave my uncle Henry lots of ideas because, in his mind, as he took the trio and the Slurry Pot here and there over miles of deserted desert roads, he was able to combine and recombine over and over again in different compositions and proportions any number of slurries containing, at one time or another, almost everything he saw from the tall seat of the Long Hawser.
Then, one cloudless and baking September afternoon in 1957, anno domini, when my uncle Henry had driven the Long Hawser about sixty miles south, with, unremembered by him, the Slurry Pot still in the back, to the aptly named East Mojave Desert town of Baker, California—a sort of watering hole, gas station, motel, and semi-urban break in what seemed to be endless and nearly useless desert to the “city folk” (the grandeur and true meaning of the desert being totally lost on them) driving from what was then The Los Angeles Basin to what was then Las Vegas—to buy a new pair of gloves and a newspaper, Fate decided to stop being just a spectator and step in to the action. With new gloves in hand, my uncle Henry parked at The Mad Greek, a combination diner and souvenir shop on a corner of the intersection of the two main roads in Baker, the roughly (in more ways than one) East-West road and the equally roughly North-South road. By then my uncle Henry had noticed that the Slurry Pot was still in the back of the Long Hawser, so he moved a few things around back there to be sure the Slurry Pot wouldn’t tip over and seal up the back of the Long Hawser for all eternity. As he tidied, the back of one of the new gloves he still held in one hand brushed the lip of the Slurry Pot as lightly as if it had been a quiet, stolen lover’s kiss, in the process having deposited on it, as lovers will do, the slightest dab, a mere but monumental essence of the adhesive slurry—monumental, because it was Fate that guided the momentary glove and Slurry Pot tryst.
Because my uncle Henry was seriously wondering for the umpteenth time, as almost everyone who lived in or drove through Baker did, just what it was the Greek was mad about, he did not notice that the now adhesive-slurry-pollinated and quite possibly already germinating glove, one half of the brand new pair of gloves my uncle Henry had just moments ago loosely put in his back pocket, had dislodged itself from its former mate—who can understand why gloves do what they do?—and fell to the concrete walk in front of the entrance to The Mad Greek.
A large sign behind the cash register in The Mad Greek says, for reasons unknown, especially now in the year 2055, anno domini, “Where Somebody Meets Everybody.” My uncle Henry was standing near the sign as he waited to pay for his eight-page newspaper, wondering, as he always did, if the Mad Greek himself had known what he had meant when he had first painted the sign, or if The Mad Greek, like my uncle Henry, just knew things that others didn’t, when Somebody walked in and tapped my uncle Henry on the shoulder.
My uncle Henry turned around and saw before him a stern, seemingly humorless man with short, blond hair, pale blue eyes, and a body as lean and tall and strong as Tom Twoflags’ was short and squat and strong. Fate had put my uncle Henry face to face with Lars Larsonsonnen, the deacon of the Ascension Presbyterian Church of Lead, South Dakota (or what was known then as the state of South Dakota)—the only Presbyterian church in the western third of South Dakota—and the secretary-treasurer of the church’s wholly owned subsidiary, the Ascension Banner and Sign Company, also of Lead, South Dakota, but with its production facilities located in a small, unadorned, Presbyterian sort of building with only a few broken windowpanes and which occupied an inexpensive half-acre in a mostly rundown, semi-industrial part of the nearby and much larger town of Rapid City, South Dakota.
Having set the pot to simmering, Fate sat back once again to see the effects of its own slurry-in-the-making. I have often wondered if Fate ever remembered the recipes, or the results. I don’t think so, though. The only recipe I’ve never seen it fiddle with much is the one for the desert: Bake until done. Of course, it never is.
Many people don’t realize it isn’t done yet, and probably won’t be for a long, long time, geologically speaking, which is a very long time indeed.
“Excuse me, meester,” said Lars Larsonsonnen in the thickest and most musical Scandinavian lilt my uncle Henry had ever heard, “but is that your glove out there on the concrete?”
My uncle Henry thought he was an unwitting audience to an opera, at first. “My glove?”
“Yah. I thought I saw you drop it as you were coming in here to buy yer newspaper.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I was purdy sure it was you. I thought I saw it fall from your pocket. Who can understand why gloves do what they do?”
“I meant about the accent.”
“Accent?” sang Lars Larsonsonnen.
My uncle Henry reached around to retrieve his new gloves from his back pocket. He looked at the only glove he found back there, and then back to the impassive face of Lars Larsonsonnen. “I guess you’re right. You say you saw it just outside?” he asked, wondering why Lars Larsonsonnen hadn’t brought it in with him.
“You bet I’m sure. Uff da, I almost tripped on it walkin’ in.”
“Tripped on it?” The concept fascinated my uncle Henry, but no more so than the possibility of an aria for an answer.
“You bet I did. I thought I saw it fall from yer pocket, but I didn’t think too much of it then because I was talkin’ with the Missus, Stands-In-The-Grass, about what she wanted from—”
“Stands-In-The-Grass?”
“I married outside da faith.”
“Oh….” He’s kidding, thought my uncle Henry. He wasn’t, though, as my uncle Henry would soon find out.
“Anyway, I had forgot about yer glove when my toe caught it—an accident, you know—and, yorda, da glove didn’t move a single inch and I almost went face-first into da white-hot concrete.”
“(Splat)” thought my uncle Henry.
“So I was wonderin’ as I got up, and I tried to pick up da glove and, uff da, it wouldn’t budge, like it was nailed down, ya know. So I got to wonderin’ some more: How’d ya do that? That’s a professional question.”
My uncle Henry had gotten his aria, and almost felt like yelling “bravo!” except that now his curiosity was peaked—how had his new glove almost tripped this man who sang everything, this one-person opera in a diner and souvenir shop? Being no slouch at abstract thought and tenuous interconnectivity, he began to smell the adhesive slurry at work here.
“You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?” he asked the troubled tenor.
“No, no, I’m just fine. More surprised than anything, you bet, because when you kick a glove, even if you don’t mean to, you expect it to move, you bet, not try to throw you to the ground. Uff da.”
“I can understand that. That isn’t the behavior I’d expect from a casually dropped glove either. Let’s go take a look.”
My uncle Henry lightly tossed a dime on the counter for the newspaper and, before turning toward the door, looked at The Mad Greek’s sign: “Where Somebody Meets Everybody.” “You’re right,” my uncle Henry thought as he headed for to the bright white blue-sky blast furnace heat outside with Lars Larsonsonnen right behind him.
Sure enough, just outside the door was the brand new light tan work glove, lying on its back with its fingers slightly flexed, definitely at the ready, almost daring someone to ignore it and try to pass unmolested. My uncle Henry reached down and tried to lift the glove, but it wouldn’t budge, and he figured from the feel of things that the square of concrete to which it was now attached so firmly would sooner be raised out of the ground than the glove would separate from it. He got down on his hands and knees and nearly pressed his cheek to the concrete—to actually make contact would have surely produced second-degree burns—and gave a close and practiced look at the exact point of attachment between glove and concrete, and it was there he saw the tiny but telltale sparkle of a trace of his adhesive slurry, set now for all of whatever time there was to come on this planet, and, who knows, perhaps longer.
My uncle Henry rose from his dangerous crouch and told Lars Larsonsonnen, who had been stoically standing silently in the heat of Hell in front of The Mad Greek, “It’s my glue, my adhesive slurry, I call it.”
“Adhesive slurry?” Lars Larsonsonnen asked, putting my uncle Henry’s invention to music for the very first time.
So my uncle Henry told Lars Larsonsonnen the abridged story of his adhesive slurry—of how he had concocted it, tested it on Tom Twoflags’ 1947 Chevy, had tried to sell it to the United States Navy, and had toured here and there trying to sell it to others, but with no takers. Then he walked Lars Larsonsonnen over to the Long Hawser and showed him the Slurry Pot, complete with the old Craftsman two-inch nylon-bristle brush. On the way, my uncle Henry nodded and smiled at the woman sitting in the right-front seat of a nearby blue Volvo, and who he was certain was Stands-In-The-Grass Larsonsonnen, wife of the one-man opera and a woman who must have surely picked up from her husband a Scandinavian affinity for saunas, given how hot it must have been in the dark little automobile that looked, for all the world, like a miniature Nash and had the longest gearshift lever ever known to be attached to a passenger car.
Lars Larsonsonnen had not sung a word during my uncle Henry’s story, much to my uncle Henry’s regret, and neither had he confirmed my uncle Henry’s guess about the woman in the Volvo, but had instead walked by as if there were no miniature Nash with a long gearshift and possibly uncomfortable woman inside. Perhaps, my uncle Henry thought, he had been wrong in his guess as to the lone woman’s identity, though he didn’t think so—she was definitely Indian, probably Lakota, Cheyenne, or possibly even Crow, and her dark, impassive eyes never left Lars Larsonsonnen—and perhaps there was trouble in the Larsonsonnen home. At the moment, all my uncle Henry knew was she was Sits-In-The-Volvo-Unintroduced.
“Hey, that’s very, very interestin’, you bet,” Lars Larsonsonnen melodized. “You say this glue—”
“Adhesive slurry.”
“Yah, sure, adhesive slurry… Works on any-thing? It will fix any-thing to any-thing, no matter what, forever and ever, amen?” Perhaps he was thinking about his marriage.
“Amen,” said my uncle Henry. You saw it bind a leather glove to concrete, and you’ve experienced for yourself how well it holds. It’ll hold a billboard together in a tornado, and stick a bumper sticker to a bumper so well you could use it for a towing hitch,” explained my uncle Henry, using the fine salesman patois he had developed over the last couple of months, while simultaneously giving birth to two concepts he had never before envisioned.
“And it’s easy to make?”
“If you have the right stuff and the recipe.”
“Herny, herny!” Lars Larsonsonnen both sang and chortled. “This is perfect. This is why I come to the desert and I didn’t even know it. This will put people in Presbyterian pews and put Lead, South Dakota, on the map!”
“Isn’t it already?” wondered my uncle Henry, who wasn’t following all this exactly and, for one of the few times in his adult life, looked just a shade perplexed.
Then began the actual opera; all that had passed before was overture. Lars Larsonsonnen explained that he and his wife were on vacation from Lead, South Dakota, touring the great desert southwest of what, at the time, was still known as the United States of America, and that he had never really been comfortable with his choice of destination because it had always seemed to him, from the pictures he had seen, to be as desolate a place as the prairies of South Dakota, and because he didn’t have air conditioning in his car, which was no surprise for 1957, anno domini, but something compelled him to pack a few things, including his wife, Stands-In-The-Grass—she wasn’t too keen on the idea of being sealed up with him in the Volvo for two weeks—and heading south by southwest. All the way through the absolute boredom of the states which were then known as Nebraska—Buzz would eventually reside and disappear in its largest city—Kansas, and eastern Colorado, all of which look identical, Lars Larsonsonnen was troubled by three things: Lead, South Dakota, was a very small town and membership in the Ascension Presbyterian Church of Lead, South Dakota, was dropping off at a rate equal to the rate at which current members were dropping dead, which they tended to do fairly regularly, most of them being quite old and bored and prone to leaving the planet with little or no notice and for ever and ever, amen; profits at the church’s wholly-owned subsidiary, the Ascension Banner and Sign Company of Lead, South Dakota, were flat at best with no foreseeable prospects to remedy the situation; and he was beginning to seriously question the wisdom of marrying “outside the faith” as he had, especially since his motives, as he now saw them, were primarily lustful (which he sometimes saw as sinful) and lazy (which he sometimes didn’t) since he had once proudly stated to a fellow bar patron that he had married Stands-In-The- Grass so she could make love to him and then make the bed, which she did without uttering a word of complaint about either chore.
His mind churning with these troubles, he had stopped at The Mad Greek in Baker for a glazed donut, only to discover what could instantly revitalize the Ascension Banner and Sign Company of Lead, South Dakota, which would, in turn, have a positive effect on the general membership roles of the Ascension Presbyterian Church of Lead, South Dakota—it was an unwritten rule that anyone who wanted to work at the Ascension Banner and Sign Company had to become a member of the Ascension Presbyterian Church in order to maintain employment; the Lord works in mysterious ways—and, since he would be doing so much good for so many people, he would be able to assuage the guilt he was fairly certain he would feel for carrying out his plan of leaving Stands-In-The-Grass Larsonsonnen behind simply by abandoning her somewhere in Kansas, probably.
Needless to say, Lars Larsonsonnen cut the scenes in the opera concerning mandatory church membership, marital troubles, and proposed wife abandonment when he sang it, a capella, for my uncle Henry.
“So what you’re saying,” summed up my uncle Henry, following the brief applause from a small group of The Mad Greek regulars who had loosely gathered to simply hear the music and after the last note immediately wander away, like spear carriers and chorus members at the end of a scene, “is that you’d like to buy my adhesive slurry for the Ascension Banner and Sign Company of Lead, South Dakota. Is that right?”
“Yorda, you bet!” beamed Lars Larsonsonnen, clapping his hands a little, either for emphasis or out of sheer, unrestrained excitement.
“Well, it’s not for sale. Not anymore.” My uncle Henry had been thinking about this for a while—for almost two full acts.
“Uff da.” Lars Larsonsonnen looked as if he had been turned to pale, silent stone on the spot by the hoped-by-everyone-to-be-mythical Gorgon. He saw his theological, business, and marital redemption being blown away with the rest of the swirling dust of Baker, California. The Lord does, indeed, work his wonders in mysterious ways; or Fate was dressed in particularly Presbyterian clothes that day.
“But I will work out a royalty deal with you,” my uncle Henry said with calm voice and his best poker face.
“Uff da!” The dust in Baker settled in an instant and redemption was back on track.
Terms were discussed and, right there in front of The Mad Greek, standing on the blistering gravel parking lot under a sun so powerful God used it to look into people’s brains and vice versa, a deal was struck that was to make my uncle Henry more-than-moderately rich by anyone’s standards, and, a year later, put his adhesive slurry in Buzz’s and my hands in the form of bumper stickers manufactured by the Ascension Banner and Sign Company of Lead, South Dakota. The legal papers would be drawn up and delivered to my uncle Henry the following week, at which time he would send the Ascension Banner and Sign Company of Lead, South Dakota, the recipe for his adhesive slurry, from where it would soon spread across the country—metaphorically, of course—in no time.
To commemorate the moment, my uncle Henry took out his pen knife and cut away from the downed glove that part which was now and forever part of the concrete beneath it, and kept the glove with a hole in it roughly the size, appropriately enough, of a silver dollar. (It was also in exactly in the same spot the stigmata would appear on a person’s hand, if they should believe in that sort of thing.) He then got in the Long Hawser and drove his new gloves and newspaper home to Tecopa.
As my uncle Henry—and all the rest of us, for that matter—later found out first hand, Stands-In-The-Grass Larsonsonnen was, indeed, left by the side of the road somewhere in Kansas, living up to the Fate in her name.
Fate doesn’t have to look like such a good deal at first to be good deal at last.
The Ascension Banner and Sign Company of Lead, South Dakota, became so successful so fast that it was way beyond the ability of the Ascension Presbyterian Church of Lead, South Dakota, to properly administer to its success. That’s when a majority share in the Ascension Banner and Sign Company was sold to the newly renamed Amalgamated TeleTekTronix, a trucking company based in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, with management which was truly before it’s time; the management of Amalgamated TeleTekTronix foresaw the need to create a holding company and for it to branch out into totally unrelated fields in order to protect the holding company’s overall profit and loss report from fiscal unpleasantness, just as they foresaw the coming national trend to create meaningless corporate names which ended with the letter “x”.
Amalgamated TeleTekTronix lived on the leading edge of almost all things corporate.
The Ascension Presbyterian Church of Lead, South Dakota, did, indeed, grow to become a potent religious force in the region. Years later, after it had taken The Ascension Presbyterian Church of Lead, South Dakota, itself under its control, Amalgamated TeleTekTronix saw a way to increase both profits and influence even more and, ever forward-thinking, helped make the Reverend Jerome Farthingword a star of radio, television, back room politics, and acquisitions.
Chapter 6
June 16, 2009
Chapter 6
Buzz’s and my political activism centering around the 1958, anno domini, congressional race—as elections were often referred to then for reasons having nothing to do with the public good—in our district of the northern part of what was then known as the state of Virginia (or, “The Old Dominion”) and expressed solely through the prodigious if somewhat indiscriminate distribution of pink-on-blue with chrome highlights bumper stickers which we attached willy-nilly and, as it turned out, absolutely permanently to automobiles, signs, buildings, curbs, bicycles, windows, and even, occasionally, each other’s clothing, and which, unknown to me at the time, began what was to be an intimate intertwining of my life with that of my uncle Henry, was not any sort of deeply felt commitment to the political process as it then existed in what was then called the United States of America, but just another of Fate’s machinations intended to create an emotional slurry as strongly connective as my uncle Henry’s adhesive slurry, and was, therefore, destined to be short-lived. Fate is often quick to abandon what it has put together, used for its own ends, and then, because it has served its purpose, no longer needs. As evidence of this particular fundamental and callous trait of Fate at work, I offer the Dodo (Raphus cucullatus), communism, and truly idealistic politicians.
That is why Buzz and I ran out of bumper stickers in about a week. That is also why profligate bumper-stickering got Buzz in a lot of hot water and, later, almost got him in an enormous amount of cold water. Fate had a schedule to meet and had to move things along.
Right after Buzz and I had run out of bumper stickers, on a weekend, I spent one of the two nights I would ever spend sleeping over at Buzz’s house. The next morning, Mrs. Westerman—wearing her usual belted cotton dress with petticoat, pumps, and apron—made breakfast for her family, which for the moment included me, and set the dishes, silverware, and glasses out on the kitchen table so precisely I thought she must have used a grid overlay and ruler. At each place-setting was, among other things, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and, next to each glass of orange juice, at the “3 o’clock” position and precisely two inches from the base of each glass, was a small, red, spherical One-A-Day brand vitamin pill.
As I have said, I had always been what could be most quickly characterized as a “sickly” child, and throughout my life to that point it had often been necessary for me to take pills of various types—coated, uncoated, small, medium, gigantic, etc.—and various colors for many and varied reasons. The chief problem this raised for both me and my mother was that I found it physically impossible to swallow pills. I could take an immense bite of a peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread sandwich, chew it just three times, and swallow without any problem whatsoever a mass which would normally clog any normal household drain. But I could not swallow pills. So my mother devised several methods for administering the necessary medications, the most effective being to grind the pill to a course powder between two nested spoons and mix the thus deconstructed pill in a tablespoon with Karo brand white syrup.
This went on for years. Fate had obviously had me in training for dealing with my uncle Henry’s slurries for some time.
Sitting down that Fateful morning at the Westerman’s kitchen table, then, posed something of a challenge for me. I was the first to sit—perhaps because no one wanted to place their own feet in harm’s way as I swung my weighty orthopedic shoe under the table—followed by Mr. Westerman and Buzz; Mrs. Westerman continued to dash from stove top to counter to table until everyone but she had been served. She did stop her flitting around long enough, though, to take part in what looked to me like an act so ritualistic it may have been passed down through countless generations of Westermans—except that One-A-Day brand vitamin pills had not been around that long—as the three of them, in practiced unison, picked up their orange juice glasses in their left hands and their One-A-Day brand vitamin pills in their right hands and then, following perhaps a silent toast but at least an instant’s hesitation, as if each were admiring either the bright redness or the imperfectly spherical shape of their One-A-Day brand vitamin pill, placed their pills on their tongues, raised their orange juice glasses to their lips, and drank. They had simultaneously dispatched a day’s worth of vitamins to their stomachs for further distribution throughout their bodies.
It was choreography at its finest and intimidation at its most intense. It also had the effect on me of throwing the next few seconds into slow-motion so effectively that they lasted, it seemed, from that Saturday morning through late in the afternoon of the following Thursday.
After what was really only a second or two of glassy-eyed introspection during which each of them seemed to be confirming in some mysterious, internal way that the red, round package of pep and vitality had reached its initial destination, they all looked at me, drawn to me perhaps by my total inertia, or by the fact that my hands were tucked neatly on either side of me between my thighs and the chair seat, or perhaps because my protective-goggle-sized glasses had the unfortunate optical effect for anyone looking through them backwards—that is, looking at me—of enlarging my eyes to what was the average size of a medium butter pickle slice.
I really don’t think, even to this day 97 years later, that they were overtly pressuring me to take the One-A-Day brand vitamin pill set before me, or admonishing me, however silently, for not doing so. I simply think that since they, as a group, had been following this chemical ingestion ritual for so long they were actually surprised when someone didn’t.
At the time, though, I was stunned, mortified, and completely cornered, because I knew without the slightest bit of doubt that the only way to not have to admit, tacitly or otherwise, to a childish quirk equal in shame only to bedwetting was that I must swallow the One-A-Day brand vitamin pill set before me, and I must do it as if it were something I did as normally and unconsciously as breathing.
Unable to control the excruciating slow-motion of my own moves, I reached for the One-A-Day brand vitamin pill, half expecting to see bowling ball-like finger holes in it, so large it seemed, but there were none and I had to struggle to pick it up. In fact, I knew it was small enough to place on my tongue, and even small enough to then retract into my mouth. The only thought I distinctly remember having in the form of a real and complete sentence was, “I’m going to die.” And I knew somehow I would not die from choking on the One-A-Day brand vitamin pill, though the thought briefly crossed my mind; no, I knew my death would be a more agonizing one, taking a lifetime. Of course, I suppose all deaths, by definition, take a lifetime, but I was imagining a living-to-old-age lifetime. What horrors I would have faced if I had known then what I know now about how long a lifetime can be.
I lifted the gaudily red and doubly oversized BB pellet of a pill to my mouth, placed it on the tip of my tongue, raised my orange juice glass to my lips, closed my eyes, and drank as if I had been wandering the desert without water for a week.
And it worked! When I stopped gulping orange juice like it was barreled bourbon and I was a drunk on a binge, I realized that not only was the One-A-Day brand vitamin pill gone from my mouth, but that it had actually gone down my throat, just like it was designed to do. I was saved. I was reborn! And I had just begun a career of non-stop pill-taking which would only end in the next millennium.
It was at that moment the world, which was, as far as I was concerned, the Westerman’s kitchen, snapped back to real-time speed, and as I surveyed the family Westerman over my still raised orange juice glass, I began to think they hadn’t been staring at me at all. Perhaps. But it left me with the difficult problem of trying to contain my celebration for accomplishing something which I would never admit was something to be accomplished.
Fate likes to test each and every one of us every now and again to see how we’re doing. In fact, at that very moment Fate was about to test the entire family Westerman.
Before he came to the breakfast table, Mr. Westerman had already been through two-thirds of his first cigar for the day, using fire to modify its structure and redistribute it as heat, smoke, and ash, and in the process altering Mrs. Westerman’s simple breakfast recipes, giving everything an odd and distinctly smokehouse flavor. Mr. Westerman’s ever-present cigars meant that an ashtray near his table place setting was equally ever-present, and it was in this ashtray he placed his cigar when he sat down to eat, allowing the cigar to snuff itself out for the time being, as cigars will do, as if resting or showing incredibly good sense and sensitivity toward others.
Mr. Westerman also like to read the morning newspaper at the breakfast table, making him not only more well informed on local, national, and world events, but also making him something of an accomplished juggler.
“Well, well, well…” Mr. Westerman said solemnly as he read an article in the paper, meaning exactly the opposite of what he said. He laid the paper aside and picked up his sleeping semi-cigar, meaning to give it a three-alarm wake-up call with his Zippo lighter.
“What’s that, Dear?” inquired Mrs. Westerman while she, herself, now seated and eating along with the rest of us, was trying to understand the curiously smokey flavor she always seemed to note in her scrambled eggs, especially since she had done nothing to season or otherwise prepare them that way, being no great fan of even slightly spicy foods.
With a sigh of resignation not unlike what I have always imagined God must have heaved just before contacting Noah about boat building, Mr. Westerman said, “These kids today.” He pointed to something on the newspaper page. “I just don’t know. Thank Heavens Buzz isn’t like that.”
“Yes, Dear,” Mrs. Westerman said as she sniffed another forkful of cooked eggs.
Just as Mr. Westerman was clamping the soon to be reactivated cigar in his teeth, Buzz interrupted spreading some real butter on his second piece of smokehouse toast and enthusiastically interjected: “Guess what, Dad? We’ve— ” at which point Buzz indicated me, and I felt the slightest tingle of impending doom zip from my ever-trusty medulla oblongata to my One-A-Day brand vitamin enlivened stomach, “—we’ve been doing campaign work for that guy you like, you know, the one who owns the furniture stores. We asked what we could do, and they gave us a ton of their bumper stickers, and we’ve been putting them everywhere. You can’t go anywhere around here without seeing his name.”
Buzz looked at me like I was supposed to be enjoying this, and snickered just a tiny bit. Mr. Westerman sat stone-still, his eyes wide, his Zippo unlit, sparing the cigar for another, Fate-designed duty.
“We plastered ‘em everywhere, on everything. Great, huh? We went through two whole big boxes of ‘em. Pretty cool, huh?”
Mr. Westerman turned with pained slowness to the newspaper article he had only just before sighed so heavily about. “Vandals Permanently Mummify Police Car With Candidate Bumper Stickers” the headline read. In real-time slow-motion Mr. Westerman, who was becoming redder and redder, his round and mostly bald head beginning to look like an enormous One-A Day brand vitamin pill, turned to once again look at his son. Buzz was still smiling, awaiting his father’s congratulations for supporting the democratic process and his father’s non-Democrat candidate of choice. I was awaiting…what? Fate knew. I didn’t.
“You?” Mr. Westerman gasped, using up what turned out to be his last one. His shock, disbelief, and good Republican righteous outrage had, for a while, simply stopped his lungs, and since there had been no recent oxygen transfer by the time he expressed his utter incredulity with the word “You”, he said it by powerfully inhaling instead of exhaling, and in the process sucked his dormant partial cigar deeply into his throat, sealing his throat tightly against the passage of oxygen or any other gasses in either direction. No one at the table was more surprised than he.
Mr. Westerman’s displeasure with his son’s apparent juvenile delinquency was now surpassed by his displeasure with not being able to breathe, no matter how hard he tried. His efforts were mighty, but his desperate attempts to get air into his lungs only served to lodge the cigar more tightly.
“Dear, what should I do?” pleaded Mrs. Westerman, but of course got no spoken answer from Mr. Westerman. She wasn’t entirely certain what was going on because the speed with which the cigar stub had been ingested, not unlike the lightning-fast catching of a fly by a frog, had rendered the calamity invisible to her. At one moment her husband was about to expound on some terrible travesty against the American way, as he had so often in the past, and the next he was sitting bug-eyed, red as a raddish, and unable to express himself in any other way than waving his arms about in what appeared to be an Olympian, if misguided, attempt to fly. Responding as best she could to the rapid and hopelessly wild and confusing improvised sign language of his flailing arms, Mrs. Westerman jumped up and began hitting him on his back, guessing from the fact that her husband was, for the first time since they met, speechless that he had something caught in his mouth or throat and needed assistance in coughing it up.
Too little, too late. Ultimately, the increasing strength of her blows to his back, and his decreasing strength caused by an acute, if not absolute, lack of oxygen caused Mrs. Westerman to knock Mr. Westerman out of his chair and onto the spotless yellow and white floral print linoleum floor. It was there, in a pool of sunlight from the window which made Mr. Westerman’s head, lying in that pool of sunlight on the linoleum, look like a red pepper lying amid daisies, that Mr. Westerman looked at his son as if he were looking with a hopeless lack of comprehension at the formula for reaching escape velocity from Earth, and then took his leave of the planet.
Mrs. Westerman began crying in a low, mournful, almost controlled way; Buzz just sat there, as he had throughout the entire incident, mouth and eyes agape, still holding his piece of buttered smokehouse toast; and I was trying everything I knew to calm my now almost throbbing medulla oblongata, because I knew it was telling me this was only the beginning. I was also earnestly wishing I was, at that moment, in a hospital. Any hospital.
The funeral was fairly modest, by northern Virginia, Republican, country-club-set standards, and was thankfully swift. The only real wrinkle was no more than an aesthetic one: Mrs. Westerman insisted on not riding in the usual black limousine immediately behind the equally black hearse, but on driving the pink and chrome Oldsmobile Mr. Westerman had bought her the year before. She said the smell of the car reminded her of her husband, proving a second time that a single cigar can exercise a great deal of influence over someone’s life. Mr. Westerman was buried dressed in his favorite golfing outfit, his hands clutching to his bosom a box of his favorite Cuban cigars, enough to last a second lifetime.
Buzz did not take any of this at all well. He felt responsible for his father’s death, even though it was a third of a cigar in combination with outraged righteousness that actually did his father in. Buzz’s downward emotional spiral is what prompted the second and last time I ever spent the night at his house. He was so despondent that Mrs. Westerman was the one who actually extended the invitation, hoping that my visit would in some magical way help, since she seemed unable to, and Buzz didn’t want to. So I went, and Buzz and I spent many hours talking, long into the night. We talked about many things, none of which were really, on the surface, relevant or meaningful. Below the surface, though, their relevance and meaning were significant, because what we talked about and around and with was normalcy, the everyday, day-to-day mundane, juvenile things that interested fourteen-year-old boys in 1958, Anno Domini, and that seemed to help get Buzz’s mind off the abnormal, that is, watching your father swallow a cigar and fall over dead at breakfast.
Eventually, late that night, one of the normal, thirteen-year-old boy things we got around to was Bobby Sue Bessemer. When Buzz said Bobby Sue Bessemer’s name, a small electrical shock traced my complete nervous system, and my silly medulla oblongata, which had been a bit traumatized by recent events, began a low hum. I had attended St. Stephen’s School for Boys for a year already, and would soon begin my second year there, so I had neither seen nor heard anything about Bobby Sue Bessemer for some time; needless to say, I had not heard from her at all.
Buzz told me she was as beautiful as ever, still had long hair, still wore saddle shoes, was developing enormous breasts, and was followed almost everywhere she went by half the boys in Williamsburg Junior High School, no matter what grade they were in. It might have been cheering Buzz up, but this line of discussion was beginning to depress me; saddle shoes are hard to follow in orthopedic shoes, and dancing is almost out of the question. Maybe my mother had made a good decision concerning my schooling.
By the time I told Buzz I was simply exhausted and had to get some sleep, Buzz seemed be in a pretty good mood. I had the feeling I had done my job, but I was wondering how Mrs. Westerman was coping, inasmuch as she was the one who had knocked Mr. Westerman to the floor, his final conscious resting place on the planet. But there wasn’t much I could do about that and I was truly tired, so when Buzz finally turned out the light in his room, I was ready to fall into a deep, untroubled sleep, which I should have done, except my medulla oblongata was itching, and it wasn’t for Bobby Sue Bessemer, so I fell into a deep, troubled sleep. What the base of my brain was doing, of course, was telling me that, as far as Fate’s schedule was concerned, the night wasn’t over yet.
It wasn’t the telephone that woke me up so abruptly at 3:00am, because there wasn’t an extension in Buzz’s room so I never heard it ring. But it woke Mrs. Westerman with a start, and that was nothing compared to what the telephone actually said, because it was the police on the other end telling her that they were holding her son on vandalism charges, serious vandalism charges, and asking her if she would come down to the police station. Blanched and shaking, Mrs. Westerman dropped the telephone without even bothering to hang it up and ran to Buzz’s room which, at that point, held only a sleeping me. A storm had developed in the last couple of hours, so it was that at the precise moment Mrs. Westerman threw open the door to Buzz’s room and turned on the light, lightning flashed and thunder boomed, and that’s when I woke up, dazed and blind.
“Where’s Buzz?” Mrs. Westerman cried.
“Wha… ?” was all I could muster, but I was certainly aware that all Hell was breaking loose around me. My medulla oblongata throbbed rapidly, almost numbing my hands as I frantically searched for my four-and-a-half pound glasses. I was beginning to understand how my father and my uncle Henry must have felt during the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
“Buzz is at the police station! They’ve arrested him!” screamed Mrs. Westerman, neatly answering her own question.
“Wha… ?” again seemed the most appropriate response. Thunder rolled around the sky and lightning lit up the branches outside and Mrs. Westerman wept and ran from the room, bound for who knew where. I quickly pulled on my pants and shirt and yelled after her:
“Mrs. Westerman! Where are you going? Wait!” I ran after her, my eyes now clear behind my goggle-like glasses, my mind still a bit fogged but catching on; but with my orthopedic shoes still hiding in whatever unfindable place they had been tossed a few hours before, it was difficult. In the precious few seconds I had I tried to run toward the kitchen.
“I must go to him,” Mrs. Westerman began to whimper as she searched for the keys to the pink and chrome Olds. “I must go to him… He may choke… I must go…”
“Mrs. Westerman, wait! I’ll go with you. Wait!” But I yelled in vain, for she could hear nothing but the sounds of Mr. Westerman making no sounds at all, and she feared for Buzz all the more. Because I was still barefoot, my running after her did no good because the faster I tried to run, the tighter the circle I ran in. Without my orthopedic shoes, I was like a dog chasing its tail to the left, and all I was doing was getting dizzy. The only thing I could do, therefore, was listen to the huge V-8 engine in the pink and chrome Olds starting up, then the tires squealing as Mrs. Westerman sped away to rescue her boy. Then all I could do was listen to the rain falling hard and fast on the driveway, a sound that marched right in through the kitchen door Mrs. Westerman had left open during her hasty departure. Damn glasses. Damn shoes.
Buzz had done what Fate directed him to do, and what my tongue-tied medulla oblongata was trying so hard and so unsuccessfully to tell me he would do. He was so close to the snapping point, it was no real surprise; the good feelings earlier that evening weren’t false, and that was the problem. It reminded him what it was like to feel good, and made stronger and more bitter his belief that he would never feel that way again.
Because we had talked about her so much, and both wanted her so much—though neither of us had the slightest idea what we’d do with her if we “got” her—and because we both, two wounded outcasts, each in our own ways, envied her easy popularity, there was really no question what Buzz had in mind.
Taking Mr. Westerman’s Cadillac was easy: Buzz knew where the car was (in the garage) and where the keys were (in the desk). Driving was easy: Buzz had done this sort of thing before, even before he didn’t have to worry one whit about his father catching him because his father was no longer living on the planet, much less in the house. Getting the bumper stickers was easy: Our familiarity with the tiny, unguarded campaign headquarters came from our several visits there, and we had both noted where a spare key had been hidden outside, just in case, for instance, the candidate had a terrific idea for a speech or a promise or a bribe and needed access, but had forgotten his keys. The vandalism was easy: All it took was time and passion and anger and hurt and loneliness and brilliance and for the storm to hold off.
That’s how Buzz came to put his police car mummification skills to work and go the next step: House mummification. Buzz completely covered every square inch of Bobby Sue Bessemer’s house with the pink-on-blue-with-chrome-highlights bumper stickers. It began to rain the instant he applied the last bumper sticker to the top of the chimney, and it rained continuously for forty days and forty nights, and, thanks to my uncle Henry’s adhesive slurry, not a single bumper sticker peeled off.
Asphalt roads are difficult enough to drive on at night, being black, but when they have no reflectors and insufficient reflective striping, a remarkable thing happens, considering how big and bulky and heavy those roads are: They become invisible, and even take on a particular characteristic of what astronomers call Black Holes by actually seeming to absorb light, no matter how many headlights are pointed at them, not that anyone has yet tried pointing automobile headlights at astronomers’ Black Holes. If it is raining on those Black-Hole roads, they take on the additional characteristic of being as slick as an ice skating rink just after a Zamboni’s been over it. When an enormous dose of driver anxiety over something other than driving is added to this situational slurry, nasty things are bound to occur.
As Fate would have it…
Mrs. Westerman sped along the wet, black asphalt back roads and byways of Arlington, Virginia, in her pink and chrome Olds just after three in the morning in the pouring rain on her way to rescue her son—and my best friend—Buzz, from the real trauma and ignominy of police arrest and the imagined dangers of choking, even though Buzz had never in his life even considered smoking a cigar. The pink and chrome Olds wove and swerved because there were no radial tires back then, and because Mrs. Westerman could not keep her hands steady on the wheel, and because she often had to use one hand to wipe tears from her eyes, eyes focused not on the road but on the image of her son, small and pink and nearly bald, freshly born and home from the hospital; that is who she thought had been arrested.
It should be no surprise, then, that she lost control of the huge, lumbering but overpowered pink and chrome Olds in a particularly tight turn and it reached its own version of escape velocity, launching itself into a trajectory determined by physics, ballistics, and Fate to end at the exact center of the trunk of a massive and sturdy elm tree (Ulmus americana) about forty feet from the slick, invisible pavement. Tremendous momentum disassembled the pink and chrome Olds instantly and, for all intents and purposes, at least as the insurance company later proclaimed, completely as it struck the tree, just as the laws of momentum launched Mrs. Westerman through the windshield—automobile manufacturers knew all about seat belts then, but, in most cases, didn’t want to spend the money to put them in their automobiles— and enabled her to reach her own escape velocity flying over the already crumpling hood of the pink and chrome Olds the instant before she, too, was almost completely disassembled by the massive and sturdy elm. Twelve nanoseconds later, the fumes from the ruptured gasoline tank exploded with a concussive thud, producing a fireball that lit up that part of Arlington, Virginia, like daylight for three hundred yards in every direction, even though it was the dead of night. Mrs. Westerman’s last moment on this planet was memorialized by the incineration of one of the oldest and most historic elm trees in Arlington, Virginia.
It was noted by the accident investigation team that, curiously, two pieces of a section of the heavily chrome plated front bumper of the once pink and chrome Olds, a section which had been snapped like a dry twig, were held together during and after the collision and explosion and fire and rain by a bumper sticker which had been, before the wreck, pink-on-blue with chrome highlights. My uncle Henry’s first Significant Invention had held, even under those extreme conditions.
If my uncle Henry had come up with his Big Invention before that night, instead of years later, there wouldn’t have been any accident.
That’s not to say there wouldn’t have been any need for one, though.
Bobby Sue Bessemer, not having the faintest notion of how central she was to this latest Westerman tragedy, did not attend Mrs. Westerman’s funeral, although Buzz had invited her.
Fate would, of course, find a way to turn the tables years later. If I have learned anything, I’ve learned it’s quite impossible to miss a date with Fate, whether you’ve finished pressing your pants or brushing your hair —or whatever—or not.
My father had been shaken by the tragic outcome of Mr. Westerman’s inadvertent but vigorous inhaling of his unlit cigar—he and Mr. Westerman had been frequent golfing partners. My father had also been strangely (to me at the time) moved by Mrs. Westerman’s colorful and sincere sentimentality when, at Mr. Westerman’s funeral, she drove the pink and chrome Olds Mr. Westerman had given her, a flashy but favorite item of costume jewelry in a string of expensive but otherwise ordinary onyx.
It should have come as no surprise to me, then— perhaps a shock, but not really a surprise—when he, too, as a salute to the courage and affection she had shown Mr. Westerman, avoided the ordinary, this time at her funeral. Instead of the usual dark blue suit, he wore his favorite golfing outfit, including the light tan cap with the snap on the visor, and, with the flimsy canvas top up against the rain and me sitting next to him, drove his absurdly small, noisy, and very white Austin-Healey Sprite, a sort of British-made half-scale model of a British-made sports car, instead of our normal size, dark-colored, and very ordinary family sedan.
As I sat next to him, studying him closely, I came to believe—and I believe even now, ninety-seven years later— that my father that day thought he was, for just a little while, back in command of his PBY flying boat, once again pulling someone from the drink.
My mother refused to go with him and stayed home, saying he was just being silly.
Chapter 7
June 15, 2009
Unable as he was to shake the feeling he was a double murderer, which he wasn’t, it took Buzz a few days to fully realize that, since both his mother and father had departed the planet without him, he was, toward the end of his thirteenth consecutive year on the planet, an orphan, which he was.
At least Buzz wasn’t saddled with the lifelong stigma of being a criminal, since all charges of juvenile delinquency were dropped by the police and Bobby Sue Bessemer’s parents; the police, being the ones who had to help clean up the mess at the elm tree, really didn’t have the heart to press the matter; Bobby Sue Bessemer’s parents had always wanted to move from their now quite mummified house, but before Buzz’s handiwork had a difficult time justifying such an upheaval. As to the cost of returning the house to something approximating its pre-mummified condition, Bobby Sue Bessemer’s parents’ homeowner’s insurance covered all manner of calamity, from fire to theft to flood to tornados to falling tree limbs and even whole trees to rivers of mud to the finger of God poking a hole in the roof, but there was nothing in its entire small-type length about pinkon- blue with chrome accents (or any other color or combination of colors) bumper sticker mummification. Luckily for both Buzz and Bobby Sue Bessemer’s parents, though, there was an obscure clause in their automobile insurance policy—one intended by the insurance company as a marketing device, and which they never in a million years thought they would ever have to pay on—which protected any and all of Bobby Sue Bessemer’s parents’ possessions, whether in their automobile or not, against destruction and/or disfigurement resulting from vandalism generally accepted (by a court where they might wish to test the case) as a type normally perpetrated against automobiles, such as a massive application of bumper stickers (color or colors not specified). Even though the automobile insurance company figured they could, by writing, including, and marketing arcane benefits, sell more and costlier policies but never have to pay on them, and though they thought they were bulletproof, in this admittedly highly unusual case they were wrong and Bobby Sue Bessemer’s parents’ automobile insurance covered their house, so Buzz was off the hook financially as well.
Within the insurance industry, this became a landmark case which was discussed and analyzed in board rooms and at conventions—workshops were actually held—in a desperate and ultimately successful attempt to make sure they, the insurance companies, the very bulwark of societal security, never had to put their profits at such frivolous risk again.
As it turned out, the insurance industry did, indeed, learn from what had become known as the Mortenson Gambit, and they were successful in not only including in all subsequent policies even more clauses which were even more arcane, but also, as a matter of policy, in excluding coverage of even more disasters, such as Acts of God, Acts of Mankind (individually, or as an enormous group), and Acts of Fate, thus being able to create the greatest return on investment possible for their stockholders. On the other hand, this rapid and far-reaching insurance company reaction to the Mortenson Gambit is what most third millennium, anno domini, business analysts credited as being the initial cause of the ultimate and total collapse of the insurance industry in 2018, anno domini, which, in turn, left many an insurance company stockholder quite broke and quite upset. Fate, along with the rest of us, enjoys a good joke now and then.
Buzz’s closest living relative, in terms of lineage and distance, was his widowed maternal grandmother, Lucinda Mellon Tomato, of Johnstown, in the state then known as Pennsylvania. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, first settled in 1791, anno domini, became a city in 1889, anno domini, just in time for the dam on the South Fork River nearby to burst during heavy rains, which in turn caused the infamous and aptly named Johnstown Flood of 1889, anno domini, in which over two thousand people left the planet involuntarily and quite permanently. Coincidentally, or perhaps Fatefully, 1889, anno domini, was the year of Lucinda Mellon Tomato’s birth in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Buzz’s nearest and closest relatives—by far—were his father and mother, the late Mr. and Mrs. Westerman, but they were no longer living relatives. So it was that, shortly after the late Mrs. Westerman’s funeral, Buzz left his house across the street from mine for the last time and, leaving my life for the last time, I thought, moved in with his widowed maternal grandmother in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Lucinda Mellon Tomato was the reclusive, intelligent, moody, strong-willed and perhaps even willful daughter of Andrew William Mellon of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an extremely wealthy financier and industrialist who had also served as secretary of the treasury from 1921 to 1932 under United States of America Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The infamous stock market Crash of 1929—a financial thud heard and felt around the world which had the truly unfortunate effect of rending the fabric of human society almost entirely apart and greatly helping the ascension to power of some of the planet’s most heinous, brutal, and inhuman dictators who, in turn, attempted to peacefully exterminate entire populations while waging war on other entire populations, war big enough to get a number (II)— happened while he was at the fiduciary helm, which causes one to wonder just whose portfolio he had his eye on most closely.
Lucinda Mellon Tomato, née Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon, almost never set foot outside the Mellon Mansion in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (née The Wilderness)—and not once off the grounds of the Mellon Mansion—during her first thirty-three consecutive years on the planet. While reclusive and, perhaps to some, even odd, this hearth-and-home quirk of Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon was certainly no hardship. The Mellon Mansion at the time was three floors, forty-five rooms, and twenty-one bathrooms of extravagant opulence, magnificently expressed in entire walls of burnished cherry wood, priceless tapestries, a library larger than those of most cities, fireplaces large enough to live in for short periods of time provided a fire was not alight, Persian rugs used as stairway runners, soaring atriums and cozy hidden rooms, more nooks and crannies than downtown Boston, a service staff that rivaled most large hotels in size and bettered them in performance, beveled leaded glass in windows large enough for tall men to walk through had there been no beveled leaded glass in them, two-dozen cut glass chandeliers including one which weighed over seven hundred pounds, and the most intricately carved and highly polished newels in all of Pennsylvania. It was one of the most spectacular and complete collections of luxury under one enormous roof in the western world. Even the roof was grand, actually covering acres and looking not unlike a large scale model of the Alps because of its many levels, dips, and turns. From a simply getting along point of view, it was an excellent place to be a recluse, odd or not.
For the first few months of her life, Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon’s reclusiveness was due mainly to the fact that she had not yet learned to walk, which somewhat limited her ability to venture forth. For many years after that it was forced upon her by her mother, due to her mother’s at first neurotic and eventually psychotic belief that many of the people in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, wanted to kidnap this, her last-born child and hold her for ransom, a belief fed by the economic truth of the situation—specifically, that a substantial portion of the population of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, lived in abject and miserable poverty while the Mellons were living a life only available to those very, very few who are obscenely rich and have probably gotten that way through the exploitation of those who certainly weren’t. Never forgetting a certain and very intrusive brick, her mother simply but effectively forbade her to leave.
Later, after so many years, Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon’s reclusiveness simply became her way of life, what she had grown accustomed to.
Whether her mother actually had reason to fear for the safety of her daughter or was only living out a neurotic fantasy is of less consequence than the fact that the fear began at the precise moment of Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon’s birth with the coincidental, sudden, and equally loudly announced, though very much uninvited, arrival—in this case, through the bevelled, leaded glass of the upstairs birthing room window—of an old, dirty, roughlytreated, dried-blood colored brick, no doubt a randomly cast but nonetheless effective metaphor for what her mother immediately feared awaited Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon outside the walls of her monied sanctuary. For the next thirty-three years, Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon’s experience of the outside world was entirely framed by window sills and filtered by lace.
As it would turn out, the brick was not metaphor, but prophecy, an inelegant first visit by Fate to Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon, an important distinction lost on all present in the birthing room.
With the possible exception of the brick.
Once she got to her feet, Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon had a lot of time on her hands. She also had a considerable head on her shoulders; she was extremely smart, curious, and had an intuitive knack for learning and discovery. She was speaking in six months, and reading in eighteen. Since the Mellon Mansion was her one and only world, she determined to know everything about it and its occupants. She had accurately diagnosed her mother’s neurosis by age six, knew everything her father knew about banks, banking, coal, coke, rail transport and labor exploitation by age ten, had designed and supervised a major renovation of the Mellon Mansion at age fourteen, and at age eighteen was the keen advice and driving force behind her father’s investment in and ownership of aluminum production. She spent her twenties becoming more than simply proficient on the piano, the cello, and, much to the elder Mellons’ chagrin, the clarinet.
Throughout her teens and twenties she read every piece of printed matter she could reach, entered into heated debates with her father and many of the business, industry, and government leaders who often visited at the Mellon Mansion, and taught herself civil engineering and oil painting, becoming quite proficient at trompe l’oeil. In other words, she was extremely well self-educated, to the equivalent of holding several graduate degrees, with honors, in many disparate fields, ranging from finance to cooking, music to metallurgy, from chemistry to philosophy, from tanning to canning, from girders to gilt.
There were limits to what she could know beyond theory, though, given her circumstances. By the time Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon began her thirty-third consecutive year on the planet, her most urgently felt but unresolved area of knowledge had focused for some time on intimate consensual adult physical relationships—sex. To her, the headstrong and brave researcher and self-educator, that meant she would have to take one of the most frightening and adventuresome steps of her life; she would have to leave the Mellon Mansion and grounds, even if only for what she imagined would be a very brief while.
Since her mother’s neurosis had by then progressed to psychosis and she spent her every waking hour wearing a heavy coat and fur hat, even in the warmest weather, sitting on a rich brocade-upholstered mahogany bench next to a window of bevelled, leaded glass in a sparse—by Mellon Mansion standards, meaning merely plush—round room atop the high turret on the southeast corner of the Mellon Mansion, a small, bronze telescope raised to her right eye, and took stock daily of every single brick she could see from her lofty perch with the 270° view, making sure none had abandoned its structural duties and was about to take on more menacing ones as a ballistic messenger, Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon never bothered to consult with her or seek permission for the forthcoming research foray.
This was a good thing, for her mother would have never agreed to such an obviously suicidal endeavor, knowing with great accuracy as she did—in fact she had, by this time, given many of them names; men’s names—just how many potentially lethal dried-blood-red bricks there were out there, but Fate needed Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon to go adventuring anyway.
Early in the evening of Wednesday, September 13th, 1922, anno domini, Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon left the Mellon Mansion and grounds by the northwest gate—she didn’t want to be spotted by her mother, though there was little chance of that, what with there being so many bricks to be observed for treachery—and set out to find a man. It didn’t take long.
Only a few blocks from the Mellon Mansion, in the midst of wandering, as she looked around at a world that most everyone else took for granted, but which she was seeing for the first time—and she began to think she had, over the years, missed something major—Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon happened upon Jimmy Hornsby, a railroad man as solid and strong as a well-used brick. He was well presented in his black suit and jauntily worn bowler, and his face was both ruggedly handsome and interesting; in fact his eyes sparkled—Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon thought his eyes sparkled with life, when actually it was a rare medical condition for which he was currently undergoing treatment, rudimentary as it was.
Jimmy Hornsby was born in 1889, anno domini, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—within just months and blocks of Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon, but worlds apart. His father worked for the railroad as a track surveyor, which kept him away from home much of the time, but he had been home for his only son’s birth, and it was a good thing because within days he was sent by the railroad to survey some possible track sites along the South Fork River near Johnstown, Pennsylvania. It was his transit, in fact, which afforded William F. Hornsby an early and frightening view of Fate rushing to meet him in the form of a mountainous wall of water, the result of the dam on the river bursting. So William F. Hornsby left the planet quite violently, courtesy of the infamous Johnstown Flood. At least he didn’t leave alone.
In 1905, anno domini, during his sixteenth consecutive year on the planet, Jimmy Hornsby took his first fulltime job with the railroad, and his mother took off with the neighborhood coal salesman so quickly Jimmy Hornsby entertained the idea she had had her feet in the starting blocks the from day the news of the infamous Johnstown Flood reached Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The instant Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon saw Jimmy Hornsby as he stood waiting for a trolley, she was actually quite smitten, a surprising and exciting feeling for her; she made a note of it on a small pad of paper she carried in her purse. It was impossible for Jimmy Hornsby not to notice this still quite attractive woman of approximately his age looking at him with her amazing combination of intense curiosity and total openness, as if she were looking at a page in a very interesting book and simply allowing the information thereon to pour into her. It was also impossible for him not to notice her—and notice her favorably—because, of course, it was Fate that had put him there to wait for that particular trolley at that precise moment in 1922, anno domini.
As soft September Indian summer evenings go, this one was particularly rich and compelling, somehow making the commencement of conversation the easiest and most natural thing to do. As they chatted, Jimmy Hornsby was discretely but continually checking to be sure his shoes were not too badly scuffed and his collar was still straight, and Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon was discretely but continuously scribbling notes on the little pad of paper hidden in her purse. When the trolley at last arrived, they both got on.
Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon learned so much that evening—twenty-two-and-a-half pages on her little pad of paper, to be exact. She learned that warm breezes can have unexpected chemical and psychological effects; that touching can actually transmit electrical impulses of varying intensity (something I later learned myself); that conversation can occur on many levels simultaneously, and even when no speech occurs; that men like to talk to specific parts of a woman’s body; that women have far more emotional and physical control than men, and exercise it sometimes to excess; that one can decide the effect alcohol will have on oneself, and its extent; that skin seems to be happiest when touching other skin; that sex and good clarinet technique have a lot in common; that noisy bedsprings can be silenced by increasing the strain on them; that sweat isn’t all bad; that it is most blessed to give and receive; that the love-sex connection takes a lot of work, some of it extremely fanciful; that men lose interest almost as fast as they lose control; that foreplay, which can begin with a conversation at a trolley stop, is fun and exciting, while afterplay is roughly equivalent to washing the dishes; that Indian summer nights can get quite cold quite quickly; and that there were far more bricks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, than her mother had ever imagined.
It all went onto her little pad of paper, which went into her purse, which went onto her arm, which, being securely attached to her body at the shoulder, went along with the rest of her back to the Mellon Mansion at just past 1:30am, Thursday, September 14th, 1922, anno domini.
Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon had learned a lot—enough to last a lifetime, she thought. When, just two months later, she learned she was pregnant, she had already learned enough to know that it was finally time for her to leave the Mellon Mansion and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, not only for the second time, but also forever.
What she had learned about finance, the value of money and financial independence, and several recipes for cooked books now served her well, for she was able to make her departure from her family and her up-to-now small universe with no significant financial woes, and with her father none the wiser. After making her plans and arrangements, she straightforwardly told her mother she was leaving, never to return, but didn’t tell her why. Showing a rare flash of lucidity, her mother said, with equal straightforwardness, “It’s about time.” This little blip of sanity, as fleeting as a hummingbird’s visit to what it thinks is a blossom only to discover it’s a discarded bottlecap, immediately gave way to her reassuringly familiar psychotic obsession, and she said, furtively, as if passing on a strategic secret, “Be careful as you leave. Raymond is coming loose from the Wimbley’s second chimney. He looks determined to make trouble.”
“I know, mother, I know…” Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon said quietly. Even the most earnest and detached researchers can, at times, be disappointed with their findings. “Goodbye, mother.”
“Raymond, you son of a bitch, I see you. I know what you’re thinking.” was the last thing Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon ever heard her mother say. Years later, when she learned of her mother’s death, Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon wrote to her father and asked that her mother’s tombstone be inscribed: “Raymond, you son of a bitch!” She never got an answer.
It was almost seven weeks before Andrew William Mellon noticed that his daughter, who had lived in the Mellon Mansion non-stop for thirty-three years and had played a key role in so many of his incredible successes, was gone. He was that busy. He also never noticed any money was gone. He was that rich.
Before she left and after she had gone, he never had the slightest idea there was a new Mellon ripening inside his ever so clever daughter.
Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon went east about fifty-seven miles to Johnstown, Pennsylvania— perhaps because it was a railroad town and she was, at the time, carrying inside of her some unclaimed railroad baggage, or perhaps because it was far enough away to be away and Pennsylvania enough not to be.
She bought a comfortable, non-threatening woodsided house; as one might expect, without too much difficulty she secured a job at the Johnstown Bank and Trust Company, where she would eventually rise to the level of first vice president; she began what would be the lengthy task of organizing the first Johnstown Community String Quartet that didn’t include a banjo, followed by creating the very first Johnstown Community Symphony Orchestra, also sans banjo; from Dwight Hopper’s brand new Courtesy Oldsmobile dealership she bought an automobile, an Olds, which she wanted to be pink but black was all she could get; and she had a baby—a girl whom she named Thelma because she could think of no one at all in her family history named Thelma—in the maternity ward of the Johnstown Presbyterian Hospital, where, during labor, delivery, and recovery, she kept an occasional eye on the window lest any meandering bricks should choose to pay a call.
Within a year of her daughter’s birth, Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon once again felt the urge to conduct research. This time, though, her methodology was somewhat different; in the first place, she now had daily contact with many people, including many upstanding men, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; in the second place, the pace of living in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was somewhat slower than that of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and because of the town’s rather smaller size and close-knit nature, everyone was much more visible to most everyone else all the time. These two factors so altered the research process that the result was significantly altered as well, and, late in 1924, anno domini, Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon married Floyd Tomato, a civil engineer employed by the county of Cambria to develop, implement, and supervise a plan to control the chronic flooding that valley region had always experienced.
Floyd Tomato, the only son of parents who had immigrated to the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, area from an extremely marginal farm in the cool and rugged wilderness of Cape Breton Island, a broken-off piece of Nova Scotia in the country that was called Canada and is now called Oh Canada, was a shy and self-effacing man, somewhat scholarly looking with very light, smooth skin and no particular hardness to him, who was three years older than Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon, had never been married, and now had an engineering problem of near-Biblical proportions on his hands; in other words, even though he did have red hair, as far as Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon was concerned, he was perfect.
Their marriage followed a short and intensely formal courtship. Following a short and intensely formal honeymoon, Lucinda Mellon Tomato was pregnant again, this time with the daughter who would grow up and marry and become the late Mrs. Westerman.
The only real fly in this otherwise idyllic ointment—giving it the momentary but usually regrettable characteristics of a stinging liniment from time to time, and with increasing frequency as Thelma grew toward her teenage years—was that Thelma, upon whom Floyd Tomato generously bestowed the legitimacy of his last name, creating forever after Thelma Tomato, was at least as strong-willed as her mother and, if not as scholastically intelligent, was much more intuitive. During most of Thelma Tomato’s tenure as a teenager she and her mother, Lucinda Mellon Tomato, clashed again and again with escalating vigor, and with a verbal fallout that can only be visualized through close study of a serving of fruit cocktail. The near constant banging together of reason and feeling, of insistent encyclopedia and proud unicorn, finally led to Thelma Tomato’s hasty but inevitable departure for the West Coast during her nineteenth consecutive year on the planet.
Inevitable, because Fate needed her to be out there.
Lucinda Mellon Tomato collaborated closely with Floyd Tomato on the flood control project, and it was a combination of her engineering and financial expertise and his demonstrated political acumen—he had never once gotten between mother and eldest daughter when the fur was flying—that made the ingenious network of dams which would keep Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and environs safe from the ravages of water out of control—for a while— possible.
Alas, Floyd Tomato was never to see the fruit of his life’s labor harvested, for he died of a combination of congestive heart failure and extremely thin skin one week before the main dam was officially dedicated, and Lucinda Mellon Tomato was once again a single woman—widowed, but nonetheless single—with a young daughter in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. And when that young daughter, the future late Mrs. Westerman, grew up and left for college at Pennsylvania State College in the nearby and cleverly named town of State College, Pennsylvania, where she would meet the future late Mr. Westerman, Lucinda Mellon Tomato, though significantly older now, was what she had been when she first arrived, a single woman in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
But not for long.
Chapter 8
June 14, 2009
Chapter Eight
It was only twenty-one years—a mere galactic blink, really—between when Floyd Tomato left the planet forever and ever, amen, and Buzz arrived for the time being at Lucinda Mellon Tomato’s physical and emotional doorstep in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. But her doorstep isn’t the first place she saw Buzz, that day; it was at the municipal airport in Altoona, Pennsylvania, a slightly larger town in the next valley to the east which was actually served by airlines, unlike Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which was still, even in 1958, anno domini, a railroad town.
Contrary to then popular belief—a belief perpetuated by the Altoona Chamber of Commerce—Altoona, Pennsylvania, did not get its name from the local Altoona Indians, a tribe which dated all the way back to 1932, anno domini, but from the Italian immigrant who actually founded the town in the middle of the eighteenth century, Alberto Toona, an itinerant cobbler, cooper, and inveterate grouch. Railroads, always keen to cash in on marketing possibilities, even back then, were quick to add Altoona, Pennsylvania, to their already immense God- and government-given holdings as an operational hub for both coal and steel transport and passenger service because they thought “Altoona” would be an easy word to build songs around, and in those days bad songs made for good marketing tools.
Just to the south-southeast of Altoona, Pennsylvania, lay the low, eroded, sleepy, and thoroughly unlikely topographical “sentinel” called Altoona Mountain. Not long after founding the town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, Alberto Toona had named the hill for himself, essentially staking a claim to it and posting it “no trespassing.” He permanently moved—lock, stock, and barrel hoops—to the top of the hill, such as it was, during his eighty-second consecutive year on the planet to escape the slurry of mud and brick and industry his peaceful valley town had become. At the crest of Altoona Mountain, which was much more like a gentle leveling off, Alberto Toona built a rough and minimal cabin—no corner of which was really square, he had built it with so much grouchiness—in which he would spend the next thirteen years before leaving the cabin, the hill, and the planet for ever and ever, amen.
As soon as Buzz saw his maternal grandmother, Lucinda Mellon Tomato, at the airport, just as he was emerging from the Capital Airlines DC-6 airliner onto the top of the portable stairs, he experienced the emotional-slap-in- the-face realization that his trials and tribulations—and adventures—were over and that an enveloping safety, boredom, and uneventfulness awaited him as surely as a grandmotherly hug, his preoccupation with these thoughts no doubt explaining why he so carelessly slipped on the bottom step of the portable stairs and barked his knees on the concrete ramp; knee-barking has always been an efficient way to take one’s mind off other, more abstract troubles and fears.
While Buzz dealt with the immediate and focused pain inflicted by a combination—a slurry, of sorts—of gravity, mass, momentum, and the unforgiving and uncaring concrete, some passengers waiting to leave Altoona, Pennsylvania, on other airplanes experienced a fear that is only natural when one sees a disembarking passenger—although it was really a knee-barking passenger—seem to fall to the ground and kiss it just as they get off an airplane.
When she and Buzz finally met, face to sagging breasts, at the chain-link fence gate, Lucinda Mellon Tomato was uncertain about what subjects might be taboo when talking with Buzz, seeing as how the reason she was meeting him at the municipal airport in Altoona, Pennsylvania, was that he had just lost, in remarkably quick succession, both his father and mother. In fact, each in their own ways, they had just left the planet completely and forever. Of course, Lucinda Mellon Tomato lost a daughter in the same moment Buzz lost his mother, but she had some previous experience in losing daughters, in a manner of speaking, what with Thelma Tomato having set out on her Fateful journey to the West Coast which, as far as Lucinda Mellon Tomato was concerned, was very near to leaving the planet altogether.
Buzz was at a loss for words, too, for he had only seen his widowed maternal grandmother twice before in his life, when she had come to visit the not-yet-late Westermans in Arlington, Virginia, and she had been a bit younger and on her best behavior then. He was also concerned because he wasn’t at all certain what life would be like in Pennsylvania living with this second-string mother, and whether she, too, was scheduled by Fate to be struck by lightning, be bitten by a rabid dog, swallow an unlit cigar—he didn’t even know if she smoked cigars—incinerate an elm tree, or simply drop dead from having used up all her allotted time on the planet, leaving him to stand quietly at yet another funeral and then pack up and leave for…where? He was fast running out of options, not to mention living relatives. To top it off, his barked shins were still yapping and whining at him.
So, after what amounted to a perfunctory “Hello”, they didn’t have much to talk about other than the flight— Buzz noted, but only to himself, that the airplane made a better landing than he had—how much he had grown— which wasn’t much, really—and how long it took two suitcases to get from the airplane to the baggage claim, a distance of some seventy-five yards—about twenty long, strained, silent minutes broken only by moments of inane, short-sentenced conversation.
Once Buzz’s bags were in hand, the walk to Lucinda Mellon Tomato’s car—which was seventy-five yards in the other direction—took roughly one-fifth the time it had taken to get the bags from the airplane to the baggage claim, proving once again the power and efficiency of rugged individualism. When he and his widowed maternal grandmother reached the car, Buzz experienced an instant, strong, but only momentary shudder which probably caught the attention of seismologists monitoring their instruments anywhere within two thousand miles: It was an Oldsmobile. But while the late Mrs. Westerman’s Oldsmobile had once been a 1957, anno domini, pink and chrome two-door hard top, Lucinda Mellon Tomato’s Oldsmobile was a 1955, anno domini, dark green and chrome four-door sedan.
Buzz needn’t have worried any, because Fate didn’t care a whit about dark green and chrome Oldsmobiles, whatever their vintage, and wasn’t going to let Buzz off the planet any time soon anyway.
At least his small seismic shock shut down the signals reaching Buzz’s brain from his snarling knees, and they immediately ceased to bother him. With a gulp and small beads of sweat on his otherwise smooth forehead, Buzz placed his bags in the trunk, which was about the size of an average unattached garage of that time, gulped again, opened the right front door—he immediately estimated the door must have weighed at least eight hundred pounds, causing him to marvel at how much raw force must have been involved when his mother’s car met the sturdy elm, because, in the police impound lot just a few days after his mother had reached escape velocity, he had seen that one of the doors of his late mother’s late pink and chrome Olds had been reduced to approximately the size, shape, and color of a small, squat, and often-used barbecue grill—and slid onto the woven synthetic fabric of the immense front seat. After slightly straining a muscle in his right shoulder by pulling the door closed, and hearing a resultant thud which sounded like closing time at Fort Knox, or like his father’s heavy coffin lid coming to an abrupt stop in what was, after all, designed to be its final resting place after it had accidentally slipped from the funeral director’s white-gloved hands, Buzz gripped the armrest on the massive door and locked his eyes in a straight ahead position, hoping his peripheral vision would also keep a keen lookout for robust and possibly challenging elms.
“All set?” asked Lucinda Mellon Tomato of her nearly marble-like grandson as she got behind the steering wheel of her dark green and chrome Olds, a steering wheel which Buzz fervently hoped would not willy-nilly decide to detach itself from the rest of the automobile at some inopportune time during the drive from the airport in Altoona, Pennsylvania, to his widowed maternal grandmother’s house in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
“Sure,” he said as best he could, seeing as how his lips and jaw were absolutely immobile at the moment. Anyway, what options did he have?
“OK. Then were off for home,” said Lucinda Mellon Tomato with an uncertain cheerfulness, mixed with the degree of seriousness driving demanded as she slipped the transmission lever into reverse and began the usually arduous task of pulling the liner-sized Olds away from the dock and easing it out into the channel. “It should only take us forty-five minutes to get home. Do you need to stop and get anything along the way?”
New parents. Back home. A girlfriend. Older. Out of this car. “No, nothing,” Buzz mumbled through his still minimally-functioning mouth. “I’m fine,” he lied.
The day was sunny, the scenery pleasant, the drive thankfully uneventful, and the steering wheel remained securely attached; Buzz began to relax and found he could, at last, nod his head up and down and swivel it from side to side, and could even wiggle his toes. None of this happened a moment too soon, because his mouth had locked up in a partially open position; that made only minimal mumbling possible, and it also meant drool running down his chin and onto his shirt was inevitable unless he loosened up some. Reestablishing a degree of mobility helped Buzz maintain a reasonable degree of dignity.
Lucinda Mellon Tomato did her part by serving as a cheery tour guide during the trip, pointing out to Buzz whatever points of topographical, geological, botanical, architectural, and societal interest they happened across, embellishing when she needed to make something interesting from something very boring. She also did her best, which was still very good, to help Buzz believe she was a good driver with a reasonable chance of delivering the two of them to their destination without ever leaving their proper lane, to say nothing of leaving the planet.
The trees were being as full and round as they could be—trying their best to live up to the standard set for trees by the aptly named artist, Grant Wood—the mountains as gently mountainous as they could, the sky as blue and the occasional clouds as puffy as possible, and the rivers and streams so well mannered, that by the time the dark green and chrome Olds got to the bridge over the South Fork River—a river so ill mannered at times to be known to come calling in places it shouldn’t; but Buzz didn’t know about the South Fork River, not yet—Buzz’s busy but thankfully mouthless mind couldn’t help breaking into intracranial song:
To grandmother’s house we go…
From that moment on, he could never separate in his mind the dark green and chrome Olds, the South Fork River, and that old Thanksgiving favorite. The sensory and emotional slurry was concocted, mixed, and set. No smells of turkey cooking, no tang of cranberry sauce, no fire in the fireplace. Just a Prelude to Pennsylvania—nothing more.
Buzz and his bags ended up in what had been Thelma Tomato’s room, a still standing and fully functional shrine to railroading and the deserts of the southern part of what was then the state of California. He was surrounded by four walls covered with photographs, posters, picture calendars of many different years, pages torn from magazines, postcards, even rough drawings and sketches—everything from cactus and creosote bushes to cattle cars and cabooses, from sand dunes and dry lake beds to switchers and big freight-hauling hammerhead steam engines. And there were maps: The entire route systems of the Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, Rio Grande, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe; road maps and political maps and richly detailed topographical maps which, in combination, covered every ever-shifting inch of the Mojave, Colorado, and Soronan Deserts.
After taking it all in, Buzz sat in on the only sittable furniture, a light blue canopy bed with a lace-trimmed dark blue comforter. He sat quietly, reflectively, because he knew he was in a shrine; he’d been in a few recently, and he knew a shrine when he saw one. What he didn’t fully understand was why the shrine had lasted in such well cared for shape for so long, for decades.
Naturally, Fate knew; but Fate was, at the moment, off taking care of a few other details and unavailable for conversation. And would Fate have told if asked? Only when the answer is no longer needed or wanted. What a trickster that Fate is.
While Lucinda Mellon Tomato was taking care of all the things widowed maternal grandmothers take care of in linen closets, bathrooms, and the kitchen when orphaned grandsons come to live with them, Buzz, having decided he wasn’t in a worshiping mood, left Thelma Tomato’s shrine and, figuring he’d find out what there was to find out about Thelma Tomato and the shrine from his widowed maternal grandmother later, set out to look around this comfortable, non-threatening wood-sided house—the only one like it he’d seen in Pennsylvania so far—especially the study he’d caught sight of on his way to the shrine when he first got there. He was particularly interested in the wood paneling in the study, which looked like burnished cherry wood, in the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, in the clarinet and cello in the far corner, in how the golden afternoon light that entered the very tall window—a window of beveled, leaded glass—fell so perfectly on the mahogany writing desk, and in the fact that this appeared to be the only room in the house with a television.
It was his eagerness to check out the study, and therefore his room-entry velocity, that caused the injury.
The study was Lucinda Mellon Tomato’s last and greatest tromp l’oeil mural, and it was her masterpiece.
Had he been a bit less eager, just a bit slower, Buzz wouldn’t have broken his nose. Unless, of course, it had not been Buzz at all who had done the breaking, but Fate, in which case, what choice did he have?
Then again, what choice did he even have? What choice, indeed?
In 1928, anno domini, the railroad Jimmy Hornsby drove trains for transferred him from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
By September of 1929, anno domini, Jimmy Hornsby was thoroughly disenchanted with the train driving business; not only was the constant back and forth, back and forth, back and forth beginning to get under his skin, but so was all the soot the big, coal-burning steam locomotives produced. His chief complaint, though, was that train driving meant he always had to stay on the track. He wanted more from life, and thought life had more to offer. We wanted to venture hither and thither, unhindered by the necessity to remain on the rarely straight—at least in Pennsylvania, where he did most of his train driving—but always narrow.
It was this disenchantment and wanderlust that led Jimmy Hornsby to quit the railroad and cash in his pension on October 1, 1929, anno domini. It was the stock market crash at the end of the same month that convinced him to hold his wanderlust in check and stay put in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. For quite a while, it was a good thing for him he did; then it wasn’t.
The fact the Jimmy Hornsby had actually cashed in his pension—that is, walked away from the railroad with cash —and that he never got around to doing what he had intended to do—that is, put that cash in a nice safe place like a bank—made all the difference in Jimmy Hornsby’s life, and in his reincarnation.
Many other people weren’t so fortunate. They had paid with practically every cent they could get their hands on, or promised to pay with all the money they were going to make, to buy stock. Now, after the crash, an enormous number of those same stocks put together weren’t worth a plug nickel and many, many people lost their businesses, their jobs, their homes, their farms, their shirts, their shoes, and their senses. Many people, now homeless, penniless, shoeless, and senseless, left town to drift from job possibility to job possibility, carrying their stock certificates with them to use as toilet paper, which, compared to the certificates, was relatively expensive.
Others—not nearly so many, but still a significant number; ask any of their descendants—chose not to leave town and wander, but to leave the planet instead, not realizing they’d still end up wandering.
Ever the humanitarian, Jimmy Hornsby, who was by now quite accidentally rich, or at least moderately well off given the general state of things, intently studied the tumultuous turn of economic events looking for his Golden Opportunity, which he found in the agricultural flood plain. There wasn’t much he alone could do about joblessness or shoelessness— not that he wanted to, anyway—but senselessness and farm foreclosures inspired him. He’d worked for the railroad for a long time, and he knew how railroad barons’ minds worked; in this time of cheap labor and cheap land, they would want to expand, and they would want to help other industries expand and make more things for the railroad to move back and forth.
The first thing Jimmy Hornsby did was legally change his name; he thought that if he ever got into any dealings with the railroad, it should not be as a former train driver. For a first name he chose Noah, because as a small child he used his family’s only large book, the Noah Webster Dictionary, as a booster seat at the kitchen table. For a last name he chose Van Horne, because the sweetest sound he’d ever heard, outside of his own banjo, was the lusty yell of the horn on a moving van sounded in the dead of a very lonely night near Bedford, Pennsylvania, near where Jimmy Hornsby was lost in the woods on a Boy Scout hike gone awry. The van horn had led him to the road, and the road had led him and the rest of his wayward scout troop to safety. Anyway, Van Horne wasn’t too far off from Hornsby—and it seemed so much classier.
Noah Van Horne, née Jimmy Hornsby, now took his cash out of the closet and began to buy up flood plain farm land at fire sale prices. It wasn’t long before Noah Van Horne, the reincarnated financier from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the single largest landholder along the South Fork River. Unwittingly—which was not uncommon—the railroad played along, leasing land from Noah Van Horne for use as everything from additional switching yards to sites for new machine shops and locomotive repair and storage barns. The railroad, in turn, encouraged their suppliers and other support businesses to move in nearby, and Noah Van Horne, who wisely leased his land for relatively reasonable rates, got even richer, proving once and for all that massive economic depressions don’t have to be bad news for everybody. He found it easy to put from his mind that they were catastrophic news for a lot of people, including the farmers whose land he now owned and who now owned little more than a few tin pots and fancily printed toilet paper.
The more prosperity Noah Van Horne gleaned from the former farmlands, the more he wanted to enrich his financier persona, which meant taking on a degree of culture and refinement he had hitherto never experienced. He began by anonymously endowing the newly reorganized Johnstown Community String Quartet with modest but nevertheless less significant sums from time to time—even though he thought the ensemble would have a better sound with a banjo—and doing the same for the newly created Johnstown Community Orchestra. He even went so far as to semi-regularly attend performances by both, and it was during those occasional visits to the world of classical music that he had the vague feeling—not unlike an itch in the medulla oblongata—that he recognized the woman who played cello for both groups. He shrugged the feeling off each time, telling himself it simply wasn’t possible—he’d never known or even met a cello player in his life—so never scratched the itch. Still, he felt it every time he went to hear them at the Presbyterian church where they played. In the end, he attributed the odd feeling to the music itself, gaining a new and actually surprising respect for the acknowledged master musical time travelers, those often daffy classical composers, in the process.
As the economic depression wore on and deepened, those lucky enough to have money and a bit of vision guided by enlightened self-interest went on a buying frenzy, and Noah Van Horne was no exception, proving through shrewdness and a willingness to risk that it was true: Money simply makes more money. And who knows, perhaps Fate had something to do with it. Anyway, Noah Van Horne took full advantage of the times and tides, buying everything from warehouses to small office buildings to recently nonprofit retail stores, and finished what would end up being his major spending spree by taking the once thriving but now quite marginal Courtesy Oldsmobile dealership off Dwight Hopper’s hands.
Noah Van Horne did well, but then, with Fate as a silent and, in fact, unrealized partner, how could he not? Because Noah Van Horne was after more than things and cash, his financial success in the midst of an economic morass produced an admirable largesse. He was the principal financiers of the new Van Horne wing of the Johnstown Public Library, the chief benefactor of Van Horne Park on the west side of town, the moving force behind the new YMCA building downtown, and a regular supplier of money for various church relief and building projects throughout Cambria County. Since he so thoroughly filled the bill—not to mention filling so many private and public coffers—the result was that, as the years passed, Noah Van Horne, transplanted financier and philanthropist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and just the shot in the arm Johnstown, Pennsylvania, needed, was finally seen and accepted as a Town Father. His eyes asparkle, Noah Van Horne, née Jimmy Hornsby, was finally living his dream.
I am reminded of the first line of a popular song from the 1950’s, anno domini:
(Backup singers): Just a Dream…
Were they right?
Buzz’s life in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was as unremarkable and as ordinary as he had feared it would be. When Lucinda Mellon Tomato apologized for the shrine the day of his arrival, and said she would take it all down and apart and repaint the bed, he begged her not to; it was then and continued to be the most interesting thing he had ever seen. He studied it for hours, days, years trying to figure out just what sort of person Thelma Tomato was, other than an escapee, which he admired. He never asked his widowed maternal grandmother about her escapee-daughter, and she never volunteered any information, except to say that she left for the West Coast—where out there she wasn’t sure—after she had entered into her eighteenth consecutive year on the planet and following a bit of a tiff with her mother. That was it; nothing about trains or deserts. It was left up to Buzz to make heads or tails of it, but all it did was make his head spin —except for his first automobile ride in Pennsylvania, Buzz always did have something of a loose head with a penchant for rapid movement and threatening to fly off in one direction or another—and stir deep within him something between wanderlust and, inexplicably, just plain lust.
In the first month at his widowed maternal grandmother’s house, Buzz tried to enter the mural-study only twice more, avoiding injury each time because he had adopted an overall easy-does-it attitude in that house, which led Lucinda Mellon Tomato to think that the trauma of Buzz’s life so far had made him either timid or listless or slow as a way of dealing with the vagaries of life. Therefore, she unwittingly helped compound Buzz’s feeling and fear of being trapped forever in exceeding unremarkability by always making her decisions based on the belief that the boy would rather not be exposed to anything remarkable or exciting. The result was that, except for one shining exception, and for the fantasies induced by the shrine, Buzz spent the next five years living a life that was never more than a single breath away from a clinical coma.
The shining exception was so unlikely that only Fate could have engineered it—who’s to know?
It began simply enough with a note Buzz wrote to Bobby Sue Bessemer’s parents apologizing for his monumental act of vandalism. It was Bobby Sue Bessemer herself who replied to his note, though, sending one of her own to express how sorry she was for Buzz, what with both his parents gone and him having to move and all, and apologizing for not coming to the late Mrs. Westerman’s funeral. She was really, really, really, really sorry and hoped he would forgive her.
Nothing helps a burgeoning postal relationship like a little guilt.
Their writing back and forth went from notes to letters, from every now and then to regularly to at least twice a week, and continued through the rest of junior high school and all of high school. They poured their hearts out, held back nothing, bared all—well, mostly: Buzz wrote to Bobby Sue Bessemer about the shrine, but not about the fantasies it induced; Bobby Sue Bessemer told Buzz about school and Arlington, Virginia, and about a few jerks she went out with only once, but never about “Rocky” Hickox.
Bobby Sue Bessemer also had a shrine: High school football. Bobby Sue Bessemer also had a shrine-induced fantasy: The quarterback of the high school football team, “Rocky” Hickox. Early in the fall of her junior year in high school, when she was almost into her seventeenth consecutive year on the planet, Bobby Sue Bessemer’s fantasy became a reality.
Toward the end of Buzz’s senior year in high school, he applied to three colleges: Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, because that was Harry Houdini’s home town and Buzz had escape on his mind since he first saw Thelma Tomato’s shrine; the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, because he had lived surrounded by pictures of the desert for five years by then; and Pennsylvania State University (née Pennsylvania State College) in State College, Pennsylvania, because his former parents had gone to school there, because, as now a resident of Pennsylvania, his tuition would be substantially lower there, and because it wasn’t too far from Arlington, Virginia, where Bobby Sue Bessemer, his pen pal, confidant, and only known love interest, was living, and who had told him in one of her long letters that, for reasons she did not bother to state, she was not planning to go to college. What did he know?
In letters that could have been typed by Fate, Buzz learned in July of 1962, anno domini, that he would matriculate that coming September in the nearby town of State College, Pennsylvania.
“At least it’s not Johnstown,” he thought to himself, sitting on the dark blue bedspread under the light blue canopy as he stared sadly at desert maps and trains. He, the orphan, had adopted the orphaned shrine as his own.
To lift his spirits, he planned a quick surprise visit to see his pen pal, confidant, and only known love interest, Bobby Sue Bessemer. Aside from a couple of high school field trips and a few shopping treks to Altoona, Pennsylvania, it would be his first time away from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in five years, and his first visit to Arlington, Virginia, since his parents had so hastily left there for parts of the universe unknown. Equipped with his less-than-two-year-old driver’s license and the “slightly used” 1959, anno domini, two-door hardtop red and white and chrome Olds his widowed maternal grandmother had bought for him at Noah Van Horne’s Courtesy Oldsmobile as a high school graduation present—actually, it was a thinly disguised, tacit instruction from her to visit her often from college—Buzz set off for what he would only realize when he arrived there would turn out to be yet another Arlington, Virginia, disaster.
In the five years since Buzz had left on his forced march to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he had written me only the occasional postcard, none of which ever gave me more information or insight that I could have gotten from a newspaper, atlas, or almanac. My best friend, the prime witness to my involuntary initiation into the world of swift and simple chemical ingestion, never said a word about his torrid, five-year Parker T-Ball Jotter affair with Bobby Sue Bessemer.
On the other hand, he no doubt knew that since I lusted for Bobby Sue Bessemer with fierce intensity in my mind, my gut, my groin, my eyeballs, and my fingertips, he was probably doing me a favor by not writing so much as a peep.
It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, since I only did my homework and slept in Arlington, Virginia—I continued to attend St. Stephen’s Episcopal School for Boys, and had spent every summer since 1959, anno domini, in the desert in the southern part of what was, at the time, still called the state of California—so I didn’t have the slightest idea what was up with Bobby Sue Bessemer at the time.
No matter how much I might have wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to warn Buzz about the emotional elm tree up ahead, and that his “slightly used” brakes were about to fail.
Since I was out of town when he arrived—or maybe not—Buzz’s very first stop was Bobby Sue Bessemer’s parents’ new house. The old, mummified house could have been restored, after a fashion, to its original, premummification state because of the Mortensons’ quirky automobile insurance policy, but they decided instead to follow their hearts and buy a new house because of an even quirkier artist with one name, Adolfo, and a lot of money. He had read about the house mummification in a newspaper and was stunned not by the audacity or magnitude of Buzz’s act of self-expression, but by the fact that he had not thought of it first. He did delight, though, in the artistic concept: A bold and irrefutable statement of how most people imprison themselves in the materialism of their own lives.
“Perhaps I didn’t do it first,” Adolfo yelled at his agent, “but I was thinking of it!”
“Right, Al,” his agent said flatly.
“If I had that house, I, Adolfo, could improve on it, heighten the crude, pure emotion of that boy’s act, and make it art!”
“Sure, Al.”
“Buy me that house, and don’t let them change a thing!”
“OK, Al.”
“And bring me a corned beef sandwich!”
“Mustard?”
“Yellow!”
So Bobby Sue Bessemer’s parents made a handsome profit on what was a very typical Country Club Hills red brick house completely covered by pink-on-blue with chrome accents bumper stickers, proving yet another time that money simply makes more money.
Adolfo’s home improvements were, essentially, to paint every square inch of the pink-on-blue with chrome highlights mummy wrap with white paint, and then to sign the corner of the house cum art piece with a large brush dipped in jet black paint. He left the marketing of this masterpiece to his agent—“Whatever, Al….”—while he left town to finish another masterpiece in what was then the state of Iowa: Expressing the oppressiveness and futility of a life devoted to work by erecting a dark grey canvas tarp which would, when finished, cover every square inch of Pottawattamie County.
As it turned out, it was actually an improvement, and perhaps Adolfo’s greatest success.
Bobby Sue Bessemer’s mother answered the door and, as Buzz was saying hello, stood wondering how much he knew and how much to tell him. She decided that her husband’s buns, which were just then browning in the oven, needed her full attention—she had been through a lot this past year, was emotionally stretched a painful length, and didn’t want her husband coming home to a dinner that included over-baked buns; she just couldn’t handle that—so she decided to tell Buzz nothing except that Bobby Sue Bessemer was now living on her own, and to give him the address.
He thanked her, hopped back in his red and white and chrome Olds, and drove off thinking of the possibilities. He would be seeing his five-year pen pal, confidant, and only known love interest alone, in the privacy of her own place. What, oh, what, could be more ideal; what could hold more promise; what could possibly be more hormonally and emotionally fulfilling? What, indeed?
When Buzz walked up the steps of the slightly seedy red brick apartment building, he thought he was entering the Taj Mahal. When he knocked on the plain wooden door in need of paint and made it rattle, he saw himself rapping on heavy wooden double doors at the Ritz. When Bobby Sue Bessemer opened the door, he thought he’d faint.
She looked terrible: She wore no make-up; her hair drooped listlessly and lacked any shine or discernable color; her soft, full lips seemed tight, drawn; there was no light in her eyes; her whole presence said she hadn’t slept in a week; she had a baby in her arms.
“Bobby Sue?” Buzz asked hesitantly, giving her every chance in the world to say: “No, Wanda.”
She looked at him intently, and as if from a distance. “Buzz?” she responded with equal hesitancy, as if he were really there to demand the electric bill be paid. Then, as realization came as slowly as an overcast dawn, “Buzz?” Then suddenly, full of energy and excitement, as if Buzz had just put new batteries in her and flipped the switch, “Buzz!” she almost yelled as the lights came on in her eyes.
Buzz just stood there, feeling very much like Pottawattamie County, Iowa, would soon feel.
“Oh God oh God oh God, it’s so good to see you! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I look like Hell. Oh, isn’t she cute? Buzz, meet Abigail. Abigail, Buzz. You’ve grown a little. The place looks like shit. It’s so good to see you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. What’s new? Come in come in come in.”
In yet another of those defining moments of his life, Buzz thought one thing and did another; instead of running far, far away, he followed Bobby Sue Bessemer into the apartment.
During the twenty-two minutes he stayed in Bobby Sue Bessemer’s apartment, he learned a lot. He learned that she had never finished high school; that she and her baby-creating partner, quarterback “Rocky” Hickox, had lived in the apartment for a year; that she and “Rocky” Hickox were going to get married just as soon as he was certain he’d be getting the job at the Esso gas station on Glebe Road, just a block from the Glebe Theater; that she hadn’t written to Buzz about any of this because she was afraid of what his reaction might be; that she adored her baby daughter; that she thought at first she loved “Rocky” Hickox, but really hated him; that they—Bobby Sue Bessemer and Buzz— were both on the verge of crying for a month, but each for their own separate reasons; and that, in another of Buzz’s defining moments, twenty-two minutes was all he could take.
Explaining that having to go to two different addresses in order to find her had used up so much time, and that he wanted to visit his former parents’ graves before it got too late—God, he hated using that excuse, but the lie just hopped out before he knew what had happened—and assuring her that he would be by again to spend more time and, yeah, sure, meet “Rocky” Hickox, Buzz fled the wretched reality and smell of baby poop. He wanted a big, gasping breath of the fresh air of fantasy, but all he found was humidity and the threat of rain.
Buzz started his red and white and chrome Olds, eased it away from the curb, turned right, then right again so he was pointed toward western Pennsylvania, and floored it.
College went quickly for Buzz because he only did three things: He studied, he went to class, and he wrote letters, hundreds of letters, to Bobby Sue Bessemer.
Buzz took every class they would allow him into, but what he studied most were economics, mathematics, and business. He wanted to be an accountant when he graduated, because when you write down numbers they stay the way you wrote them, no matter what, unless you wanted to change them to something else, which you could do whenever you wanted to do. He rarely drove to nearby Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to visit his widowed maternal grandmother, and when he did it would only be for a weekend, nothing longer. He took summer school each year so he could graduate early. He wanted to leave Penn State and follow the instructions he had gotten from Thelma Tomato’s shrine. He also wanted to leave Penn State because it was known throughout the land as a “football school,” and Buzz detested football, especially quarterbacks, or, as he called them, humpbacks.
The only letters he ever received while at school were from Lucinda Mellon Tomato, which he read, but which stopped quite abruptly in 1964, anno domini, and from Bobby Sue Bessemer, which he threw away unopened, and which trickled off and finally stopped in 1965, anno domini.
After an early graduation in 1966, anno domini, he packed up the red and white and chrome Olds to head west. He was only going as far as Omaha, in the state which used to be called Nebraska and which, decades later, would become part of the nation called Football, much to his chagrin, because that was where he was able to secure a top accountancy position with an insurance company, an industry he had some first-hand knowledge of.
He drove straight through from State College, Pennsylvania, to Omaha, Nebraska, and took very little with him, because there wasn’t much to take by then. Good thing, too, because he needed the room for the hundreds and hundreds of letters he had written to Bobby Sue Bessemer and, of course, never mailed.
Naturally—or perhaps, Fatefully—there was a particular reason Lucinda Mellon Tomato’s regular letters to Buzz stopped so abruptly in 1964, anno domini. That year was the seventy-fifth anniversary of: The arrival on the planet of Lucinda Mellon Tomato (née Lucinda Abigail Farthingword Mellon); the arrival on the planet of Noah Van Horne (née Jimmy Hornsby); and the infamous Johnstown Flood, which took more than two thousand souls off the planet in just minutes, including William F. Hornsby, the brand new father of the then brand new Jimmy Hornsby.
This series of coincidental anniversaries was a slurry too charged, too powerful to not effect all involved, and effect them all it did.
Noah Van Horne wanted to use the occasion of his seventy-fifth consecutive year on the planet—although it had really only been thirty-five Noah Van Horne years—to celebrate his having reached out and taken hold of his star, lived his dream, and arrived at the very zenith of his Town Fathership.
“What better way,” he posited to himself, “than for me to lead a combination commemoration of the terrible Johnstown Flood and celebration of the seventy-five flood-free, happy, productive years since?”
“None. None at all!” he answered.
So Noah Van Horne organized the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Johnstown Flood Exposition and Commemoration. Songs were written, school essay contests held, marching and dance bands booked, a parade route determined, and fire engines polished. A small stage and grandstand were built on Noah Van Horne flood plain property just downstream from the main dam. Speeches were written, a seating chart drawn up, and a fireworks company contracted.
When Noah Van Horne was looking over the seating chart for the invited VIP’s, a strange chord moaned somewhere in his seventy-five-year-old cranium—the inner-aural equivalent of a medulla oblongata itch—when he saw the name of the wife of the original supervising civil engineer for the dam project completed in 1937, anno domini: Lucinda Mellon Tomato. It took him a while, but he finally placed the name in his seventy-five-year-old memory:
“She’s… She’s… She’s the woman,” he said to himself at the moment of revelation, “who brought that wonderful music to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Why, if she weren’t a woman, she’d almost be a Town Father, like me. Almost. I should take advantage of the situation and introduce myself. I’d like to talk to her about whether there might ever be a place for a banjo in a string quartet, or, at least, somewhere in the orchestra.”
There was a while when it looked like the gala might have to be postponed, because it rained for forty days and forty nights, and only ended a few days before the Big Day. A few crackpots in town saw that as a bad omen. Of course, no one with any sense listened to them.
No one in their “right” mind ever listens to crackpots. Regrettably, crackpotting is a lost art.
The parade led over two thousand tourists and residents from Van Horne Park in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to the site of the stage and grandstands and planned fireworks just below the main dam on the South Fork River. Noah Van Horne was in his element, the Town Father sharing his glorious birthday with the town. His speech about overcoming adversity, meeting challenges, creating prosperity, and the values of home was enough to make a person weep—namely, Noah Van Horne. He gave up the microphone to the mayor and, as he returned to his seat, he happened to glance at Lucinda Mellon Tomato who was also seated on the stage. She glanced at him, saw something she only dimly remembered now—sparkling eyes—and stood bolt upright, unblinking. At that same instant, Noah Van Horne unconsciously reached back in his suddenly reliable memory forty-two years to a trolley stop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on a particularly soft September Indian summer evening, and knew he was seeing for only the second time the one woman on the planet he had actually loved. For each of them, the world fell eerily silent, and sight closed to reveal only one to the other, closing out all else. Slowly, very slowly, they each began to walk toward the other, completely abandoning the program schedule. The closer they got, the quicker they moved, until, finally, they were almost running to each other. They stopped mere millimeters from one another and stared silently into each other’s eyes, one pair deep and searching, the other all asparkle.
“There is so much to say…. So much has happened…. I’ve gained and lost and learned so much….” thought each of them, separately, but identically. But there was nothing they could say; there were no words. So they slowly, carefully, affectionately reached and hugged, tightly.
As they began to settle into each other’s arms for what could have been an eternity, a tremendous explosion sounded.
“Are the fireworks early?” Noah Van Horne thought.
Oh, that it had been only fireworks!
The explosion was the first Fateful and eventually fatal cracking open of the dam. All eyes, including those of Noah Van Horne and Lucinda Mellon Tomato, simultaneously turned to the center of the dam looming over them. The only eyes to then turn away were those of Noah Van Horne and Lucinda Mellon Tomato, who looked into each other’s eyes once more as if to say: “Luckily, some things last forever.”
Only seconds later, the entire dam gave way and the Johnstown Flood celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in its own way, once again taking more than two thousand souls for a ride completely off the planet, forever and ever amen, including Noah Van Horne and Lucinda Mellon Tomato.
R.I.P.
Chapter 9
June 13, 2009
Chapter Nine
When my uncle Henry telephoned my father in the very early summer of 1959, anno domini, it was to offer him a job, but it ended up with me flying out to the desert in the southern part of what was then called the state of California to begin my life-long—and perhaps eternal; who knows?—connection to and total immersion in the desert, the difference between the intention of the call and the result being my mother.
At the time my father had what I thought was one of the best jobs a person could have and still be paid for it: He was an airline pilot. He had retired from the United States Navy because he had heard that the airlines were looking in bars, under rocks, and everywhere else for qualified pilots to fly their wildly expanding routes, and because, since there was no war on at the moment, for PBY flying boat commanders as my father was, unlike what Captain “Buddy” Blox had been able to do with AD-1 Skyraider fighter/bombers, flying in the United States Navy had become little more than delivering admirals, bulbous and otherwise, to meetings at beach resorts the United States Navy owned and called bases and to golf courses the United States also owned—which was, in my father’s estimation, essentially what airlines did, except that the resorts and golf courses weren’t owned by the United States Navy—at a pay scale and benefits package far below what the airlines were offering. Anyway, by then my mother was quite sick of life in the United States Navy. So, while on leave once during what would prove to be the twilight of his career with the Unites States Navy, he went looking about some and talked with a few airlines and talked to some of his United States Navy buddies, including Captain “Buddy” Blox in Long Beach, California, and ended up entertaining a very nice offer from Capital Airlines, an airline based in Washington, D.C., the now former capital of the now former United States of America. Capital Airlines didn’t have any flying boats, but that was alright with my father because, while he was fine flying, he tended to get a little seasick whenever he had to spend any time in his PBY flying boat bob-bob-bobbing up and down on the surface of the ocean.
So my father quit working for the United States Navy and took a job with Capital Airlines as an airline pilot; according to my father, the chief difference between being a United States Navy pilot and being an airline pilot was that for the United States Navy a pilot “commanded an aircraft,” while for an airline a pilot “drove an airplane.” This was a difference which one day caused him to attend Mrs. Westerman’s funeral behind the wheel of his Austin Healey Sprite, wearing his golf clothes and his light tan cap with the snap on the visor.
The other main difference he faced—one which he dealt with extensively in the training he had to go through after he started working for Capital Airlines, but before he could drive any of their airplanes with passengers in them— was that PBY flying boats, or any flying boats for that matter, landed on and took of from the moving, changing, liquid surface of a body of water in whatever direction best suited the wind and wave circumstances of the moment, while airliners tended to be landed on and taken off from fixedposition, fixed-direction, essentially non-moving paved runways on land called airports, airfields, airstrips—although none of them were made of air—and, if the marketing people had anything to say about it, international gateways.
As Fate would have it—and, as I have so well learned after one hundred and ten consecutive years on the planet, whatever way Fate wants it is the way it will be—by the time my uncle Henry telephoned my father in the very early summer of 1959, anno domini, Capital Airlines had been bought—lock, stock, and pilot contracts—by Amalgamated UniTekTronix, using, in large part, the profits they had so quickly made from my uncle Henry’s adhesive slurry to finance the deal.
This was a good thing because the original managers of the airline, who were not pilots or mechanics or stewardesses (as they were called then) or even full-time passengers—just managers—had managed Capital Airlines into a position of very nearly losing its fiscal shirt.
But it turned out to be a bad thing because, not too many years later, Amalgamated UniTekTronix decided to run Capital Airlines as if it were a trucking company—that is, to see passengers as mere cargo. There was something quite uncomfortable for my father to think he was saving people from the drink while they were being treated like boxes.
That, too, would change, though. For at least one last flight.
My father trained in and drove several different types of airplanes, but the ones he drove the most were DC-4s, DC-6s, and DC-6Bs, which had been designed and manufactured by what was then the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California; this was the same Long Beach, California, though not the same precise site, where my uncle Henry’s Big Demonstration of 1957, anno domini, had been held, and not too far in Los Angeles Basin miles from Thelma Tomato’s place in San Pedro, California. Small world.
Captain “Buddy” Blox had become an ace by blasting MiG-15s and such out of the sky and enemy foot soldiers into it while at the highly and personally modified controls surrounding the highly and personally modified seat of a particular AD-1 Skyraider which belonged to the United States Navy; the AD-1 Skyraider had been designed and manufactured by the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California. Even smaller world.
My uncle Henry had spent a lot of his time while employed by the United States Navy during World War II sitting in the back seat of an SBD-4 Dauntless dive bomber, always on the alert for something or someone menacing at which to shoot or from which to duck. The SBD-4 Dauntless was designed and manufactured—in huge quantities—by the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California. A very small world, indeed.
The DC-4s and DC-6s and DC-6Bs my father drove for Capital Airlines were designed to lift people from the planet a relatively little bit and, without turning them upside down or inside out or incurring any other form of undue unpleasantness, deliver them back to the planet safely after flying them from Point A to Point B, and sometimes on to Point C, and even Point D. With my father as the driver, these airplanes were quite good at doing what they were designed to do, which was not altogether different than what the PBY flying boats he commanded were designed to do, except that the passengers were much less inconvenienced getting into and out of the DC-4s, DC-6s, and DC-6Bs. For one thing, it was never a requirement that passengers be in the drink and soaking wet to board a Capital Airlines DC-4s, DC-6s, or DC-6Bs. (On the other hand, if one were in the drink and soaking wet, one didn’t need a ticket to board a PBY. One just hopped right in if one were lucky enough to have a PBY come bob-bob-bobbing along.)
Unlike the DC-4, DC-6, and DC-6B, the AD-1 Skyraider and SBD-4 Dauntless were designed—by the very same company, though it may have been in a different division involving different designers—to shoot guns and drop bombs; in short, to expedite people from Points A and B not to Point C and possibly even Point D, but clean off the planet for ever and ever, amen. As the ace, Captain “Buddy” Blox, and the gunner, my uncle Henry, and others showed again and again, these airplanes were very good at doing what they were designed to do.
My mother rerouted my uncle Henry’s telephone call from his intentions to her own for two reasons: One had to do with where she was from and was never ever going back to ever again, and the other had to do with the ever-changing but always ongoing saga of my health, or lack of it. She was also a little worried about my reaction to the Eskimos.
For the record, while they may have been what most people thought of as Eskimos, they weren’t Eskimos, but Aleuts. Aleuts are the native people of the Aleutian Islands, an archipelago that stretches west for over one thousands miles from the bottom of mainland Alaska and in the process separates the Bering Sea (on the north) and the Pacific Ocean (on the south), although the experts are not agreed on how long the islands will be able to keep up this obviously arduous task, nor are the experts agreed on the advantages of this segregation of the waters; no one has, to date, asked the Aleuts who, I suspect, know the answers and have all along.
Shortly after Mr. and Mrs. Westerman left the planet for who knows where and Buzz left the state for Pennsylvania, Mr. Aleksei Foxtrap, a full-blooded Aleut Indian, his wife, Mrs. Aleksei Foxtrap, and their fourteen-year-old six-foot-tall son, Aleksei Foxtrap, Jr., also full-blooded Aleut Indians, moved into the former late Westerman’s house across the street from our house in Arlington, Virginia. Mr. Aleksei Foxtrap, a tribal leader from Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island, had been moved, along with the rest of his family, to the Washington, D.C., area so he could work with persons in the United States Government concerning the statehood status granted to—visited upon?—Alaska on January 3rd, 1959, anno domini, a cold day in Alaska. Mr. Aleksei Foxtrap thought he was there to assist the United States Government in the process of making the new state of Alaska a better place to be for the various indigenous populations, which had by then suffered a couple of centuries of exploitation by various non-indigenous populations from various other countries. The United States Government, of course, knew better, but wasn’t about to tell Mr. Aleksei Foxtrap that his role in Washington, D.C., was expected to be something like a relatively short, soft, barely animate totem pole: Something quaint to look at and pretend to understand. It should be no surprise, then, that Mr. Aleksei Foxtrap, being a man of honor, was not long for the house of Westerman.
I have to admit that I was thoroughly intimidated by the stature and dark, brooding features of Aleksei Foxtrap, Jr., so was never able to warm up to him as a replacement for Buzz as an across-the-street friend, even though he was my age and, after all, did live across the street. Naturally, way back then at that tender age, I never stopped or even slowed down to consider the reciprocal viewpoint: Aleksei Foxtrap, Jr., had been abruptly uprooted from the only life and only place he knew—a place of cold, windy, hilly, hard desolation and warm, close, extended familial ties—and re-potted, so to speak, in what must have seemed like a vast, flat, crowded, fast-moving tropical rain forest remarkable for the transient and disconnected nature of its inhabitants. Add to that the fact that the only person on the block with whom he might share come commonality because of gender and age compatibility—the one living across the street from him—had one leg shorter than the other, a disparity quasi-equalized by a pair of orthopedic shoes, one of which was approximately the size and weight of a small kayak; had eyes which were magnified to an unnatural size by four-and-one-half pound eyeglasses that had to be nudged, pushed, slapped, or slammed back in place constantly because their great weight made them slide forward and down, especially when it was at all warm and humid, which it was a lot in Washington, D.C.; and who disappeared every school day morning, only to reappear late each afternoon because he went to a private Episcopal school for boys located far to the south instead of the neighborhood public school Aleksei Foxtrap, Jr., attended. No wonder he was dark and brooding.
My mother was also deeply suspicious of the fact that Mr. Aleksei Foxtrap, Mrs. Aleksei Foxtrap, and Aleksei Foxtrap, Jr., all had Russian-sounding first names. At the time, way back then in 1959, anno domini, Russia (more accurately, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or, the “U.S.S.R.”), a huge country on the other side of the small planet, and the United States of America (or, the “U.S.A.”) were mortal enemies with enough deliverable nuclear destruction pointed at each other to be able to turn the small planet we all lived on—and still do, some of us—into a small-to-medium star with a projected half-life of just under eight hundred billion years if they were all ignited at the same instant. Because it was well known that all they wanted to do in the United States of America was steal military secrets and poison minds and the water, Russians—or commies, as they were also known—were not to be trusted.
My father tried to ease my mother’s concerns by explaining that the Aleutian Islands, and the Aleuts themselves, were discovered by Russian explorers in 1741, anno domini (which must have come as something of a surprise to the Aleuts who had inhabited those particular islands for tens of thousands of years, and who most likely were unaware they and their homelands were “undiscovered”), and it didn’t take long before Russian fur traders—they gave the Aleuts everything from saucepans to syphilis and the Aleuts gave them the furs from quite recently denuded blue foxes, seals, otters, and such; aside from involuntarily providing the furs, the blue foxes, seals, otters, and such weren’t in on the deal, so received nothing in return for their furs but a trip off the planet—started trading for more than furs (my father would wink several times when he told my mother this) and soon families with what, in most cases, would prove to be usually temporary Russian fathers but much more lasting Russian names were clinging to the windswept Aleutian Islands like lichen. These Aleuts with the culturally-compounded names were still Aleuts and were no more commies than any redblooded American (as Caucasian, Eurocentric citizens of the United States were called then) you might pluck off any street of any town at any time in the United States of America. Ho, ho, ho.
The Aleuts were not always the “Aleuts”; along with saucepans and syphilis, the Russians who were out in their sailing ships in the eighteenth century, anno domini, looking for the furs of blue foxes and seals and otters and such— intent on taking instead of trading, should they deal with the animals directly—and finding “undiscovered” islands and indians along the way, gave the people indigenous to the Aleutian archipelago the name by which they have since been known. Lost in the shuffle, and among all the saucepans, was their own name for themselves: unangan, which meant simply “the people.”
My father knew a lot about Aleuts and the Aleutian Islands; for a while during World War II he and the PBY flying boat he commanded for the United States Navy were stationed at the Adak Naval Station on Adak Island, one of the Aleutian Islands. From there he fairly regularly patrolled an area of the north Pacific Ocean, his keen eyes always looking for some unfortunate United States Navy sailor or flyer bob-bob-bobbing and in desperate need—the water was always very cold—of being pulled out of the drink.
He patrolled only fairly regularly instead of regularly because, as he explained it, the weather over the north Pacific Ocean was so often absolutely stinko for flying. That always bothered him because, as stinko as the weather was for flying, he knew it had to be even more stinko for bob-bob-bobbing in the drink with unknown and uncaring species of fish nibbling on one’s toes and the extremely cold and vertically-active water constantly probing for a way to reach deeper and deeper into more and more of one’s temporary and temperature-sensitive core.
After only a few months at Adak Naval Station, my father and his PBY flying boat were transferred back to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and other exotic—not to mention considerably warmer—venues. But while he was at Adak Naval Station he had many an opportunity to mingle with, get to know, and even compare saucepans and other things (wink, wink) with some native Aleuts. In the process, he learned to respect their strength of spirit, their respect for the land, the water, the weather, and each other, and their ability to spend days on end in the dark surrounded by howling, stinko weather. Their intuitive connection to the planet—it seemed no one hunted blue fox, seals, otters, and such for “sport,” nor did they believe that trash went away if they buried it—impressed my father, and their good humor in the face of what my father considered a thoroughly miserable place to live warmed him.
No matter how much he tried to explain this to my mother, though, she still suspected the family Foxtrap’s commie intentions, and found their self-imposed isolation within the neighborhood to be nothing less than unneighborly, a truly un-American trait. It never occurred to her that they were the only people on our street who didn’t think the trash simply disappeared after the trash truck drove by early every Tuesday morning.
My mother knew with the same certainty that she knew everything she knew that Aleksei Foxtrap, Jr., was not and would never be an acceptable replacement for Buzz in my life, and she was equally certain that I needed a Buzz replacement, even though had she ever suggested to me that I was suffering because I was Buzzless it would have been news to me. Suffering from Bobby Sue Bessemerlessness wouldn’t have been news to me, and neither would the idea of Aleksei Foxtrap, Jr., never being a suitable Bobby Sue Bessemer stand-in.
But my possible negative psychological reaction to Buzzlessness was not her major concern regarding my health when my uncle Henry called to offer my father a job. It was myasthma. (From the day I was born I began a long, long career of fighting for my life against the ravages of allergic asthma, spending almost as much time in hospitals as out of them, at the same time beginning what would end up being a life-long affinity for hospitals.) At first, it was simply “asthma,” then “my asthma,” but after living with it—thank God, considering the alternative—for so long, it became “myasthma”; it also became, depending on who was discussing it with whom, “yourasthma,” and “hisasthma”.
As it happened, different seasons and different climates made myasthma worse, sometimes making it so nearly impossible for me to breathe lying down that I learned early in life to sleep soundly sitting perfectly erect in a dining room chair. The Washington, D.C., area, former home of the seat of government of the former United States of America, and my home for far too many years as I was growing up, had seasons and an overall climate which were as stinko for myasthma as the Aleutian Islands’ weather was stinko for flying. The trees and flowers and weeds and various other flora, which were everywhere and as densely packed together as sections in an unopened orange, filled the spring and summer air—which was already as damp and humid as the Indian Ocean itself—with pollen, spores, and molds that triggered protracted attacks of myasthma so severe that my lungs would simply seize up like an engine without oil and refuse to participate in any part of my still-young- but-quickly-getting-a-lot-older life. One doctor after another who were experts on asthma—and regrettably for them, becoming experts on myasthma—suggested that a dryer climate, such as the desert, might offer some advantages for me, such as being able to breathe more often. Having just recently gotten that bit of medical advice again, whether she knew it or not my mother was primed and ready for my uncle Henry’s telephone call to my father.
To her, anyplace less cultured and sophisticated than Washington, D.C.—and that was borderline—was Emporia, Kansas, if not geographically then certainly philosophically and psychologically: Tecopa… Topeka… Emporia… Same thing.
Her escape from Emporia, Kansas—the major components of her escape plan being a) to have finally spent eighteen consecutive years on the planet (regrettably for her, in Emporia, Kansas) and, b) finishing high school (also, regrettably for her, in Emporia, Kansas)—was never in her mind in her lifetime a total success: She was never able to shake the desperate feeling that the roots she had tried so hard to sever would nonetheless finally reach out and snatch her back into the black hole void of her own past at any moment. This constant fear kept her ever cautious, always looking over her shoulder for the Pursuing Tendrils From Hell, and, as one might expect, somewhat preoccupied her from time to time.
Ironically—and isn’t that always the way of Fate—in the end my mother needn’t have worried, because Emporia, Kansas, left the planet before she did.
The town was bought—lock, stock, and stoplights— by Wal-Mart. Their plan was to built their first nineteen thousand acre Super Galactic Mart—where one could buy anything from hex nuts to halter tops to whole houses—just outside Emporia, Kansas, and use their freshly-bought town, the name of which they had immediately changed to Emporium, Kansas, as a sort of consumer hatchery in order to test this bold new step in retail marketing. The test floundered, then flopped completely when the hatchlings, every last citizen of Emporium, Kansas, either collectively resented Wal-Mart’s manipulations or (though less likely), felt a bit of what my mother must have felt decades earlier, and took what is now generally recognized as the first step in what would prove to be the total restructuring of what was then the United States of America, and moved out of town, leaving the Wal-Mart district manager as the only living soul there.
Ever alert to subtle changes in retailing, Wal-Mart modified their original plan and established Emporium, Kansas, itself as the ultimate Sam’s Club for wholesale brick sales serving a large area of the central plains. They enjoyed initial success, but when there was nothing left in Emporium, Kansas, but the streets and sidewalks, Wal-Mart moved on, and the black hole vortex that had been Emporia, Kansas, closed for all time. Since my mother never ever even wanted to hear or read anything about Emporia/Emporium, Kansas, she never knew it had closed and that the Pursuing Tendrils From Hell couldn’t touch her.
Whoever said ignorance was bliss wasn’t being entirely truthful.
Another factor Fate had seen to throw into the emotional slurry which had been set to simmering by my uncle Henry’s telephone call was the certainty that my mother wasn’t ready to entertain any possibility of my father changing his career, especially when, as she stood close to my father while he talked to my uncle Henry, using facial expressions and other unmistakable body language to convince my father to tell her everything my uncle Henry said to him—causing my uncle Henry a degree of confusion as my father seemed to repeat back to him each of his phrases word-for-word, like some sort of whispered echo—she learned that what my uncle Henry had in mind for my father was a newspaper job.
My uncle Henry, who was eclectic in his interests if he was anything at all, and whom my mother suspected of being something of a commie, wanted to use a bit of the growing royalty money he was getting for his original adhesive slurry to publish a good newspaper to serve the East Mojave Desert area. He knew my father well enough to know that he had spent a few years—during college and before he went to work for the United States Navy—as a member of the working press, and that he was a pretty darn good writer for an airline pilot. In fact, he knew my father better than my father, my mother, and I did put together, and knew my father was born to wear sleeve garters, a green eyeshade, sit at an old rolltop desk with an old Underwood typewriter in front of him, and edit a good, old-fashioned newspaper, which was just the type of newspaper my uncle Henry wanted for the East Mojave Desert—one with integrity. History would later prove my uncle Henry was dead right.
My mother abruptly reached out and clamped her hand over the telephone mouthpiece, almost punching my father on the chin in the process—or just missing. “No!” my mother said emphatically. “ ‘No’ what?” my father asked, lightly stroking his chin as if to say “whew.” “Tell him ‘No!’ There’s no chance of you doing such a thing.” “But it just might be fun,” he said to her in all innocence and naïveté. Then to the phone, after he used a pencil from the nearby desk to pry her hand off the mouthpiece:
“Just a second. There’s a little discussion going on here.”
“Uh oh…” said my uncle Henry. He knew my mother almost as well as he knew my father. My mother sealed off the mouthpiece once again, a broken pencil now between her hand that the telephone company black plastic.
“ ‘Might be fun…?’ What’s ‘fun’ got to do with it?” she demanded.
“Well…”
“ ‘Well,’ nothing. You’ve got a perfectly good job now. You’re an airline pilot.”
“I drive airplanes…”
“You’re a captain. You have a uniform with four gold stripes on each sleeve.”
“I had a uniform when I commanded aircraft for the United States Navy.”
“You only had three gold stripes on each sleeve when you left the United States Navy.”
“You always hated life on United States Navy bases,” he said absently. “Anyway, if anyone gets pulled from the drink now, it’s because I haven’t done my job. Working on a newspaper like that out there, I might be able to pull people out of the drink again, maybe….”
“What are you talking about? It’s desert out there; there’s no drink to pull people out of. And who cares anyway? Who ever thanked you—or paid you—for pulling them out of the drink? Name one.”
“Captain ‘Buddy’ Blox.”
“He paid you?”
“He thanked me.”
“You’re just doing this to—” Using a letter opener this time, my father once again pried my mother’s hand from the telephone mouthpiece. He spoke to my uncle Henry, who I thought might have gone out for a sandwich by now.
“We need to discuss it some more. Can I get back to you?”
“I’m really sorry,” replied my uncle Henry. “I didn’t mean to… well, you know… I just thought it would be fun, you know?”
“Yes, and I appreciate it… I think….”
It was at this moment Fate couldn’t take any more and stepped in, connecting a few things in my mother’s head, giving her enough to get the idea that would change my life forever.
She picked up my father’s sand wedge which he had leaned against the desk when he answered the telephone—he was an avid but not especially good golfer who loved to polish his clubs whenever he had a spare moment at home; he did this, I always suspected, so he wouldn’t have spare moments at home—and lifting it as high and threateningly as the living room ceiling would allow, thrust out her other hand in a silent but eloquent and unmistakable “request” for the telephone.
“Uh,” said my father uneasily into the telephone, “someone else here wants to talk with you.”
“Oh… no…” sighed my uncle Henry.
Keeping an eye on the sand wedge and estimating my mother would be able to drive his head about twenty-five or thirty yards with it the way she was positioned, assuming her grip was strong—if there hadn’t been surrounding walls, of course—my father handed the telephone receiver to my mother.
Even as she continued to wag the sand wedge menacingly, she said hello to my uncle Henry with a voice so sweet and innocent it would have been easy to imagine there were two different women in the living room at that moment who were both my mother. (Later psychological testing indicated that that was, indeed, the case, although they shared the same body, but somewhat uncomfortably.)
“While you two were chatting,” she cooed, “I was thinking of our son and the particularly difficult time he’s having with hisasthma just now…”
She was? I am? Just now?
“…and I was think about how the doctors have all said a warm, dry climate would do him a world or good…” If she meant by that being able to breathe and being able to actually go to bed at night instead of going to chair, she was right.
“…so—and I really hesitate to impose here—but the thought occurred to me that if he could come out and visit you there in the desert for the summer, it would be terrific. What do you think? I’ve just been worried sick about him for so long.”
Partially true: She was worried sick, but only since the telephone rang.
“Since his father works for Capital Airlines,” she said with a bit of an edge and a sharp glare at my father, “our son could fly out there and back for free, and, of course, we’d give him money so he wouldn’t be any kind of burden on you. As an airline captain,” she said with more edge and an even sharper glare, “his father makes plenty of money, so that wouldn’t be a problem.” She paused for a breath. Then, “What do you think?” both of my mothers asked my father and my uncle Henry simultaneously.
My father interrupted his study of my mother’s one-handed golf club grip and his assessment of her possible swing strength and ultimate club head speed, looked at my mother, and gave up.
“Why not?” he asked, more of himself than anyone else. “Since I work for the airline and probably will till I die, why not.” He began to unconsciously work his hand into the shape of my mother’s one-handed golf club grip, slowly wrapping his hand around an imaginary golf club handle.
Although he couldn’t have possibly seen the golf club in my mother’s hand, much less the imaginary one in my father’s hand, I suspect my uncle Henry understood exactly what was going on anyway. He was like that, I was to soon learn.
“Hey, that’s a great idea!” he said as cheerfully as if someone had just asked him to go on a speedboat ride. “Sure, send him out, I’d be grand to have him for the summer. I think he’ll love the desert, and it’s been so long since I’ve seen him.”
So long that I had no conscious memory of my uncle Henry; only stories from my father and pointed comments from my mother. But he was right, as usual: I’d love the desert.
So the arrangements were made. It was really more like confirming the reservations Fate had already seen to, though. But, with the possible exception of my uncle Henry, what did any one of us know?
My uncle Henry was really looking forward to my coming out to Tecopa. My mother was, for the moment, relieved the way things turned out. My father was already on the phone in the other room trying to find out if there weren’t some extra flights—one’s with long layovers—he could work for the rest of the summer. I was so elated I started to cough, blinding myself by accidentally shedding my four-and-a-half pound eyeglasses in the process.
If anyone had asked Mr. Aleksei Foxtrap, Mrs. Aleksei Foxtrap, or even Aleksei Foxtrap, Jr., they would have said: “Just because the truck picks it up, that doesn’t mean the trash disappears.”
* * *
My mother overpacked for me, and both my mother and my father took me to the airport to see me off on my Grand Adventure. If they only knew….
Just before I passed through the chain-link-fence gate to board the Capital Airlines DC-6B that would fly me to Las Vegas—the nearest airport of any consequence to Tecopa—but after all the usual hugs and kisses and checks to make sure I had enough of the necessary medications for myasthma in case the therapeutic value of the desert turned out to be just an old wives’ tale, my father touched my shoulder and I stopped and turned to face him. My mother was behind him, so could not see the little exchange that was about to take place. My father bent down and forward a bit, so that we were very close. His parting words to me at that rare moment of intimacy were said quietly, tenderly, truthfully.
“I love you, son,” he said. And then, after a very short pause and a slight look behind him, he leaned close to me and handed me an envelope from his coat pocket. It was a standard white letter-sized envelope with the Capital Airlines logo and address in the upper-left-hand corner and, in the center, written in my father’s bold and destinctive block-letters hand, my name; perhaps he was afraid it would fall into the wrong hands, or I would forget it was for me.
Fat chance.
The envelope was sealed, but I could tell it was loaded with messages because it was so fat and heavy. I was desperately afraid it was loaded with messages not only from my father, but also from Fate itself.
My father whispered to me that I should not read what was in the envelope until I was on the airplane and actually off the ground. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it at all.
My father then leaned even closer, put his mouth no more than an inch from my ear and whispered:
“Your uncle Henry isn’t really your uncle.”
