The Sporadic Curmudgeon

Prologue
(Cool! Finally, I get a legitimate excuse to write a prologue!)

Looking back across the gulf of three decades, even the most vivid memories get wobbly, like a stretch of distant highway on a hot summer day. We’re usually unaware of it because the other people involved long ago went their own way, or died, or have become successful and will not return your calls. And so we go on, completely oblivious to the fact that big chunks of what we remember aren’t reliable.

Facebook has changed all that.

You see, I started writing this story one year ago tonight. Through Facebook I had recently gotten back in touch with my few surviving friends from way back when, and was very excited about detailing the spectacular events of July 4th, 1979. Unfortunately, I made the fatal mistake of checking a few details with the old gang first.

It turns out that the girlfriend I thought had been with me on the expedition had not, in fact, been present at all. Worse, the confusion ran deeper: I am still unclear as to precisely which girlfriend that I imagined had been there had not really been there. If reading that sentence gives you a headache, just think how I feel. Detail after well-remembered detail were gunned down without mercy.

As a result, my faith in one of my most pleasant memories was utterly shattered, and I never finished the story. (Not finishing stories is something I’m very good at, by the way. I’ve developed it into something of an art form. A shameful, self-destructive art form.)

Over the past year, however, I’ve noticed a trend in my friends’ recollections on Facebook: theirs are as messed up as mine. Locations are misplaced, events conflated, and some really embarrassing stuff mysteriously never happened.

That’s when I realized that memory is just like Silly Putty: it’s malleable but more or less holds its shape, it picks up really clear impressions that you can stretch, and it will get stuck in your hair if you fall asleep on the couch while playing with it and you have to cut it out with a pair of scissors while your mother yells at you. Okay, it’s not one of those prissy one-to-one analogies, but you get what I’m driving at.

So I decided to go ahead and tell you my recollections of that Fourth of July anyway. Some of it probably didn’t happen exactly this way, but some of it did. If you can do better, please, be my guest. As always, the names have been changed to protect the miscreants. Also as always, the pseudonyms will be lame.

The Story Proper: July 4th, 1979

It had been an amazing, incredible summer already. I lived in the mythical land of Hollywood and had a nice girlfriend and a fun job lording it over a bunch of Rocky Horror Picture Show freaks. For the first time in my life I was, if not exactly popular, at least not universally loathed. I had more friends than I’d ever had before, and some of them were so cool I still can’t figure out why they stooped to my level. That’s actually a pretty good description of my love life, come to think of it…

Anyway, the summer of ‘79 just flat-out kicked ass. I was 22, and was in that magical period between discovering drugs and finding myself rocking back and forth in the corner of a skid-row hotel room muttering about beetles and the military-industrial complex. LSD was my substance of choice; I’d even dropped acid to meet Timothy Leary at a book signing. For real. I actually shook Tim Leary’s hand while tripping. That’s the stoner’s equivalent of climbing Everest.

We had assembled at the Center of the Universe, Mary and Gerald’s apartment. Mary was my boss at the theater, and Gerald was her brilliant writer boyfriend who had built a mechanical television as a boy. My girlfriend Linda had to work that day, but everyone else was there: Stoner Bill Jr., Nina, and the adorable punk couple Britt and Tamara. (I’m not being sarcastic; they were cute as bugs.)

I’d managed to get hold of some el-cheapo LSD from a friend in San Diego. We called it “The Brown Bomb” for two excellent reasons. First, it came on brown paper that had obviously been cut out of grocery store bags. Second, it was not for the faint of heart. The first time I’d taken it I remember turning to Britt about an hour in, my face screwed up like I was trying to pull a fighter plane out of a death spiral, and chattering through clenched teeth, “I think this might have some speed in it.”

Britt, Tamara and I divied up the acid. Stoner Bill Jr. volunteered to be a designated driver. Nina, who always exuded an air of detached amusement/irritation at our antics, declined to partake. Gerald elected to stay home and write. Our plan was to go down to Santa Monica Beach to watch the ocean and people wearing skimpy swimsuits.

Piling into the cars, we headed west toward the Pacific.

It was insanely crowded. We had to park a good half-mile away and walk. The acid was starting to kick in, and things were getting very strange indeed. There was one storefront that made us stop and stare. It was a menswear place, and displayed shirts and jackets on headless gold-painted mannequins. Instead of the usual smooth edge, though, the mannequin manufacturers had chosen to end each neck stump with a ring of rounded surfaces surrounding a central bump. I guess it was supposed to resemble upholstery, but to us it looked more like someone had taken victims straight from the guillotine and gilded the corpses.

Santa Monica is on a cliff over the beach, and we began making our incapacitated way down the zigzagging walkway. Halfway down, we came across a group of Hell’s Angels lounging around in a rest area. Putting on our bravest faces, we walked past them, desperately hoping to avoid a confrontation. I brought up the rear, and just as I passed, one of them looked at me and said, “BOO!” Everyone cracked up laughing.

We crossed the pedestrian bridge to the beach itself. The beach was completely packed, and yet people were setting off fireworks everywhere. It was like trench warfare in World War I but with hot chicks in bikinis. We huddled together, jostled by the crowd, with firecrackers snapping at our feet and bottle rockets whistling just over our heads. A decision to bail was quickly arrived at. To our relief, the biker gang was gone when we made the trek back up the cliff.

I rode back with Stoner Bill, Jr. It was five o’clock as we pulled into a parking space on the hillside below Mary’s apartment. Deep Purple’s “Hush” came on the radio, and Bill turned it up loud. He grinned at me. “Classic psychedelia!” he said. I’d never heard it before. I never heard it that way again, either. If you’ve never heard “Hush” on LSD, let me tell you… oh, never mind. It’s like trying to explain an orgasm.

Back up in Mary’s place, a traditional Fourth of July party was in progress. In spite of the Brown Bomb’s jittery side effects, I managed to eat a hot dog. There were lots of laughs and more substance abuse.

Then Mary had an inspiration: we should all go to the concert at the Hollywood Bowl, because they were performing The 1812 Overture, complete with a real cannon! This, we all agreed, would be fantastic. The only problem was that we had no tickets, and the event sold out every year. And so a daring plan was hatched.

An hour later, I found myself with Mary and a couple of the more intrepid party-goers climbing the treacherous hills above the Hollywood Bowl in the dark. A few stars twinkled in the sky through the city’s warm glow. I sat down on a teeter-tottering slab of rock and, resting my elbows on my knees, put my chin in my hands. Below us lay the famous amphitheater, brightly lit, and the familiar strains of Tchaikovsky’s music drifted up. I have rarely known such contentment.

And then came the great crescendo: Da-da-da-da-da-dah DA da-dah! Ka-BOOOM!!!! The cannon went off, the sound caroming around the valley. Fireworks launched from behind the band shell, exploding in time with the cannon. Da-da-da-da-da-dah DA da-dah! Ka-BOOOM!!!! The heart-swelling music, the fireworks blossoming below and above us in fiery colors, the cannon belching flame and thunder… We were on our feet and cheering and whooping and generally acting like the happy idiots we were.

Sigh.

It’s all just fragments of memory now, after all these years. Those fragments are worth more to me than I can possibly say.

Da-da-da-da-da-dah DA da-dah! Ka-BOOOM!!!!

Yeah. That was a Fourth of July.

Last night I was thinking about the first Earth Day. Well, specifically I was remembering an hour of it, and only vaguely. I don’t have any solid memories of what I did, but I know precisely where I was: in Mrs. R’s art class at Alamo Heights Junior High School in San Antonio, Texas.

Alamo Heights was a wealthy neighborhood, and while I didn’t quite live on the wrong side of the tracks, I was only a block or two away. It wasn’t a fun place to be. I got bullied a lot, although I have to admit I gave them lots of fodder: I was poor, socially inept, had crossed eyes, loved to read, and had yet to learn the simple fact that the things I find most fascinating irritate the hell out of muscular, slow-witted classmates.

The teachers there were pretty stodgy. San Antonio didn’t cotton to most of the shenanigans the rest of the country had been engaged in, and this was Alamo Heights, after all. Most of them were nice enough, although one was utterly horrifying. (The social studies teacher was a middle-aged man with some kind of skin condition, and once in a while when we were supposed to be reading we’d catch him chewing on the back of his hand. I believe that class is where I first heard the immortal phrase, “Ewwwwwww! Gross!”)

But there were two wonderful teachers there: Coach Ploetz, about whom I intend to write about in detail later, and Mrs. R. (I’m giving Coach Ploetz’s real name because he has since passed away. A wonderful man who may have saved my life.)

Mrs. R was young, and she wasn’t at all like the other teachers. She wore bright modern clothes, and laughed a lot, and treated you like a human being instead of an unpleasant duty. She did gorgeous psychedelic ink and watercolor drawings in class. She drove a really cool car, too, an old Rolls-Royce. She may have even gone barefoot in class once in a while. She was, dare I say it, almost a… a Hippie!!! We all had huge crushes on her, of course.

I’ve been in schools where the kids complained about having to go to art class. Not there, though. Everybody loved her classes. She was, therefore, in frequent trouble with the school authorities.

That first Earth Day was one of her biggest transgressions. I can’t remember any specifics across the gulf of forty years, but Mrs. R. led us on a march for Earth Day. Keep in mind that at this time environmentalists were considered roughly on par with a crazy uncle that suddenly starts barking at the milkman. The principal was not amused, and it took weeks for the hubbub to die down.

So last night I was thinking about Earth Day and Mrs. R, and I decided to see if I could find out what happened to her. I started googling her last name (I don’t think I ever knew her first name), but all that kept coming up was a famous author who wrote a series of fantasy novels that are my daughter’s favorite books of all time. One of them has been made into a very popular movie. I kept scrolling through, trying to find Mrs. R, when I ran across a reference to this author having been born in 1964 and graduated from a San Antonio high school.

Hmm, I thought. Nah, it couldn’t be. Still, it was just possible. I started googling for this author’s mother. I found her name, which did not begin with R, and googled her. She is a respected educator in Texas, with art being one of her many subjects. Okay, I thought, this is looking more and more likely. I found her Facebook page, and left a message asking if she was a teacher at Alamo Heights Junior Hgh in 1970 or 1971. This was at 2:30 in the morning.

When I woke up this morning and checked my email before beginning a massive debug (computer, not vermin), there was a reply. It was her! I had actually found Mrs. R! We caught up a bit, and now we’re friends on Facebook. Oh, and it turns out the car was an old Jaguar Mark X, not a Rolls. I’ll be asking about the march. Memory is a funny thing.

The best part of all this? Telling the story to my daughter and watching her eyes get very big and bright.

It was about 10:30 on a sweltering June Friday night in 1988, and I was in the back seat of a crowded car mid-way between Los Angeles and San Diego. One of the strangers in the front seat turned on the radio, and The Plugz’ Hombre Secreto, their inspired cover of the Johnny Rivers classic Secret Agent Man, came blaring out of the speakers. I cheered. It was perfect, for that night we were headed into Mexico.

Had I been completely sober and had a firmer grasp of social niceties, I would not have been on this trip at all. My long-suffering girlfriend at the time, let’s call her Sonya, had been invited to spend the weekend with some of her college friends at a rented villa in Ensenada, a few hours south of Tijuana on the Pacific Coast of the Baja Peninsula.

I was politely asked if I wanted to come along, the safe assumption being that I would refuse. This was because I a.) had just spent a week in the VA hospital vainly trying to fix my crippling back pain, b.) had an abscessed tooth that was driving me mad, and c.) was a notorious stick-in-the-mud that never wanted to do anything but sit home and drink. They figured I would say “No, thanks,” and Sonya would get to spend a guilt-free weekend with her vaguely shady friends whom she’d been spending an awful lot of time with while I was in the hospital. She would be off in a foreign country, and several hundred miles away from her drunken boyfriend.

For some reason known only to Satan himself, I said, “Sure! Why the hell not?” Luckily I was too wasted to be aware of the resentment this caused, a condition that would not change until the following Monday while Sonya was angrily chewing me out for my atrocious behavior.

It wasn’t all my fault, of course. If they’d thought about it a little harder they would have simply come up with a plausible lie instead of being polite. They rolled the dice and they lost. It’s like asking a co-worker how he’s doing and he spends the next thirty minutes vividly describing his impacted colon, complete with arm gestures and sound effects.

We crossed the border and made our way through the sleazy maze of Tijuana. I had never been further into Mexico than that wretched hive of scum and villiany, and once we were past the city limits and headed south on the divided roadway the change was startling.

There were no streetlights. It was unbelievably dark, and quickly became eerie. No one spoke for long periods. After half an hour we drove slowly past a car burning beside the road. There was no one around, and the only illumination came from the guttering abandoned automobile.

A few miles later we passed another one just like it on its side in the ditch between the lanes. We were getting seriously spooked.

I don’t know if it was a planned stop or a desperate attempt to save us, but soon we pulled into a little roadside shrine to the Virgin Mary. There were candles around, and people praying, and even though I’m not very religious I felt quite a bit better about our situation. The mood lightened.

Just outside Ensenada the road joined again, and what had been two lanes per side became two lanes, period. We turned a bend and a carload of kids headed back to the US was in our lane. Our driver, who had been on his toes since we passed the wrecks, was able to avoid a headon collision by running off the road.

We got out. It was cool and windy. We were all pretty shaken. There was no moon, and we still could not see anything. It felt like we were inside a cave. We climbed back in and headed into town.

We found the villa quickly enough. It was a timeshare on the slope of a valley north of town; there were dozens of them. We turned on all the lights, had a few drinks, laughed about our narrow escape, and went to bed.

The next morning we drove out to where we had gone off the road. It was a couple of yards from the edge of a fifty-foot cliff, and there was no guardrail.

Sonya and two of her friends and I explored town. It was a lot like Tijuana without the pickpockets and donkey acts. I liked it. We found a little resaurant and went in for breakfast. I was badly hungover, and decided that I could probably use some heavy-duty food to replenish my system. I ordered steak and eggs.

When it arrived it did not look particularly appetizing, the steak being an odd grey color. I cut off a piece and put it in my mouth. It was tough, and full of gristle. After ten minutes of chewing, I was still unable to determine its species, and was only willing to make the roughest guess as to its phylum. Soon my face was greyer than the meat.

After our repast, we began searching for our real objective: legal prescription painkillers. Sure, I could have taken Tylenol and it would have worked fine, but I had heard that percodan could be purchased over-the-counter in Mexico. After dragging my companions fruitlessly all over town from pharmacy to pharmacy, we finally gave up.

We did, however, find a fireworks store. A regular shop right there in the middle of town. We went inside and looked around. Hundreds of different firecrackers and roman candles and skyrockets lined the shelves. The smell of gunpowder was intoxicating. And then I saw it.

It was on a shelf all by itself. I can still picture it in my mind’s eye, laying on its silken pillow, surrounded by a sparkling golden aura while heavenly choruses filled the air and cherubs fluttered above. It looked like… No, it couldn’t be. Could it? It was red, and was the right diameter. It had the fuse coming out of the middle. It had the paper endcaps. Yes!! It was!!!

I was looking at a genuine M-80. It was for sale. And I had enough money in my pocket to buy it.

Percodan, schmercodan. This was a goddamned M-80!

For those of you who have led an overly sheltered life, the M-80 is a, no, let me rephrase that, THE firecracker. It was developed by the US military for wargame simulations. It had been illegal in the United States for decades, and with good reason. A significant chunk of the generation preceding mine were missing fingers and hands because of it. It has, no joke, about sixty times more powder than the biggest firecracker you can legally buy in the US. The M-80 is the H-bomb of firecrackers.

Be honest with yourself. Would YOU have been able to resist? I bought it with trembling fingers. Which I am damned lucky to still possess, as you shall see.

We went home. It was one o’clock. A barbecue was planned for later that evening. I figured it was time for happy hour.

I’m still not entirely sure what happened that afternoon; there was a polaroid I took of Sonya flashing her tits, but she’s got a sour look on her face and definitely didn’t think it was sexy. I must have gone back into the villa and passed out. I woke up in a bedroom at seven-thirty, after the barbecue was long finished. There was none left for me, and I was upset that no one had woken me up to eat.

Later some locals showed up for a poker party. They brought some visiting friends from El Salvador and Guatemala. I played like shit, and they loved me. We were drinking Mescal, and I didn’t just swallow the worm, I chewed on it. I was hungry, after all, and it tasted way better than the donkey/monkey steak I’d had for breakfast. Sonya and the others went to bed.

We had a great time bitching about Ronald Reagan. I drank too much too fast, and went to the bathroom to be sick. When I came back they had another shot and a fresh hand waiting for me. Either they really liked me, or they were trying to kill me by alcohol poisoning.

At three in the morning I had The Idea. I explained blearily to my new Central American friends that I had an insane, gigantic monster firecracker in my actual possession. One of my amigos pointed out that he did, in fact, have a lighter on him. I got the firecracker of which dreams are made out of my bags and we staggered out through the sliding glass doors to the patio.

I placed it on a low stone wall about thirty feet from the house. We stood in front of it, reverently bowing our heads. Some people have their shrines, and I have mine. I was handed the lighter while my accomplices prudently retreated. “Do Not Hold In Hands” was printed in stern letters on the casing. I thought to myself, “No shit,” and lit the fuse.

I ran as fast as I could back toward the villa. As the fuse quickly burned away toward Armageddon, I suddenly realized what I had just done. We were standing in front of a big sheet of glass and were only slightly more than the length of a city bus away from an explosive device the US Army had designed to teach soldiers what being under a mortar attack feels like. I brought my arm up to my face just microseconds before it went off.

The blast was far bigger than I had imagined. The glass behind us rattled, but thankfully did not shatter. A chunk of rock hit my forearm, the same one I had thrown over my eyes. It drew blood. We felt the shock and heat of it, and a massive boom rolled across the landscape.

Our ears were ringing. Lights were going on all over the the neighborhood. From far across the vally we could just hear an American voice screaming “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MINDS!?!” We looked at each other, and busted up in helpless laughter.

We walked over to look at the wall. There was a shallow crater the size of a dinner plate blown out of it. I knew I was going to remember this trip for the rest of my life.

I was awakened the next morning by a bunch of obnoxious frat boys from USC who had rented the place next. I was face-down on the couch, and just beginning to feel the leading edge of the worst hangover I’d ever had. My mouth seemed to be filled with dust and dead spiders.

One of the frat boys was standing about three feet from my head, wearing fluorescent lime-green swimming trunks. I snarled that if he didn’t get those fucking green shorts out of my face I was going to rip his face off and stuff it down his throat with his own foot. He moved away.

I remember nothing of the trip back other than nobody making eye contact with me. That’s probably all for the best. Sonya didn’t ever completely forgive me, and we broke up not too long afterwards.

The weekend had been full of sullen companions, agonizing pain, unforgivable drunken misbehavior, multiple cases of almost-getting-killed, and what could very well qualify as an international incident.

But good God, it was glorious.

This evening I experienced something truly odd, and although my wife has dismissed it as a symptom of stress, I am not entirely sure. Here is what happened:

It was getting late, and I didn’t feel like driving to the grocery store, so I decided to make do with whatever I could find laying around.

Spaghetti? Yep.

Olive oil? Yep.

Parmesan? Yep.

Fresh garlic?

We store our garlic in a little unglazed terracotta jar. It has always been in the corner of the counter to the left of the stove, and holds one or two cloves. But it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. I looked behind the bags of flour tortillas and half-loaves of bread; it just wasn’t there. I opened the cabinets and looked around. No garlic jar.

“Hey, hon,” I said. “Where’s the garlic container? Did you move it?”

“No,” she said. “It was broken in the move from Las Vegas.”

“What? Really? Are you sure?”

“Yes. I dropped it when I was packing the kitchen.”

And she was right, of course. We keep the garlic in the cabinet.

But — I remember using that garlic jar since we moved to North Carolina. I’ve fished garlic out of it dozens of times, and it’s always been in the corner to the left of the stove.

In reality I have not actually used that garlic jar since the move, and right now it’s in a landfill in Nevada.

What I want to know is this: why, after having been in this apartment for five months and cooking who knows how many meals would I suddenly start looking for a non-existent garlic jar? Why this particular meal? Why on earth would I abruptly forget that I’ve been keeping the garlic in the cabinet all along?

Furthermore, why would I know exactly where the garlic jar normally was in the North Carolina kitchen, when it was never in North Carolina, and more importantly not in the same place I kept it in Las Vegas? In Nevada, the garlic jar was closer to the sink than to the stove, by about three feet.

I guess what I’m asking is, why was my memory of the North Carolina version of the garlic jar so damned normal? If it never existed, why the hell was I looking for it? This isn’t like forgetting something; it’s more like being jerked from one version of reality, where the garlic jar was never broken, to another where it broke in Las Vegas.

Objectively, I realize that this is just some sort of memory malfunction; a misfiring set of neurons or something. Subjectively, it feels disconcertingly like the past changed.

The odd thing is that I have run across a description of this exact phenomenon before. Philip K. Dick wrote about it in one of his best novels, Time Out of Joint. Here is the relevant passage:

He still had not found the light cord that dangled in the darkness of the bathroom. His nausea and irritation grew, and he began thrashing around in the dark, holding up both arms, hands together with thumbs extended and touching; he rotated his hands in a wide circle. His head smacked against the corner of the medicine cabinet and he cursed.

“Are you okay?” Margo called. “What happened?”

“I can’t find the light cord,” he said, furious now, wanting to get his pill and get back to play his hand. The innate propensity of objects to be evasive . . . and then suddenly it came to him that there was no light cord. There was a switch on the wall, at shoulder level, by the door. At once he found it, snapped it on, and got his bottle of pills from the cabinet. A second later he had filled a tumbler with water, taken the pill, and come hurrying out of the bathroom.

Why did I remember a light cord? he asked himself. A specific cord, hanging a specific distance down, at a specific place.

I wasn’t groping around randomly. As I would in a strange bathroom. I was hunting for a light cord I had pulled many times. Pulled enough to set up a reflex response in my involuntary nervous system.

Dick believed that these occurrences were a sort of glitch in the space-time continuum, and were evidence of a point where one universe branched off from another due to something having changed in the past. He talked about it at length in his speech If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.

I submit to you that such alterations, the creation or selection of such so-called “alternate presents,” is continually taking place. The very fact that we can conceptually deal with this notion — that is, entertain it as an idea — is a first step in discerning such processes themselves. But I doubt if we will ever be able in any real fashion to demonstrate, to scientifically prove, that such lateral change processes do occur. Probably all we would have to go on would be vestiges of memory, fleeting impressions, dreams, nebulous intuitions that somehow things had been different in some way — and not long ago but now. We might reflexively reach for a light switch in the bathroom only to discover that it was — always had been — in another place entirely. We might reach for the air vent in our car where there was no air vent — a reflex left over from a previous present, still active at a subcortical level.

Of course, if the current theory that there’s a one-in-five chance that we’re all living in a synthetic universe holds, then what I experienced a few hours ago might be more of a software bug than a kink in space-time.

Who knows? Maybe time-travellers from the future have messed up yesterday. Or just maybe, as my wife tells me, I’ve got some neurons misfiring due to rivet-popping “I cannah hold’er, Cap’n” stress.

All I know is that this evening I honestly believed I got my garlic from a terracotta jar beside the oven, even though that’s clearly wrong. Memory hiccup or an artifact from a timeline shift or some other damn thing: something’s gone wonky and it makes me very uncomfortable.

Special PKD Update: Elsewhere in If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others, Dick talks about overlapping universes:

There cannot be one because, of course, as we all know, such a concept is merely a fictional premise; none of us, in our right minds, entertains for even an instant the notion that such alternate universes exist in any actual sense. But let us say, just for fun, that they do. Then, if they do, how are they linked to each other, if in fact they are (or would be) linked? If you drew a map of them, showing their locations, what would the map look like? For instance (and I think this is a very important question), are they absolutely separate one from another, or do they overlap? Because if they overlap, then such problems as “Where do they exist?” and “How do you get from one to the next?” admit to a possible solution. I am saying, simply, if they do indeed exist, and if they do indeed overlap, then we may in some literal, very real sense inhabit several of them to various degrees at any given time. And although we all see one another as living humans walking about and talking and acting, some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of, say, Universe One than the other people do; and some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of Universe Two, Track Two, instead, and so on. It may not merely be that our subjective impressions of the world differ, but there may be an overlapping, a superimposition, of a number of worlds so that objectively, not subjectively, our worlds may differ. Our perceptions differ as a result of this.

Personally, I believe that this is quite literally true, and verified by the one-photon-at-a-time version of the Double-slit experiment. Some quantum physicists take a bullshit wishy-washy wave interpretation of the experiment. Me, I side with the second-smartest guy of the 20th century, Richard Feynman, who said that until they’re observed photons take every possible path through space-time to get from point A to point B, which points toward multiple universes. I’m talking about a man that helped build the first atomic bomb, taught himself Portuguese on a plane flight from LA to Brazil, won the Nobel Prize for his theory of quantum electrodynamics, and figured out a foolproof method of picking up women at a bar. Clearly a God amongst men.

The smartest was Einstein, of course, who also had an eye for the ladies. In programming terms:

if($iq > $edward_teller)
{
$tail += $sinatra;
}

I honestly think I would rather sacrifice a finger than go through the last week again.

On July 3, I was scheduled for surgery to remove an extremely painful kidney stone. The day had started well; after dutifully peeing through my plastic strainer I found it contained a small chunk of solid material. I called the doctor, and he had me come in for a CAT scan to see if the bastard had finally passed. Unfortunately it was just a fragment, and the surgery was still on.

At the hospital they started an IV drip, with morphine and an antibiotic. I’ve had morphine before, so the burning in my veins wasn’t unexpected. It kept burning, though, and seemed to be getting worse. I looked down and saw that every vein in my arm was distended and red, and it was spreading north. It turns out that I am allergic to Levaquin. One of the nurses commented that I was lucky it hadn’t been a systemic reaction.

The surgery went well, the stone was removed, and they installed a stent to keep my ureter from swelling shut. I woke up, they sent me home with a pain prescription, and that was that.

I didn’t tolerate the stent well, and started having spasms. I was given antispasmodic medication that helped a little, but still ended up spending most of the week in bed. I couldn’t take enough Vicodan to handle the pain without risking liver damage. (Why do they put acetominophen in everything?) The stent hurt every bit as much as the kidney stone had, but instead of hitting me every few hours it was constant, 24 hours a day.

As if that wasn’t enough I have chronic psoriasis, which is aggravated by stress, and by Friday the lower half of my face looked and felt like I’d been making out with a belt sander.

Tuesday morning they removed the stent. It was agonizing and humiliating, but at least it was over quickly. I’m starting to feel better, although my innards still feel a mite abused. My skin rash is even beginning to subside.

I have to say, this has been surprisingly difficult to deal with. I’ve been stabbed in the chest (complete with collapsed lung), suffered sciatica from a slipped disc so extreme that my leg started to atrophy, have had abscessed teeth, a broken elbow, a few cases of the DTs and a near-fatal run-in with colitis, and none of it has hurt quite as much as that damned little rock. Without the kindness and understanding of my wife and daughter I don’t think I could have gotten through it at all.

Now I’ll shut up about it. Thanks for listening to me bitch. Tomorrow I’ll get back to the jokes.

Q: How do you know if you’re masturbating too much?

A: When the only way somebody can make you stop beating off is to stab you twice in the shoulder.

An Australian man showed up at his female friend’s house, popped some speed, hopped into the shower and proceeded to pollute himself. Not sated, he went into his host’s bedroom and rolled around on her bed naked, still milking the snake. He then returned to the bathroom, where the woman was attempting to give her 3 1/2-year-old daughter a bath (I hope she rinsed out the tub), and began flogging the log yet again.

The woman was understandably upset at this bizarre behavior, and demanded that he stop. The frenzied onanist continued buffing the bishop, however, so she ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and stabbed him. This got his attention, and he put on his pants and went outside to wait for the police to arrive. His monophilia got the better of him, though, and he retreated to the garage where he once more made the angels cry.

Well.

You can only imagine my horror upon reading this sordid little tale and finding that it has brought a long-repressed memory burbling back to the surface like a foul-smelling bubble of sulfurous methane. Many years ago I, too, had to deal with a crazed masturbator.

 
The year was 1992, and the Rodney King riots were in the news. I was living with a woman and her seven-year-old daughter in a two-bedroom apartment in San Antonio, Texas. I’ll call the woman “Sharon.”

I was working as a housepainter. My boss, “Wally,” was a recovering cocaine addict. One Saturday afternoon the doorbell rang. I opened the door, and there was Wally, looking a little nervous.

“Hey, Wally,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I was driving by and I’ve got to go to the toilet. Can I use yours?”

“Uh… sure.” I let him in.

“Thanks, man.” He rushed into the bathroom and shut the door. I heard the lock click.

Sharon came out of the bedroom. “What’s going on?”

“My boss just showed up at the door asking to use the toilet.”

“That’s kind of odd,” she said.

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

 
Thirty minutes later, Wally had not emerged. I knocked on the door. There was a rustling noise and the sound of running water. “Yeah?”

“Hey, Wally. You okay in there?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Fine. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“Alright. Just checking.”

 
Fifteen more minutes passed.

“Wally?”

“I’ll be right out. Give me a few more minutes, okay?”

“Okay.”

Sharon looked at me. “What the hell is he doing in there?”

“I don’t know. But he’s behaving very strangely. I think he’s on something.”

“In my bathroom!?”

“I think he did it before he got here.”

 
Another fifteen minutes. He’d been in the bathroom for an hour.

“Hey, Wally? Are you sick? Do you want us to call the paramedics?”

“NO! No, I’m fine. Just having some… trouble. I’ll be out soon.”

Sharon glared at me. “I want him out!” she hissed. “I have to go myself.”

“Okay, Wally. We need you to leave now. Please get out of the bathroom.”

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

“I’ll give you five more minutes, and then I’m going to call your wife.”

“Hold, on, hold on. Don’t do that.” There was a lot of thrashing about from behind the locked door.

 
The five minutes passed. No Wally.

“That’s it, Wally. I’m going to call your wife.”

I called her and outlined the situation. A few minutes later I was back at the door.

“Hey, Wally. Your wife told me to go ahead and call the cops if you don’t get the fuck out of the bathroom right now.”

“Shit. Okay, okay.” I heard Wally getting dressed. The door unlocked and opened. Wally looked out, blinked at Sharon and me, and scurried toward the exit. “Thanks for everything,” he said. He was carrying his shoes, and his shirttail was out.

He’d been in our bathroom for more than 90 minutes.

“You’d better let me take a look before you go in there,” I said.

“Hurry up. I have to go bad.”

I turned on the light. It was humid. The mirrors were steamed up. I noticed a strange gleam on the tiles, toilet, tub and sink: hand lotion. Here and there were dark curly hairs sticking to the porcelain.

I must have spent fifty dollars on cleaning products that afternoon.

 
I never returned to that job, and Wally never called to find out why. Shortly thereafter I was asked to find other living arrangements.

Now I must see if blunt-force trauma will help me re-bury that memory.

They tell me that not passing a kidney stone is far worse than passing one. We’ll see.

In the Emergency Room last Saturday I was informed that the horrible stabbing abdominal pains I’d been experiencing were not due to a bad conscience or an alien chest-burster making a wrong turn at Albuquerque. My right kidney has unilaterally decided to grow its own little mineral specimen.

There are good and bad sides to this.

Bad:

• The waiting

• The aforementioned horrible stabbing pains

• In between stabbing pains, feeling remarkably like somebody stomped on my testicles five minutes ago

• Having to piss through a sieve every damn time I go to the bathroom (and guys, don’t make the same mistake I did — your wife’s pantyhose will not do in a pinch)

Good:

• Heavy-duty pain meds

Of course, if the stone sees its shadow and runs back into the burrow, I get something a heck of a lot nastier than six more weeks of winter. A medieval torture device called a stent will be inserted into the passage between my kidney and bladder, via the urethra, while I’m under general anesthesia.

It acts like the timber bracework in a mine shaft, which I guess would make the urine sort of like one of the ore car trains from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and that obnoxious little kid would be the kidney stone.

What’s giving me nightmares is the prospect of stent removal. There are two kinds of stents (one with a thin cord attached), and thus two ways to extract it once its excruciating job is done. My urologist pantomimed the easy one: tying the end of the string to a doorknob and slamming the door.

So I wait, hoping that sometime soon I’ll go through some fairly ugly pain while pissing a rock out. It’s better than the alternative scenario: an amateur comedian sticking a long pair of needle-nosed pliers up my dick and rooting around.

A lot of people take part-time evening jobs to pay the bills while they continue their education. Some work in the food-service industry, others become couriers or move boxes around in warehouses. Me? I sold plastic wangs in Hollywood.

Dildo salesman isn’t the sort of job that creeps up on you. I didn’t wake up one morning, look around, and say “Hey, how the heck did I end up doing this for a living?” No, I’m afraid it was a deliberate decision. Believe it or not, it wasn’t my most disreputable career choice by any means. In 1980 I had an actual shot at becoming a porn director, but the, um…, “connections” of some of the people I’d be working for made me reconsider. Compared to that, dildo salesman is almost wholesome. Here’s how it happened:

In 1984 I decided to give college one more try. My girlfriend was attending a small agricultural college in the west end of the San Fernando Valley, and I thought I’d attend classes there myself. I quit the low-paying-but-fascinating job I had at a science fiction bookstore and enrolled. I remember having some vague idea that the whole food-and-rent thing would work itself out somehow.

Two weeks later my growling stomach was loud enough to get complaints from the neighbors. I had to do something. My girlfriend, being somewhat more practical than myself, suggested that I find a job. But hypnotized by the wonderful mirage of an academic existence untainted by menial labor, I decided to try to sell some of my paintings instead. Since what I painted was mostly naked people doing what naked people do best, my options were limited. (I would like to say in my defense that I’m a decent indecent artist, and have shown paintings and sculpture in several galleries, both in Las Vegas and San Antonio.)

The only venues I could locate were The Pleasure Chest on Santa Monica, and a place called The International Love Boutique on Hollywood Boulevard. Since guys wearing black leather chaps and not much else is considered appropriate attire at The Pleasure Chest, and most of my paintings are of nude women, I settled on the latter.

I arrived one bright morning with my portfolio and asked to speak to the manager. After I explained the purpose of my visit, she showed me the small erotic art gallery they had upstairs. My hopes rose. Then she shot me down, telling me that for legal reasons they only displayed work by established artists represented by well-know agencies. However, she had a part-time position on the sales floor available, and asked if I was interested. I acceded to the inevitable and took the job.

She took me around the premises, including a complete torture dungeon in the basement that was rented out for parties and film shoots. It looked like Hannibal Lecter’s rec room. She gave me the ground rules, the two most important of which were:

1. NEVER hit on a patron under any circumstances, and
2. Don’t lounge around doing nothing. I had to be either helping customers or straightening shelves at all times.

To illustrate how delusional I was back then, I honestly thought that rule 1 would be the most difficult to live with.

And so it came to pass that I spent five days a week riding the bus from Hollywood almost all the way to Camarillo, attending a few classes in history, sociology, philosophy and ceramics, riding the bus back to Hollywood, putting on a cheap polyester vest and circling the aisles of The International Love Boutique until quitting time at 11 PM when I could stagger home and collapse. I literally spent three hours a day on the bus.

Good lord, the no-lounging-around rule was a bitch. I was already dead tired when I arrived, and had to stay in motion like a shark or I’d get fired. This was also a time when Van Halen was inexplicably popular. I have to say, it’s a peculiar form of hell trudging between racks of cheaply-made lingerie and endcaps piled with boxes of rubber penises while David Lee Roth does his patented weird squeaky-toy squeal on the store’s stereo system.

Most of the customers were either couples or women shopping in packs, since the raincoat brigade generally preferred to practice their perversities in less pretentious venues, so gradually I lost any lingering traces of embarrassment over what I did for a living. One night, in a kind of twisted epiphany, I decided that if I was going to sell dildoes, then by God I’d do a really good job of it. It was kind of like Scarlett O’Hara’s “I’ll never go hungry again” moment from Gone With The Wind, but with vibrators instead of turnips.

And you know what? It worked. The customers liked having someone unashamed to be selling sex toys helping them. The biggest seller was something called “Mr. Squirmy.” It was your basic vibrating fake penis, but with a flexible wire running up the middle attached to a motor. You put a little bend or two in it (ouch!), turned it on with the remote control, and the thing wriggled as only a squirming vibrating fake penis can. Or so I’ve heard.

The routine usually went something like this: I notice a couple of giggling women pointing at things in the dildo section. I walk up to them with benevolent confidence, like you approach a nervous horse.

Me: Hi. Can I help you find something?

Them: Oh, no, thank you. (more giggling)

Me: Okay. Let me know if you have any questions. If this is your first time here it can be a little intimidating. (At this point I start straightening things a few feet away.)

Them: (giggling, but quieter because I’m around)

Me: (as if just thinking of something) You know, we’ve got one thing in this section that’s very popular.

Them: Oh, that’s okay…

Me: No, it’s no trouble. Here, I’ll show you. (I grab the Mr. Squirmy demo off the shelf) Open your hand. (I set it on her hand)

Them: (more giggles)

Me: Okay, now close your hand around it and shut your eyes.

Them: Why?

Me: Just trust me.

Them: Okay.

Me: Here we go. (I turn it on)

Them: (pause, during which there are no giggles) I’ll take it.

Eventually the late hours, sore feet, scary walk home through Hollywood at night and my burgeoning eternal hatred for David Lee Roth led me to quit the job. But, for one brief shining moment, I was the very best dildo salesman in the entire world.

One year ago tonight I got a phone call from my sister telling me that my mother was dying. After I hung up I sat on the edge of the bed and cried. It is an indication of how much I am estranged from my family that I was surprised at my own tears. Some of those tears were out of anger.

I loved my mother very much, but as an adult I hardly knew her, and the reason was my stepfather.

I’d been happy when they got married. I was eleven years old, and was excited that I was going to have a father again. (My parents had a bitter divorce, and I hadn’t seen my Dad since I was six.)

When they returned from the honeymoon, though, it quickly became apparent that he loathed me and had been concealing it. From then until I left home my senior year of high school he made my life a nightmare. I was continually subject to an endless stream of personal insults, taunts, and draconian punishments for manufactured infractions.

A catalog of the attacks would take pages and serve only to make me depressed and pissed off. Some of the things I recall were possibly just the usual brain damage of adolescence, but many were unmistakably malevolent. His shouting “Wait! You forgot your purse!” out the front door as I climbed into a friend’s car to study at the library is difficult to dismiss as mere teenage paranoia.

Now let’s be clear on this: I was no angel. There were a lot of lines I crossed that I shouldn’t have. I was a teenager, and you all know what that means. And to be perfectly honest, I will also say that on a couple of occasions he interceded with my mom on my behalf, and on some pretty bad stuff, too. I had no explanation for them then, and have none to this day. They tended to muddy my thinking, probably because deep-down I still wanted him to like me.

But most of the time he treated me like something nasty he’d stepped in. Let’s just leave it at this: it damaged me. Physical abuse isn’t the only kind that leaves a mark.

After I had finally had enough and moved out (without having a place to go; I spent much of my early adulthood homeless) I became persona non grata, possibly because I indulged in a bit of childish revenge the day I left: I shot his beloved rain gauge to pieces with a pellet gun. I heard from others in the family that he flew into a rage at the mere mention of my name, the implication of which was that if I were around, mom would suffer for it. So I was not allowed to visit my own mother.

We stayed in touch by telephone over the years, but I generally had to wait for her to call me, since if he answered the phone it would get bad. I got used to it after a while, and sort of thought of myself as an orphan. I moved to Los Angeles, and heard from her once or twice a year, and that was that. A few times when I really got in trouble I risked calling her.

Eventually I ended up moving back to San Antonio (yes, the trouble got that awful), and I managed to visit her a few times when he was out of town. One wall of the house had pictures of all the kids and grandkids on it. Except me. That hurt.

She actually came to my wedding, and even made up with my real father (who was to die of a brain tumor two weeks later). She stayed in my life a bit more after that, especially after my daughter was born. She saw her granddaughter perhaps ten times in three years. Then we moved to Las Vegas because that was where I found work.

So a lot of what I felt when I heard she was dying was rage at all the lost time. I was mad because I didn’t really know her. I was mad because my daughter, now six, was losing the only grandparent she’d ever known, even if she was a virtual stranger. I was mad at him for causing this.

On the plane back to San Antonio, I rehearsed over and over how I was going to handle the situation. My sister had warned me that he was, of course, at the hospital. If he made a scene I was going to tell him firmly but calmly to shut the fuck up and get out of my way so I could see my mother.

I walked into the waiting room, ready for just about anything except what actually happened. He saw me, stood up, came up to me and asked me to forgive him. He said that he had been wrong and wanted to make amends.

I was stunned. I looked at him.

He was a broken man. This wasn’t the ogre of my youth. This was a man that was losing the woman that he loved and doing everything in his power to deny it. He was afraid of what was happening.

In a flash what came back to me wasn’t what he had done, but the bad things in my life that I had done, a couple of which were major-league bad. And it seemed to me that the many times I was an asshole were mostly because of my fears and weaknesses. I almost never set out to be a prick. It just sort of happened because I wasn’t strong.

So I said “I forgive you.” And I did.

My mother rallied for a few months after that, but finally succumbed. She spoke with her granddaughter over the phone a couple of nights before she died. I know the reconciliation had been very important to her.

I have stayed in touch with my stepfather since, although the ongoing soap opera of my own hellish life the last six months has made me withdraw into myself. (Just a couple of months after my mom died, I got laid off and was subsequently forced to move cross-country, with all the fun that that entails.) I should probably call him soon and see how he’s doing.

Anyway, there’s no big moral to this story or anything. Maybe that it’s possible to forgive someone, even if you still have strong feelings about the things that were done to you. I’m only human, of course, and all that old shit still hurts, but I care about the guy and hope he’s okay instead of hating him. Which has got to mean something, right?

Like anyone who has not spent his or her life rotting in some remote Russian village, I have met a great many attractive women. Although it may be skirting the edge of incorrectness to acknowledge it, I suspect that most people generally believe attractive women are a Good Thing.

Some women are, of course, more attractive than others, and this seems to be the cause of some friction. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If I were to express my opinion that Jodie Foster is several orders of magnitude smarter than, say, Paris Hilton, nobody would bat an eyelash, probably even if the eyelash in question actually belonged to Paris Hilton herself. No one doubts that Venus Williams would mercilessly grind poor Paris into the turf at Wimbledon. But to suggest that Angelina Jolie is ten or twelve times more beautiful than the sadly outgunned Ms. Hilton raises hackles in some quarters.

Fie, I say. (That’s old-codger-speak for I call bullshit.) I certainly don’t have a problem with the idea that I have never, do not now, nor shall I ever even vaguely approach the godlike good-lookitude of Brad Pitt or the young Sean Connery. I do not mind that they are far more, well, everything than I am. It’s just the way it is. I’m happy for them. (That utter bastard Jude Law, though… that’s an entirely different matter…) *

What most people don’t realize, though, is that there’s a competitive advantage far greater than mere physical beauty, and I ain’t talking nobility of spirit or chest size. It is pheromones, although you could just as accurately call it an aura or hyper-charisma or witchity hoodoo. Whatever it is, it’s real. I know because I have personally met two women that were preternaturally attractive.

Oho, you are saying to yourself, he just thought they were hot and has been looking for a chance to use the word “preternaturally” in a sentence for years. Perhaps. One of them was very cute, in a short-dark-haired seductive-beatnik-chick sort of way. She was definitely above room temperature. But she gave off some pretty powerful vibes that I picked up on, and it wasn’t just me: she didn’t believe in birth control and had about seven kids.

But the other woman is much more difficult to dismiss. She was, and is, a well-respected character actor, and if you’ve watched television or gone to the movies in the last twenty years chances are you’ve seen her. She is certainly attractive, but most people would probably describe her as “striking” rather than “beautiful.” On the screen she tends to play the oddball mother or a world-weary madame; that sort of role.

Ah, but in person…

If you are a male and you get within ten feet of her it hits you right between the eyes like a twenty-pound sledge. You find yourself involuntarily drawn to her. You think horrible, inappropriately carnal thoughts. You wonder about things like the shape of her calves. While you are in her presence she is amazingly, breathtakingly desirable, even if she’s not your type at all. It’s a bizarre and disorienting experience.

The funny thing is that none of this translates across film, so that when men meet her for the first time they’re completely unprepared. I remember seeing her on one of the deservedly short-lived late night shows of the 90s, and it was hilarious to watch the host when she sat down next to him. He visibly reacted, and you could tell he was confused by his sudden sexual attraction to her. His questions were disjointed, and he seemed vaguely frightened because he couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. If you’d never been exposed to her personal “Orb of Confusion” yourself you would have suspected that he was drunk.

By the way, I didn’t put the moves on either one of these women for the exact same reason that I don’t attempt to juggle chainsaws.

* Just kidding about Jude Law. I think he’s a fine actor and he seems to be a nice guy. Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow is one of my favorite films. True, Jude can’t compete with the Gernsbackian ** tentacled robots in that movie, but that’s just my personal perversion, and certainly not his fault.

** Here’s a special treat: the entire William Gibson short story The Gernsback Continuum on the American Heritage website. It’s a flat-out masterpiece of science fiction, and you owe it to yourself to read it if you haven’t, and reread it if you have.

Special Marital Update: My wife’s reaction to this piece was, “Poor Paris Hilton. She’s become the world’s punching bag.”

“Do you think I was too hard on her?” I asked. “Should I choose someone else?”

“Nah,” she said. “That’s what punching bags are for.”