Bill Wiley

Cell Division

2011-07-28T17:52:00.004-04:00

It’s the end of July, and although it’s sizzling hot here in the northern hemisphere, temperatures are in the mid-twenties in Hell. On a related note, I’m getting a cell phone.

I’m not happy about it, though. In fact I am being dragged, kicking and screaming into the early 1990’s. For over 20 years I have been unwavering in my pledge to never own one. I’ve saved thousands and thousands of dollars by refusing to become one of Those People. I have prided myself in being a stubborn curmudgeon, lashing out against all those people who say, “How do you live without a cell phone?” The real philosophical question is: How well do you live with a cell phone?

My early relationship with cell phones was dysfunctional at best. I was required to schlep one around when I was on call 24/7 at work. The phone was the size of Shaq’s shoe (gesundheit), and along with it I also dragged a “laptop” computer that weighed as much as a bag of topsoil. Back then, I think engineers were instructed to create a “laptop” that would fit Mama Cass.

When I was on call, production workers used to call me at 3 in the morning because they had forgotten their passwords and had to get into their work e-mail so they could show off pictures of their new children/grandchildren/puppy/cat/pickup truck. When I left that job, I renounced cellular technology and swore I’d never fall into that trap. That was a decade ago, and I’ve held my ground. I did say that I might consider a cell phone if they came out with one with a rotary dial.

I believe cell phones are responsible for the collapse of civilization that I see happening today. They turn normal human beings into rude, selfish, dangerously inattentive robots. They are responsible for an increase in traffic fatalities. They are destroying traditional grammar by turning nouns into verbs (as in, “He texted me yesterday.”) And even if research is inconclusive about them contributing to brain/ear/salivary gland tumors, why take the chance? Should I mention the cell phones that have caught fire, cell phone batteries that have exploded or overheated and burned people? Terrorists use them to remotely set off bombs, and they even make guns that look like cell phones that can go undetected at TSA checkpoints. They have spawned the art of “sexting” that has brought down government officials and embarrassed parents of teenagers. Want me to go on? They are harmful electronics, pure and simple, and I detest them. Don’t tell me they’re a necessary evil. They’re just evil.

This is not to say that I don’t fully understand the benefits of having a cell phone for an emergency, but why do I have to pay $11 a month (my half) for something I might never use? For years this has been a point of contention between Other Bill and me, and after a lot of insisting and complaining and whining and me giving in, I say, “I’ll get one as soon as I find a cheap enough plan.” And then I never go looking for a plan, and it is forgotten about until some event happens where having one would have been useful, and Other Bill takes it to task again.

I am as stubborn about this as he is about direct deposit. For 19 years I have told him it would save time and gas if he eliminated standing in long bank lines on Saturdays by signing up for his salary to be electronically transferred into his bank account. He also waits for 3 or 4 checks to pile up before he gathers up his loot and takes it to the bank, so he’s also losing interest on that money. He seems to think if he doesn’t see or touch the check, (or leave it on his dresser for six weeks) he won’t get paid.

So we have both reluctantly agreed. I will get a cell phone if he gets direct deposit. He has 30 days to do the paperwork for direct deposit, and my Jitterbug phone has a 30 day free trial. So if one of us (i.e. Other Bill) fails, the phone goes back.

That’s right: Jitterbug. You’ve seen them advertised on TV and in Parade magazine. It’s the phone that caters to the greater AARP community because it has big readable buttons and displays. When you order it, they will even pre-program frequently used numbers that you give them, because you’re too old and stupid and can’t read a user guide to do it yourself. My favorite part of this service is that the phone has a dial tone to give you a false sense of security and make it seem like you are home on your hospital bed with your oxygen mask on and ordering take-out from Wan Fat.

I prefer the Jitterbug because it’s the farthest thing from a smart phone. In fact, it’s downright stupid. It doesn’t do anything but pretend to be a land line. It doesn’t send or receive texts. It doesn’t have a clue what the Internet is. You can’t download ring tones for it. And when you press zero, you get to talk to a Jitterbug operator for free. It’s been decades since I’ve called an operator just to ask her the time, so I look forward to that. As far as add-ons go, I was overruled when I insisted I didn’t want to pay the extra buck-fifty a month for voice mail, so instead, I have taken a secret vow to never check it. I’ll contend I don’t know how, because I’m too old and stupid to read the user manual. And after a few months, I’ll press zero and tell the operator to cancel the voice mail. That way my Jitterbug will turn into something even stupider.

Part of my giving in to this ridiculous plan is that I get to waive the right to learn my cell phone number, because I am still planning on telling everyone I don’t have a cell phone. And if I don’t know the number, I won’t be able to give it out. The only one who will know the number is Other Bill, and the 911 operator who will take my call during the alleged emergency I will be having somewhere between today and death. You will only be able to get this number if Other Bill betrays me or you bribe the 911 operator who will tell me that sometimes it’s good to make yourself cough when you’re having a heart attack.

We have also agreed that I will not be obligated to carry the phone around with me on my person. I plan on leaving it in the side pocket of my car door. Note to thieves: It’s a red Honda Fit, and the door will be unlocked, so please don’t break the window. That way I’ll be able to go for months without realizing it’s been stolen, provided the thief does not use over 50 minutes a month, which, incidentally, are rollover minutes, whatever that means. Hopefully these minutes won’t trip over the dial tone when they roll over it.

I know there are a few friends out there who will be gleefully trying to rub it in with told-you-so chants, malicious greeting cards and Facebook postings (which will be deleted). So I would like to remind these so-called friends that I am a master of, and pride myself in, the art of retaliation. So expect to get something ten times worse thrown back at you, and if you’re smart, you’ll hide your precious iPhones if you know what’s good for you. I accidentally discovered a liquid you can buy in any grocery store, which will literally dissolve your cell phone while giving it the overpowering smell of a urinal cake. With Glade Plug-In icing. And just because Other Bill’s cell phone melted and is unusable because this liquid accidentally coated his former phone does not mean that I did it in retaliation for his insisting upon my having a cell phone. Or did I?

Is it clear I am not happy about this?

I have agreed to get the phone solely in the event of an emergency during my lengthy 7-mile commute to or from work. And since it’s illegal to drive and talk on a cell phone in this state, the only time I can use it is when it is illegal to do so. (Note to fact checkers: Actually, we don’t have any laws in Florida which ban phoning and driving, but since I work in law enforcement, I can say anything I want, and Other Bill will believe it.)

So yes, I have a cell phone, but if anyone asks me to my face if I have a cell phone, the answer is still no, and I will deny it until the day I die.

So if you want to talk, call me at home.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

And yet another reason to own one.

Who's Your Daddy?

2011-06-06T16:33:00.005-04:00

For an entire lifetime, I have been whining about the devastating effects of growing up fatherless. I probably will still continue to do so, although the older I get the more I realize things could have been worse. A LOT worse.

For example, I read recently in England’s seedy, albeit legitimate tabloid, The Sun, that a guy who was born in 1967 and was given up for adoption decided, later in life, to go hunting for his birth parents. Matthew Roberts found and began corresponding with his birth mother, and he eventually got her to admit that his dad was none other than Charlie Manson. He had been conceived, she said, when Charlie raped her at one of his famous drug-laden orgies.

This startling discovery could spawn (Spahn?) at least two TV events that I can think of: 1) A public service announcement to scare the pants off any adopted kid who’s hell-bent on finding his or her birth parents; 2) A game show called Who’s Your Daddy?

Based on Queen for a Day, Who’s Your Daddy? would bring out 3 adult male adoptees who would take turns telling their tales of woe before a live studio audience. All the contestants share their mournful memories, such as sitting alone on father-son lunch days at school; sleeping in a one-man tent at pop-and-son camp-outs in Boy Scouts, and the humiliation of jockstrap shopping with mom. The contestant who has had the saddest life, based on the results of the Applause-O-Meter, gets to meet his dad and also receive a year of all-you-can-handle psychiatric services. The losers get fifty bucks and some lovely parting gifts. And of course, they all receive a copy of the home game.

So yeah, things could have been worse. Instead of growing up without a dad, I could have been the proud son of a man with a swastika tattooed into his forehead. Imagine how popular he would have been at PTA meetings.

I also picture this familial introduction:

Mom, Dad, I’d like you meet my future in-laws, Harriet and Marty. Harriet and Marty, these are my parents, Charles and June. We want to thank you so much for including us in your Seder this year.

Frankly, I think it would be endearing to watch Charles Manson try to shovel down a plateful of cold herring in cream with a side of gefilte fish. I suspect the food in prison is much more stomachable.

The news report said that Charlie’s son had sunk into a serious depression after learning that his dad was one of the most psychotic people on the planet. Call me crazy, but when I’m depressed about something, the last thing I want to do is alert the media about it. I just want to stay in bed.

The Sun article goes on to say that Roberts had written to and received replies from Dear Old Dad, and the article includes the obligatory images of undecipherable, meaningless, nutcase sentences and signed with a sad attempt at drawing a swastika, which looked more like nothing more than a zigzag. They were written on college ruled notebook paper that had been ripped from the three-ring binder.

Charlie’s boy also said that Daddykins gave him his prison phone number, but Roberts couldn’t bring himself to call his pop. I am guessing the end of that sentence would be “…until the Oprah Network offers me a million dollars up front, half of the pay-per-view and live audience’s gross and a really good speakerphone.”

Well, of course he’s depressed. Who wouldn’t be with that kind of thing in your genetic soup? And how would you go about finding a support group for children of famously horrible parents, and who would be present? Well, for starters: the two dozen Bin Laden kiddies, the Qadaffi Nine, Sitha Pot, Iman Amin, the lesser-known Palin children, Donald Trump’s kids, Miley Cyrus and the Bush twins. Unfortunately, there would be serious language barriers, especially when it came to making sense from what spewed out of Miley, Jenna, and Little Barbara.

Although I sympathize with the biological son, I’m curious as to why he decided to go public with it. If I had received that news, I’d have cut my long black hair, shaved my beard, found a good plastic surgeon who could make me look more like, I dunno, the Pope, maybe. And I would find a really good psychiatrist to help me deal with it.

Like his dad, Roberts is a poet and artist. They are unmistakably similar in appearance. With a little makeup, he could make a fortune jumping out of the darkness and yelling, “Death to Pigs!” and scaring little children at Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Night. I’m sure they would pay him top dollar, and Roberts would be on every Florida billboard on I-95 during the month of October. But other than the monetary rewards, what good could come out of going public with this? Maybe it would make you attractive in some women’s eyes, but I would think that most of these women would be more interested in the cash they could rack up by prancing around the talk show circuit with their firstborn, the third generation of Manson.

Will you just look at those eyes? He looks just like his grandpa on the cover of Life.

Maybe his hope is to find other Manson offspring, his half sisters and brothers. I read that Manson admits to three sons, and according to eyewitnesses, Manson was notoriously, tirelessly virile, so Roberts isn’t the only Charlie-bastard running around depressed. Probably more than a handful of them are scattered around the country. They could all get together, commiserate and, with a little musical coaching, form the Manson Family Singers. On Ice. They could sing some of their dad’s tunes, old Country favorites, remakes, and their own compositions. What else could piss off their dad more than making it big in the recording industry, which was Charlie’s biggest dream, but just one of his thousands of failures?

I recommend these tracks for the playlist of their debut CD, with the working title of “Meet the Mansons.”

Hey, Hey We’re the Mansons
Papa Don’t Preach
Nothing Compares to You
We are Family
Love Child
Crazy
I Don’t Know How to Love Him
Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word
Medley: The First Cut is the Deepest/Cuts Both Ways
Have Mercy on the Criminal
I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)
Killing Me Softly

Read the article.

Thanks to Mary and Chris for their contributions to this post.

Samurai Junkman

2011-04-21T20:20:00.012-04:00

At the tender age of 30, even though I was working as a Kelly Girl without benefits, I had decided it was time to break down and buy a new car.

I had never owned a new car before. I had a thousand-dollar Volkswagen that I’d kept for ten years and then sold for $1200. Then I had a $1200 Rabbit that I abandoned shortly after the master cylinder blew out while I was speeding down a steep grade in West Virginia. Not having any brakes, at the bottom of a hill I flew through a stop sign and plowed into a corn field. Then I got another used bug, a convertible, that was fond of rocketing out the oil pan plug, immediately draining all the oil onto the street and illuminating a red light on my dashboard. I was lucky to have never been fined by the EPA, nor did I ever file an environmental impact statement.

Then I bought, for $700, a rusted-out 4 wheel drive Subaru, which was brown. The hatchback, clearly taken from junkyard skeletal remains, was blue. I couldn't deal with driving a spare parts car, so I ended up spray-painting the hatchback almost the same brown as the rest of the car. Although it did get me in and out of the snow, every time I shifted gears, let my foot off the gas, or turned off the ignition, it would emit a sound similar to a cannon blast.

As a temporary Kelly Girl, I was earning in the single digits per hour, so economy was at the top of the list of must-haves for my new car. And four wheel drive. I lived at the bottom of a hill on a dirt road. I could be trapped for days in the winter.

It would have made sense to buy a Jeep, but that was cost-prohibitive. I needed something less than the cheapest four wheel drive on the market.

Enter the Suzuki Samurai, which looked like a shrunken-down version of a Jeep CJ. And like the Jeep CJ, it was convertible. Well, at least the top came off. Buying the Samurai would, I concluded, make me look like the tough, rugged, Marlboro Mannish stereotypical Jeep driver, but on a smaller scale. As my friend Jack told me, “You want to be butch, but you don’t want to be that butch.”

So I drove 150 miles to Maryland to the closest Suzuki dealer. I had my checkbook, and I wasn’t leaving without a black-with-a-black-top model. If I were going to be not-that-butch, I wanted to be the butchest of the not-that-butch.

I went into the showroom and asked the first salesman/leech who approached me if I could test drive a Samurai. He got the keys and sent me on my way. It was a little sluggish, and maybe a little loud, and it had sticky vinyl seats. But it didn’t explode or shoot out the oil plug or lose the brakes, so I was sold. I went back to negotiate.

Samurais, at the time, believe it or not, were a hot-ticket item and selling like hotcakes. The arrogant leech/salesman flat-out refused to negotiate because I wanted your basic stripped model. No pin striping, no air conditioning, no radio, no power steering. Just the car. He said if I would consider adding on options, he could find some wiggle room there, but that would still have been more money, so I agreed to pay the asking price, which was $7000-something. He ran the credit check, and drawing up the bill of sale said, “Oh, I forgot to ask. Do you want a back seat with that? It’s $500 more."

I took a spatula and scraped my jaw off the floor. What car company considers the back seat a luxury, or worse, optional equipment? In the end I bought the back seat, and anyone who ever sat in it would grow to hate me for it.

I was saddled with a car payment for the first time in my life, and I didn’t like it at all.

But I did have my first new car! For the first week I was so proud of it. I brought it home, gave it two coats of expensive car wax, cleaned the windows, and Armor-Alled the black vinyl top, the seats, the dash, the gearshift knob. During the second week of ownership, it was announced by Consumer Reports that the Samurai, with its short wheel span and top heaviness, was a severe rollover risk. Demand plunged, as did the prices.

My little dream car quickly deteriorated into an unpleasant driving experience. When ever you sped up and got into fifth gear, the cheesy vinyl top would flap and slap, sounding like high-speed applause. I had put in a radio-cassette player and powerful speakers that could barely be heard at full blast with all that flapping going on.

On careful inspection, I sadly realized that the majority of the car was made out of what normally comes on long rolls in which to wrap food. The doors, thin and tinny, made a clank noise when you shut them, like a teaspoon tapping an empty tuna can. Clearly, the metal on this machine was nothing more than Reynolds Wrap. The plastic windows in the vinyl top were weak and deteriorated quickly, so they were pretty much Seran Wrap. The vinyl upholstery was brittle and made a crunching sound whenever it was stressed, especially in winter. In other words, Cut Rite waxed paper. The “carpeting” was pretty much the consistency of kraft paper.

The weak engine was made by the Ideal Toy Corporation and was formerly used in the Karmann Ghia Motorific car. I took it on one long road trip that required navigating through some rather steep mountains. The car could not even climb to the top of an overpass in fifth gear. It would stall or shake until you downshifted into fourth or third, and then the engine would whine while the vinyl top applauded. Climbing over the Blue Ridge mountains, I was left in the dust by passing tractor-trailers, Vespas, and grandmothers on roller skates.

A special feature on the car: When you drove through gusty winds, the car magically turned into a box kite.

On most convertibles, you undo a couple of latches, press a button, and in seconds you are driving with the top down. The Samurai was a little different. Each time I wanted to put the top down, I would have to hire a mechanical engineer for two hours to help me get it off and again when I wanted it placed back. There were snaps and slots and Velcro loops and zippers. It was important to have a supply of Q-Tips on hand for cleaning out the gunk in the slots. Eventually in the summer I would just leave the top off and stick a big beach umbrella in it while I was at work, and that, for the most part, kept it relatively dry until I got it home and parked it safely in the garage.

It was not by any means a comfortable car, especially if you were a passenger in the back seat. Every time you hit a bump (and by “hitting a bump” I mean “running over a cigarette butt”), the rear passengers were sent flying skyward, so seat belts were more than mandatory. They were life-or-death. In summer, the vinyl seats demanded your sweat. If you wore cutoffs and went shirtless (which 30-year-old, not-that-butch kind of men tend to do in summer), extracting yourself from the seat was often a painful experience which yielded a sound similar to Velcro being separated. Only if you were lucky did you get out with all your skin still in place.

Nevertheless, mechanically, the car stayed the course. I had to replace the muffler twice, and someone stuck forks in the rear Seran Wrap windows and broke in and stole my stereo twice. It would have been just as easy to get in by unzipping the back window, but I suspect the thieves didn’t have ready access to a mechanical engineer. As long as it got me from point A to B, I was fine with it. I faithfully crawled under it every 3000 miles and changed the oil, and I never had any engine or transmission problems. I drove it for 10 years, or 100,000 miles, whichever came first.

By then I had a permanent job and was making three times as much as my Kelly Girl job. I was growing older, and I was tired of chipping my teeth whenever I went over a speed bump, so I went shopping for a newer car. I was over the new car obsession and ended up with a two-year-old vehicle.

It was a 1995 Suzuki Sidekick. It's shown in the picture, above, between the Samurai and the Motorific Karmann Ghia.

Some not-that-butch guys never learn.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Deleting the Dead

2011-04-18T17:44:00.004-04:00

The electronic lady who prompts me from our voice mail system told me yesterday that I was about to run out of message space, and she strongly encouraged me to delete some of the Forty! Seven! old messages that I had been too lazy to review over the past several months.

This, of course, required me to listen to all of the Forty! Seven! messages, or at least the beginning of them. I ended up deleting all but three of them. The ones I kept were from people who are dead.

I don’t know why I can’t bring myself erase them. The messages were from good friends, and one of them died just months ago. Maybe it seems like some final act of betrayal to delete them to make room for messages from the living, most of whom are strangers since it was my work voice mailbox. Yet, I can’t press that number 3 button on the phone, knowing I’ll be unable to hear their voices again. I find it odd, and just a little bit macabre, because I don’t intentionally go back and play their old messages to hear them speak again. That is, until the electronic lady tells me it’s time. And then it's surprising, because I have forgotten I've intentionally not deleted them.

Many years ago, in an early version of Microsoft Windows, there was an applet called Cardfile, which was nothing but a digital version of a Rolodex. Instead of flipping through tiny pages of real Rolodex cards, you would click your way through virtual pages to find the contact information of anyone you put in there.

It was during this timeframe that my beloved Aunt Dorothy died. She lived to be 95, and whenever I went to visit her she would always make a cheese ball, nut rolls and her famous calico beans. Because I have never been a very good file clerk, her name was alphabetized under “Aunt” instead of “Dorothy”, and hers was the first “card” that appeared whenever I opened the Cardfile program. Seeing it after she died would always make me a little sad (and hungry), so one day I decided to get rid of the virtual card. I clicked the button on the screen, and a dialog box appeared that read: “Delete Aunt Dorothy?” with Yes and No buttons underneath the question.

Microsoft no longer includes Cardfile in its operating system, and frankly I’m glad. I felt resentful that some computer was throwing salt on my wound. Well, no! I thought, I don’t want to delete Aunt Dorothy! Why is that left up to me to make that decision? I pondered a couple of things: If I deleted her, I thought, I would soon forget about her jovial cackle and hard Pittsburgh accent. And of course, the cheese ball, nut rolls and calico beans as well. If I didn’t delete her, would that bring her back? In the end, I kept Aunt Dorothy, although I cloaked it under a card with merely the letter “A” on it, so she wasn’t the first one to appear. That was stupid, because every time I saw the “A” I knew what it stood for, and what it was covering up.

Today, with a Contacts section in every e-mail program, when you delete a contact, it just goes away without a requesting a confirmation. That’s the way it should be. This does not mean that computer programmers are becoming kinder and gentler, otherwise why would they have created autocomplete?

Just about any e-mail application now has autocomplete enabled to reduce your keyboard strokes. For example, in composing a message to Other Bill, I just have to type a “B” in the “To:” box, and his complete e-mail address pops up for me to select. I just hit the Tab key, and the software fills his in his address automatically, saving me sixteen keystrokes.

But dead people show up in the autocomplete list when you begin to type in something that looks like their e-mail address. They are easily deleted without any sass from the computer, but most people don’t know how, and the dead remain as reminders. I recently deleted from that list someone I never talk to anymore (a CPA who used to do my taxes for me—badly!) She disappeared completely after I highlighted her name and hit the delete key. The computer didn’t ask me, “Are you sure you want to delete That Lousy CPA?”

These little unthoughtful computer annoyances are nothing compared to physically cleaning up after the dead. In my 54 years I have never had to clean out the belongings of anyone who died. My mother took care of my dad’s clothes and other possessions. Later on, my sister handled my mother’s affairs. Other relatives and friends who have died, naturally, had their spouses or children take on that depressing deed. I can’t imagine how painful it would be to throw out Other Bill’s “Tuff Guy” t-shirt that was given to him by a friend who died years ago. How do you go through someone’s belongings that evoke so many memories when you’re already suffering such crippling pain? I’d have to hire someone to do it, but someone who would do a lousy, incomplete job so it wouldn’t look like anything was missing. The only person who could half-ass that task would be Other Bill, but he’d be deleted. Maybe That Lousy CPA would offer to botch that chore, just as she had my income taxes.

As I age, the impact that death has on me has diminished. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve sat through scores of funerals since the 1980’s, or if the Prozac just works well. I still hate being the one who has to click the mouse or erase the voice of a close friend. Maybe funeral homes could recognize significant revenue by offering a digital deleting service. For a stiff fee, they could delete every recording and every computer account and all of the family’s autocomplete entries.
Before I die, I want to turn over my passwords to a trusted friend who could freak people out by sending humorous musings from me on what it’s like being dead via e-mail and Facebook. I would write several years’ worth in advance. My Facebook status could be changed periodically.

For example:

Bill Wiley is dead, but really, it’s not that bad. A little dark. I could do with a flashlight.
Bill Wiley is just visiting hell. Honestly, it’s no worse than Orlando in August. In fact, it’s better. People here are so much more interesting than your typical Disney tourist, with the exception of Mom. She is still complaining and criticizing. I sure am glad I brought that Get Out of Hell free card. There are a lot of people just walking around trying to find their lost car keys and glasses.
Bill Wiley just found his first Siamese cat, Mr. Ling, playing Deathville.
Bill Wiley got his first look at God today. She looks a lot like Moms Mabley. That explains a lot.

And then an alert reader could collect them and publish them in a bestseller. They could call it Heaven is for Real.

Oh, that’s been done, you say? Damn. I am always a day late and a dollar short when it comes to becoming another Jacqueline Susann.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

2011-04-18T17:29:00.002-04:00

The electronic lady who prompts me from our voice mail system told me yesterday that I was about to run out of message space, and she strongly encouraged me to delete some of the Forty! Seven! old messages that I had been too lazy to review over the past several months.

This, of course, required me to listen to all of the Forty! Seven! messages, or at least the beginning of them. I ended up deleting all but three of them. The ones I kept were from people who are dead.

I don’t know why I can’t bring myself erase them. The messages were from good friends, and one of them died less than two months ago. Maybe it seems like some final act of betrayal to delete them to make room for messages from the living, most of whom are strangers since it was my work voice mailbox. Yet, I can’t press that number 3 button on the phone, knowing I’ll be unable to hear their voices again. I find it odd, and just a little bit macabre, because I don’t intentionally go back and play their old messages to hear them speak again. That is, until the electronic lady tells me it’s time. And then it's surprising, because I have forgotten I've intentionally not deleted them.

Many years ago, in an early version of Microsoft Windows, there was an applet called Cardfile, which was nothing but a digital version of a Rolodex. Instead of flipping through tiny pages of real Rolodex cards, you would click your way through virtual pages to find the contact information of anyone you put in there.

It was during this time frame that my beloved Aunt Dorothy died. She lived to be 95, and whenever I went to visit her she would always make a cheese ball, nut rolls and her famous calico beans. Because I have never been a very good file clerk, her name was alphabetized under “Aunt” instead of “Dorothy”, and hers was the first “card” that appeared whenever I opened the Cardfile program. Seeing it after she died would always make me a little sad (and hungry), so one day I decided to get rid of the virtual card. I clicked the button on the screen, and a dialog box appeared that read: “Delete Aunt Dorothy?” with Yes and No buttons underneath the question.

Microsoft no longer includes Cardfile in its operating system, and frankly I’m glad. I felt resentful that some computer was throwing salt on my wound. Well, no! I thought, I don’t want to delete Aunt Dorothy! Why is that left up to me to make that decision? I pondered a couple of things: If I deleted her, I thought, I would soon forget about her jovial cackle and hard Pittsburgh accent. And of course, the cheese ball, nut rolls and calico beans as well. If I didn’t delete her, would that bring her back? In the end, I kept Aunt Dorothy, although I cloaked it under a card with merely the letter “A” on it, so she wasn’t the first one to appear. That was stupid, because every time I saw the “A” I knew what it stood for, and what it was covering up.

Today, with a Contacts section in every e-mail program, when you delete a contact, it just goes away without a requesting a confirmation. That’s the way it should be. This does not mean that computer programmers are becoming kinder and gentler, otherwise why would they have created autocomplete?

Just about any e-mail application now has autocomplete to reduce your keyboard strokes. For example, in composing a message to Other Bill, I just have to type a “B” in the “To:” box, and his complete e-mail address pops up for me to select. I just hit the Tab key, and the software fills his in his address automatically, saving me sixteen keystrokes.
But dead people show up in the autocomplete list when you begin to type in something that looks like their e-mail address. They are easily deleted without any sass from the computer, but most people don’t know how, and the dead remain as reminders. I recently deleted from that list someone I never talk to anymore (a CPA who used to do my taxes for me—badly!) She disappeared completely after I highlighted her name and hit the delete key. The computer didn’t ask me, “Are you sure you want to delete That Lousy CPA?”

These little unthoughtful computer annoyances are nothing compared to physically cleaning up after the dead. In my 54 years I have never had to clean out the belongings of anyone who died. My mother took care of my dad’s clothes and other possessions. Later on, my sister handled my mother’s affairs. Other relatives and friends who have died, naturally, had their spouses or children take on that depressing deed. I can’t imagine how painful it would be to throw out Other Bill’s “Tuff Guy” t-shirt that was given to him by a friend who died years ago. How do you go through someone’s belongings that evoke so many memories when you’re already suffering such crippling pain? I’d have to hire someone to do it, but someone who would do a lousy, incomplete job so it wouldn’t look like anything was missing. The only person who could half-ass that task would be Other Bill, but he’d be deleted. Maybe That Lousy CPA would offer to botch that chore, just as she did my income taxes.

As I age, the impact that death has on me has diminished. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve sat through scores of funerals since the 1980’s, or if the Prozac just works well. I still hate being the one who has to click the mouse or erase the voice of a close friend. Maybe funeral homes could recognize significant revenue by offering a digital deleting service. For a stiff fee, they could delete every recording and every computer account and all of the family’s autocomplete entries.

Before I die, I want to turn over my passwords to a trusted friend who could freak people out by sending humorous musings from me on what it’s like being dead via e-mail and Facebook. I would write several years’ worth in advance. My Facebook status could be changed periodically. For example:

Bill Wiley is dead, but really, it’s not that bad. A little dark. I could do with a flashlight.
Bill Wiley is just visiting hell. Honestly, it’s no worse than Orlando in August. In fact, it’s better. People here are so much more interesting than your typical Disney tourist, with the exception of Mom. She is still complaining and criticizing. I sure am glad I brought that Get Out of Hell free card. There are a lot of people just walking around trying to find their lost car keys and glasses.
Bill Wiley just found his first Siamese cat, Mr. Ling, playing Deathville.
Bill Wiley got his first look at God today. She looks a lot like Moms Mabley. That explains a lot.
And then an alert reader could collect them and publish them in a bestseller. They could call it Heaven is for real

Oh, that’s been done, you say? Damn. I am always a day late and a dollar short when it comes to becoming another Jacqueline Susann.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Huffing Post

2010-12-27T22:40:00.006-05:00

I was held up by a computer today at Home Depot.

Usually I get into the self-checkout line, because I can always convince myself it is quicker than going to a live cashier. It never is, though. Human cashiers are professionals and can resolve problems immediately. They have override power and can enter bar code numbers manually when the self-checkout scanners refuse to do so. The self-checkout stations draw in the mentally challenged, the illiterate, and as a special holiday treat, French Canadians, who generally fit into both categories.

I deceive myself into believing that the self-checkout is quicker because of the shorter lines. Let's say there are three people in line at self-checkout, and there are two self-checkout stations available, The shorter line should move faster than being behind six people in a living, breathing, single cashier line. I do try to pre-screen the people in front of me. If the person at station A is using in a Jazzy and buying 12-foot-lengths of lumber, and the person at station B is speaking rustic French to no one, it’s time to find another self-checkout line.

This time I was next in line at a self-checkout. At station A, there was a woman who apparently knew what she was doing and was scanning her hardware as a professional cashier would. At station B, there was a man who had four large, sewer-sized PVC fittings. One of them would scan; three wouldn’t. He was very frustrated and was actually screaming at the computer: “C’mon! I don’t have time for this shit!” Considering he probably had a septic tank emergency happening at his home, I believed him. He tried sliding the pipe; he tried rolling. He tried both bottom and side scanners. Nothing worked.

Meanwhile, the self-checkout monitor was ignoring all the problems of all the self-checker-outers. Eating a chicken wing and filing down her expensive acrylic nails while chatting on her Bluetooth, this multi-tasker had clearly selected the least customer friendly tasks.

The woman at Station A, meanwhile, was performing a deep cavity search on herself, in a feeble attempt to locate her debit card.

I was stuck there. Meanwhile the seventh person in the living, breathing, single cashier lane where I should have been had taken his receipt and handed it to the store security guard. This outsourced employee was an illiterate 9-year old dressed in an ill-fitting shirt with pseudo-police patches (which probably belonged to his alcoholic father/mother who was out on a holiday binge at the time). The child made a big, pink-highlighter X on the receipt, without even bothering to look at or count the customer’s items.

Over her Bluetooth, the self-checkout monitor finally heard the PVC man’s computer rage, toothpicked out the chicken residue from her teeth, blew the acrylic dust off her plastic nails and shuffled over to the screaming man, and guided him over to her place.

The checkout screen that was now mine informed me that, “Your order has been cancelled.” I waited and waited for the screen that asked me to pick the language I wanted, but, of course, that never happened. I touched the “call attendant” button, which only served to bring up on my screen four PVC fittings. Before I could respond, the angry man returned from the attendant’s station and said, “I just have to pay now. He pulled the credit card from his wallet and selected “Cash” as his method of payment.

I don’t need to go on, do I? By this time, the lady at Station A had moseyed off to the Outdoor Grilling department and had selected a pair of barbecue tongs and was using them to probe deeper, in a feeble attempt to find her payment method.

Hours later, and with much assistance, PVC man was finished, and lo and behold, the screen asked me for my preferred language. I thought of selecting Spanish just to piss off the person behind me, but then I remembered the Golden Rule. I scanned my one 97-cent item. The screen returned with a dialog box that read, “Please show attendant your photo ID.” Why, I wondered, did I have to show a photo ID? Clearly, the computer thought I was buying Home Depot crack, so I looked up and tried to get the attention of Miss Bluetooth Nails.

The “attendant” at that time was then with her supervisor, and they were sharing a dessert.

By luck, I saw another open station and rushed over to it. The “attendant” reached her station and was dabbing her lips with her Home Depot apron and screamed at me, “Sir, you just had to show ID because you were buying paint!” But she didn’t bother looking at my driver’s license, because I looked old enough to be her grandfather. I returned to Station B, scanned my credit card and left.

Who knew that you had to have a passport to buy a 97-cent can of spray paint? I assume that it’s all because of the huffing movement going on. The only people I know who have been punished for huffing are people my age and up to 20 years younger. What good does a driver’s license do? Acknowledge that you’re old enough to huff and drive? He’s old enough to drive, so he’s old enough to kill millions of brain cells via inhaling.

I remembered the many nights as a teenager, hanging outside the Liquorama, hoping to find a really cool adult who would have no problem buying me a quart of Jose Gaspar rum for $3.99 (which didn’t even include the coupon), and I thought of a new retirement enterprise. I can stand outside of Home Depot in a trenchcoat, looking for children with blue goatees to whom I can sell spray paint at a 1900% markup. On a good day, I could do the same thing at Office Depot to sell keyboard-cleaning compressedair at a higher markup to the better groomed.

I got home at sunset, spray painted the frame I had bought at the thrift store, and I am much calmer now and have put the whole annoying incident behind me. That incident is just a fading memory. But since the can is now empty, it’s time to go scrub the paint off my face. No one would believe a 54-year-old with a jet-black goatee. Next time I'll buy silver. From a living, breathing cashier.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

How to Age Prematurely

2010-10-29T16:21:00.005-04:00

I’ve written before about how annoyed I get when people give me the senior discount without even asking me if I’m a senior. For the record, as of this writing, I am 12 years younger than being an official senior, and I have changed my tune about taking offense when people assume I have supplemental Medicare insurance and am reaping the fruits of my Social Security.

Since April, I’ve been hanging out every other weekend with my new best friend, a 98.5-year-old woman who is the only person on the planet (above ground) who knew my dad in the 1920’s. Perhaps this has made me feel young again and not take offense to the ageist opinions recently piled upon me.

But it is more likely that I just welcome any discounts offered to or insisted upon by me. My changed tune, which sounds like Big Band music, makes me want to assist younger people in achieving the same fraudulent status of which I am now taking advantage. Yes, kids, you too, can ruin your looks early by following my unique regimen of activities that will get you significant senior discounts when you are merely middle-aged.

1. Enjoy the sun. Just as I did, you should go to the beach as frequently as possible, and take tanning accelerator with you instead of sunblock, an umbrella, and a muumuu. Just as I did, spend all day there during peak ultraviolet exposure hours. Go even when it is overcast, because you will still get a nice ruby finish to your skin similar to that of a red snapper.

2. Not near the beach? If you find yourself summering in, say, Denver, take advantage of being a mile closer to the sun and bask in the sweat-free comfort of low humidity. Lie in your aunt’s back yard on a nice big towel, drenched in baby oil, Coppertone or Hawiian Tropic tanning lotion. Feel free to take naps there from eleven AM to one PM. Then eat lunch, flip over, and take another nap from 1:15 until dusk. The days will go by very quickly, and you will be the most envied person in middle school upon your return.

3. Spend some time in the Middle East. Nothing says, “quick-fried to a crackly-crunch” more than the year I spent in the Saudi Arabian desert, where highs in the summer were in the mid-to-high 130’s. Keep your car windows down and your air conditioner off. Feel the burn and enjoy the excitement of being able to get sun blisters by just walking from your car to your doorstep.

4. Pretend that moisturizer doesn’t exist.

5. Shower in hot water and use caustic deodorant soap applied with a loofa or, if you’re budget-conscious, a Brillo pad.

6. Take care of your oily skin and blackheads by rubbing isopropal into your pores with a washcloth.

7. This isn’t anything you have control over, but you can pray that both of your parents will age prematurely. My dad was gray in his 30’s, and my mother was as thin-skinned as your average Florida backyard lizard. Genetics play an important role. It’s especially advisable to have your mother’s brothers be thin haired or bald with psychiatric disorders. A history of cardiovascular or degenerative disk disease in the family wouldn’t hurt either.

8. Remember you can always vacation near the Equator. You can go anywhere around zero latitude year round and expect a heaping helping of 12 hours of sunshine. I’ve been to Seychelles, but I've never been to Kiritimati.

Follow those eight simple steps, and you, too could find yourself:
► getting an offer for early retirement
► being escorted across the street by an adorable, clean-cut Boy Scout
► receiving compliments on what nice teeth you have for someone your age
► qualifying for Meals on Wheels
► accepting a Jazzy at no cost to you

and receiving multiple other discounts for which your peers have to sit back and wait 20 years to receive.

Here’s the latest good news. Other Bill and I just returned from a vacation in San Francisco, which is a great place to be if you want to avoid the sun and foolishly maintain your youthful appearance. We are bolder these days and now brazenly ask for senior discounts. Two of the days we were there, it was raining non-stop, so we decided to take in a couple of movies. Instead of paying $10.50 for matinees, we demanded the senior discount and paid just six bucks a ticket, which was still not enough to wheedle us into paying $29.50 for a bag of popcorn.

Back at the hotel, where the lighting in the bathroom mirror was superior to our home furnishings, I rejoiced when I saw not one, not two, but six new wrinkles just outside my tragus on both ears. Looking good!

When the sun came out again, we were wandering around the city on a crowded bus. In the front third of the bus, there are stickers on the windows that read: “These seats must be vacated for the disabled and the elderly.”

Imagine my joy when a conscientious young woman in her thirties stood up and offered me her seat.

I really wanted to accept the gesture, but I guess I’m just not there yet. I’m happy to take advantage of corporations, but not quite at the point to do the same to generous individuals.

On the flip side, later in the week we were racing a couple who was probably 25 years our junior up Russian Hill, and got there easily a block and a half before they did.

I can’t wait to tell my cardiologist.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Stupid Old Man Tricks

2010-08-18T16:40:00.003-04:00

There have been some goings-on under the Bill roof lately that have me a little bit disturbed. I don’t know if I am pre-Alzheimers, just old, or just not paying attention to things.

A few months ago I made reservations to go see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, also known as dudes in tutus. It’s an all-male ballet troupe, and the ballerinas are men. I saw them about 30 years ago and thought it would be fun to see their hilarious rendition of “Swan Lake” once more.

So we got to the will-call window, and they couldn’t find tickets under my name. They checked the credit card. That didn’t help. Apparently when I bought the on-line tickets I neglected to click the “Buy” button. The show was one night only and sold out, so after miraculously getting our parking fee back, the Bills drove back home with their tails between their legs and ate ice cream and watched part of a DVD before falling asleep on the couch.

My next theatrical gaffe took place in Miami. This time I made sure I had actual tickets in my hand to take with me. We parked the car, got a bite to eat, and when the theater doors swung open, we waited in line to get our tickets’ barcodes validated. Somewhere, a buzzer sounded, and we were rejected. It turned out that our reservations for our seats were not good until the following night.

That may sound disappointing, but at least we were early instead of 24 hours too late. And even though the next day’s date was clearly printed on the ticket, in a bold font, no less, I hadn’t bothered to read it. My mind is such a steel trap these days. Not galvanized or stainless; more like corroded and rusty. Fortunately, a trip to the box office got us, for $20 more, seats for that night that were in a better location. So that was good, because in Miami, I know we wouldn’t have gotten our parking refunded. We enjoyed seeing Spring Awakening for the third time, because apparently it is the only show that we like. And we’ll probably go see it next year as well, hopefully on the right day. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but thinking before the curtain rose, “What the hell is wrong with me?”

And it’s not just harmless little boo-boos that are making me question my sanity. Some of these things are very costly.

For instance, our back lawn was being ravaged by sod webworms. Millions of little white moths flying around meant they had larvae digesting the roots of the grass. I sprayed them once, but they came back. So it was time to spray it again.

When I went to reach for the pump sprayer, there was about a quarter of a tank left of insecticide, or so I thought. I didn’t dump it out, but merely mixed the new bug killer with the old bug killer. In less than two days I discovered the quarter of the tank left in the sprayer was not pesticide, but instead, herbicide. So, okay, the good news is that the sod webworms are gone. The bad news is: so is the back lawn. The front yard is lush and green. The back yard looks and sounds, when you step on it, like shredded wheat. This will no doubt require tilling and re-sodding unless we decide that paving is more practical, which it is. You need a jackhammer to destroy cement, not just a garden sprayer. And that would take more effort than I have the strength to give.

Another costly mistake was made earlier this year. I purchased non-refundable airline tickets to San Francisco, and, oddly enough, made non-refundable hotel reservations for the week before we were to arrive. We got it straightened out, for a fee, of course. I have no explanation for this. I can’t even make up something that would make someone say, “Oh, well, that’s an easy mistake to make.” It’s not. It’s something a bald-headed Stooge would do. It was a stupid mistake that makes it look like I am content sabotaging my own well being.

It’s scary to think about what the future holds for me. Will I buy 40-pound bags of Jello, thinking they are pool salt? I can see me diving into a red-colored pool, only to bounce back onto the pavement. Will I get quick-drying cement mixed up with the Drano? Sometimes I feel like I’ve been dropped into the middle of a Road Runner cartoon. It’s a small wonder one of my many nicknames is “Wiley Coyote.”

Countless have been the times that I incur late fees just because I forget to pay a bill on time. I’ve even started racking up fines at the library for forgetting I checked out books that I didn’t have time to read. During times of drought, I’ve tossed the hose in the pool and left it running until the pool overflowed. I once nearly destroyed Other Bill’s car after failing to tighten the oil filter after I changed the oil.

A lot of people dread getting older and forgetful, and I am certainly a member of that club. But for my own physical safety and financial protection, assisted living can’t come soon enough.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Pansy

2010-08-18T16:19:00.003-04:00

I’ve been called a lot of names in my life, but the worst case happened recently.

In one of his lost columns, my dad wrote about the outrage he endured one morning, crossing the street at an intersection. He was crossing a crosswalk before a impatient right-turning driver who called out to him: “C’mon, grandpa. Move it along.”

My dad was in his late 30’s at the time. Ah, the curse of being prematurely gray.

It’s not unusual for school playmates to name-call in a group in order to feign superiority, nor is it remarkable when siblings do it to each other. I have always had an abnormally large head, and my sister, even today, likes to rib me about that.

When I was in junior high school and got my braces off my teeth, I was shocked at the yellow color of my teeth. This, as I found out years later, was not due to poor hygiene but was the result of large amounts of tetracycline I got shot into my butt during my wonder years.

I tried everything. Baking soda, expensive Pearl Drops tooth “polish,” and even sent away for this tooth paint that used to be in tiny ads in the backs of magazines. There was a picture of a grinning woman holding a Q-tip against her bright, shiny smile. I saved up my allowance and got a money order and sent away for a bottle of it. It turned out to be nothing more than Liquid Paper with a different label. Sure it made your teeth white, but it had a brush-marked matte finish that stuck to the inside of your lips. It also scraped off when you ate. Another failure. Thus, my sister continued to keep referring to me as Chief Yellowteef.

Last week after receiving the slander of a lifetime, I thought back and remembered the second worst name I was ever called. It happened, not surprisingly, in seventh grade.

There was a boy who entered my sixth grade class as The New Kid, a transplant from the hills of a southern state. For want of a better name, let’s call him Andy Taylor.

He turned out to be one of my best friends in sixth grade, and at the beginning of seventh grade I carpooled with him and his little brother to school, and I carpooled home with other friends when school let out.

Andy and I used to go to movies and ride the big toboggan slide that was set up in the Monkey Wards parking lot. One weekend a family friend rented a hotel on the beach, and Andy came with me to spend the day romping in the swimming pool and eating all the free junk food that we could stuff into ourselves. It had been a really fun day.

In junior high, life was hugely different than it had been in elementary school. You were taught by several teachers, not just one. You had to get naked in P.E. and discover that some boys were developing faster than others, and it only served to make those undeveloped, unmuscled, hairless boys without Adam’s apples feel even more inferior about our bodies. Those of us who had slower hormones prayed every night that God would light a fire under our testosterone, or whatever it was that made guys bigger, hairier, and more physically defined than we were.

Over the summer between sixth and seventh grade, I disappeared as I often did to Colorado to be with my favorite aunt. After I got back, it didn’t take long to realize that the entire social structure had changed. Girls, who used to be our enemies, were often given assignments. They asked their girlfriends to ask our friends to ask us if we liked them. This was done by telephone, sometimes from parties, or note-passing or whispering in class. Whenever a friend of mine told me that a girl wanted to know if I liked her, my standard response to deliver third-hand to the girl was, “Yes. As a friend.”

That was the kiss of death for a girl. It would have been an improvement if I had instead said, “Yes, I like her at least as much as I like Hitler.”

Boys were trying to act more grown up. At the one party I was invited to, I was shocked to see boys smoking stolen cigarettes from their parents’ stash. And racy girls carried embezzled alcohol in cleaned-out green squirt bottles of liquid acne soap that they buried in their purses. Couples went to dark corners and kissed!

I was having none of that. I didn’t feel grown up enough to be doing that. Furthermore, I didn’t want to do any of that. My testosterone was still incubating in the tundra of my body.
That kind of attitude got you nowhere in a hurry fast with the people who were drawn into the popularity race. Nothing pushed you to the bottom rung faster than not being interested in girls, or cigarettes or gin.

So it was inevitable that my nouveau-cool friends would turn on me. I was standing at a urinal in the boy’s bathroom at Wilson Junior High School when it happened. The feet-to-chest porcelain fixtures were bizarrely arranged in pairs, flush against each other at 90 degree angles. I was peeing at the one closest to the exit, and no one else was in the room.

Then Andy, who had established himself by then as a jock, walked into the bathroom and stood at the urinal farthest away from me. And he started chanting in a singsong way, “Bill is a pansy. BILL IS A PANSY.”

I couldn’t for the life of me understand the betrayal. He had nothing to gain by doing this, as there were no witnesses who could cheer him on or make note of his superiority. He was saying that because he meant it.

At that time I thought he was right. Maybe because I wasn’t like he was, I was a pansy. I looked down into the urinal while zipping up. I felt tears starting to well up in my eyes, and I bit the inside of my cheek to prevent it. I made a beeline for the door. And the next time I spoke to Andy was just chit-chat, fifteen years later, at our ten-year high school reunion.

I dropped out of both carpools. The school-to-home carpool got to be too much when everyone but I was dropped off at a rich kid’s house to swim and play pool and foosball, and I was left alone in a big station wagon with the driving mother. I never had another guy-friend until four years later. (Behold, little gay one: Meet the high school drama club!)

Yeah, yeah, boo-hoo, Bill. Send yourself some flowers. There probably isn’t a gay man of my generation who didn’t experience something similar to this, usually under worse circumstances with more severe damage. At least I never got beat up.

So THAT was the second-worst sticks-and-stones thing that ever happened to me. Up until last week, at least. If people call me a pansy or a faggot or a homo these days, I immediately grab Other Bill, dip him, and give him a big, sloppy, get-a-room kiss. Even if it’s in the middle of Independence Avenue in Washington, DC. And he is usually happy to play along.

So here’s what happened last week. We were in a thrift store. My back was misbehaving, so I sat down on a sofa for sale, and Other Bill, fresh out of knee surgery, went and stood in the checkout line. I was sitting still on the couch, becoming one with the fumes of used clothing, when a man walked in front of me. I moved my leg out of the way, and he jumped back, put his hand on his heart and had this frightened look on his face. I looked back at him quizzically, and then he said it.

“Mannequin!” he gasped. “I thought you were a mannequin!”

Bill is a mannequin. BILL IS A MANNEQUIN.

Since then I have been thinking and have decided that pansy, big-head, Chief Yellowteef and being called “grandpa” in your thirties by impatient drivers are small potatoes when compared with mannequin. At least the guy didn’t tell me he thought I was a corpse.

Now that would have been insulting.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Miracle of Laundry

2010-03-12T16:59:00.005-05:00

I knew they were dying. It was just a matter of time. They had been faithfully serving me for almost 9 years, even though they were both 19. They were suffering, and from the noises they made, they were obviously in pain.

So they are dead now, but not yet buried. I disconnected Amana, the dryer, from life support, called it, cleaned out the vent hose, and replaced it with a scrappy 2-year-old named Maytag Neptune. I snagged it from a wealthy couple in a gated community for $250. Thank you, Craigslist. It purred and dried a load of towels in 40 minutes, something that took the late Amana close to four hours to do.

Meanwhile, the washer, Miss Whirlpool, had been bleeding small amounts of water, so I was thinking of calling the repairman to take a look at her. This need intensified once the “new” Maytag Neptune dryer started making the sound of several thousand bowling balls being dropped from the ceiling of the Republican national convention.

So the repairman came out, quickly fixed Maytag Neptune and felt up underneath Miss Whirlpool washer and proclaimed her terminal. She obviously heard that, because 48 hours later, she stopped spinning and dropped dead.

Forty-nine hours later, Bungee, in one of her vengeful PMS moods, jumped up on our bed, vomited and peed on the heavy, king-sized comforter. And the sheets. And the mattress pad. And the pillow top foam pad underneath that.

So there we sat with a pile of laundry stench and no way to clean it. Bungee, meanwhile, basked in a lounge chair by the pool, smoking her Terrytons using a long, Marlene Dietrich cigarette holder. At the same time she sipped from her pitcher full of Long Island iced teas, munched on cucumber sandwich points and pawed through centerfolds of back issues of Playbitch magazine.

When Saturday rolled around, neighbors started calling the police because there was an awful dead smell coming from our house, so we relented and threw the big soiled pile in the back of the truck and drove to a coin laundry.

I grew up in a laundromat and hated it. Once I turned 16 and got my driver’s license, laundry duties for our household were assigned to me. For two or three hours a week, I sat in a hot room and observed the public laundry behavior of Homo sapiens, if you want to call them that.

Sadly, the laundromat has not changed much in 40 years. The last time I used a public washer, it cost 75 cents to do a load. It is now $4.25. That’s the only difference. The aura of the inhabitants of the coin laundry is identical with the laundries of 40 years ago. Back then, there was always the prototypical single Mom with two toddlers and a Chevy Vega. These days she’s a single mom of two with a sputtering Saturn. Then and now, she smokes generic cigarettes while screaming things at her children, such as:

I’m gonna tear you up when we get home!
SIT THE FUCK DOWN, AND DIDN’T I JUST TELL YOU TO SHUT THE FUCK UP?
All right, but don’t you ask me to buy you anything else. Today or ever.
Don’t you touch that, or I’ll cut off your hand.
When we get home, you’re going to spend a two-hour timeout inside the locked Coleman cooler.

I decided then and there that I’ve worked hard all my life, and one of the things that comes with a steady paycheck is the option to decide if you want to spend your weekends witnessing child abuse. I decided that I didn’t care if I had to pay full price for a new washer, but I was not going back to a laundromat. I’d cart my laundry to a creek somewhere and beat shirts against a submerged rock before I would start collecting quarters again.

With clean bed coverings back in place and the bedroom door locked to prevent further doggie violations, we set out to find a new washer. So for the next week I used a nit comb on Craigslist, searching for the perfect affordable cleaning machine. I made an offer on a snazzy KitchenAid monster. In her return e-mail, and the seller told me she would call me on Saturday with directions so we could come for a pre-adoption interview. She did not give her phone number.

On Saturday, after three desperate e-mails from me, KitchenAid lady did not contact me. Laundry was piling up, so we actually had to leave the house and shop for a new one. The best we could find for a new washer at a store was $750.

After physically shopping, we came back home, and I did some virtual shopping. I didn’t find any better online deals, and the laundry was threatening to take over the house. So I finally let go of the rope. I unhooked Miss Whirlpool, and decided it would be wise to replace the faucets, which were also leaking. I attached and turned the pipe wrench, and the whole fixture snapped off, copper pipe and all.

I sent Other Bill back to Sears to buy the $750 Duet. I stayed home, seething, waiting for the plumber to show up. On a Sunday. $265 and a couple hours later, I had new faucets and a $750 receipt for the Duet.

“The bad news,” Other Bill announced, “is that they can’t deliver it for three weeks.”

I went into the garage to find something sharp. I needed to cut myself in several places.

“THREE WEEKS!” I, according to Other Bill, yelled. “Wasn’t the whole point of this to—”

“I don’t mind going to the domestic violence laundromat for three weeks,” he said.

Biting through my teeth and holding a bag of garbage that contained not even one rusty razor blade, I spun around and marched into the alley to dump the bag in the big can.

But then something strange happened. The gray clouds parted and a bright ray of light shined down across the alley. I heard Gregorian chants. The light pointed to—yes!—my neighbor’s Maytag washer. It had a sign on it that read: “Still Works.” Just like the “Eat Me” cake in Alice in Wonderland.

It was a miracle from God. I called Other Bill into the alley to witness it. We stood there with our jaws dropped and our eyeballs Marty Feldmanized.

I ran to the garage, jumped into the truck and drove it down the alley, where Other Bill, armed with semi-automatic weapons, guarded this new miracle, which we named Baby Jesus Maytag. True, it was still a top loader. But it was bigger than Miss Whirlpool, plus it had bleach and detergent dispensers. I hooked up Baby Jesus, washed a half load with minimal holy water, and he worked perfectly and quietly. He was, after all, Jesus; what else would you expect?

Other Bill called Sears and canceled the order for the $750 Duet.

Meanwhile, I was planning on starting to attend church.

The next day, lo and behold, KitchenAid Craigslist lady sent me an e-mail, apologizing for failing to call me back on Saturday. Translated into Craigslist-ese, this means: The person who offered more money was a no-show. She also asked if I was still interested in the washer.

I started to doubt my religious beliefs. True, Baby Jesus Maytag could wash a mini load of clothes, but he hadn’t yet been tested under tougher conditions. Could he handle the Super Capacity load? Could he turn rinse water into Moet? If he was so perfect, why was he was a water hog and not energy efficient? I e-mailed Craigslist lady back and told her I’d have an answer for her within a few hours.

I stuffed Baby Jesus to the gills with towels and anything dirty that I could find. I set the water level to the max. The agitator moved about as fast as the Fickle Finger of Fate Award, for those who can remember that far back. For those who don’t, let’s just say that with a full load, Jesus looked like a nose hair trimmer powered him. Jesus wasn’t washing. He was soaking in it. Once again, I was disappointed by religion.

He also leaked a bit. Fortunately, the puddle looked nothing like the Virgin Mary; otherwise I would have had to go find a theatrical agent for the machine.

Several hours later we found our way back from the rich side of town, toting a massive KitchenAid monster made of concrete, covered in stainless steel, and filled with an IBM mainframe computer and its own water heater.

At this time we had five (count ’em 5; V) laundry machines in our garage: Our original broken washer and dryer; the Maytag Neptune dryer, Baby Jesus Maytag, and the KitchenAid Hulk.
A neighbor walking her dog came by and inquired, “Are you guys opening a laundromat?”

After it got really dark and the neighborhood got quiet, we loaded the Baby Jesus and Miss Maytag into the truck and idled down the alley with just the parking lights on. When we got to Jerusalem, also known as the house across the alley, we lay Jesus back in the manger and then dumped Miss Whirlpool across from him, behind our fence.

Now we were down to a washer and dryer that worked, and a broken dryer, which would have to stay in the garage until the next bulk pickup in a month. The only place to put it blocked a door.

But the next day, I received my salvation. Sure enough, another alley miracle occurred. I heard a scavenger rattling around back there. He had a pickup truck full of scrap metal, broken fertilizer spreaders, and Baby Jesus. Once again the sunrays beamed down and Gregorian chants played in Dolby sound. He was one step ahead of the city’s garbage truck, and he was clearing a path in the bed of the truck for Miss Whirlpool. I went out and helped him make room for it. Any man whom can singlehandedly lift a washing machine into a truck usually is very well built, and he was no exception. The truck was packed tall and over the tailgate.

“Do you want a dryer?” I asked him.

“You have a dryer too?”

“Yeah, pull around front. If you think there’s room, I’ll pull it out for you.”

“Oh, there’s room,” said the muscular Fred Sanford.

So at last, peace, order, and cleanliness, next to Godliness, have at last been restored to Bill and Other Bill’s Obsess-O-Mat, and I’m thinking of taking communion on Sunday.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Magazine Drive

2010-03-12T16:39:00.002-05:00

Whoever said that youth is the best time of our lives obviously skipped junior high school, or middle school, or puberty school, or whatever they’re calling age 12-to-15 schools now.

During my pimple years, I wore Woody Allen glasses, braces, and orthopedic. Give me a pocket protector and dispatch me from the A/V room to set up a filmstrip, and I would have gratefully accepted the nomination to run for president of the Global Association of Geeks (GAG).

It was during junior high when I failed to develop into someone “cool” and was left standing in the tattered residue of the socially inept.

And at the same time I learned my first lesson in deceptive business practices.

In order to raise money for the school to, I guess, replace the mysteriously disappearing supply of mimeograph fluid (hence called “huffing juice”), a fund raising company was brought in at the beginning of the school year, and multiple assemblies were held. These were pep-rally-style meetings during which we were passionately encouraged to go door-to-door after school, selling magazine subscriptions. If we were successful, we would prove to competing schools that we were the best salespeople, and therefore the best junior high in the city. For all our hard work, we would be rewarded with crappy little trinkets like key chains and cheesy stuffed animals called “Dream Pets,” which rivaled today’s collectible Facebook friends and cell phone ring tones. The top sellers would actually win cool, expensive stuff, like portable 8-track tape players, the Ipods of our time.

Every morning we would bring in our hard-earned cash and checks to homeroom, where the teacher collected, counted and recorded it. Our totals were converted to Dream Pet points, which would be redeemed at the Friday assemblies. Daily totals were announced by our homeroom teacher, and those who didn’t bother to sell anything were humiliated and branded as Communists for being unmotivated, non-contributing, freeloading leeches. I believe our homeroom teachers were schooled in humiliation by being forced to watch PBS during Pledge Week.

I believe there were four assemblies during the two week magazine drive. These pep-rally-style roundups were held by sleazy, leisure-suited vermin with too much false enthusiasm. These fast-talking hyenas were slicker than used car salesmen. Today they are most likely well-paid , bottom-feeding motivational speakers (“I made millions by taking advantage of adolescents, then drank to forget, but now I’ve completed rehab, and I’m back, and this time I’m taking YOUR money.”) They would scream like Pentecostal preachers and pit individuals against each other and warn us of the looming threat of Coleman Junior High School. The Coleman kids were our arch rivals who, the hyenas threatened, were right on our tail. At the third herding, in order to spur end-of-magazine-season sales, the emcee told us that Coleman had edged ahead, and he encouraged us to work extra hard the last week so we could be the junior high sales champions. Then they paraded the big prizes up and down the aisles, like well-fed Americans tempting starving children of the Congo with gourmet food. You can smell it, but no tasting, please.

The second Friday was the day everyone eagerly awaited, mainly because it was our last day of being periodical prostitutes. On the final Friday we’d find out if our last-minute rally to ward off the Coleman threat was successful, and we’d see the top salesman crowned and given the grand prize, which was, I don’t know, maybe a new car. Actually it was probably just a portable black and white tv, but it was just as unobtainable as a new car, because no one, when it came to magazine sales, could trump Ann Schmundt.

Everyone hated Ann Schmundt. While we were out pounding the pavement, striving for just one more three-dollar subscription so we could get the coveted autograph hound Dream Pet or the plastic Road Runner that quacked when you squeezed its head, Ann Schmundt never had to set one foot outside her air conditioned pool home. Her father was a successful cardiologist and each year spent two or three C-notes on magazines, which were nothing more than a pocket-change tax write-off for him. All three years of junior high, Ann won the big prize. In our final year, sales dropped because most of us had lost interest trying to compete with Ann. If someone was on her tail at the middle of week two, Dr. Dad would simply bump up her grant. Clearly, her family was rich enough to buy her anything she wanted. Her dad had the opportunity to teach her a life lesson in hard work, or at least humility, but each year he chose to ignore that opportunity. It was selfish of her, and despicable of her rich father to allow her to claim that prize every year, and not once let the award go to someone who actually wore out shoe leather to earn it.

My school, Wilson Junior High, was an odd demographic mixture of West Tampa dirt poor and the Palma Ceia/Davis Island A-listers. Both sides of the fence unilaterally despised Ann. Years later, in an unrelated incident, I egged her car. It was a pretty blue, bought-by-Daddy, speedy little sports car. After the crime was committed, I drove close to her house and saw a police officer taking a report. Fearing that jail time was imminent, I came up with an alibi, and I waited for the men with badges to show up at my door.

So the final Friday, the Bulldog Band played, the streamers were thrown, and the motivational dweebs were in top form. They announced that yes, Wilson had beaten Coleman in sales. Yippee! We’re number one! Then they gave out the Cadillac or whatever it was to Ann Schmundt, who in addition received a smattering of applause from some teachers, but it was drowned out by the boos and hisses of the resentful. When the emcee held a microphone in her face and asked her what her sales secret was, she said, “Well, I sold a lot to my Dad.” She was lucky we didn’t rush the stage and dismember her and dine on her limbs while the band played a motivational Sousa march.

As it turned out, the Communists who refused to put their dignity on the line by begging door to door were right. When I got into high school, I made friends with a girl who had gone to Coleman. One day the subject of the magazine drive came up, and Faith and I laughed about how silly the whole thing had been.

Faith said, “Yeah, and you almost beat us every year.”

“We did beat you.” I corrected.

“No, you didn’t,” she countered.

“Yes, we did,” I insisted.

We were 17 before we realized we really had been scammed. They apparently told every school that they were number one.

By that time, Ann Schmundt seduced a friend of mine, David, and convinced him that it should just be the two of them to run away to Miami to see a Bob Dylan concert. David and I had been planning for weeks to do that, but once again, Ann held the high cards. Her sports car had air conditioning, comfort, and speed. She also had her daddy’s Shell credit card, which eliminated the need for David to sweat or pay for half of the gas for the trip. Not to mention the fact that she was female and heterosexually active. This understandably triumphed over a hot, humid six-hour drive in a noisy, black vinyl upholstered VW bug being driven by an obsessive nerdboy who had a crush on you. They ran away to attend the show, and I, the little piggy who stayed home, plotted my revenge. The best I could come up with was making her shiny new car the recipient of the coveted windshield raw omelet. I would have cooked one up for David, too, but he didn’t have a car. He always relied on the kindness of strangers for rides.

She knew I had done it; I’m sure she named me as the perp, but I was never questioned by the police. I can’t help but wonder if the investigating officer didn’t pursue the case because he had a kid our age who had gone to our school and known of Ann’s periodical infamy.

I recently was reminded of Ann and David after receiving a Facebook e-mail from Ann (which I ignored, as I’m not sure what the statute of limitations is for car egging.)

They never did apologize for leaving me for Bob Dylan, just as I never apologized for vandalizing Ann’s car, and for years I maintained that she had more than that coming to her. But we’re 35 years older and have lost all interest in Dream Pets. Because the world is less safe, magazine drives are now held on the Internet. We no longer run away from home to attend rock concerts, because we are no longer reckless and care-free. It would be the civil thing for me to apologize. It would be good for my karma and my physical well being. As we move through our fifties, our so-called mature years, we more carefully calculate our risks and take our health more seriously, so I am wondering: Would Egg Beaters mess up a car just as much as regular eggs?

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Math Whiz

2010-02-28T13:29:00.005-05:00

One of the biggest lies you are fed as a child is: “It may not be important now, but you’ll need math skills in order to get a job when you grow up.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, unless you’re applying for a job: a) at NASA; b) as a math teacher.

All you need to know about math is how to use a pocket calculator. And that doesn’t take years and years of study. It takes, if we’re talking about me, which we are, just nine months. Even then, to this day I don’t know how to use the Memory button. And 90% of the time, after I enter a column of numbers, I’ll press the Equal button, only to realize that I forgot to turn the machine on. It’s a good thing they’re all solar powered now. That whole battery thing perplexes me.

I never liked math and was never really good at it. Here’s a direct quote from my first grade report card: “I am pleased with Bill’s ability to work with numbers. He forms them correctly and he has a good understanding of their values to nine.” Yeah, but get me into those tough two-digit numbers, and I’m as lost as Pat Robertson in a gay bar.

Nevertheless, without any say-so from me, I got put on the math fast track beginning in eighth grade. They threw me in an Algebra I class, and I had a good teacher, Miss Eason. Everything went okay. I got it, for the most part. I could solve for X. I understood that if A=B and B=C, then A=C.

Then I got into Geometry. Plane Geometry. Back in those days there was no Peanut Geometry, as I assume there is today. No one ever told me how dangerous it was before I got in there. I received no warning of the migraines that deductive reasoning could trigger. I was never given safety training on the risk involved with cleaning your ears with the sharp end of a protractor. I just thought it was math with triangles. Furthermore, I was dismayed when I learned that Plane Geometry had nothing to do with propeller-driven flying machines.

It got complicated very quickly, and in no time I was lost when presented with something like this:

If M is the midpoint of AB, prove that AM = ½ AB, and MB = ½ AB.

Wiley’s Theorem of Geometry was: If a book tells you to prove it, that means it it’s provable, so why spend time bothering with it? The correct answer was always: just because. Wiley’s Sub-theorem of Geometry was: I wish someone would invent the Internet already, so I can order the teacher’s textbook with the answers in the back.

Our class was way overcrowded with a student-teacher ratio of about 60:1, whatever that means. All I knew was that in the first report period of Geometry, I was dangerously close to getting a Scholarship Warning. I don’t know if they still exist today, but back then, nothing labeled you as a loser more than going home with a Scholarship Warning. It was basically just a note sent home to your parents that said, “Your child is a loser.” They had to agree, sign it and send it back. Actually it just a form letter to notify the parents that you were getting close to flunking a class. I had a D average in Geometry, but I ended up getting a C for that report period. I think at the time the solution to overcrowding was, “give them a letter grade higher than they earn.” I don’t know what they did with people who earned an A. That was something I seldom had to worry about.

Once I realized that I could get a C with a D average, I relaxed and saw the class as my hour each day to join others in laughing at the thick southern drawl of our geometry teacher. “All rat,” she say, “cumda ohdah.” My friend Hank and I used to literally laugh at every sentence she spoke. Every time she spoke of the Hinge Theorem (which she called the “heeeenge throm”), our lunch milk from earlier in the day would shoot out of our noses.

Like many pubescents, I like to refer to the first year and a half of high school as my Dark Ages. Probably one of the scores of contributing factors was Algebra II. All I remember about it was that I passed. I was too busy during the day pining away for a straight boy and at night taking expensive, psychologically damaging courses in Transactional Analysis.

By the time I reached my junior year, my Algebra I class teacher from junior high had transferred to my high school and was now teaching Algebra III, which was a six-month class. I enrolled because all my friends did, too. And they enrolled mainly because Miss Eason had enormous breasts and wore tight, sleeveless shirts. In the middle of the semester, she sensed that something was wrong with me and phoned my mother to tell her that she thought I might be depressed. Although I appreciated her heightened awareness, what is more depressing than having your math teacher call your mother? Pondering that now, I guess it would be a worse scenario if your home economics teacher did the same thing. Bill is not weaving potholders with his usual enthusiasm.

I used that phone conversation to convince my mother to get me off the fast math track. Instead of telling her I had managed to convince myself I was the only homosexual on planet Earth and was doomed to the life of a Tennessee Williams character, I told her that math was killing me. All you needed to graduate was Algebra II, and that was already under my belt. I finished Algebra III but never took another math class. Most of my friends went on and took Trigonometry and Calculus and wore on their belts trig calculators that cost two hundred, 1974 dollars. I think that at the time they were called waist-side computers.

Math wasn’t completely unworthy of my time. I learned some valuable lessons that contributed significantly to my life, not necessarily in a good way:

Don’t waste your time signing up for anything that’s not mandatory; otherwise you’ll never make your dream of becoming a slacker come to fruition.
Realize that you’ll only use geometry if you want to be a handyman. Even then, you can bypass it altogether if you apprentice with someone who knows how to miter.
Trig and Calculus are necessary only if you want to wear taped up glasses and crash a billion dollar piece of equipment into the moon to see if ice comes out.
Obsessing over straight men can make your life much easier.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

A Code in the Head

2010-01-26T17:19:00.002-05:00

If I’m going to get sick, I usually get sick in January. It tends to be the coldest month here in South Florida, and this month is no exception.

Apparently this is something that I have inherited from my Dad. To prove that, I am re-typing one of his “Matter of Opinion” columns which appeared for 12 years from the mid-forties to late fifties in the St. Petersburg Evening Independent. They are now out of business, but they can probably still sue me for copyright infringement, so I thought I could at least acknowledge where it came from.

This is from (naturally, January) of 1949. So call me lazy for not writing today’s story. I openly admit to plagiarism. But I hope you realize it is a pain to re-type using Sick Dad dialect, verbatim. My spell checker is now on life support.

Aboud once a year, ad aboud dis tibe a year, I stard gedding a code id the head.

Ad when I ged a code in da head, dat’s all, brudder, dat’s all.

I cad eat. I cad sleeb.

Ad worst of all, I cad think.

I just sid here and look at the blank paper in the typewriter ad wish I was dead.

Thad’s the way I ab today. I got a code in the head.

Ad I wish I was dead.

All I can think aboud is the code in my head. Ad every tibe I dry to pull myself together and remember whad it was thad I was going to write here – all I cad think of is my code in the head and how miserable I am, and how I wish I was dead. Dead, dead, dead!

If I cud just disappear for the next day or so, if I cud just curl ub in bed I might get through this all right. But you can’t do that with a code in the head. If you say, “Well, I god a code in the head, and I think I’ll go home and go to bed,” everyone will say, “Ha, ai’d he the sissy – just a simple code in the head, and he goes home and goes to bed. Whad would he do if he was really sick?”

Thad’s the trouble with codes in the head. You’re neither sick enough to go to bed, nor well enough to acd like a human being. All you cad do is sid around and dry to act bright ad –

Wish you were dead – from a code in the head!

De biggest trouble wid a code in the head, is the fact thad everyone dries to cure you. Dis is a situation I’ve never bed able to understand.

If you dell someone you have naso-pharyngitis or a bilateral upper-respiratory infection, they’ll look ad you with amazement and say, “Great God, whad are you doing here. Ged to the hospital at once!”

But answer theb ad say, “Oh, I just god a code in the head, ad I’ll be all right in a couple of days,” ad dey will pud on their best bedside manner and say, “Well, what are you doing about id?”

(Plagiarist’s note: This “bedside manner” person was clearly my mother.)

Ad that does it!

If you dake the position (which you know is true) thad there is nothing thad will cure a code in the head, they’ll look at you with a patronizing smile and zay, “Well, why do’d you go over to the drugstore and get a box ob ‘Fifteeen-Way Cald Tablets,’ those will knock a code a-looping in one day.”

You explain dad you have daken “Fifteen-Way Cold Tablets” and all they did was to make your mouth dry and upset your stomach. And den they will look at you unbelievingly and say, “Well, I don’t know, but they’ll cure my cold in nothing flat. Never fail!”

You thank dem kindly for their interest, but you don’t go buy any code tablets, for you know that nothing will cure a code in the head but tibe –

Or death!

Ad then some jerk will come along and say, “Oh, you have a cold don’t you? Well I tell you what you do. Squeeze out a pitcher of grapefruit juice. Then you alternate. Drink a glass of grapefruit juice and then a glass of bicarbonate of soda.”

There are more cures for codes than there are people. Ad none of the cures are any good. I have daken everything for a code from abble juice to zemenol. I have drunk lemonade, rock-and-rye, Tom-and-Jerry and cascara. I have swallowed bromides, powders and cathartics. I have taken so many shots my hide looks like a sponge.

But nothing cures a code in the head–

Except tibe, or death.

But still there is something the world needs worse than a cure for a code in a head. It needs a cure for all the people who dry to dell you how to cure a code in the head.

I wish I was dead!

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Twenty Rules for Home Contractors

2010-01-24T16:52:00.002-05:00

I sometimes hire contractors to do work on our house. Usually I get them to do work that hurts my back or labor on tasks I am unqualified to perform. Most times, I just hire them because I’m too lazy to do the job. I get three or four estimates before making a decision on the bid award. I thought I’d pass along a few tips to the salesmen who make my dog crazy when they slam their truck doors.

1. Show up on time. If you can’t show up on time, call ten minutes before you were supposed to get here and tell me what time you can get here. I schedule appointments for ten minutes after I get home from work. Don’t make me sit around and watch Internet porn in the interim.

2. Take your time. Don’t try to speak to me as if you were an Evelyn Wood graduate. If I don’t understand something, take some time to explain it to me. I’m 53. I have a long attention span.

3. Stop being an asshole.

4. This should be number one, but I didn’t want to appear revolutionary. Do NOT assume I am straight. Don’t call to reschedule and ask if Mrs. Wiley might be home earlier to receive your pitch. Maybe I recently divorced Mrs. Wiley. Maybe Mrs. Wiley, committed suicide in 2001. Perhaps Mrs. Wiley is on a respirator. The only thing even close to a Mrs. Wiley is Other Bill, and he works later than I do, so stick to the schedule.

5. Continuing with number four, don’t assume I’ll laugh at your sexist jokes about how the man has to take out the garbage; the man’s got to please the little woman; the man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. In my case, the man has stopped listening and is doing everything he can to refrain from projectile vomiting all over you.

6. Don’t tell me if you fired your “office girl” three years ago because of the bad economy. That does not instill confidence.

7. Don’t give me a fistful of brochures and say, “I can get this.” I can get that too, probably cheaper, and do it myself. Show me pictures of the work you’ve done and give me the phone numbers of the last three people you’ve worked for, or at least the last three who speak English.

8. If your overhead is an ’87 Silverado and a cell phone, do your best to shield me from that. Or, better yet, cancel your appointment.

9. A comb-over? Are you kidding me?

10. If you have a 99-cent OfficeMax binder with an underbite and cheesy, draft-print pictures falling out of flimsy sheet protectors, here are a few words for you: lamination, laptop, PowerPoint presentation.

11. If you smell like alcohol and cigarettes, I’m usually able to detect that.

12. Don’t tell me I’ll have to hire another contractor to precede your work. Subcontract and don’t tell me about it. I won’t ask for employee ID cards. If I have to hire two companies to do what I consider one job, I’ll just live with things the way they are. Unless my roof is leaking. Then I’ll just put up a tarp.

13. If at all possible, do your best to look hot. Take advantage of my weaknesses. I have hired men because of their looks. One hottie’s work was shoddy and had to be redone a few months later. Stanley is in jail now, but he’s the only contractor whose name I remember. Although he both smoke and drank heavily, he worked shirtless and drove a Harley. I can’t say no to that, even if he did have his license revoked.

14. If you see the dated, worn-out Obama bumper sticker on my car, you also voted for him.

15. If by some chance you’re a gay contractor, sweet Jesus, don’t tell me about all the drama going on in your life and expect me to identify with you. We once made the mistake of having post-quote dinner with a gay house painter, and we both came this close to stabbing him in the eyes with forks to get him to shut up. We ended up tackling the job ourselves, and what he said he could do solo in two days ended up taking us six weeks to do right. He followed rule number 13, but in his case, we made an exception. Sure, we could overlook his being high on meth, but negotiations ended when he told us that business was slow and he was making ends meet by charging for sex. Ew.

16. Clean up and take your crap with you. My grandfather was a carpenter and never left without sweeping up. If you forget some tools and don’t call to inquire about them, they’re mine. And I’ll use them. How do you think I got this nice table saw?

17. Don’t steal my tools and tell me you never saw them. I literally handed you that crowbar, Stanley. When you get out of federal prison, I’d like to have it back and get a peek at those bowling-ball biceps of yours (wink, wink).

18. Don’t charge me for a five gallon bucket and then show up with two one-gallon buckets. I know this because you left them behind. See rule number 16.

19. I know how difficult it is to cut crown molding. You miter it upside down and backwards. That doesn’t necessitate a Master Craftsman fee of $20 a linear foot.

20. If by some remote chance you win the contract, remember there might be more work in the future here if you do a good job. I once hired a window replacement guy to also hang some siding, break out a window and replace it with a door, and build a deck around the pool.

God, he was hot.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Nose of the Jet (or, I'm So Sorry. It's Another Snot Story)

2010-01-24T16:30:00.003-05:00

Not long ago, I witnessed an embarrassing situation. No, someone wasn’t walking across a restaurant, wearing a toilet paper trail on her heel, and it wasn’t a woman who accidentally tucked her skirt into her pantyhose or a man with an open fly. But you get the idea.

I never know what to do in these situations, and I haven’t really researched the proper behavior one should adopt when these incidents occur. Generally, I just take the denial route, turn my head, and pretend it isn’t happening. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone besides Other Bill, parading around with an open fly. I’m more than comfortable telling him to zip up, because we’ve been adjacent for almost two decades. You don’t live that long with someone without doing things you’d prefer never to do, and wouldn’t think of doing to strangers. And quite frankly, he has done things for me that I couldn’t do for him without throwing up. He had a summer job in a nursing home once, and for years worked with developmentally disabled citizens, so his tolerance level is high. Let’s just say that both of us have had post-surgical issues to deal with that have required more than two hands, and leave it at that. Blech.

Other Bill and I had tickets on a Southwest flight to come home, and it was open seating. We were lucky and got in the “A” line, quickly took our seats and began observing all the people boarding. Sometimes we play Who’s The Hottest Man on the Plane. Other times, even though we would never publicly admit it, we do our own secret profiling. “Does this guy look like he could be carrying explosives in his underpants?” I think. “Probably not, but I better keep my eye on him. Besides, he’s the hottest guy on the plane so far.” Don’t laugh. Remember that we got a conviction for a strong-arm robber who was so memorably cute.

Several rows in front of us, a flight attendant, who was kneeling sideways on a seat, was welcoming the passengers, telling them, “Good morning. Welcome aboard. Just take any seat.” We did hear him sneeze, and later looked up and saw a significant amount of post-sneeze by-product glistening colorfully across his upper lip. Actually, at first we didn’t know what it was. I thought it was a couple of runaway nose hairs, but Other Bill, upon looking closer, recognized that the flight attendant was indeed welcoming the passengers aboard the Booger Express.

“Should I get his attention and tell him?” Bill asked.

“God, no!” I replied, for two reasons. One, nothing embarrasses more than seeing people embarrassed. Two, because this created some great potential footage for me that might one day evolve into an essay.

Most oncoming passengers just looked at him and then diverted their eyes, as if they had just seen The Elephant Man (I am not an animal! I am sinus residue!) Some didn’t even look at him, because we are a nation of people who don’t make eye contact. Some I saw clenching their teeth, trying not to laugh. One boy, as he reached our row, turned around to his big brother, pointed to his own upper lip and said, “Did you see that?” His brother smiled and pushed him down the aisle towards the back.

By this time, Other Bill had had enough, and he was trying to get the boogieman to look at him by waving his hand and pointing to his own upper lip. This mortified me, and was trying to squirm down onto the floor, but we were in coach, so there was nowhere to go. I closed my eyes tightly and tried to go to a happy place. I just wanted it all to disappear. Finally another passenger told the snotooed flight attendant he had something on his lip, and Other Bill, after seeing him wipe it off with his hand, told me I could open my eyes again.

Later, when we reached cruising altitude, the same attendant came around and offered me peanuts and a soft drink.

I politely declined but was thinking: “Never in a million years. I know where that hand’s been.” And I wanted it washed with potable water.

What do you do when you encounter something like this? I know a mature adult would tell him, “You have something on your face” while pointing to the place on his own face to give the offender an idea of where to wipe. But by that time, there is an entire Airbus 300 watching your every move to see exactly where you’re going to deposit that mess.

So I’m looking forward to another Southwest flight. I expect to hear the following pre-boarding announcement, back inside at the gate:

Ladies and Gentlemen, before we begin boarding our flight, we’d like to ask all our passengers, as we have our flight crew, to check the contents of your nostrils, as some shifting or settling of the contents may have occurred during your walk to the gate. Thank you, and welcome aboard.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sentimental Old Fruit

2010-01-11T16:26:00.005-05:00

When I lived up north in the mountains of Virginia, my mother would send me, for a late Christmas present, a heavy box of Minneola tangelos, the sweetest, most pulpless, practically seedless, thin-skinned balls of heaven on earth. They were as sweet as orange Kool-aid, only natural and nutritionally sound. They look like a big tangerine with an outy belly button.

I would eat as many as I could, and when they started to get too soft, I would juice them and freeze the juice for special breakfast occasions. They were big as a boxer’s fist, and there was enough juice from just one of them to fill a tumbler with nectar.

People in Virginia could barely tell the difference between a grapefruit and a tangerine, so only rarely did I offer to share my bounty of citrus with the uninitiated. If they weren’t stupendously impressed, I would never offer them another one. They were used to buying grocery store fruit or being sent that bred-for-beauty, cosmetically-perfect orbs from the Gift Fruit World in the Greater Disney Area.

Truth be told, the best citrus is seldom the prettiest, as tweaks made from geneticists and plastic surgeons are for visual perfection and extended shelf life. These alterations can sometimes make for a thick-skinned, dry piece of tasteless carnage. Sure, it’s pretty on the outside, but on the inside: soggy packing peanuts. In Florida no one with choices buys from those citrus hacks. If you’re lucky, you own or know someone with trees, or you go to a grower or fruit stand and watch someone slice up samples from the bin you’re buying from. You buy what you taste, not what they ship you.

My mother and stepfather lived on a lake in central Florida and had a rich bounty of maybe a dozen citrus trees, which they grew from infancy and fertilized, grafted, watered and inspected obsessively. The trees, along with my mother’s fish-head-fertilized rose bushes, were dotted all over the acreage.

The little off-square shack was previously used as a weekend getaway. When they bought it, there was no electricity and no running water. The place had been trashed by vandals, and we worked hard to replace the smashed windows, scrape off all the old dirt dobber nests, throw up a little molding, and eventually convince the electric and phone companies to run cable out to the ramshackle joint. That was during my memorable voice-changing years, and I hated going there and being forced to carry five-gallon buckets of hand-pumped water to every citrus tree on the property.

As I grew older and the modern conveniences of life were brought into this Cross-Creeky hovel, the five-gallon buckets were upgraded to a long hose. My mother and stepdad nurtured those trees as if they were the grandchildren my sister and I would never produce for them. Whatever they fed them or did to them, they knew how to coax each tree into creating the sweetest, juice-squirtingest fruit you could ever taste. People in town knew their reputation and would barter for paper bags of their annual crop.

Before a hard freeze would come, my mother would throw all their blankets, including the electric one from their bed, into the treetops to protect them. Since smudge pots were banned years before, they would stay up all night burning campfires near the trees to keep the ice and frost from forming and destroying their small grove. That’s why sometimes the fruit that arrived after Christmas was black with soot, but was nevertheless still the best money couldn’t buy. I would bring one into work each day, and I’d wipe off the soot with a paper towel, peel it, separate the tender sections (Floridians call them “plugs”), and drop them into my mouth. Using my tongue, I would press the plug against my palate, and a sweet spring shower rained down on my taste buds, making them dance with orgasmic delight. My countenance would rise up and my voice box hummed.

My Virginia colleagues would look at me as if I had just eaten a bucket of bait. It’s just an orange, pal.

Eventually, my stepfather died; my mother sold the shack and its perfect little grove, moved into assisted living, had a stroke, and died too. That took a lot of time, and by the time I moved back to Florida, the Minneolas were just a good memory.

I could never find Minneolas in the grocery stores or in local fruit stands down here for the longest time. When I asked for them, no one had ever heard of them.

Turns out the Gift Fruit World in the Greater Disney Area felt that “Minneola tangelos” was not a marketable moniker, so everyone on earth now calls them honeybells. I’m sure you have probably seen them advertised in Parade magazine and seen pictures of the perfectly wax-painted, bell-shaped fruit wrapped tenderly and placed just-so in sterile boxes insulated with fake Easter grass. They charge a couple of bucks apiece for them. In the fall, you pay up front for fruit that is immature, but it comes with the promise of being shipped in January as soon as they’re ripe.

I’ve tasted those beautiful looking bells, but the ones I've had can't hold a candle to Mom's. They do, however, look pretty. I have read some online reviews by people who have bought them from cable shopping channels. These reviewers are people I would ordinarily ridicule, but they frequently describe the fruit as tasteless, seedy, membraney, tough, juicy but bitter, not worth the money, and watery. This is further proof that pretty doesn’t always come with good taste.

Not far from our house, there’s a place called Spike’s Grove, where you can still select the fruit by touch and buy it by the quarter-bushel or more. The second weekend in January we always go there to buy our annual Minneola supply. This time we were lucky to buy them before the hard freezes destroyed the crops and skyrocketed the prices. Gift Fruit customers of the Greater Disney Area might pay forty dollars for prettier fruit than I brought home for $12. I can only assume ours is tastier.

I had my first one yesterday. It was a little on the small size, slightly green on top, but still ripe, and the juicy meat of the fruit had stressed the skin to tight thinness during its outward expansion. It was a little spotted and didn’t have the distinctive, perfect bell shape or much of a belly button. It looked, and tasted like, one of Mom’s.

Maybe my back is giving me problems these days because of the miles I schlepped, struggling with heavy water buckets held with both hands between my toothpick legs. But I’m not going to say it wasn’t worth it. I brought a couple Minneolas to eat at work today, but nobody cared. They’re just oranges, pal.

They have no idea what they’re missing.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

What Means This Customer Service?

2010-01-07T17:52:00.010-05:00

CSR Shiny Robert has entered the session.
BILL: Can you please provide me with a phone number for our sales agent, John Yadda-yadda?
CSR Shiny Robert: Hi bill.
BILL: Hi
CSR Shiny Robert: Thank you for contacting the Office Blah-blah.
BILL: Can you please provide me with a phone number for our sales agent, John Yadda-yadda?
BILL: Are you still there?
CSR Shiny Robert: Yes.
CSR Shiny Robert: Please do contact your account manager YADDAYADDA,JOHNVINCENT at johnyaddayadda@officeblahblah.com . they will surely assist you in this regard.
CSR Shiny Robert: Is there anything else I can assist you?
BILL: I tried e-mailing him, but got no answer. I've been trying to get a credit from you guys for three weeks now. Do you have a phone number for him?
CSR Shiny Robert: I am sorry . there is no phone number.
BILL: What?
BILL: How can he not have a phone number?
CSR Shiny Robert: I am sorry please do contact him through email.
CSR Shiny Robert: Is there anything else I can assist you?
BILL: Yes, please. Put a manager on.
CSR Shiny Robert has exited the session. You are the only user left in the session.
CSR Shiny Robert: Due to the inactivity this chat session will be terminated. Thank you for choosing Office Blah-blah. This Service is available 8 am- 8 pm EST. Monday through Friday. Please don't hesitate to use this service again
Have a nice day..

And thus ended my first, and most likely, last experience with customer service online chat. This is a direct cut-and-paste, although last and business names and John's e-mail address have been altered But Shiny Robert is real. Too real. Even I couldn’t make that one up.

The most pressing question I have for now: Is Shiny a first name or merely an adjective?

Okay, all right, I admit my last two texts were a little belligerent. Some might construe them to be borderline abusive. And no, I didn’t really think that Shiny would let a manager start typing, but I was hoping that Shiny would start typing as if he/she were a manager. And perhaps improve the grammar to even make it believable.

Maybe the conversation would have continued like this:

MGR Glossy Bob has entered the session.
MGR Glossy Bob: How may I help you? I have read your transcript, and that is all that can be done.
BILL: I’m just trying to get a phone number.
MGR Glossy Bob: And I told you, I mean Shiny Robert told you, there is no phone number.
BILL: So how does John Yadda-yadda, the person who handles this multi-million dollar account, have no phone number? No cell phone?. Do you have a CB radio handle for him, or what?
MGR Glossy Bob: Explain to me, please CB Radio. What means this CB Radio?
BILL: C’mon, citizens band radio. You remember, back in the 70’s, before cell phones?
MGR Glossy Bob: I was born in 1991.
BILL: Really? You’re a manager at age 19?
MGR Glossy Bob: I will be in October.
BILL: What are you wearing?
MGR Glossy Bob: A powder blue leisure suit and tasseled loafers. Why do you ask?
Bill: Never mind. Wrong chat room. You really don’t know what a CB radio is? You never heard the song, “Convoy” by C.W. McCall? You know, the rubber duck?
Bill: You still there, Glossy?
MGR Glossy Bob: I know not of which you are talking of. I have helped you the best I could do.
BILL: You’re really Shiny Robert on the lamb, aren’t you?
MGR Glossy Bob: I am not Shiny Robert. I am Glossy Bob. I am on the lamb but off the cow.
BILL: Huh?
CSR Shiny Robert pretending to be MGR Glossy Bob has exited the session. You are the only loser left in the session.
CSR Shiny Robert pretending to be MGR Glossy Bob: Due to the inactivity this chat session will be terminated, and so will your entire infidel country.
Thank you for choosing Office Blah-blah. This Service is available 8 am- 8 pm EST. It’s the middle of the night here in the Middle East, so cut off some slack for us. Please don't hesitate to use this service again. Have a nice day.

Either way, the results would have been the same: hung up on by Shiny/Glossy. Apparently, outsourced customer service is on a timer. If they can’t answer the question in X seconds, they hang up on you. It reminds me of how my aunt would get you to eat your vegetables. She would set the timer on the stove and stand above you, wielding a fly swatter. You would have three minutes to eat your broccoli before Armageddon and fly guts were rained down upon you. No one was ever brave enough to actually test this threat.

I am told I should be grateful just to be given more than 144 characters to use in my chat box.

I’m not.

Following my dialog with Shiny Robert, I dialed Office Blah-blah’s customer service line on the telephone (channel 13 on your CB radio). I was given a number to a menu. I pressed zero to speak to an operator. The phone rang 38 times and was never answered. I did finally get John Yadda-yadda’s number through internal means, even though the written contract had to be pulled to find it. Almost 40 minutes after Shiny entered my life, I was able to speak to a human. John Yadda-yadda told me he was with a customer, had received my e-mail and would call me back at 1 PM.

With a customer? So he must be real!

It’s quitting time now, 3 PM, so I am going to go home. Never heard back from John Yadda-yadda.

I try hard not to get all Andy Rooney and say things like, “Remember when business used to be conducted in person, and you, as a paying customer, weren’t treated like stale bread being fed to ducks?” No one wants to hear that. They don’t even want to read it. It just makes me sad and tired (and, apparently old, ugly and boring too).

Oddly enough, it’s my birthday today. I’m hoping there’ll be cake. If not, I wonder if there’s an online chat I can enter to correct that. If not: Breaker one nine, good buddy of mine, this here’s The Tired Buyer on the lookout for some tasty pastry. Over.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

What are the Airlines Smoking?

2010-01-04T19:03:00.005-05:00

Okay, that’s it. I’ve had it up to my nostrils with you airlines. I just made an online reservation for Other Bill. The flights were cheap enough, but before I completed the transaction, I was given the opportunity to purchase travel insurance ($12, no thanks), and presented with the option of staying at a $250 hotel (pass). Then I was asked how many bags at twenty bucks a pop Other Bill would check (None. It’s cheaper to go to a laundromat). But then, before I could complete the deal, I had to surrender a SEAT FEE. If Other Bill wanted extra leg room, it was $30 more (each way). To sit closer to the front, where he’d be more likely to die in a crash, it was $25 more. So he will be sitting in the next-to-the-last aisle seat, which was $10 more. Such a bargain.

So what’s next, airlines? Pay toilets? Honey-roasted peanut tolls? You already charge for those “pillows” which are only big Kotex pads, and “blankets” that are no bigger than a Kraft Single. So tell us, you bunch of rat-eating pigs in space, what’s next on the agenda? A mandatory in-flight magazine reading fee? Twenty dollars for a ballpoint pen to fill in the crossword puzzle, which has a fifty-cent per word application fee and a substantial penalty if we look at the answers or leave it incomplete?

Stop it. Just stop it. Just raise your damned fares already and stop ten and twentying us to death. Double your rates (triple first class) and give us service like we had in the sixties, when a box of four cigarettes and a pack of gum for both adults and children were placed on our fee-free seats before we even boarded. Bring back those washable head doilies so we don’t have to lean into previous passengers’ hair product. Provide us with a bland, unpleasant, half-warmed meal so we have something trivial to complain about. And who are you kidding with those “reclining” seats that push back half an angstrom? Bring back the ones that allow me to put my head in the lap of the passenger behind me. I’m happy to return to my original upright position if they need to get up to pee. And go get me a magazine: a real damn magazine, not the freakin’ Sky Mall. I am not interested in choosing from a variety of cordless, rechargeable ice tongs, beginning at $350. Plus shipping.

Or how about this: Chop up sections of the plane and charge more for seats based on something real. Have a no-screaming-babies section, a no-seat-kicking section. A no-coughing-or-virus-spreading section that is wiped down with bleach after each flight. Give us comfortable, non-ass-freezing temperature compartments. Partition off a no-alcohol zone so we don’t have to hear fat, blathering businessmen broadcast their make-believe sex lives or endure their flirting with the flight attendants. I’d pay more for all of those. On cross-country or trans-oceanic flights, offer a high dose Valium for ten bucks a pill to let the people who just want a little peace and quiet be guaranteed it. If you’re going to sock us for fees, give us something tangible. I’d also like the ability to choose a non-oxygen-container-carrying plane so I don’t end up as alligator food.

This is what happens with government deregulation. You don’t see buses or trains charging seat fees. Can you imagine hailing a cab and having the driver tell you, “If you want to sit down, that’ll be thirty bucks each, over and above the fare. Otherwise the back seat stays in the trunk, and you squat.” What if I refuse to pay this airline seat fee? I’d be happy to send Other Bill off with a folding chair.

On the now-defunct People Express Airlines, you used to pay for your ticket in the air. The flight attendant came down the aisle with the credit card imprinting machine, and then, if there was time, which there never was, they’d roll out the beverage cart. Imagine a plane in a dangerous situation, and the flight attendant making his way down the aisle (in full hazmat gear as the plane fills with smoke) and offering an oxygen mask for $50. Credit, (gasp) or debit, sir?

As I said, if you’re going to charge for something, at least let it be for something we will appreciate. Use your head. As long as you’ve got the credit card scanner out, you could charge us a Landing Fee. If everyone onboard doesn’t cough up ten bucks, the captain will circle the airport and hold his breath until the jet runs out of fuel or he passes out (whichever comes first) and then let gravity take over.

You could stick us with a Gate Sleeve User Fee. That would give us the option of boarding, for a fee, through the jetway or, for a lower charge, climbing a rickety ladder onto the wing and crawling in through the emergency exit. Attention, passengers: Don’t forget some rope and a winch so you can hoist up your carry-ons and disabled relatives. You may also need a plunger to get the heavier ones through the window.

How about charging us the Important Safety Information opt-out choice? Look, if you can’t figure out how to unbuckle your seatbelt without a live demo, you have no business being an airplane passenger. Go find space in the cargo area. You’ll have to fork over a surcharge, though, based on your weight. Should have skipped that 8000-calorie Cinnabon back at the terminal.

On our last flight, Other Bill asked the flight attendant nicely if he could have the whole can of ginger ale instead of just the standard plastic thimble. The flight attendant said, and I quote, “No.” So, there you go: another revenue opportunity, the Whole Can Tax. You might want to consider a per-cube Ice Tariff as well.

We are all sick to death of you airlines and your surprise fees and surcharges and miscellaneous intangible tariffs. Seat fees: are you kidding me? You airline execs need to have a meeting and agree to charge us $300 for any domestic round-trip flight ($3000 for first class), even if it’s just from Kennedy to LaGuardia. Let us check two bags for free. Get out the tape measures and put the tallest people in the exit rows. We surrender. You win. Just come back down to planet earth and let us enjoy flying the way we used to.

And don’t forget my gum and cigarettes.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Here's the Beef

2010-01-03T12:58:00.005-05:00

The only time we spend more than $20 for dinner for two is on special occasions. Birthdays, usually, and sometimes when we’re on vacation. So we are never on the lookout for chic, pricey, snooty, Nuevo Cuisiney, South-Beach-we-only-accept-gold-card-style restaurants. On our birthdays, in January and in April, we usually go to a great seafood place and arrive before 6 PM while the early bird prices are still in effect, saving us, I think, four dollars.

We stumbled upon this Brazilian Steakhouse Phenomenon quite innocently after winning a raffle for dinner for two a couple of years ago. I was very lucky that night, winning the meals, two bottles of wine, a bottle of rum, an all-in-one printer, another dinner for two somewhere else, and some more goodies. For a $20 investment, I made out like a pirate.

So later in the year, we got as dressed up the best as we could, drove down to South Beach, paid an outrageous fee for parking and then went into this restaurant the size of a warehouse and were promptly seated. This is the kind of restaurant where the wait staff puts the napkins in your lap for you. Other Bill had never been to a place this fancy and thought he was being sexually assaulted. This is the kind of overstaffed joint where when you ask the restroom’s location, they don’t give you directions; they escort you to the bathroom, wait outside and escort you to back to the table. And while you’re gone, someone folds your napkin in a nice triangle for you. It’s rather unnerving.

Our waiter told us how the thing worked. First we were to visit the appetizer bar, and when we were ready to have some meat, we were to flip over a little cardboard disk to the green side, and the meat men would come serve us some meat. In addition to knives and forks on the table, there was a pair of tongs for each of us.

When you get to the appetizer bar, you feel like you’re a horse at the Kentucky Derby. There is this huge oval table. Out of the gate you see platters filled with shrimp, salmon, grilled peppers, marinated mushrooms, tomatoes, and asparagus. At the first turn there are olives, tabouli, imported cheeses (goat and cow), crusty breads, grapes in gorgonzola sauce, artichoke hearts, hearts of palm, thick sliced seasoned bacon. By the time you’ve made it halfway around the track, you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake, because your plate already weighs fifteen pounds, and there’s still the last quarter mile to go, and there isn’t a square inch of empty space on your plate to put anything else. You realize you’ll never make it to the home stretch, and not even close to the finish line, so you go back to your table, stopping only for a nice large bowl of lobster bisque. After all, you do have two hands.

After you're reseated, the person whose sole job is to deliver spiced mashed potatoes (ingredients: whole cream, butter, and potatoes, in that order) and sweet plantains makes the drop-off, just to make up for your losing the Kentucky Derby. Soon, your palate is pleased, but you are soon forced to make painful decisions, because if you eat everything on your plate, how will you have room for the meat when you flip your disk to the green side? So you eat the stuff you never can afford to buy and the stuff that tastes really good but you don’t know how to make, but you still want to eat the rest of it.

Meanwhile, 75 employees have dropped by to ask you if everything is okay. C’mon. How could anything not be okay? Stop asking if everything’s okay and help me make some decisions regarding the stuff on my plate I’m going to have to throw out. I should have realized this was going to happen and brought a Hefty bag.

There is, however, a person whose sole job it is to watch you and make sure you don't scrape meals into a Hefty bag. If you put down your fork, she comes and asks if you’re ready for a new plate. She is used to throwing out a lot of really good food, so she’s not bothered by it. You are busy feeling guilty about the hundreds of people in South Beach who, due to the economic times we are in, no longer come here nightly.

We weren’t ready for the onslaught of men dressed in overly-pleated, frilly pants and large, knee-high boots who bring different animal body parts to the table. Once you go green, you are immediately swarmed upon by seagulls. Once that disk is flipped it’s like you’ve gone out on the beach and started throwing bread into the air. These seagulls are actually very handsome young men carrying machetes and skewers of meat, including: parmesan crusted pork, sausage, chicken wrapped in bacon, flank steak, filet mignon cooked two ways, leg of lamb, sirloin cooked three different ways, and lamb chops. What? No venison? Do they not have deer in Brazil? I didn’t sound off about that because a) I don’t like it, and b) I would have felt a little too much like Clara “where’s the beef?” Peller.

With the first carving, you discover what your tongs are for: tweezing off the meat that is carved right in front of your face. In seconds, your plate is a mountain of carnage and you feel your vampire fangs beginning to extend. You quickly flip your disk back over to the red side and start eating. The seagull-gaucho-waiters immediately realize the last piece of bread has been tossed in the air and retreat, prompting the return of the seventy-five employees who come by to ask if everything is okay. They arrive at fifteen second intervals, and you avoid the temptation to say, “There’s a crumb on my napkin. Can you take my tongs and pick it up and feed it to me, please?

We felt sick when it was time to leave, and it’s a long, uncomfortable ride back home to Broward County, during which time we were both thinking, “I sure am glad there are two bathrooms in our house.”

So we had a good time, and loved the food and figured that would be our first and last trip there, because for non-raffle-winning customers, dinner for two without wine or dessert is still over a hundred bucks.

Unfortunately, we made the mistake of surrendering to them our e-mail addresses before we departed, and every so often we get little surprises in our inboxes for irresistible bargains, like 50% off or buy one, get one free offers.

So, armed with coupons, we have made the trek back to Miami Beach several times since then and always forget to not overeat.

In the past few months, Other Bill has lost 32 pounds and will probably lose 40 before things are all said and done. That’s the weight of the giant bag of dog food we buy once a month that Miss Bungee thinks is the best thing on earth, besides her lime rickies and Virginia Slims cigarettes. So once Other Bill is down by 40 pounds, I’m hoping he will strap on a big bag of Iams and carry it around for a day just so he’ll remember what it was like. That should keep the weight off.

To celebrate this weight loss, we decided to redeem an e-mailed coupon at this steakhouse. When I went online to make the reservation, I discovered, much to my loathing, that a new franchise had opened up right across the street from where I work. (It’s true, I don’t get out much.) And the dinner for two price is twenty bucks less than the Miami Beach location, plus there’s free parking. And it meant a much shorter ride home in total discomfort to dash our unescorted selves to our bathrooms.

He weighed himself before we left: 204. He did the same thing when we got home: 210. This morning that had dropped to 205.

And this morning when I opened my Hotmail inbox, there was a “happy birthday” e-mail from the House of Brazilian Pigfest, offering me 50% off dinner for two the whole month of January.

These people really know how to get you.

For Christmas, one of my superiors gave me a $50 gift card to the place, so if we go again this month, we both can eat for free.

And we can have dessert.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Brain vs. Body

2009-12-26T17:10:00.002-05:00

I spend a lot of time these days staring at old people. I understand that it’s impolite. But after I turned 50 I had a rude awakening. Sure I’d been eating at the adult table for a long time. I’m not kidding anyone when I say I’m still young, because I’m not. I’m simply immature. The next table I will be eating at will be the nursing home table. Followed by the hospital tray de puree. My body understands this. My brain doesn’t.

I see and feel myself getting old. When I look in the mirror, I notice my eyelashes have disappeared. They’re still there, but they are thin and flesh colored. Hundreds of childhood-fertilized, sun-baked wrinkles cover my face. My skin has thinned, and the face fat has disappeared. I’m getting “those horrid age spots!” they used to warn about in Esoterica ads, and worst of all, I am forever ripping out piano-wire-textured hair from my ears. I do not remember signing up for Chia Ears. Could someone call them off? I won’t even go into the age-related health problems. I’m saving my “organ recitals” for The Home.

So although I have physical signs of age, even beyond my years, my general psychological being is still an adolescent. So I’m paying attention to people a couple of decades older to prepare for what I’ll have to look forward to.

So far, there’s nothing.

I was at the pharmacy yesterday, and the woman in front of me, who was probably ten years my senior, was buying three giant-sized packages of generic adult diapers. “God,” I thought, “that could be me any day now. I’m so glad I’m not there yet.”

But I am there. After all, what was I standing in line for? To pick up my (fifty-dollar co-pay, thanks a lot) Celebrex prescription. For the osteoarthritis in my back.

I’m sure my brain is this way because it lives in denial. I nearly drowned last year when I got caught in a rip current in the Atlantic Ocean. I kept telling myself I’m one of the best swimmers I know, and I don’t need no stinkin’ lifeguards watching me. They couldn’t see me, of course, because they were dutifully patrolling their cell phones, having text conversations with their friends. I eventually swam out of it, but I did get to the point of yelling for help or drowning of pride. Other Bill helped rescue me. Will I swim out to a sandbar again? Probably. Because, to me, I’m not 53. My body tells me I am, but my brain is back in junior high school, wondering why all my friends are suddenly attracted to girls.

Granted, I have slowed down some. My body tells me that it’s perfectly all right to be ready for bed at 9:00 PM. Yet, my brain says, “Well if you’re going to do that, make sure you Tivo Dude, Where’s My Car? so you can watch it during the daylight hours.”

I try to eat healthy. During the weekdays, I have green tea for breakfast and an apple and a big carrot and a yogurt for lunch. But when candy, doughnuts or cookies are available at one of the many public offering tables at work, my afternoon repast will be a handful of tasty miniature Krackle bars, and if I’m lucky, a big piece of someone’s birthday cake.

My 53-year-old body tells me I should exercise to prevent myself from stiffening up. It says I should join a senior yoga class. But my 14-year-old brain says, “What that sore back needs is for you to push yourself all the way back in the recliner, put your feet up, have a couple stacks of those delicious, orange-colored Voortman vanilla-crème-filled waffle sandwich cookies while you enjoy two hours of Warner Brothers animation on the Cartoon Network. My brain bullies my body.

Doctors, therapists, and new age spiritualists all agree that you should listen to your body. But I can’t hear my body when my brain is screaming for ice cream. My brain uses a megaphone and holds the key to the sound-proof booth, where my body is isolated backstage.

I don’t know how or when my brain and body will merge and start to cooperate with each other. The brain is definitely the super-heavyweight in this fight, and my body is the light flyweight. The body will always be knocked out with the first punch.

So I stare curiously at older generations as if they will somehow give me a clue as to how this will come about. When I’m 80, I wonder, will I be driving a Lincoln Town Car and be shrunken up so badly that I can’t see over the steering wheel? In my twilight years, will I be wearing plaid pastel pants with white patent-leather loafers and matching belt? Who’s going to tell me when it’s time to stop wearing shorts and tank tops and jeans and worn-thin vintage t-shirts? At what point does wearing an Abercrombie and Fitch polo shirt look more ridiculous than a leisure suit and a bow tie? Will I ever own a car that is not a stick shift? When will I want to listen to Guy Lombardo, Bing Crosby or Celine Dion CD’s? The music thing may have already started, given the fact that there are four Mandy Patinkin CD’s in my collection. But how will the rest of the transition take place?

I’ll tell you how it’ll happen. This body, which has been bullied all its life by my brain, will finally rise up, grow a pair and fight back. Well maybe “fight” is too strong a word. It’ll just let go of the rope. The body knows Depends and Levi’s are not compatible. It is aware that no one at the nude beach wants to see your colostomy bag. It understands that portable oxygen tanks are not allowed on roller coasters. Wheelchairs are not going to cut it during vacations to hilly San Francisco. My body will refuse to step out into the sun without forming some kind of ugly, suspicious growth. My teeth will rot and crumble, leaving my body only mashed potatoes and Gerber products to consume. And as the body grows bolder yet sicker, the brain will have no choice but to relent, throw in the towel, and start doing what the body says. Unfortunately, by then, it’ll be too late. The brain will merely exist in regret.

Meanwhile, my brain is reminding me that it’s been a long time since I’ve gone—and it’s only a four-mile drive—to the beach for fudge and salt-water taffy. And maybe a nice new pair of flip-flops.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tea for One

2009-12-25T19:32:00.003-05:00

When you come over to our house, even though I always have it on hand, I will not offer you iced tea. There is usually lemonade, Diet Coke, water, and sometimes Fresca. But offering you a drink of tea will just be a waste of time. You won’t like it. I guarantee it.

Other Bill tends to put it on his list of available beverages to offer visitors, but I usually chime in with, “You probably won’t like the tea.” To some, that becomes a challenge. Who doesn’t like iced tea, after all, especially in the warm South Florida climate? The answer is everyone, unless, of course, you are my sister or a cousin on my Dad’s side of the family.

I’ll admit my iced tea looks like lawn clipping stew. Two thirds of it is brewed with green tree leaves that are rolled into the size of a BB. It is called gunpowder tea. When the hot water hits these pellets, they expand, just like those capsules that have animal-shaped sponges crammed into them. The other third is loose jasmine tea, to give it color and just a hint of flowery aroma. It has to be strained. My tea does not come in clean and convenient teabags. I don’t think I’m a tea snob, but I look at a teabag the way that Donald Trump looks at the rest of the world. In other words: I’m worth more than that.

The reactions to tasting my tea boil down to two. A polite person will express no displeasure with it, and he will spend the rest of the night thirsty while everyone else is enjoying their drinks. The ice will melt, leaving a glass of watered-down, untouched tea. An impolite person will wrinkle up his face as if he’s just taken a sip of a Rotten Sushi Slurpee, slam the glass down and say, “You really drink this shit? Can I have some lemonade instead?”

It’s true. I do drink that shit, and I have since I was twelve years old. Each summer when I’d go out to visit my Aunt Kay in Colorado, she’d fill up her 2-quart glass pitcher with the oranges painted on it, dump in a few teaspoons of gunpowder, and a few fewer of jasmine, and set it out on the side stoop in the morning. By lunchtime, it was sun-steeped and yellowish, and was a welcome thirst quencher. Initially I added teaspoons of sugar, but she gradually weaned me off of it until I drank it straight.

She would fill up the bottle again with water, set it outside, and we would drink it until it was too weak to differentiate from tap water. Then she’d make a new batch with new leaves. Call me wasteful, but I don’t adopt that Depression mode of tea recycling. I like it strong and bitter.

For the longest time, I made the tea in the sun, too. But Other Bill read something on the bastion of sketchy information, AKA the World Wide Web, which said that sun tea could encourage the growth of harmful bacteria. Other Bill’s job is as a safety and health regulator, so if I do not comply with his wishes, he threatens me with a fine. Plus he wasn’t fond of looking at sod floating in a pitcher of water every time he opened the fridge. So these days I make it in my iced tea maker, whom I refer to as Mr. Tea (I pity the fool that don’t drink this shit.) I dump the dry leaves into the bottom of the pitcher and let it steep until the water cools, and then I strain it into a gallon jug so that instead of looking like street runoff, with the leaves swirling around, it looks more like a giant urine sample. Much more appetizing.

I also get teased at work. Officers sometimes see the soggy tealeaf compost in the bottom of the Mr. Tea pitcher and threaten to field test it to see if for weed. People are not used to seeing tea out of a bag. Most people believe that teabags grow on bushes.

At my last job, a clueless party-girl intern staggered in one morning and watched me pouring off my delicious gunpowder mix, leaving the soggy tealeaf sludge behind.

“What is THAT?” she demanded to know.

I rolled my eyes. I’d been through this countless times. “It’s tea,” I told her.

“Well, it looks like leaves!” she said.

I just stared at her until she left the room.

I was so heartened when I had a cousins reunion at our house a few years ago, and everyone, except Other Bill, of course, drank that tea, because they learned to like it when they were young, too. I felt so warm, so tingly, so validated by people who actually had seconds. I have never felt less like a freak in my life. I was moved to tears.

The truth of the matter is, my sludge is actually good for you. Green tea is full of healthy anti-oxidants. It is good hot or cold. I drink two to three gallons of it a week.

It’s a little bit bitter, but it’s very refreshing and has a fresh aftertaste to it. I understand it’s an acquired taste, just like scotch or gin or bourbon, but without the harmful side-effects. I’m not trying to convert anyone. It’s pricey, about $10 a pound, so I hate pouring out the big glass that guests are too grossed out to finish.

All I want is a little respect. It is not a urine sample, nor soggy marijuana, nor flat beer. My tea has zero calories and very little caffeine. I don’t tease you when you gulp down 420 calories from 3 cans of cola. I say nothing about the possible dangers of artificial sweeteners as you chug down a diet soda and can only pray that your DNA or healthy cells won’t be affected by it.

I’m tired of being judged because of my beverage preference. I want anti-discrimination laws to read that I can’t be discriminated against because of race, creed, color, religion, sexual orientation, or consumption of fluids that the majority of people find 100% reprehensible. Even Martin Luther King said in his “I Have a Dream” speech: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” I happen to be quite fond of my cup of bitterness and don’t see how it even remotely relates to hatred.

Drinking something that looks like floating mulch is a cross I have to bear. I will never be part of a movement. I will never gain a following. There are no bitter tea drinkers support groups. Nevertheless, I will not be intimidated. I will not be silenced. I have a dream, too, you know. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the meaning of its creed that all beverages are created equal; that they will realize that a man who boils water, steeps his tea leaves, waits patiently for his infusion to cool (a process that takes several hours), is not in any way better or worse that a manufacturer who churns out 2400 twelve-ounce cans per minute.

Until then, I am imploring Other Bill to no longer offer my bitter potion to houseguests. Wasting my beverage of choice will not in any way impede me from making more. I am a member of a small, exclusive club, which he has been invited to join but chooses not to.

Give me liber-tea, or give me death.

Well, okay, maybe not death. But not Lipton, either.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Ghost of Christmas Presents

2009-12-12T09:35:00.005-05:00

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Joyful Hanukkah, Groovy Kwanzaa, and Pleasant Other December celebrations that I don’t know about. Now shut up and get shopping. There are toys to be bought.

These days, all the danger is taken out of toys. Everything has to be touched, tasted, burned, crash-tested and, of all the stupid things, checked for lead content. What hogwash. I was snacking on lead paint chips more often than Lay’s has potato chips, and do you see anything wrong with me? (He asked, typing with his tumorous stumps.)

I grew up in the golden years before the Consumer Product Safety Commission was born. Giant head-piercing Lawn Darts, blinding projectiles, small choking hazards, and BB guns were all the rage. We had hand-burning Thingmakers that cooked toxic Plastigoop Creepy Crawlers. We loved our pinching, scalding, finger-amputating Vacu-Forms that created plastic molds you did nothing with. It was just fun to melt the molds and inhale the toxic, new-car-smelling fumes. We danced in clouds made by DDT-spraying, mosquito-killing trucks that went up and down the streets on summer nights. Pesticide smelled so good in those days. Okay, maybe that wasn’t a gift. We are still monitoring our cells for a possible class action lawsuit.

I am a bit loathe to admit that the first Christmas present I completely adored was a Swingline stapler. I wanted that more than anything, and after I got it, I spent hours putting that stapler to work, and evaluating its power. Could it staple my sister’s sleeves shut? Absolutely. But could it staple her shoes shut? There were scores of experiments to run. It occupied me for days on end. Boys push their toys to the limit to determine what it takes to break their Christmas presents. And once they find out, they ask for another one for their next birthday. Hopefully by then it would be new and improved.

Thanks to government regulation, we no longer have to worry about getting shot with the teeny-tiny little James Bond figure that ejected out of a toy Aston-Martin into my cornea. My eye was bloodshot and sore four days after the ejection took place.

And speaking of cars, my sister wanted, but never got the Barbie Dream Car. She only got the cardboard Barbie Dream House, which, along with a fifth of bourbon, kept my uncle awake while he put it together one Christmas Eve. Those were the days when “some assembly required” meant, “hope you have at least a Master’s degree in civil engineering and the patience of a saint.”

I have a friend whose sister received the Barbie Dream Car. Alan’s sister built an intricate ramp on their front steps to send her Barbie dream car down. That was all fun and games until Alan poured lighter fluid all over it, tossed a match on it, and sent the Barbie Dream Hearse down in flames. Literally. With Barbie in it, of course. And Ken. To my knowledge, Mattel never did manufacture Flame Retardant Barbie. Now get the collectable, breakable Flame Retardant Barbie, made of genuine terra cotta clay and now with long, flowing, brushable asbestos hair! Ask your parents to give it to you for your next birthday!

Girls kept their dolls clean and groomed back then, but boys lived to destroy their Christmas gifts. It was more fun to crash your electric train into a cinder block rather than just watch it go around in circles. I had a battery-operated Hot Wheels Power Blaster that sent toy cars flying off the track, across the living room, and, if you aimed right, into your sister’s face. We’d bring in a ladder and build a Hot Wheels track from the top rung. This caused the gravity-powered cars to have momentum beyond what they were engineered for, and we’d sail them off a ramp to nowhere and tried to get them to plunge into a tub of Cool Whip. After that we just ran around the room with the tub of Cool Whip and tried to catch the car in it. Naturally this ruined shirts, stained carpeting and made upholstery, in spots, suspiciously shiny.

There was this stuff that came in a tube, the precursor to Super Elastic Bubble Plastic. It smelled like a combination of leaded gasoline and ammonia. You’d squirt a blob of it on the end of a straw, blow on it, and sometimes it would make this dreary, blue-gray, brittle, plastic bubble. Other times, you would just see a girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

There was a compound sold around the time of the movies The Absent-Minded Professor, and its sequel, Son of Flubber. Flubber was a moldable plastic clay-like substance that had more bounce to it than Play-Dough could ever dream of. Mothers loved it because even though it was clear when new, Flubber turned black with dirty hands and was often ground into the new carpeting without a trace of hope of being removed.

Everything worth having back then contained the word “Super” in it. There was this tub of pink gelatinous slime, which I think was called Super—perhaps Sooper—Goop. It was hot pink, came in a small tub and smelled like formaldehyde. You would form a blob of it over your mouth, blow on it, and a bubble would form, pop, and drip down into the carpeting to piss off your mother, who was already busy scrubbing the blackened Flubber and Cool Whip out of the new shag. After Sooper Goop became passé, you could use it to preserve your dead parakeets.

There was the rock-hard, high-bouncing Super Ball, which could break car windows or give you a concussion. After that came the Super Small Ball, a tinier version. My friend, Ray, and I would go into the bathroom and throw it against the side of the bathtub and see how many times it hit parallel walls. That lasted until it bounced out and cracked the medicine cabinet door. How’d that happen? I dunno.

One Christmas, Ray got something called a Water Wiggle. Picture a fire hose that gets dropped and starts flying around, willy-nilly, smashing windows, denting cars and knocking very wet people unconscious. The Water Wiggle was a scaled down version of that. It was a narrow, pressurized hose with a goofy, bell-shaped face on the end of it. You attached it to a garden hose and it would fly around, spraying water, until it finally wrapped around your neck and strangled you like a boa constrictor. We figured out on our own that if you just kinked the garden hose, you could save the victim from asphyxiation, but only if you got there in time.

After months of begging, I finally got my Slip-n-Slide. Wham-o, the manufacturer, made the assumption when marketing this lengthy sheet of plastic, that people would spread it across spongy, cushioning grass. You would hook up your garden hose to it, and it would squirt water onto the plastic runner, and one would take a sailing dive on it and slide across the yard. Yippie!

We had zoysia grass. It’s like the grass used on putting greens. You can bounce Super Balls off of it. It is short-bladed and packed firmly into the hard earth beneath it. Jumping onto a Slip-n-Slide on zoysia grass was like taking a flying leap onto wet asphalt. You could only take it two or three times before you got a splitting headache or a spinal injury. Fortunately, Alan never tried setting you on fire while you slid across it. But only because I didn’t know him then; he probably would have.

One Christmas, I received, though never asked for, something called a wood burning kit. Probing the Internet, I see these things are still being made. How do you look at a seven-year-old boy and think, “What this fatherless, unsupervised boy needs is a pen that heats up to five billion degrees centigrade. He could use it to burn his name onto a wooden shingle. Or maybe set the house on fire. Wouldn’t that be nice?” I used my wood burning kit twice or three times, and never walked away without several giant blisters somewhere on my person. Billy’s birthday is just two weeks after Christmas. Maybe we’ll get him that Mattel Battlin’ Blowtorch or the Marx Miniature Nuclear Reactor.

Some genius made millions by threading a heavy glass ball on each end of a string and putting a plastic ring in the center. These things were called Clackers, because of the deafening sound they made when you bounced them against each other. It took weeks of practice and a fractured wrist before you could rattle them to sound like machine gun fire. Even my mother recognized them as unsafe. Although she feared more for the safety of our newly-acquired color TV set more than anything else. “You’re not allowed to play with those in the TV room,” she warned. “They could slip off the string and go through the television tube.” These clever toys were known to shatter, cut, blind, break bones and were the culprits of hundreds of concussions and other brain traumas. But as long as you don’t blow out the picture tube, knock yourself out. Why can’t you be more like your friends who spend a lot of time in the emergency room?

But thanks to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, kids don’t get so damaged these days. Characters in video games don’t really shoot back and hurt you, or punch you until you’re unconscious. Hopefully one day technology will advance so electronic games can actually hurt you, by locking themselves down when they ascertain that the child’s homework hasn’t been done.

We have the Consumer Product Safety Commission to thank for shielding us from the Hasbro Slippery Noose, the Milton Bradley Slice-n-Run Chain Saw, the Parker Brothers Quaalude Fun Factory, Let’s Play Surgeon! by X-acto, the Just Like My Stepdaddy’s Tire Iron from Matchbox, Mommy’s Little Transvestite Schoolwear for Boys from Abercrombie and Fitch, Ideal’s Home Crematorium, and the Charlie Manson Map of the Stars’ Homes by Remco.

Actually, I visited the CPSC’s web page on children’s toy recalls and counted 823. One of my favorites is a desk set shaped like a submarine that houses a tape dispenser, pencil sharpener, scissors, and a razor blade cutting tool. Recommended for ages 6 and up! It houses storage drawers, convenient for, I would imagine, holding your barbed wire, ninja throwing stars, Ritalin, and, if you’re Alan, flammable liquids. Thanks for catching that, CPSC! Maybe if I’m lucky, I can find one on eBay.

I also was fond of the recall of Good Neigh Bears, a choking-hazard plush toy given away free by State Farm insurance agents from 2005 to 2007. I wonder if their life insurance claims rose those two years. Kind of counter-productive, wouldn’t you say, State Farm?

You can take the toy away from the boy, but you can’t keep the boy from his imagination. We made blow dart guns from straws housing pin-embedded Q-Tips. They were deadly accurate. We burned ants (sometimes aunts, if they were asleep outside) and started brush fires using only the sun and a magnifying glass. We made rockets out of matches, toilet paper, and tin foil. We made miniature Hindenburgs with suffocating dry cleaner bags, balsa wood and birthday cake candles. They would rise about 6 feet off the ground and then burn and melt, possibly on you.

God, this whole thing makes me sound so old. I need a diversion. Maybe I’ll go play some cards or a game of Scrabble.

Or would I get paper cuts and choke? Perhaps shuffleboard is in my near future.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Search for Intelligent Hippies in the Universe

2009-11-16T17:10:00.007-05:00

We didn’t intentionally set out searching for genuine hippies in San Francisco, but if we had, we would have been disappointed.

It was a beautiful Saturday morning, and our friend, David, and Other Bill and I had a huge, organic breakfast at Kate’s Kitchen in the Lower Height. For me, this meant 9-grain French toast covered with yogurt, covered with fruit, covered with granola, covered with honey. My plate weighed 15 pounds. Afterward, we waddled onto a bus to the Upper Height. There is obviously a huge weed-smoking contingent still in the Height-Asbury district, because there were stores that sold nothing but bongs and pipes and assorted drug paraphernalia that could get anyone arrested.

I figured this meant that San Francisco, especially that part of town, must still house thousands of genuine hippies, so I was intrigued and excited to see what they looked like these days. I was a little too young to be a genuine hippie. I was 12 the Summer of Love in 1969, when Woodstock and anti-war protests were headlining the news. By the time I was of hippie age, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Moody Blues and the Doors had been usurped by Morris Albert, Barry Manilow, Debby Boone, and KC and the Sunshine Band. Nothing good came out of the 70s. Boxy architecture, the color orange, polyester doubleknit leisure suits, shag carpeting and haircuts, platform shoes, neon blue eye shadow, the Plymouth Volare, pant suits, shiny Nik-Nik nylon disco shirts, pastel tuxedos, and cheap vodka prevailed after a decade of Frank Lloyd Wright, the color blue, jeans and t-shirts, natural long hair, PF Flyers, the VW Bug, terrazzo, 100% cotton, monogrammed Brooks Brothers dress shirts and vintage wine.

True hippies who survived would now be in their late 50’s through mid 70’s, I guess. But on that side of town with organic everything and an assortment of people sitting next to buildings smoking dope and pleading for spare change, did that genuine hippie tradition still live among the young? I wondered.

As we walked into Golden Gate Park, we were given the opportunity, before we even sat down, to buy some weed by four different young vendors. Apparently, marijuana has fallen into the hands of designers. In my former youthful weedy days, a heavy ounce of grass set you back $20. Now it can cost in the hundreds just for a little tidbit. Gone are the days of gentle, peace-loving people who sowed and reaped their own and shared it with all of their friends. Now it is just commerce, and quite competitive. Each dealer who approached us said his stuff was better than any other park dealer’s.

I felt oddly giddy thinking that at my age I was cool enough for these potheads to proposition. Reflecting back, just like the TSA screeners at the airport, they most likely flagged me just because of the beard. They don’t call it grass or weed anymore. They call it bud. Like “deer,” “bud” is singular and plural. It can be a bud or some bud. After we found a nice grassy place to lie in the sun to digest our organics (on a slope I later learned was called Hippie Hill), we were even offered the chance to buy it in the edible form of Rice Krispie treats. When I was a teenager, I often followed the recipes on the cereal box, and I sometimes made loaded brownies, but I never even thought of baking loaded Rice Krispie treats. At first I thought, “What a great idea,” until I remembered I could eat a whole pan of them in one sitting, so it’s probably best that I never mixed that concoction together. I would probably still be lying on the booth of my mother’s kitchen (even though she sold the house in 1982) listening to Simon and Garfunkel while topping off the crunchy treats with Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Nabisco Mystic Mint cookies, if only they were still manufactured.

There was a small contingent of quasi-hippie types sitting next to us. They were rather unwashed and shaggy-headed just like the genuine hippies of the 1960’s. But they weren’t the quiet, peace-loving, earthy hippies. They were rather cranky and argumentative, and instead of noshing on vegan sandwiches on home-baked bread, they were tossing back Doritos and washing them down with shared quarts of Coors beer.

The quasi-hippies asked passersby if they needed any “bud,” and they weren’t getting many customers. Behind them sat an old blind woman with a homeless tan and long, straight hair. She looked like she was pushing 70, but she could have just as easily been 40. She could have been a genuine 60’s hippie, but I’m willing to bet she wasn’t blind back then.

The blind woman spoke up. “Why don’t you give me some of that bud? I’ve got my pipe here,” she said, in a voice reminiscent of 1970’s Lucille Ball, or perhaps Suzanne Pleshette with a head cold, as she displayed a small wood and steel smoking apparatus. In seconds, one of the quasi-hippies got up, took her pipe and stuffed it full of bud, and the old or not-so-old woman smoked it down to puree of ash.

A kind display of generosity, I thought. Maybe these were genuine hippies and not quasi-hippies after all. Sharing. Community. Peace, love, freedom, happiness? Except for the once-boycotted beer and Doritos, they appeared to shun everything corporate or commercial. One of them even yelled out, to no one in particular, “We’ve got more hippies than you have rugby players.” No one was playing rugby within eyeshot. There was a flag football game going on, and farther down the field there was a Frisbee football game taking place. So, as high as they were, they apparently labeled themselves as hippies. I began to feel hope in the hippie rebirth.

We lay back in the cool air slightly warmed by the California sun. Occasionally I would sit up and observe, and sometimes just lie back and listen to the growing throng of nearby percussionists: bongo and conga drum players, cowbell clangers, zither zippers maraca rattlers, and people shaking coins in soda cans. The rhythm was wonderful and exotic and grew stronger as more musicians showed up, including an accenting clarinetist and a recorder tooter.

It was sweet, relaxing, and peaceful; one might even say, “groovy.” Who needs bud, thought this 53-year-old, when the air was so clean, the sun was so warm, and the music was so trance-inducing?

As time went by, the blind woman passed out on the lawn. Two police cars idled by on the walking path, and even though the park was rife with drug dealers and there was a slight hint of burning hemp in the air, no one was arrested, although everyone was eyed suspiciously.

As the hippies/quasi-hippies grew louder and drunker, I started to rescind their possible authenticity as arguments bloomed and insults were hurled among the group. What finally convinced me, however, was the shrill chirp of a cell phone that shot above the peaceful percussion beat. One of the quasi-hippie girls got up, answered her phone and left the group. Apparently, her mother wanted her home, so she quickly exited the park.

I knew it. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. These were not hippies; just self-indulgent, young, garden-variety substance abusers. If they were anything, they were 70’s people wearing natural fibers. I was disappointed. If these people wanted to call themselves hippies, then they were desperately in need of reading Hippies for Dummies. Maybe someone will write a comic book version of it, or perhaps, text it to them.

There seemed to be no shared cause among them, other than who had the most severe case of the munchies. The 60’s people had Vietnam as their cause. We 70’s people had Watergate. Who was griping for this generation of people? Those tea-baggers, or tea-party people, or whatever they’re called. They are the voices of protest today, and universal health care is something 60’s and 70’s folk would be marching for, not against. I wouldn’t trade all the AMC Pacers, Chevy Vegas, and Exploding Pintos manufactured or all the 45’s of Disco Duck, Convoy, and Piña Colada Songs pressed in the world for having to carry around that legacy. I’ll throw in Pet Rocks, mood rings, and streakers as well.

The sun was moving westward, and it was time to get moving and return to the hotel. We were again offered the chance to purchase some more bud just before we got to the children's playground, this time with the lure of free samples. Again we declined. As we walked through the kids’ section, we watched diverse families climbing, swinging, bouncing, spinning, and supervising. How many of these children and toddlers would grow up and become hippies?

None, I decided. If real hippies still existed, surely they’d be in Golden Gate Park on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

We crossed at the traffic light on Stanyon and walked (sadly, past the McDonald’s on Haight) into Amoeba Music, a converted bowling alley filled with miles of new, used, off-the-cuff and tough-to-find vinyl albums and cassette tapes, but mostly CD’s. Even in retro San Francisco, 8-tracks are no longer alive. I meandered into the Folk section, where I found myself totally alone. You could hear crickets chirp. I happened upon a Simon and Garfunkel CD, a live recording from New York City in 1967. It was five bucks, so I bought it. I went back and listened to the sweet harmony and simplicity of two twenty-something young men and one acoustic guitar, and it made me long for earlier years.

I wondered if there were any genuine hippies still living in Central Park. Maybe it’s worth a visit to find out.

Nah.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Honey Bunches of Christ, or The Holy Host: It's Not Just for Communion Anymore

2009-10-22T17:47:00.008-04:00

At the funeral of a deeply loved family friend a couple of years ago, I took communion for the first time in decades. Anyone who knows me is aware that religion plays no part in my life, especially organized religion, but I did it for Bobbie. She had, after all, taken me out for peppermint ice cream at the Old Meeting House and presented me with a prayer book after my first communion, so I thought this would be a very nice closure in a circle-of-life kind of way.

Even Other Bill, who’s Jewish, went up to the altar with me, knelt down and got blessed by the priest. No body and blood of Christ for him, though.

Communion was a big deal growing up. Like it or not, we attended confirmation classes, where we all thanked God we were Episcopalian and not Catholic, because catechism took so much longer, was so much more involved, and we’d gotten word that nuns would crack you across the knuckles with rulers if you stumbled while reciting a creed.

I don’t remember much about confirmation classes. We had a very liberal deacon who showed us religious 16mm movies, and then, because we were eleven-year-olds, he’d show the movie backwards. Nothing like watching people spitting wine back into the chalice and the body of Christ back into the priest’s hand to lighten up an evening. And by the way, have you ever watched an hour-long movie backwards? After you stand up and leave the room, you feel like you should be walking backwards. It’s very dizzying; kind of like getting off the Tilt-a-Whirl.

One thing I do remember about confirmation classes was that there was some memorization, mostly creeds. All I remember now are the Nicene Creed, and um, the Apollo Creed. I also remember being shocked to learn that Pontius Pilate (who I thought was named “Conscious Pilot” (apparently now an extinct breed) never flew an airplane in his life.

My sister had graduated from confirmation class 3 years before and was partaking of the body and blood of Christ, and didn’t she think she was hot stuff to being allowed to drink wine. A priest feeding alcohol to a minor: Why does that just not sound right these days? But that was the big deal about your first communion: your first taste of alcohol.

I had talked to my best friend, a Methodist and was kind of grossed out to learn that at their communion, they gave out grape juice in little cups. Nobody sipped from the chalice. Just a cracker and a sip of Welch’s from a tiny plastic Nurse Ratchet pill cup that you tossed in a can on your way back to your pew. Apparently the Methodist version of Jesus was a teetotaler; no booze running through his veins. It seemed very cold and impersonal to me. There were no plastic cups at the Last Supper.

I’ve been reading that more churches are shelving the chalice and moving to the little pill cups, due to sanitation issues, especially now that the H1N1 flu is in full swing. That little napkin the priest uses to wipe the lipstick off the chalice isn’t exactly an autoclave, you know. And alcohol doesn’t kill all viruses. If it did, no gay man would ever have gotten AIDS, nor would have any Episcopalian. But I kind of like the chalice. It instills in me as a parishioner a sort of family belonging. It puts the “commune” in “communion.”

Long before I took confirmation classes, I thought that people were actually eating pieces of Jesus and drinking his actual blood. After all, up at the altar, the priest gave you a little disk that my sister always said tasted like envelope glue, and said, “The body of Christ.” They never asked if you wanted white or dark meat. That was followed by a sip of wine and the priest saying, “The blood of Christ.” I couldn’t logically figure out how there was so much Jesus to go around. There ware so many churches. You’d have thought by then they’d have run out of Jesus pieces. But I just chalked it up with one of the mysteries of life, like Santa Claus. You’re telling me one man drops by every house on planet earth and leaves presents for children he met just two weeks before at Monkey Wards?

It wasn’t until later when I learned that communion was just a symbolic ritual, and not the actual chunk o’ Christ. So you had envelope glue body, cheap port wine for blood, so why not fried pork rinds, too? “The body of Christ, the blood of Christ, and the skin of Christ." Would you like to see a dessert menu?” Hey, if you’re tithing 10% of your income, there should be a Buffet of Christ. Or at least a Snack Bar of Christ. Let’s all go to the altar to get ourselves a treat.

I do remember my first communion, and uncharacteristic of me, I looked forward more to tasting that wafer than the wine. But it was not to be. I don’t know what happened; maybe the church ran out of hosts, but that night we were served little chunks of bagels instead of envelope glue wafers. What, no whitefish salad to go on this? And which way to the pickle bar, dawlink? I thought it was kind of classy and inclusive, and I’m pretty sure that Jesus, as a Jew, would have given it his full endorsement.

As it turned out, I discovered during my second communion that I actually liked the taste of the wafers, those body of Christ substitutes, and I rediscovered that flavor once again at Bobbie’s funeral. So at my next party I’m serving cheeses on Jesus. I can walk around with a tray with brie and Stilton cheese topped on the wafer of Christ, and offer, in my best Don Pardo voice: “Aaaand here’s your host!”

To accommodate this, I have learned that through the miracle of the Internet, you can actually order those tasty wafers for a fraction of the price of Triscuits. You can get a thousand of them, gluten-free, if you want, for less than twenty bucks. Some are still made by cloistered nuns. You can’t say that about Triscuits. The only thing that comes close is the Keebler elves.

Apparently the people I love most, Quebecers, have already adopted Body of Christ Chips as a diet snack food. If you don’t believe me, go here: http://www.dailygrail.com/node/2453.
Leave it to the snowbirds to find something cheap to fill their guts with.

Despite the sad occasion, it was nice being back at St. John’s, the church I grew up in. It was nice to get a little reminder-taste of the Son of God. And I don’t think I would shock myself if the next time I’m in Tampa on a Sunday, I found myself wanting to attend mass. I sure did enjoy the choir.

But maybe I’ll wait until next summer, after the Swine Flu is on the decline.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Confusing Facts of Life

2009-09-25T15:51:00.004-04:00

I was eleven or twelve when my mother finally gave me the birds and the bees talk. Up until then I was pitifully ignorant on how babies were made. Although not as ignorant as the granddaughter of my next-door neighbor, who thought babies were born through the mother’s nostrils.

“Yeah,” I remember saying, “maybe if you’re a booger baby.” Although what I believed wasn’t exactly sane, either.

I thought all babies were delivered by C-section. I surmised that every mother had to be sliced open to have the baby removed. That was how, I was told, my sister and I were delivered, so I assumed that was the way everyone came out. I knew they didn’t go out through the nose, and I didn’t suspect there was any other way of getting something big out of a body.

I also assumed that most women automatically got pregnant by some kind of act of God after they were married. More than once I had heard childless married women say, “We weren’t blessed with children,” so I guess that is where I got the Divine Conception theory. I thought that married women who did not have kids had done something to piss off God. When I told my sister this one morning as we were walking to the day camp bus stop, she said, “Are you kidding me? That’s how you think women get pregnant? You and Mom need to have The Talk.”

Even though I was the only male in a house of three, women were nevertheless a complete mystery to me. For years I had played with the cardboard tampon applicators that set next to the toilet in a pink rubber trashcan, which oddly enough, I still own today (the can, not the applicators). I didn’t know what they were, and I certainly didn’t know where they’d been, but it was fun to play with the little telescopes while I sat on the toilet. Here’s something I don’t like to admit. If you push your thumb over the bottom of one and blow down into the other end, they make a great whistle.

One day in fifth grade, all the girls got to leave the classroom to go see a movie in the auditorium. The boys were never told what it was about, so we just automatically assumed the worst, figuring it was a full-length Disney animation, or even disheartening to us, The Batman Movie. The boys never got to go see a movie in the auditorium without girls. It just wasn’t fair.

Once, my sister was applying to go to sleepover camp, and I had looked at the application. One of the questions was: “Does your daughter know about menstruation?”

“Hey, Kathryn,” I asked, “what’s menstruation?”

She looked up from her eighth-grade homework at me. “Ask your mother,” she said.

Before I go on, there are a couple of things you have to understand:

1.) My mother hated her job. She worked for an overly-frisky, borderline abusive narcissist, your typical 60’s asshole-in-charge government supervisor.

2.) My mother believed that she was going to be one of those bridge-playing, Junior-Leaguing, garden-clubbing, hat-wearing Ladies Who Lunch. My father was a prestigious editorialist who helped shape public opinion. He was funny and entertaining and had friends in high society, so Mom actually had reason to believe she was headed toward a life of leisure. That shit hit the jet-propelled fan when Dad died, and she had to go to work. Not only did she hate her job, but also she resented working. She also told us that it was my father, not her, who wanted to have kids.

With those two things in mind, it’s pretty obvious that the first thing you want to hear from your ten-year-old son when you walk in the door (after coming home from a crappy day at work with a sexist pig boss at a job you thought you’d never have to work to support children you never wanted to have in the first place, and all you wanted to do now was curl up in bed with a good book and a fishbowl full of bourbon, ice and water) is not: “Mom? What’s menstruation?”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” she sighed, kicking off her heels, “go look it up in the dictionary.” And she headed towards the ice cube tray.

So I did look it up in our ancient Webster’s dictionary. I’m sure it was no different from today’s modern online version:
men·stru·a·tion: a discharging of blood, secretions, and tissue debris from the uterus that recurs in nonpregnant breeding-age primate females at approximately monthly intervals and that is considered to represent a readjustment of the uterus to the nonpregnant state following proliferative changes accompanying the preceding ovulation; also : period.

So, yeah, that really shed light on it for me. Whatever it was, it sounded pretty disgusting, and since it only occurred in female primates, I knew it was never going to happen to me, so I was happy not to pursue it.

“Where’s your sister?” visiting friends asked that summer.

“She’s at menstruation camp,” I’d say.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t you know anything? Look it up in the dictionary.”

This was a common ploy of mine. As long as I made people think I knew things, I got by. By the time I was in sixth grade, I was a master at this. There were three groups of boys in the sixth grade: those who knew about sex, those who didn’t know about sex, and those who pretended to know about sex. The cool boys were the ones who knew about it. The ones who pretended to know about it could hang out with the cool guys, but neither of those groups would associate with the ignorant. As a pretender, I had to watch everything I said.

So my sister had begged mom to Explain Things to me. I had embarrassed her too many times about things that shouldn’t be brought up in a public venue. (“Mom? What are those little telescopes in the bathroom trash can?” I once asked at a cafeteria.) But it wasn’t until I formally made the request for my facts of life talk that Mother finally gave in.

I had asked because I had blown my cover with the cool boys. I had made a fatal faux pas in telling a friend of mine to go give a girl a “blow job.”

Everyone was talking about blow jobs in sixth grade. I took everything literally. Why would you want someone to inflate your penis? Wouldn’t that hurt? Where does the air actually go? Out your nose? Would they have to cut it out of you?

“Bill,” Joe had said, “you can’t blow a girl.”

I was immediately transferred to the other side of the line drawn in the sand: in the corner with the unknowing.

I’d had enough. It was getting too confusing. Girls could menstruate but couldn’t get blow jobs. Boys could get blow jobs but not give them, and they couldn’t menstruate. So it was that night I had made the request. Mom asked for some time and told me to start writing down the questions I had.

I grew impatient. I had to know and know now. A gap was growing between the boys in my class who knew the facts and me. I was so anxious about it, I was wetting the bed. I secretly slept on towels at night. One day Mom brought home something in a paper bag and quickly skipped the ice cube tray and went in her bedroom. A minute later she came out into the kitchen without the package.

This is how I ruined every Christmas. Every present was peeked at. Mail that I was not supposed to read was also hidden in her room. There was no lock on her door, and I had a two after-school hour window to snoop through her room to find things I had no business finding.

What I found was this tall, narrow, very colorful book called Take the High Road, which would have been better titled, Don’t Even Think About Masturbating. I sneaked it into my room and read the entire book in less than 15 minutes. It was a puritanical book warning against getting involved with the wrong crowd and dictating the way boys should treat girls, but its focus was a list of things that could happen if you masturbated. You would fall into the wrong crowd. That would lead to catching VD and not being able to graduate from high school. The illustrations were sinister and frightening. The book insisted that whacking off could damage the penis and make you sterile, which I assumed meant really, really clean. This book was of no help, but it sure made me a lot more curious about jerking off. This would turn into the first of many things in life I did that were allegedly bad for you, but really, really felt good doing them. The sad part is, it was the least harmful.

I put the book back in the bag and returned it to her top dresser drawer, under her bras. I went back to my bedroom and wrote down more questions. And made sure I had my secret towel ready for my slumber that night.

That Friday, after supper and the dishes were done and my sister had left the house to spend the night at the house of one of her menstruation camp mate's, Mom and I sat down on our beat-up sectional sofa in the den.

She had a legal pad and a sharp number 2 pencil, and she drew what looked like the head of a bull (the horns, I soon learned, were called fallopian tubes) and started the explanation. The mysteries of erections, fornication, impregnation, masturbation, and yes, even menstruation were solved in less than an hour. And I cried with relief to find out I wasn’t a bed wetter at all but merely an innocent wet dreamer, a mere adolescent with normal, textbook nocturnal emissions. I was pleased to find I was headed toward adulthood, not reverting back to diapers.

We then switched to the question-and-answer period.

My first question was, “What’s a blow job?” It was reluctantly explained with moderate disgust.

“Next question,” Mom prodded.

“What do homosexuals do?” I asked.

Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped ever so slightly. She stood up.

“I’m going to go fix a drink,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

She returned shortly, dark brown cocktail in one hand and Take the High Road in the other.

She took a swig of her drink and sat back down.

“I bought you this book,” she said, handing me the diversion.

Tossing it aside, I said, “Thanks. So, what do homosexuals do?”

“How do you know about homosexuals?” she asked.

“Everyone knows about that. I just want to know what they do.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because it’s one of my questions. You’re the one who asked me to write down all my questions and said you’d answer them all.” Sheesh. It was like pulling teeth.

Eventually she told me what homosexual men and lesbians did to each other.

I was so excited. I couldn’t wait until Monday so I could tell Joe that women could get blow jobs.

But only from other women.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Blob

2009-08-23T18:58:00.003-04:00

What you are about to read may contain very strong sexual or offensive language, strong explicit nudity, very strong gore or disturbing violence, or graphic drug abuse. Essays with this rating should not be read by anyone over 18 (even if they are accompanied by an adolescent) and are usually edited to get an "R" rating. Today NA-17 essays are called "uncut" for verification that very graphic sex or violence scenes will be depicted.
Or it may just contain vivid descriptions of snot.

Whenever I want to make myself laugh, I think of this one particular “incident” I had with my friend Julie in college. I sometimes do this intentionally, and I can really get myself laughing maniacally if I don’t stop thinking about it. If I were an actor, I’d use this to my benefit if given a scene that required me to perform floor-punching, hysterical laugher. I don’t know why I find it so funny, but I doubt seriously that I’ll get through writing this without slipping over the edge several times.

I first met Julie in junior high school, although we really didn’t like each other then. We were both in band, and she admitted years later that she couldn’t stand me at that time. Julie was always high strung, and she wore her emotions on her sleeve. The first time I noticed this was when she got into an argument with the band conductor. I don’t remember what the problem was, but I do remember that he was the kind of person you didn’t want touching you. He was creepy in a Bela Lugosi kind of way. His skin was semi-transparent and tissue-papery, and Vitalis dripped out his thinning gray hair. I believe he made a sexist innuendo from his podium, and Julie took issue with it, and they went back and forth until he sent her down to the dean’s office.

Even at age fourteen, she had balls bigger than anyone I knew, and I always admired that. She was dramatic in a Bette Davis, Depression-era movie kind of way. To this day she is the only person who has ever thrown a drink in my face in a restaurant. Or anywhere, for that matter.

When we got into high school, we were still in band, which was overcrowded. Neither of us bonded with the director (“I can’t respect a man who blows his nose on a washcloth,” she once said.) We both had the low honor of being Band Alternates. As if being a band nerd wasn’t bad enough, we were the leper nerds of the Plant High School marching band. There were a set number of people needed to march the formations. Any extra players, instead of practicing marching every day on the football field, had to show up and just sit in the stadium. If someone was sick or broke a leg or couldn’t play for any reason, the director would put in an alternate. If he’d been a reasonable person, he would have switched out alternates for each game, but that’s not how he operated. We were Permanent Alternates. The Not Good Enough. During the entire school year I marched once.

Julie and I got to know each other while being leper Alternates, roasting in the afternoon sun on splintery wooden bleachers. We learned we had a lot in common. We both were in single mom-led families, something that was much more the exception than the rule back then. Both of our mothers were “heavy drinkers” (although neither of us would ever utter the “A” word about that.) We both loved Volkswagens. Her mother had a tan squareback, and when I turned 16 I bought a ’71 Superbeetle. And we both shared a perverted sense of humor and adored the grotesque.

A friend of her mother’s was opening a restaurant, and Julie got me my first job as a shrimp peeler/dish washer there. We got work permits and health certificates together, which were required of anyone under the age of sixteen. Ever the emotional one, Julie almost fainted while having her blood drawn for the health certificate. And she cried.

Although I never told her so back then, Julie was lovely. She had blazingly white, wavy Lady Godiva hair that she wore in a long braid that stretched all the way down her back. But the thing about her that really got to me was her laugh. It was loud and sharp, and once she got going she would throw her head back, look towards God, and bring her hand up to her chest as if she was grasping make-believe pearls. It physically drained her. When she ran out of air, she would stomp her feet back and forth until she could stop laughing long enough to inhale.

Just as she was hot-headed and dramatic, she was also quick to laugh and fast to forgive. And I did plenty of unforgivable things in those years.

As time passed, we remained close friends, but we were also, at times, viciously passive-aggressive. To know and to love Julie was like living in a kettle of fish. You couldn’t help but admire her assertiveness, and she was seemingly fearless. You also recognized that there were times when Julie would not only stir the pot, but would light the flames under the kettle, and before you knew it, everyone in the pot would turn into an uncomfortable, steaming bouillabaisse. I, on the other hand, was only mean and inconsiderate. Julie would always calmly say, “Bill, I can’t wait ’til you die so I can dance on your grave.” And after we graduated and shared a 50-minute commute to college, I would sometimes leave her stranded out there, forcing her sister to drive out and pick her up.

Which brings us to The Incident. One late afternoon after classes, we got in my bug, buckled up, and I let out this rip-roaring, fender-popping sneeze. “God, Bill,” Julie said, “flip the car, why don’t you?”

I’d had a headache all day, and didn’t want to get into it with her, so I just apologized. As we headed west on Fowler Avenue, I noticed that my headache was almost gone.

We are approaching the NA-17 segment of our program. You may want to leave now.

There are times when you get something caught between your respiratory system and digestive system. You have to get rid of it, but you can’t decide the best way to remove it from your body, so you try both ways. You try blowing your nose to get it out through the respiratory system. When that fails, you try to swallow it and hawk it up into your mouth to expel it. But sometimes, neither system works satisfactorily, so you just stop, conceding that in time it will work its way out on its own.

This foreign body isn’t really snot. It’s a semi-translucent, whitish-clear color. Maybe it’s 20% snot, 80%, uh, I don’t know, but for want of a better word, let’s call it “organic latex.” Like a bungee cord, it is extremely rugged and quite stretchable. Sometimes you blow out only the beginning of it, and you can pull the rest out, like a magician with endless tied-together silk handkerchiefs up his sleeve. It is tough yet adhesive, and well held-together, and sometimes you can pull the whole alien out of your nose and feel it resurrect up the back of your throat. Sometimes it hurts to unearth. But it is so bizarre and so elastic that you could use it to secure luggage to the roof rack of your car. Let’s give it a name and call it The Blob. We have all produced this at some time in your life.

A little later, we stopped at a red light, and I noticed something bright and shiny in the hollow of the tiny armrest on the door of my car. I stuck my finger in to the opening and pulled out what appeared to be the largest Blob known to mankind. I really didn’t know what it was or how it got there. To this date, it has never been matched, either size or durability. It dangled from my pointer like a giant, slimy pendulum, or perhaps a baby elephant’s trunk.

“Good God!” I exclaimed. “What the hell is this?”

Julie took one look at it and, remembering The Sneeze ten minutes earlier, began howling. She grasped her chest and turned her head upwards. Her feet drum rolled against the floorboard of the car. She was radish-red, and tears streamed down her face, and when I moved The Blob closer to her for further examination, she screamed, hit my arm away and continued laughing and crying and screaming until after the light turned green and we approached the interstate.

Her laugh was infectious. After I remembered the sneeze, and could therefore identify the foreign object, I should have pulled over. We were both hysterical. I don’t remember what I did with The Blob, but knowing the kind of person I was back then, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I at least tried to hang it from my rearview mirror, just as people do with CD’s and beads today. I should have bottled it, or somehow preserved it for science. It was simply not of our species. We were on the highway a long time before either of us could speak again, and when we did, we could only have tiny conversations until Julie would recall my prying The Blob out of my armrest, and off she’d go again. That would, in turn, prompt me to start laughing breathlessly as we rushed southward on the interstate. It wasn’t safe. I’m surprised that Mothers Against Laughing Drivers was never launched.

When we pulled up to her house, Julie plopped down on the sidewalk and went into her last nuclear-powered hysterical rant. She reclined onto her back and rolled side-to-side, stomping her sandaled feet, and I soon joined her, getting to the point of silent laughter, where all you can hear is breathless wheezing. I don’t know what was funnier: the incident itself, or just watching her being so tickled. It took a long time to stop. There would be a minute of getting under control, and then for another few minutes we went off on another doubled-up, cackling binge. If any neighbors saw us, they probably assumed we were under the influence of some really good weed. It was painful. My abs were sore the next day.

Julie and I have spoken several times about this in the last three decades, and every time we do, we both still get out of control.

And luckily for me, she has passed this story on to both of her children. And if this legend keeps being handed down, I hope one day it will be a common folk song played around summer campfires: “The Blob That Ate the Volkswagen.”

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Y2K+10

2009-08-12T18:25:00.004-04:00

Is anyone planning on celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Y2K scare? And if not, why not? Maybe if I play my cards right, we can actually re-live it.

For those of you who were either not yet born or were just not paying attention, bad things were predicted for New Year’s Eve, 1999. According to some reports, people wouldn’t be able to order Happy Meals or flush their toilets. All traffic lights would go dark, and nuclear power plant meltdowns would force us to duck and cover. Reactionaries hoarded food and water, bought guns, ammunition, extra door locks, gas masks, survival books, and hazmat suits. Bank failures and a global economic collapse would trigger the launching of nuclear missiles. Even normally rational people were withdrawing all their cash from banks, because there were rumors that ATM’s would not work, all because mainframe date fields might remain at two digits instead of increasing to four. Because it was over-reported, people naturally overreacted. There was global paranoia.

Instead of the earth exploding, people woke up on the first day of 2000, amazed to find their televisions still working, and all channels were running endless loops of Emily Litella chirping, “Never mind.”

Y2K was a scam. Overnight, people who were good proposal writers became millionaires. According to a February, 2000 article in Money magazine, the Y2K scare cost American businesses half a trillion dollars, all of which, I suspect, was awarded to contract workers from Bangalore, India. After, of course, the proposal writers who procured them were paid.

I worked in IT at the time and was relieved to learn one Friday in late 1998 that not one person on our staff would be dedicated to Y2K repair. It would all be taken care of by a group of contractors. I was so thankful to learn that Y2K would not interrupt my afternoon tradition of playing endless games of Space Cadet: 3-D Pinball for Windows that I took that afternoon off to go and play it at home rather than from behind a locked office door. It was so much more fun with the sound turned on.

I worked in a rural town of 1800 people. When I moved in, there was one stoplight. When I left, there were three. Most of the jobs in the area were manufacturing jobs with companies that produced either a) drugs, or b) alcohol. In fact, I challenge any other city of 1800 to show that the majority of their residents work for companies that enable addiction. I suspect that Elkton, Virginia, has the highest per-capita rate of workers dedicated to making people drunk or high. It is so remote and out of the way that the nearest town with a movie theater or a Walmart is Harrisonburg, sixteen miles away. There is no public transportation. Most people have pickup trucks. Ours was the only one without a gun rack mounted on the rear window. Ours was a parasol rack.

So I will never forget that following Monday morning when two taxis, quite possibly the entire fleet of Harrisonburg Yellow Cab, pulled up and dropped off 6 Indian nationals who were to be our Y2K programmers for the next several months.

I am not proud of the way they were treated. They were all shoved into a dirty, crumbling trailer with toxic paneling and discarded office equipment. This work environment, sad to say, was identical to mine. Yet in opposition to the 14 years I spent there, none of the Indians frittered away hours composing letters to the editor and company vice presidents, insisting that we were working in poisonous, sub-human conditions.

Eventually the six of them pitched in and bought two sputtering old cars so they didn’t have to pay the outrageously expensive taxi fare to and from The Burg. They were all more comfortable living in a movie-theater-sized town instead of backwoods Elkton. And even that wasn’t a safe bet, as once an uncooperative Mexican migrant worker was literally shot out of a tree for not obeying law enforcement. Turns out he didn’t speak a word of English and couldn’t understand the commands. And let’s face it: Elkton was far more frightening to an alien. If you weren’t born in Elkton and had generations of inbred families that came before and after you, then you were not to be trusted. If you were brown-skinned and spoke without a twang and were hard to understand, you were one deer-rifle-shot away from the grave.

As one of the alcohol employees, I was in training and technical support, so I didn’t have much to do with the Y2K fixers. My job, by then, was pretty much obsolete. If you didn’t know anything about computers, the company didn’t hire you. Yet, I was still teaching at the Control-Alt-Delete level. Trainees often usurped the class from me and did a better job of teaching than I did.

The Y2k Indian tribe interfaced minimally with our database programmers, and if it wasn’t for the smell of curry wafting from the microwave of our shared break room, we probably wouldn’t have even noticed they were there. They were soft spoken, self-supervised and self-testing. I always suspected that they weren’t Y2K fixers at all, but rather spies from an outsourcing company, EDS, which one year later took over our department and fired everyone who failed to suck up to their corporate executives. And the ones who spent too much time behind locked office doors playing Space Cadet: 3-D Pinball for Windows.

A few months later, the programmer/spies/tribesmen proclaimed our systems to be Y2K compliant, and they drove off in their one remaining rickety car, and we never saw them again.

If you were an IT employee at my company, once every 8 weeks you were tethered 24/7 to a company-supplied pager, shoebox-sized cell phone and 25-pound laptop computer. You took them wherever you went, as if they were the nuclear code briefcase. I would solve all the unimportant requests, like the ones that came from pustules who would call at 3 am because they forgot their Outlook passwords. Most of the other calls were too complicated for me, so I always had to chase down our database administrator and let her take care of the brainy problems. Fortunately, she had the nuke box the week of the Y2K click-over, but I still had to work for 8 hours on Saturday, January 1, 2000, in case an unseen Indian Y2K bug created a production delay. During those eight hours, my phone rang exactly zero times, and I got so bored playing Space Cadet: 3-D Pinball for Windows that I can’t even launch that program today, sounded or silent, without feeling as if I just swallowed a handful of Ambien.

While I was “working” that day, the rest of America was logging on to eBay to sell the emergency supplies they had purchased in order to sustain life after the Y2K Armageddon. When people realized they’d been duped, their generators, battery-operated ovens and icemakers, water purification tablets, Pocket Fishermen, and cases of margarita mix were sold at a fraction of their original purchase price. Elsewhere in the world, proposal writers retired and shopped for real estate in St. Tropez and St. Barts. In India, underpaid former Y2K fixers rang in the new year with double portions of dahl and naan, e.g., beans and bread to all you Elktonians.

So I’m thinking the best way to celebrate the anniversary it to revitalize it. If I could get some major clients on board: IBM, Oracle, and perhaps SAP, and get them to publish white papers warning the world that computers have crashed when post-2010 dates have been entered, we could relive the entire bogus scenario. Once it’s reported on CNN, I’ll download and plagiarize a proposal from the Web, change 2000 to 2010 and e-mail it to all the Fortune 500 companies. One of them, some think-outside-the-box, proactive-instead-of-reactive MBA will have to believe me. And I’ll move into a skuzzy trailer, join a tribe, and pretend to work. A few months later, I’ll be yacht shopping.

But first I’ll need to find a new computer game to keep me looking busy.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Auntie's Boy

2009-08-08T15:50:00.010-04:00

(with apologies for the sappiness.)

Every summer for six years in a row I hopped on a plane headed west. Usually it was on the now-defunct Braniff Airlines. I don’t know why Braniff went out of business, but two reasons float to the surface: 1) Their tickets were dirt-cheap; 2) They commissioned the inventor of the mobile, internationally-acclaimed artist Alexander Calder to design “Flying Colors,” a fleet of jets he painted in wild, abstract designs, just as amorphous and vibrant as his regular, non-jetliner pieces. Imagine what that must have cost. Imagine Southwest, hiring, say, Robert Rauschenberg to do the same thing today. Not only would it cost millions, but it would be tough to execute, since he’s dead.

Before I got my first paying job at age 15, I would fund these annual trips by collecting and recycling aluminum cans and deposit bottles. It takes 32 cans to make a pound of aluminum, and I would get ten cents a pound for them. From September to May I had to collect 32,000 cans to make a hundred bucks. Soda bottles were much more profitable, but they were much more difficult to find. So to make fifty bucks, I had to locate only 1000 Coke bottles. $150 would pay for my flight and give me a little summer spending money.

I was motivated to do this so I could spend three months with my Aunt Kay, my dad’s sister, and my favorite person in the world. If I stayed home during the summer, my mother would force me to enroll in bizarre institutions, such as the Sadomasochistic B&R Ranch Day Camp, where ne’er-do-wells and rule breakers would be publicly beaten at the daily “council ring” meetings. I also once spent two weeks at Vacation Bible School, a long, tedious ten days of hell. When they asked how we wanted to celebrate the last day, I suggested a Jesus piñata. Whatever the event, they were always things I hated, so it was in my best interest to go west in the summertime.

Aunt Kay and Uncle Earl would pick me up at Stapleton and take me home. If I arrived after dinner (Did you know they used to serve meals on domestic flights? It’s true,) then there would be a fresh-baked apple pie (Kay’s specialty) and Dolley Madison butter brickle ice cream (Earl’s favorite) to top it. If I arrived before dinner, there was always my favorite meal: corn flake chicken, pan-fried potatoes and a fresh garden salad. I was spoiled rotten every summer. It was worth every bottle and can I picked up.

The first thing I saw when I entered the house was Kay’s amazing Chambers gas stove. She had cooked on that stove from the day they moved into the house they built in the late 30’s. It was a beautiful white Art Deco stove with red knobs and handles and built-in salt and pepper shakers. Above it hung a set of Revere Ware pots, pans, and skillets. Stainless steel with copper bottoms, they were always kept shiny by her scrubbing them with Twinkle copper cleaner and a nylon net scrubbie she made herself.

I can’t put my finger on it, but there was something defining about those shiny copper bottomed pans. My mother had the same set of Revere Ware, but instead of being hand washed and polished with copper cleaner, they were just tossed in the dishwasher and later put away in a dark cabinet. My mother once remarked to me that she still remembered coming home from the hospital after delivering a stillborn baby, and the first thing she saw was the Revere ware, bright and shiny, reflecting in the just-cleaned kitchen window. Kay had been taking care of the house and my infant sister while the caesarian took place. Mom reflected warmly on the feeling she got coming home to those clean windows and gleaming pans, after having gone through such an awful event. It was something she never forgot.

It was the kindness and simple things that defined my Aunt Kay. Growing up, each Christmas there was always a hand-knitted sweater or pair of slippers under the tree for my sister and me. And she took exceptional interest in my well being. Maybe because I was the youngest and seemingly most at-risk, the most vulnerable after my Dad died, or maybe in some odd way I reminded her of her late brother. But every summer was an adventure. A road trip to see my cousin in Vancouver. A jet boat excursion up the Snake River at the bottom of Hell’s Canyon in Idaho. But more than anything else, it was just the interest she paid and the attention she gave me and the things she taught me that meant the most. There was such a void of that back in Florida and such a flood of it that came from her every summer, that it was no wonder I cried on the plane going back home every August.

It’s because of her that Other Bill considers me such a genius around the house. I can hem his old pants and turn them into shorts, rewire a lamp, paint a house the right way, hang crown molding, manufacture a new catching bag for the avocado picker, fix a toilet, cut glass, prime a pump, hang a ceiling fan. Everything I know how to do is a result of Kay’s instructions. My dad’s family members were poor Michigan dirt farmers and never went to college. Everything they did, they did themselves. And if they didn’t know how, then they’d by-God learn how, because there was never money to pay someone else to do it.

My Aunt Kay could cut hair, singlehandedly add an addition to, or strip and re-roof a house. She could sew anything, from a pair of drawstring pants to a formal gown. I don’t think she ever bought a dress off the rack for herself. She could throw together a strawberry-rhubarb, lemon meringue, peach and apple pie in the time it would take a normal person to follow a recipe and measure the ingredients for just one of those. She canned her own pickles, made her own jam from raspberries she grew in her back yard, split rails and built a fence with the wood.

One summer she bought me my first 35 mm camera. It was almost $300, and she paid for $200 of it and loaned me the rest. “Well if you figure you have four more Christmas presents and three more birthdays and a graduation present, that’s two hundred bucks right there.” And I paid her back ten dollars a month for the next ten months. And she still sent sweaters. She stopped sending the knitted slippers because she had taught me now to make them. That camera took the best pictures and documented the next 20 years of my life.

On the cool Denver summer nights, unless there was a democratic convention on, we would never watch TV. She would sit in her red velvet Victorian rocker and knit. In the 70’s she made ponchos and sweaters to order that were sold at Andersen’s Variety Store, and she could burn through the skeins of yarn and complete one in two nights. We talked about politics, what I was learning in school, about my friends, and not often enough, about her childhood. She had some great stories about my dad, like the time he chased after her with the egg beater and got it caught in her hair. When I’d ask her for more stories about my dad, she’d say, “What do you want to know?” But my answer, “anything,” wasn’t enough. She didn’t care so much to reminisce. I think it was because she and my dad were so close, and she still mourned his early death. But she loved talking about current events, and she was full of questions for me, and she often forced me to think outside my little middle class box.

We were once talking about college draft deferments, and I told her I was glad I was going to college so I didn’t have to go in the army. “Why should you,” she asked, “just because you’re lucky enough to go to college, get out of serving your country just because you can afford to?” Her challenges to me on so many 70’s newsworthy events shaped my political outlook and social mores even to this day. I was starving for conversations like these, but back in Florida, they never happened. In Colorado, there was a plethora of topics that we discussed every night, and once we exhausted one topic, we would quickly move on to the next. Before we knew it, it was midnight or 1 AM.

She gave, and she taught, but most of all she cared. In so many disputes I had with my mother, Kay took my side, including my opposition to my mother’s second marriage. Having an adult to agree with me was an enormous comfort and an equally enormous thorn in my mother’s paw.

Aunt Kay had two kids who cared for me and took me under their wings as well. Generosity of the soul is apparently inherited and passed on.

I’ve tried for five years to write something about her that wouldn’t sound sappy and sentimental, and for the life of me, I haven’t been able to do it. This will have to suffice until I learn to be a better writer. Having her in my life was meaningful beyond words, and I still think of her all the time, but always every June 23rd, her birthday. I was often with her to celebrate it, sometimes sneaking off in the late afternoon on my cousin’s bicycle to buy her something sweet smelling from the florist. She lived a long life and died at 89. She’d be 101 now. I tried telling her several times, in person and in writing, how much she meant to me. She never thought she did anything other than what a normal aunt would do. She’d simply thank me, and then we’d move on to the next topic.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Nursing Pool

2009-07-22T17:12:00.012-04:00

Give Him The Enema!

Who hasn’t heard the complaint of a weary airline passenger when they get off the plane: “Why is it that I’m always the one who has to sit next to the screaming baby?” Although I have often complained about that, a screaming baby is a birthday at the beach compared to the person I inevitably get as my hospital roommate.

I have a history of cardiac problems. It’s not that I’m overweight or don’t eat right or don’t exercise, or at least one out of those three. My parents should never have bred. My father was 51 when he checked out from a heart attack. Several years later my mother had valve replacement surgery and a pacemaker stuck in her, and she was never the same after that. Why I got all the bad genes and my sister is totally unaffected in any way from this mishmash of foul genetic combinations is something that makes me wonder if maybe, just maybe, my dad wasn’t actually her father.

In my early forties, I was a hospital inmate for 6 days with a messy bout with appendicitis. When I was first wheeled into my room, I got stuck with a barely cognizant man, easily twice my age, which is typical for me, because I’m usually in the cardiac wing. When you’re in the cardiac wing, you’re pretty much guaranteed that your roommate is going to be someone’s great grandfather. For this visit, I wasn’t in the cardiac wing, but I got the octogenarian anyway.

I always, without fail, end up with the screamers, the moaners, the complainers, and the violent, and they all poop in their beds (so do I, but that's another story).

Don’t deny it, nurses. You always wait for the one new patient who looks most likely to not complain. Once you find him, he becomes the person you place with the screaming nut case. You see me coming. I hear you whispering. “Looks like this one’s ripe for the picking.” is what you’re mumbling, isn’t it? ISN’T IT?

In order to be a hospital employee, it helps to be a gambler in order to pass all the free time they have. So they all take bets on the time they think someone will die, or, in my case, when I would finally break down and begin to complain about the accommodations.

So after a while, my roommate was sound asleep, muttering quietly to himself. I could live with that. I drifted off to sleep with his gentle yammering not disturbing me.

When I awoke to the screaming, my heart was pounding, and I had the uneasy feeling that a macaw had been released into my room.

“AAAAAAAAA! HELP! HELP! HELP ME! HELP ME!” screamed the tropical bird. After I tucked my heart back into my chest cavity, I realized it wasn’t a macaw at all. It was my roommate. I then thought, why don't hospitals have some kind of Match.com website where you can pick someone compatible? I'd put in for a quiet reader, maybe a Ipod listener of 60's folk music who spoke only when spoken to.

The screams were still echoing down the halls, and nurses came running into the room, not to aid him, but to help me. It seemed that the needle on the pulse-o-meter from the heart monitor on my chest sent out a code blue signal.

“Are you all right?” the nurse asked.

“Yeah, I’m all right. It was him screaming, not me,” I said.

“Yeah but your pulse shot up to 200,” he told me.

“That’s because he was screaming,” I tried to say with a sad look on my face, the kind that would send them the “I need a private suite with a whirlpool spa” message.

“Yeah, he goes on like that all night, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Well can I get moved to another room, then? This is crazy,” I snapped.

“All beds are full now, but maybe tomorrow we can get you in another one.”

“Please?” I begged.

The nurse moved out to the hall and yelled out, “Okay, whose name is in the 3 am box in the complainer pool?”

Someone called back, “Dr. Ansari.”

My nurse cursed, “Damn! It’s always a doctor who wins!”

Just as I was drifting back to sleep, the feathers flew again and the macaw started back in with the screaming. He sounded like a helpless girl in a B movie about to be stepped on by a dinosaur.

That was it. I took my pillow and my plasma-on-a-pole down to the family visiting room, which, at 3 am, was naturally empty. I stretched across half a dozen brick-hard chairs. When I woke up, my body felt as if it had been attacked by killer woodpeckers.

The next day was my surgery. The appendix and part of my intestines were successfully removed, but damn, I forgot to tell the doctor I wanted my appendix for show-and-tell.

Which brings us to the story of the first time I was hospitalized. I was seven and went in for a tonsillectomy, complete with ether anesthesia, which I can smell clinging to my nostril hairs to this very day. Before the surgery, I asked Dr. Bagby if I could have my tonsils to take to school for show-and-tell. He amusingly granted my request, and later sent them home with me in an old mayonnaise jar full of formaldehyde. They were enormous and red and just the thing to make the girls run away, screaming in terror. I’ve never seen the inside of a scrotum, but I suspect I could have convinced people they were testicles. But I was 7; I didn’t yet know what testicles were.

After my recovery, I couldn’t wait to be the envy of my second grade class with my Removed Organs in a Jar. My mother drove me to school that morning, but somewhere between my bedroom and the ’57 Chevy, the jar started to leak.

“What’s that smell?” my mother sniffed.

“What smell?” I pretended not to be a part of this.

“It’s those tonsils! Throw them out, throw them out now!” She pulled over, stopped the car and threw it in Park.

“Give them to me!” she demanded.

“No, c’mon Mom. It’s just a few more blocks,” I whined, pathetically.

“What’re you gonna put them in? They just don’t have empty jars in your classroom.”

Actually, they did. If you think back to second grade, you probably remember a high cabinet full of donated baby food jars that were used for doling out tempera paint. But before I could make my case, Mom snatched the jar from my hand, rolled down my window, unscrewed the lid and splashed my testicles, I mean, tonsils into Mark Pintaure’s next-door neighbor’s front yard. She tossed the jar on the back seat and sped off, as I carefully marked the spot where they fell, because I hoped to rescue them later. But alas, that afternoon when I walked home, I searched high and low, but the tonsils were gone, probably to a crime lab somewhere where someone was probably looking for the rest of the body.

Back to the appendectomy post-op scene. My second roommate was a 20-something mutt with long, greasy hair and teeth that had probably never seen the overhead light at a dentist's office.I waved as they wheeled me by him. “At last,” I thought as I pressed the morphine pump, “a young one who won’t scream.”

I woke up to him screaming on the phone, demanding that someone come pick him up, because, “I ain’t got no health insurance. You gotta sneak me outa here. “No, I di-ant drive here. They brought me by ambo-lance.” He was one of those odd white boys who spoke ghetto and thought that because he wore his pants belted at the knees, he was just as cool as the brothers who do the same. But he wasn’t.

After he finished his rant, a social worker came in and told him that he qualified for assistance in paying his bill. After that he called his friend back and told him to gather the white homies to come see him.

The next day, while eavesdropping, I learned from his ER-assigned doctor that he had only been dehydrated. The doctor told him to drink more the next time he went to the beach. It took a night’s stay and thousands of dollars of publicly-funded testing to figure that out.

Meanwhile, each time I woke up, it was to a room full of scary-looking white people and blasting hip-hop music. Once I woke up as Mr. Dehydro, waiting for his discharge papers, was reading the riot act to a nurse, demanding a better (free, publicly-funded) lunch. Mercifully, I was one with my morphine pump, and I just knocked myself out again.

Not long after that, I was back in the hospital for the first of two unsuccessful cardiac ablations. As I walked into the room I glanced over to see CNA's and volunteers waving dollar bills, eager to get in on the pool. I saw this as a bad sign. This time I roomed with a loud, old couple, even though he was the designated patient.

This great-grandfather and his wife were the bitterest wintering couple I have ever listened to. He was in for some kind of intestinal blockage and had just completed one of those luxurious barium enemas.

There was constant bickering between the two of them, even after visiting hours were long over.

He: Why can’t I see my doctor?

She: Because the doctor’s a stupid schmuck.

He: Well get the noiss, then.

She: I just went to the noiss. She said she’d be here in a minute.

He: They don’t care. You think they care? That was an hour ago. Tell her if she can’t give me an explanation, then I want to check myself out. I want to go home.

The nurse finally came in just as the doctor arrived, who insisted grampa would not be released until they figured out why he couldn’t keep any food down. Along with his wife, the patient (the word and the man both being oxymorons) demanded that they be told what was wrong right now; they were tired of waiting, and they were going to report the doctor to the AMA. The doctor said there was nothing he could do until the tests came back and made a hasty retreat.

A second nurse arrived with a bag and a hose, and the two of them hit him with the news. “We have to wash the barium out of you, otherwise it’s going to turn into concrete.” I don’t know if this was medically necessary, or if they just wanted to punish him. Naturally, the old couple flew into a rage.

As they got into a physical fight, Nurse Ratchet said to Cherry Ames, “Give him the enema.”

“I’m going to call the police!” he threatened, trying to slap the nurses away.

“The police won’t come, because there is no crime being committed,” the nurse argued. Then back to Cherry Ames, Butthole Nurse, she screamed, “GIVE HIM THE ENEMA!”

“I’m calling all the newspapers when I get out of here. I swear to God I am!”

The enema quieted him down. Or maybe it didn’t. You see, this time I had brought earplugs and forced them with my pinky way down in my external auditory canal. You learn you have no control over these kind of things. I drifted off to sleep, and in the morning I was taken in for the heart surgery, which was a picnic at the park compared to the ranting of Mr. and Mrs. Enema.

When I woke up, I was in a private room. No whirlpool spa, but completely void of noisy strangers. Apparently, if you don’t complain before you have your procedure, you win the pool.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

So You Want to Work for a Police Department

2009-07-19T15:21:00.007-04:00

It was a few days after September 11, 2001. I had been voluntarily unemployed and planned to stay that way until my unemployment insurance ran out. Because there were reports that the attack would cause a recession, I figured it would be in my best interest to go out and start applying for something with benefits.

Several weeks later, as luck would have it, I got a response to my application at a local police department and went in for an interview. Because it was a low-paying administrative job, I had intentionally dumbed-down my resume, hoping to make myself look more interesting in person.

Not long after that, a detective called me and requested that I report the next day for a polygraph.

I had never taken a lie detector test, and had only seen them in the movies, with the nervous, off-the- paper, needle-twitching-device going berserk whenever the accused was fibbing. So I felt a little nervous about it, but not nearly as nervous as I should have been, I later learned.

The night before the test, I tried in vain to resist reviewing my sins of the past, which numbered in the upper digits of infinity. I wondered exactly what they’d want me to admit. Would they make inquiries into my sexual orientation? I thought about all the reckless things I did when I was in high school. My only chargeable offenses were drunk driving, vandalism, weed smoking, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, all of which went uncaught, but what else should I prepare for?

At the police station the next day, before he started asking me questions I didn’t want to answer, Detective Palmer shut me in a conference room, leaving me alone to fill out a 22-page volume of questions. Most of my written answers I had never told family or even my closest of friends.

I could feel sweat dripping down my armpits. There were dozens of questions, asked several times but with different wording, attempting to trip me up about my drug and alcohol use, gambling, and financial status.

I had a tough time with the questions. Did taking office supplies really count as stealing, and wasn’t a laser printer just an office supply? What about using the photocopier for my income tax returns? At least I didn’t take it home.

Another question was: How many times have you smoked marijuana?

Who writes for these people, I wondered. Are they kidding me with this shit? Did they think I kept a reefer diary? A narcotic spreadsheet, maybe? How many times? What did that mean? What constituted a time? Did one hit constitute a time, or did a whole joint constitute a time? When I was in high school, no one ever smoked their own joint. It was passed around. If I had half a dozen bong hits at one party but hours apart, was that one time or six? Should I wait for Detective Palmer to come back in to illuminate? And what kind of idiot was I going to look like if I asked him for clarification?

I decided to estimate. I probably toasted one with friends every weekend through high school. As the worst case scenario, let’s say the group of us hit on 3 joints every weekend. I didn’t smoke on summer break. 52 weeks minus 12 weeks equals 40 weeks times 3 J’s times three years. I had to do the math longhand, but the answer was 360 times. That seemed excessive, so I rounded down to 200. But what about college? Fuck it, I thought. I am never going to get this job. I should just get up and leave.

Detective Palmer came back in the room before I had gotten to the end of the book. He told me to take my time and went away again.

Great, I thought. Not only am I a degenerate, but I’m also a slow degenerate. Sweat poured off of me. I finished it as quickly as I could, trying not to read too much into the questions. Then I started reviewing it, but before I could finish, Detective Palmer came back in and sat down.

Earlier he had told me, “As long as you tell the truth about everything, you will pass the polygraph. All you have to do is not lie.” This gave me little to no comfort.

He slowly scanned each page. I was thinking, Would it be bad form to ask to have a ceiling fan installed in here or request some Gatorade? My electrolytes are dimming.

“How many times have you used cocaine?” Detective Palmer asked me, pinching his chin.

“Twice,” I admitted, just as I had on paper.

“And when was the last time you used cocaine?” he continued.

“Probably around twenty or twenty-one years ago.”

“When you used cocaine, how did you use it? Did you snort it or shoot it?”

Honestly, I thought, why is he asking me this? Was this going to be on the final? Wasn’t it enough to admit I had done it?

A cokehead lesbian friend of mine once told me if I didn’t like the taste or the feel of snorting coke, I could get the same buzz if I inserted it rectally. I never liked cocaine, and at that minute, I was so relieved that it would have been a lie to say I had shoved it up my ass.

“Snorted it,” I said.

For some reason, he looked pleased.

Just as the questionnaire had asked the same questions several times in different ways, so did Detective Palmer. For example, at one point he asked me the value of the things I stole in the past 10 years, then later on asked me the total value of everything I ever stole. This, I guess, should have included those sixty-some rolls of Lifesavers I tricked out of a faulty vending machine at the library where I once worked. And was that stealing, or was it just a good value? After all, I had paid a quarter for those rolls of Lifesavers. Was it my fault the vending machine wasn’t foolproof? This was a 30-year-old theft I recalled the night before when I was trying not to remember bad things I’d done.

After reviewing every question in the 22-page book, Detective Palmer decided to go through it one more time for good measure.

“So you smoked marijuana 200 times,” he said.

“Well, you know it’s hard to say. When I was a kid, the group I hung out with, that’s what we just did. It’s hard to put a number to it, it was so long ago.” I tried to emphasize the fact that it was ancient history. That should count for something, right?

“Well,” the detective continued, “would you say you smoked it two times a week for several years, or one time a week, or more?”

“Sometimes more than twice a week,” I admitted, refraining from adding the Clintonesque addendum, depending on what your definition of what a “time” is.

“So let’s say you did it three times a week,” he suggested, rounding back up. “For how long?”
He knew that I smoked dope more than two hundred times. He’d been interviewing applicants for, oh, let’s say, three times a week for the past fifteen years.

“All through high school, and then I tapered off during college,” I said.

“So would you say two hundred and fifty times over a period of maybe, five years?”

I could feel the sweat running down my neck now. Great. Nothing like visible signs of dishonesty to insure my unemployment for the next fifty years.

I delayed my answer, trying to do the math in my head and compare it to what I wrote down.
“I’m not sure,” I finally said.

“Does three hundred times sound like a more accurate number than the two hundred you put down on your answer?” he probed.

What was this, a flea market? He was trying to jack my number up. I should have been riding it down. Instead of a job, I was going to be leaving with poor-quality tube socks.

“I guess so, now that I do the math.”

“Well, that’s why we go over this with you, because sometimes a person won’t go back and think about the span of time involved,” said Palmer. “This will make it easier for you while you take the test. So three hundred times sounds good?”

I nodded.

I knew that every time this man blinked, he saw a different junkie, as if he was clicking through a Viewmaster. Blink. Hello, Keith Richards! Blink. It’s John Belushi! Blink. Lookie, it’s James Taylor! Blink. Looks too old, but is that River Phoenix?

The tide of sweat started to recede a few minutes later, while he covered debt, gambling, and arrest history. He made notes in the 22-page workbook as we conversed.

Then he said, “It says here you don’t drink alcohol.”

“That’s correct,” I told him.

“You don’t drink any alcohol at all, or you just have a cocktail now and then?”

I said, “I don’t consume alcohol at all.”

Now I was being grilled for the bad things I didn’t do. Am I on Candid Camera? Is Alan Funt, Jr., behind the wall?

This seemed to perplex him. How could I, this Timothy Leary job applicant, have snorted coke, sometimes took Percocet just for the euphoria, and smoked bales of marijuana, not also imbibe in the legal intoxicants?

“Did you ever drink alcohol?”

Here we go, I thought. I decided just to purge. “Yes, when I was younger I drank a lot. From the time I was fourteen up until I was twenty-eight. Heavier when I was in my twenties.” And you would have too, if you’d lived with the dickhead I’d spent my twenties with.

“So you quit when you were twenty-eight?” Palmer asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you go into rehab or join AA?” He asked that as if those were my only choices. What, like I couldn’t have become a Mormon?

Detective Palmer was getting on my nerves. I was beginning to wonder if these were legitimate questions, or if this was all for his personal entertainment. After the interview was over, would he and a bunch of other officers head down to Mr. Donut and recite excerpts from my 22-page Dissertation of Sins? “Get a load of this one!” And they would all laugh and say, things like, “Oh, yeah, and while we’re at it, let’s hire Charlie Manson.”

“I didn’t do either. I just stopped. I changed my routine and instead of going home after work, I went to the gym.” I was proud of that and wasn’t embarrassed to admit it.

“Very admirable,” said Palmer, genuinely.

Wouldn’t kill you to put a few dents in the treadmill, either, I wanted to say, but held my tongue. I had no reason to be hostile; the man was just doing his job.

Finally, he closed the book, stood up and said, “Okay, are you ready for the test?”

I stood and looked at my shirt. You could see through it, it was so wet. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I told him.

“Just relax and tell the truth, and you’ll be fine.”

We walked into the next room where there was a desk, a chair with arms, and a personal computer. Palmer hooked me up. He strapped two belts on me: one over my chest, the other over my abdomen. There was also a blood pressure cuff snugly in place on my upper arm and a gizmo clipped to my finger. I was told to sit up straight with my feet on the floor and put my arms on the armrests of the hard chair. His desk was behind me, so I didn’t look at him when I answered. I looked at a blank white wall. I felt as if I was seated in the electric chair. Where is my pastor? Where’s my stone crab claw dinner?

Blink. I’m not Janis Joplin; I’m Susan Hayward. I want to live! I want to live!

The room was silent while he booted the computer. He told me my answers would all be yes or no. He then started the program and had me answer “yes” to a couple of questions that I knew weren’t true, I guess to gauge the meter. That’s it: just relax and lie.

The interrogation then began and went on for the next forty minutes. I felt like a dumpling, curdling in chicken stew. Most of the questions that Palmer asked me began with, “Other than we discussed.”

“Other than we discussed, were there any other times when you took things from your employer?”

“No,” I answered honestly.

“Other than we discussed, were there other times that you used cocaine?”

Instinctively, I almost said no, but at that second I remembered a time when a friend brought some cocaine to a party, and we did a line in my mother’s bathroom. Fortunately again, not rectally.

“I just remembered another time,” I said.

“Just answer yes or no,” he reminded me.

“Yes,” I answered. I figured I was finished then. There was a long pause.

“Other than the ways we discussed, were there other methods you used to ingest the cocaine?” Palmer asked.

I was immediately paranoid. Had that cokehead lesbian been interviewed during my background investigation and told him I took opioids up the butt?

“No” I muttered, but I was flustered, and I felt myself turn red. If the needle flew off the Richter scale, it was then. I knew that was going to be his lead punch line at the Mr. Donut meeting.

After it was over and he unplugged me, Palmer asked me about the third time I had done cocaine, and I told him I really didn’t remember it until right when the question was asked.

“It’s okay,” he asked. “You were still honest and told the truth.” He released me and promised someone would call me the following day with the results.

I went out to my car and breathed a sigh of relief and wondered if I had any Percocet left in the cabinet at home, or if I had finished them during my last migraine. I could use the euphoria, but I was late for another interview elsewhere.

Just hours earlier, I thought that being a working for a police department would be fun as hell. I’d get to rub elbows with motorcycle cops and the SWAT team. Maybe some of them would let me play with their Tasers. I thought I had certainly earned it during that three-hour Spanish Inquisition, but realistically, I never expected to get the call I got the next day from the interviewing captain, offering me the job.

“I passed the polygraph?” I asked, thinking that this was some kind of cruel joke and that maybe she was calling on a speaker phone from Mr. Donut.

“Well, Detective Palmer said there was a little inconsistency in a couple of the questions, but not enough to disqualify you,” she informed me, and she asked me when I could start.

I thought for a moment. “You know, I was wondering if I could have until the end of the week to let you know.”

“We really need to know as soon as possible,” she said, “because we don’t want this position to get held up in a possible post-9-11 hiring freeze.”

I sighed and said, “Well as long as you promise me the job won’t be as stressful as the polygraph.”

She laughed and said, “Hell, no one here has a job more stressful than that, even when they’re being shot at.”

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Inability to See Distances

2009-07-07T16:50:00.007-04:00

I was in third grade. Initially, my teacher, Mrs. Reins, was out recovering from cataract surgery, and we had a substitute. This was back in the day when cataract surgery was a life-threatening operation, before implantable lenses. After surgery you looked like Mr. Magoo, with eyeglass lenses so thick you could fry ants on the sidewalk with the magnified solar energy. Mrs. Reins was no exception. When she arrived in December, she was a target for mockery. A frightening sight, her eyes were magnified to the size of tetherballs. And unfortunately, she was still pretty blind. You could make wild faces at her, and she never knew. Her handicap also enabled Howard Frankland, Steve Smith and me to stay busy drawing Batman pictures while she assumed we were practicing our newly-learned cursive techniques. Today, of course, if you need cataract surgery, all you have to do is pull up to the speaker at the cataract drive-through.

“Do you want 20/20 vision with that?” comes the voice from over the speaker. “It’s only seventy-five cents more.”

You then answer, “Yes, and I’d like mine with cheese.”

“The doctor will see you now. Please pull up to the first window.”

For ignoring my blind teacher and failing to do my class work, my karmic justice arose four years later when puberty hit. I flunked the in-school eye test and was sent home with a note to my mother, directing her to take me to the eye doctor.

The optometrist confirmed the myopia, and I was given a prescription for eyeglasses. At that time, the choice of frames for boys was virtually unlimited, provided you wanted only black or brown horn rims. I chose the black plastic frames, because I knew that my ability to look like pubescent Woody Allen, along with my sparkling orthodontia and clunky orthopedic shoes, would make me the most popular boy at Wilson Junior High School.

Picking up the glasses at the optometrist’s office, I remember looking through the storefront window across the street to the clock on the bank and being able to tell the time.

Wasn’t technology wonderful?

But my vision continued to deteriorate. When I was fifteen, I begged my mother to let me have the now-available wire-rimmed frames. Up until then we just replaced the lenses in my shabby looking Woodys.

By then the braces had come off, and I flat-out refused to wear the orthopedic wingtips anymore, knowing full well that this would cost me my popularity for the rest of my youth.

The frames were awkward and heavy. My lenses were glass, and thick glass at that, and they drilled dents in my nose and behind my ears. When I took off my glasses, there were big red spots on the bridge of my nose and blisters on my ears. They couldn’t be adjusted enough to make them comfortable.

When I was a junior in high school, I don’t know how, but I convinced my mother to pay $200 for a pair of hard contact lenses for me; the cornea-scratching, painful, masochistic kind. Had to have them.

For two weeks I ran around school with my head tilted back at a 45-degree angle, because that was the only way I could see. I looked like some kind of William F. Buckley trainee. I never thought they might be ill-fitting. I just thought that was the price I had to pay for fashion. They made my eyes itch horrendously, and I would rub them, and the lenses would slide up into my brain. Then I’d have to raise my hand and tell my teacher I needed someone to guide me to the bathroom so I could look in a mirror and fish out my lenses, which were lodged up somewhere in my dura mater. I had insisted that getting rid of my thick spectacles would make me appear less ridiculous, and clearly that was happening. I had evolved from Woody Allen to José Feliciano by way of William F. Buckley.

I got refitted, and the new hard lenses weren’t so bad, but every other time I blinked, one would fly out, and then I went back to glasses for a week until a new lens was ground for me.

The next year I switched to soft lenses and had a little celebratory party in the bathroom to flush my old hard lenses down the commode.

In my life, I wore soft lenses, gas-permeable lenses, extended wear contacts that damaged my eyes, and disposable lenses. With every new contact lens breakthrough, I stood up to the plate to try them.

In my 30’s I got sick of buying the paraphernalia required for contact lenses: cleaning solution, boilers, conditioning solution, saline solution, forceps, artificial tears, re-wetting drops, and endless cash to buy all that crap. Not to mention the affirmation cassettes that told you that nothing was wrong with plucking rubbery disks off your eyes with unsanitized digits. It was too much trouble. I went back to glasses.

My vision still declined, but just as technology changed with contact lenses, so they did with eyeglasses. They were now able to condense the thickness of my Mrs.-Reins-tetherball specs to a thinner polymer. There were glasses that were almost frameless, making them very lightweight and comfortable to wear.

Still, when I entered the production floor of the beer factory where I worked, I had to wear safety glasses, and the employer didn’t pay for condensed lenses, and the required frames were solid and heavy. The lenses were 5/8" thick, so thick that they prevented the side temples from closing. Legally blind is 20/200. I was 20/200 light years.

I closely followed vision technology. I remember seeing a show about a procedure called radial keratotomy, where your cornea is sliced like a pizza to improve your nearsightedness. The procedure was discovered by accident by a Russian doctor after picking shattered eyeglass lenses out of a young boy’s eye.

Yeah, baby, come at me with an X-Acto knife, smile and say, “Pizza! Pizza!” I’m ready for that.

I only knew one person who got the radial-K surgery, and he ended up having to get new lenses implanted from a cadaver. He had stitches hanging out of his eyeballs, and if that doesn’t make you wince, you are not human.

Then along came LASIK. And after Tiger Woods had LASIK, I went to the same doctor who did Tiger’s eyes. I was making enough money then that it seemed reasonable that for perfect vision, I would have to pay four thousand dollars. As a bonus, before the procedure, they gave me Valium, which to me is worth at least half of that.

I thought the procedure would be grosser. My worst fear of seeing someone come at my eyes with a knife was unsubstantiated. They just had these little gizmos that pried my eyes open so I wouldn’t blink. It went dark, and I heard a little buzzing and felt a disgusting little splash on my face (eye soup?) I sat up, looked across the room at the clock and could tell the time.

Isn’t technology wonderful?

That was ten years ago. Three years ago I got a prescription from an optometrist and am again wearing glasses. My myopia has returned. And I need a magnifying glass or readers to look up a number in the phone book.

My dear third grade teacher, Pauline Reins, I’m sorry I ever mocked you. If you were alive today, I’d treat you to a ride through the cataract drive-through. And then we’d go split a pizza.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Allene's Voice

2009-07-03T17:45:00.007-04:00

It is January of 1964, a few days after my seventh birthday. It is my first birthday without my father, who died 4 months earlier. I have been sick a lot since then, and my mother has an interview today and can’t stay home to take care of me.

I am a veteran croup kid. When I cough, it sounds like the bark of a bull seal. I also have a temperature. As a special treat, Mom calls Allene to see if she can come watch me.

Having Allene there guarantees that I’ll have an exceptional day, despite my being sick. Before Daddy died, she would come to the house to clean and make us a nice fried chicken dinner. Now, without our man-of-the-house income, we can only afford to have Allene on rare occasions.

In Tampa, it is a common site every day at 8 am to see throngs of black women walking down the street in front of our house. They arrive on the bus that brings them from the other side of this segregated city. They dress colorfully, and some carry umbrellas to keep the sun off of them. After their walk, they arrive at the residences of white ladies, where they change into their crisp white maid dresses and scrub floors and toilets, wash windows, vacuum, dust, and sanitize their kitchens after making the evening meal. For all this hard work, they get paid only a few dollars a day, less than minimum wage. In the late afternoon, they don their bus dresses again and walk back to the bus stop, laughing and trading stories about their day.

Today when Allene arrives, as always, she pretends not to know who I am. “Where’s Billy? All I see is a big boy.” Then after taking a closer look at me, she says, “Well lookie there. You’re growing so big!” I give her a hug. She smells like line-dried laundry and vanilla.

Allene changes from her traveling clothes to her white dress in the back bathroom and puts her colorful dress in the clove-scented broom closet in the back hall.

After my mother leaves, Allene comes to my room and asks me what I want. It’s always the same: a Coke. Allene makes a Coke like no one else. She wraps ice cubes in a dish towel and goes out on the back step and pounds it with an empty glass Coke bottle until the ice is coarsely crushed. She transfers the ice into a plastic tumbler and then pours the Coke over it . She wraps a paper towel around the base and serves it to me in bed and asks if I want a story.

“I want to play school,” I say.

“Your Mama said you need to rest. But maybe later we can play if you’re up to it,” she offers.
She pulls out The Tall Book of Nursery Tales. The book has been opened and closed hundreds of times by Allene and my parents. Many pages are dog-eared. The spine is split, and some pages are loose.

My favorite story is always "The Three Bears." She sits beside me in the bed, holding the book with one hand in front of me so I can see the pictures. The other arm is behind my neck with her callused hand resting on my shoulder. She reads with such joyful expression and uses different voices for all three bears and for Goldilocks. I laugh with her, and she reads me another one, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, which puts me to sleep as her voice intentionally softens.
She wakes me up in a couple of hours to give me a Sucrets lozenge and a tablet of penicillin and asks me what I want for lunch.

“Peanut butter and jelly,” I say.

“What kind of jelly?” she asks.

“Ummmm, apple.”

“What else?”

“A banana popsicle.”

“You want to watch some television?” she asks. “If you take your blanket and pillow out into the den, you can stay warm on the couch.”

I am happy to do so. There is a long sectional sofa that I bundle up on. We have two televisions, but they are both in the den. One is an old DuMont console that stands like Atlas, holding on its shoulders the Sylvania black and white portable that used to be my grandmother’s. They are set up this way because the DuMont only has sound, and the Sylvania, on top, only has picture. Sometimes we like to watch NBC while listening to CBS. When my dad was alive, he would watch Chet Huntley, and then when it switched over to David Brinkley, he would let me switch the sound to the other channel, which was Woody Woodpecker. I loved watching Woody’s voice come out of David Brinkley’s mouth. When Chet came on again, I had to switch the sound TV back to his voice.

Today I decide to watch The Price is Right, and in a few minutes, Allene brings me my sandwich, cut in four even squares, just the way I like it, and some apple slices and thin strips of carrot. And of course, another crushed-ice Coke. For a while she watches the show with me as people win new ranges and other things we can’t afford, like new color televisions.

“Aren’t you going to eat something?” I ask her.

“I think I’ll get something later,” she says, but she never does. She doesn’t eat our food. Allene always brings a piece of fruit or some crackers from home, even though we have told her many times to help herself to anything in the house.

After lunch, I fall back asleep to the sound of someone winning an Amana refrigerator-freezer. When I wake up, I’m back in my bed. Allene has carried me there because it’s closer to the kitchen, where she can keep an eye on me. I stretch and yawn and call her name.

“Awake now?” she asks, arriving at my bedside with half of a popsicle.

“Yes, can we play school now?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says, “after you finish your popsicle.” The cold bar is soothing on the back of my swollen throat, and I finish it slowly, savoring its sticky coldness as it trickles past my tonsils.

We go into the kitchen, where we arrange two dinette chairs to face each other, and we sit.
Sometimes Allene is the teacher, and sometimes she is the student. This time, as the teacher, she holds up a pad of lined paper that we pretend is a chalkboard. She draws a picture of a cat on it.

“Can anyone in class tell me what this is?” she asks, panning the room of imaginary students. I raise my hand, but she calls on Jennifer. She cups her hand to her ear. “What? What, Jennifer? Speak up Jennifer. A horse? No, this is not a horse. Go sit in the corner.” We both laugh.
She sees me with my arm up. “Billy, can you tell me what this is?”

“A cat,” I say.

“Yes, that’s right, it’s a cat. Now can you spell cat?”

“C-A-T,” I recite.

Below the drawing of the cat, she writes, D-O-G

“No,” I correct, “it’s C-A-T.”

“That is C-A-T,” she insists.

“No it’s not. It’s dog, D-O-G.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes I’m sure.”

“Why don’t you write it for the class, then?” she suggests.

She gives me the crayon and the pad of paper. I cross out D-O-G and write in C-A-T.

“Oh, that’s right. You’re so smart. You get an A-plus.”

This game goes on for an hour. We switch, and I get to be the teacher, and she intentionally answers my questions wrong. Two plus two equals five, she insists, and we both break up with laughter. I love to hear her laugh. It is a hoarse, wheezing chortle that grows into big belly laughs.

Not too long after that, Mom comes home, frustrated and in a bad mood. But the smell of Allene’s fried chicken is somehow soothing, sitting steaming on its paper towel-covered plate.
Allene has also prepared her scrumptious milk gravy. Later Mom will make rice to put under the gravy and also a box of frozen vegetables. Mom thanks her and offers to drive her home.

“I’ll take the bus. You don’t want Billy out in the cold car, now.”

Mom thanks her again.

She changes clothes, and I always cry when she leaves. She gets down on one knee and hugs me and promises she will be back soon. I watch her through the jalousie windows as she joins some of her friends on their walk to the bus stop.

My sister and I grow up and learn to cook. We are made to vacuum and dust, wash windows and strip wax off the kitchen floor. We rarely see Allene now. She is old and doesn’t work much anymore, but now and then she comes over to make us chicken and visit with us.

As I enter adolescence and become politically and socially aware, I chastise my mother for taking advantage of Allene and tell her she should send her a thousand dollars. Times are a little better now for us, and we have a cleaning woman, Helen, who comes in once a month. Mom pays her $7.50 for a day’s work, and she never even sees Helen. She just leaves her the money in an envelope with the instructions written on the outside.

It is 1969, and I am 12. When my grandfather takes us out to dinner, it is always to the cafeteria. At the end of the food line there are a half dozen black men dressed in starched white uniforms. They work for tips only. Three men carry our trays for us, and my grandfather gives one of the men a dime. It drives me absolutely out of my mind.

When my grandfather dies, more than anything else, I feel relieved that I no longer have to be a witness to his selfishness. But now, when Mom takes us to the cafeteria, she puts only a quarter on one of the men’s trays. She doesn’t even put it in his hand. She places it on the empty tray the man offers, just as my grandfather had.

The next time she offers to take us there, I refuse to go. My mother and I bicker about it. I insist the cafeteria is violating labor laws, getting something for nothing and is taking advantage of minorities. My mother insists the men are just carrying trays, for God’s sake. What do they expect for that? She asks, “Would you feel the same way if they were white men?”

“Absolutely. The cafeteria is getting free labor no matter what color they are,” I insist.

“Well then why do they do that job if they feel like they’re being taken advantage of?” she asks.

“Maybe they just need the money.”

“Well they should be glad they have a job. It took me months after your father died to find employment.”

It’s no use arguing with her, and I stand firm in my convictions. “Fine,” she says, “your sister and I will go, and you can stay home and fend for yourself.”

So I do stay home. I eat a peanut butter sandwich. With apple jelly. Cut in four squares, just the way I like it, and some apple and carrot slices.

Now it’s 1983. I am working in Saudi Arabia, and the mail, which is addressed to me at work, is the highlight of my day. I recognize my mother’s handwriting on the envelope and return to my office to read it.

My Dear Bill,
I have the unfortunate task of having to tell you we lost our dear Allene last night. Her house caught fire and she was trapped inside…

I weep hard, like a child, and my tears smear the ballpoint ink on the letter. After I was old enough to do so, I never visited Allene, even though I loved her and thought of her often. I was a teenager and was too busy misbehaving with my friends to pick up the phone and call her. I feel just dreadful; my guilt is immeasurable, and I’m consumed with sorrow. I can no longer picture Allene as the sweet, generous woman from my childhood. I can only picture her with a look of terror on her face as her rickety old clapboard house, in flames, engulfs her.

Today a copy of The Tall Book of Nursery Tales arrives in the mail. It is a sentimental find from eBay. When it arrives in the mail, I am happy to see that it is as beat up as our old copy had been. I leaf through it and admire the colorful illustrations. I sit down and read "The Three Bears." The words come back to me, but I don’t hear my mother’s voice or even my dad’s voice.

It’s Allene’s voice I hear.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Dognapping

2009-06-29T21:16:00.012-04:00

I applaud the states and localities that have enacted legislation and passed laws limiting or banning the chaining of dogs. I never understood why one would adopt a dog, only to neglect it and tie it up in the back yard year round, day and night, in good weather and bad. Tethered dogs can choke, bleed, or drown from this act of animal cruelty. Bottom line is, if you can’t put your dog in your house, don’t get one, or move to a place where you can.

Other Bill and I once had to take the law into our own hands about this. In rural Virginia, we lived next door to a duplex that housed renters. It was my gathering from the real estate agent who sold us our house that you’re not supposed to say “renters,” especially when you are outside and the renters might hear you. Instead, you merely whisper the word, as one would utter a racial slur under one’s breath. Pete would always speak to us in audible volume, unless the sentence included the “R” word, which was muffled, often with a hand in front of his mouth.

We lived in our big brick house for several years, during which next door renters would move in and out of the units, often changing tenants several times a year.

I never met the landlord, but did speak to him on the phone once. He was an idiot. Wait, let me change that: He was an idiot! There was a beautiful, huge, 100-year-old walnut tree in the duplex’s back yard, and there was a rumor circulating that he was going to cut it down. This tree shaded our tin-roofed sunroom and in summertime, prevented it from becoming a steaming pit of hell. I talked to him on the phone about it. He said he was cutting it down because he was tired of walnuts clogging his gutters. Even though I offered to clean his gutters for him, he turned me down, and in no time, two guys with enormous chain saws came out and dropped the big, gorgeous tree to the ground in just minutes. They left it there for months to rot, until it was finally cut up in pieces and hauled off. It would have made some great flooring or furniture, but instead became firewood.

Apparently he did not allow his renters to have dogs in the house, and since there was no fencing in the back yard, any tenant who brought in a dog usually tied it up, usually but not always, under the formerly-standing walnut tree, which was close to the house, not at the bottom of the lot, where the dog could be easily fogotten about.

There was a rental family that built this ramshackle lean-to for their small mutt to seek shelter under during storms. Made of sticks, scrap lumber and rotting, unpainted plywood, this rat hole was not even big enough for the dog to turn around in. In addition, the dog was tethered to a ridiculously short chain that only allowed it in and out of the hovel.

I had often heard the dog shrieking and had seen the little white trash rental children pick the dog up by the neck and poke it with sticks.

I called the local SPCA and found out that chaining a dog was legal, as long as the chain was three times the length of the dog. How generous. A 20-inch dog could be tied with a chain the length of a shoelace.

Other Bill and I weighed our options. We could speak with the screaming, boozing mother about it and offer to buy the dog a longer chain. We could catch the kids on camera abusing the dog and show the mother and/or the police, but because she was a mean, alcoholic redneck, and we were city-born homos, we knew that this would not garner pleasant neighborly relations. Since she was on welfare and was home all day, we thought that having our house burned to the ground wouldn’t be out of the question. We had never introduced ourselves to her; although we did hear her yelling at her children a lot.

So our only other option was to steal the dog.

Other Bill had a friend who was always rescuing dogs and finding homes for them. She picked up the stray and wounded, or sometimes selected some from the shelter. Nancy repaired them and showed them love and either kept them herself, or farmed them out to friends and dog lovers. Bill called her and asked if she wanted to be a co-conspirator. Without giving it a second thought, Nancy said, “absolutely.”

Late one Saturday night, Other Bill and I got dressed up in all black, including gloves and balaclavas. We loved playing Mission Impossible. I had played the theme song in junior high band, and if someone had handed me a flute, I could have really set the stage.

We had literally mapped out our plan. We would keep the dog quiet with pieces of a leftover hamburger. He would hold the dog by the collar, while I would bend out the clasp on the chain so that it looked like the dog just pulled herself out of it. We were nervous and shaking as we crept down the back yard. We were probably the only residents of the town who didn’t have at least one gun, and people could be nutty on the weekends. I made a mental note to look into body armor in case this was to ever happen again.

The dog, a small beagle-mix mutt, was totally cooperative. She jumped on us and wagged her tail and whimpered a little, and then started chewing up the hamburger. I uncrimped the latch while Other Bill held the dog by the collar. When the chain was free, Bill scooped up the dog, and we ran back up into the warm house.

The dog was a little flipped out, but our dog, Murphy, helped to calm her down. But she was coated in mud and her own shit and had an intolerable stench to her. Plus, she was covered in ticks, some the size of small grapes. We removed the ticks, gave her a nice warm bath with the Shower Massage by Water Pik, dried her off, cut out the mats in her fur, fed her and gave her water, and in no time she fell asleep on our good boxer’s bed. Murphy slept in bed with us that night.

When dawn arrived, I got up, stretched and looked out from our second story bedroom window.
“Oh, my God!” I gasped. Other Bill immediately sprang out of bed, because there is just no way to wake him quietly, especially when you are exclaiming.

“What? What happened? What is it?” he asked, panicking, surmising that the FBI, Canine Theft Division, might be lining up troops in our yard.

“Look at the tracks!” I told him. Indeed, in the darkness of the night, we had left clear footprints in the dew-covered grass from our back door all the way to the back of the lot next door. We jumped in our clothes and shoes and ran outside and started stomping around and running in circles, making other tracks in the dewy grass, so when the FBI came, it wouldn’t be so obvious. Whew, that was close.

Nancy, the dog rescuer, was to meet us halfway between her home in Maryland and our house in Virginia. We stuffed the clean, fluffy dog into my car via the garage, remotely opened the garage door and fled the scene. A little over an hour later, we met Nancy in a Denny’s parking lot, made the drop, and then sped away in opposite directions.

No renters ever posted any “lost dog” signs in the neighborhood. Law enforcement did not come pounding on our door. We were willing to suffer the consequences if they had, and we could always get the dog back, as she lived with Nancy for a couple weeks before she found a good family for her.

And not long after that, to the new owner’s surprise, our stolen dog gave birth to a litter of puppies.

As far as I know, none of the new puppies went to live with renters.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Race of '72

2009-06-29T17:16:00.002-04:00

When I was a little runt I used to go with my mother to the polls every Election Day. They had voting booths with curtains back then, which reminded me of the dressing room at JC Penney, where there were 3 mirrors placed at different angles. I liked looking at the reflection of the reflection of the reflection and wishing that I could just step through all those shrinking mirrors and become really small. I’d imagine all the things I could do if I were fly-sized, until my mother would shout from the other side of the curtain, “Why is it taking you so damned long to put on a pair of pants?”

In the dressing room on Election Day, my mother actually let me press the levers for the candidates and issues she selected. It was a great way to educate me and instill in me the need to always carry an additional outfit on the first Tuesday in November. And when we exited, there was always a polling volunteer handing out “I Changed My Pants” stickers. Or something like that. It was a long time ago.

The '68 presidential election was the last time I went into the voting booth with Mom. The polling volunteers decided, at age eleven, I was too old to see my mother in her underwear anymore and told her not to bring me back.

That was unfortunate, because if I had been able to get in there with her during the '72 election, I would have quickly pressed the McGovern lever and checked her out. She voted for Nixon three times in her life, despite Checkers, Vietnam, and the swelling tide of Watergate. By then my adolescent revolutionary period was in full swing. I had spent the summer with my liberal-agenda Aunt Kay in Denver and stayed up all night watching the Democratic convention on the black and white TV. We both listened carefully to George McGovern's "Come Home America" acceptance speech, which, as far as I'm concerned, is still unsurpassed in the goosebump meter rating. We had a neighbor whose fiancée was missing in action then, and I thought if the Vietnam War were to continue, it wouldn't be long until I could be sloshing through the swamps of the Mekong Delta.

So beginning early in 1972, right before I had to make that terrifying transition from junior to senior high school, I started doing telephone canvassing at McGovern headquarters in Hyde Park in Tampa. After school I would ride my bicycle there, come in, tear off a computer list of Democrats to call to ask three questions:

1.) What do you think of the Democratic candidate this year?
2.) Could you please tell me if you intend to vote for the Democratic candidate this year?
3.) Do you need a ride to the polls in November?

The third question was only asked if question 2 was yes, which was almost never.
Looking back, I see that it’s a pretty good look at how desperate the Democrats were. They didn’t want us to say “McGovern,” because they were hoping, I guess, that rubber-stamp voting Democrats might not know he was the candidate, and would tow the party line. Also, they were relying on 15-year-olds to gather their statistical information.

Apparently, someone had already called all the Democrats in town and said, "Hey, if you hear some kid whose voice is changing call you from McGovern HQ, tell him you wouldn't vote for George McGovern if he were running for dog catcher."

I got that answer a lot. Given the paranoid environment and the dirty tricks campaigns going on, I wondered if all of our outgoing calls were being funneled to one person who fed us back the dog catcher line. It wasn't funny after the first 50 times, so despite the rules, I would go outside the three questions and take issue with the turncoat Democrat on the other end of the phone.

"Well, sir, if you were a more educated Democrat, you would know that dog catcher is not an elected position." Or: "Ma’am, McGovern cannot run for dog catcher. Spiro Agnew has a life-long appointment to that job."

I would even try to trick them and get them to abstain by offering them rides to the polls after the polls were already closed. "Well, I'm sorry you won’t be supporting the candidate this year, but we want to make sure that everyone gets out and votes this year. Will you be needing a ride to the polls? We could pick you up at 7:30 PM."

Click. Slam. Ding.

It was Phone Canvassing Roulette. You would never know who you were going to talk to or predict the temperament of the party whose number you dialed. I learned new obscenities in the summer from men who defiled me when I interrupted their viewing of the World Series. It was a shocking exploration in human behavior.

My friend and schoolmate Mary Lou made the worst call. The lady who answered told Mary Lou told her she'd gotten her out of her deathbed because she thought it was her daughter calling. Mary Lou was inconsolable. We sensitive Democrats, especially those of us who weren't yet old enough to change clothes in the voting booth, had yet to develop thick hides. I tried to convince her it was probably just a joke. After all, who uses the word "deathbed" anymore, except possibly romance writers? It didn’t work. Mary Lou went home early that night.

The whole volunteer experience was made worthwhile when I called a woman who said she had listened to McGovern's speech on TV, and there was nothing in the world that could keep her from voting for him in November. "I'm 74 years old and blind, but I'd like to come do some work for the Senator. I could stuff envelopes or answer the phone." I put her on hold and went and got the volunteer coordinator to talk to her. I never followed through on what happened, or if she ended up joining the campaign.

It was enough to know that she was just willing to.

I worked tirelessly night after night there, and as the weather cooled, so did McGovern’s chances of winning. Maybe it was the fact that Thomas Eagleton, his first running mate, dropped out when it was learned he had hospitalized, it was reported, for “exhaustion.” Or maybe it was because McGovern was just too liberal for the time. Either way, he never stood a chance. Still, mainly because I was young and naïve, I maintained a glimmer of hope. I thought that maybe the numbers were wrong or that people would come to their senses on Tuesday.

The tiny, run-down, rented building on South Boulevard was packed full of local politicians and business leaders on election night. The media were shining lights and popping flashes every time you turned around. Everyone there was at least a generation older than Mary Lou and me, and the crowd was loud and somehow not sad. The champagne flowed, the local Democrats schmoozed. People even laughed, but Mary Lou and I were brokenhearted and silent. It was my first volunteer job, and I had done everything I possibly could and failed. It was a tough lesson. I called my mom to come pick us up. Even though her candidate won by a landslide, and McGovern only carried Massachusetts and DC, she didn't rub it in.

But I did.

Two years later I was flying back from my summer pilgrimage to Aunt Kay's in Denver. It was August 8, 1974. I got off the plane in Tampa and stepped on the escalator. I saw my mother at the top, and I held up my copy of the Denver Post with the splash headline: "Nixon to Resign!"

I stepped off the escalator and gave her a hug. "Told you so," I said.

billwiley.blogspot.com by Bill Wiley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

People Eating Tasty Animals

2009-06-19T15:37:00.004-04:00

Whoever is in charge of publicity at the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is a public relations dreamboat. PETA will do anything to get publicity, especially if it’s free, and they are geniuses at getting it.

Their latest publicity stunt involves weighing in against President Obama for killing a fly during a television interview. A PETA spokesperson, one Michael McGraw (certainly no relation to Quick Draw) said: “One thing this has done is raise awareness, that even the smallest of animals, a chicken, fish, cockroach, or yes, even a fly deserves protection.” To set Barack straight, they sent the president a no-kill fly trap.

Wait, back up a second. Did he say “cockroach?”

I have a question for One Michael McGraw, and it goes like this:

“Mike, have you ever had a cockroach, a really big, Florida-sized palmetto bug-style cockroach, fly into your mouth?”

I have, and I’d like to meet you one day and stick a live one in your mouth, and see how you handle it.

I was nine years old. In 1966, there were no such things as plastic garbage bags. We used paper grocery bags to line our trash can, and we didn’t have a garbage disposal, so all of our meal wet-nasties went into the open bag. When it got full, I, having been the sole male in the house for three years, had the responsibility of taking it out to the can.

This was not a task I took kindly to. The garbage cans, made of galvanized steel, initially sat outside our garage. There were always lizards around, and I hated lizards. They scared me and grossed me out when they stuck out that bright orange goiter-thing at me. And I had been bitten by more than one. Not to mention the fact that they loved garbage, and when they saw me coming, they would herd around me as if I were some kind of reptilian Pied Piper, or like feeding time at the O.K. Cold Blooded Corral. They would jump all over me.

The outside location of the cans became problematic. The Farriors, one of the wealthiest families in Tampa, bred beagles like rats, and just let them roam free around the neighborhood, knocking over people’s trash cans, spewing nastiness all over the property. Since I was the one who had to pick up their stinking mess, I successfully lobbied to have the trash cans moved inside to the locked garage.

And that’s when cockroaches became an issue.

Whenever it was time for me to take out the garbage, I turned on the garage light from inside the house at least five minutes before I took out the stinking yutz. Lights make cockroaches hide.
Unfortunately, it didn’t make the cockroaches already housed in the metal trash cans hide. Whenever you opened the lid, there was cockroach mayhem. They would flutter around as if the giant, animated can of Raid had entered their perimeter. Some would flee south into the bottom of the can, some would crawl out, and, because they were Florida palmetto bugs and they could, some would fly out.

One night the can was particularly gamy, and I did as I always did before I opened the lid, which was to bang on the outside of the can to let them know Mr. Raid was about to make an entrance. I could hear them scatter, so I took the lid off, dropped in the soggy paper bag, and then noticed, right next to my face, underneath the lid that I was holding, the mother of all insects, the size of a grown man’s thumb, dark brown and shiny, with flickering antennae and six hairy-looking legs.

I froze and screamed, and the instant I started screaming, the bug took flight and landed right in my wide open, screaming orifice. As quickly as I could, I spat it out, stomped on it, and ran inside to find anything that would rinse away this memory forever: mouthwash, bleach, sulfuric acid, electroshock therapy. Needless to say, nothing worked.

It is still one of the top ten worst memories of my childhood, possibly even number 2. I realize that in the scheme of possible childhood traumas, this is petty, even insignificant, compared to, say, contracting leukemia or polio. Nevertheless, it’s something you never forget.

So Mr. One Michael McGraw, I invite you to be a guest at my home here in South Florida. I’m sure that if I let my exterminator skip a spraying, I could find a nice juicy one for you. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get a female with a nice, fat egg case popping out of her abdomen.

Now you just sit back and relax while I let this adorable, defenseless little animal roam around the depths of your outspoken, publicity-snaring mouth. I want to watch you as you calmly grasp it with cotton-padded tongs, place it in a luxurious, dark shoebox full of rotting refuse and then go out find a nice adoptive family for it.

Typing with My Vagina

2009-06-16T08:59:00.010-04:00

Unless your career goal was to clip the beaks off of baby chicks, slaughter poultry or work on a manufacturing production line, the Shenandoah Valley was not an easy place to find work in the 80’s.

At that time, I had managed to get myself in a Green Acres-type situation. The man I was pretending to love insisted we abandon our practical city lives in DC and move to this dumpy weekend place we had bought outside the tiny town of Shenandoah, Virginia (see photo, above). You are my wife. Goodbye city life!

I lived on unemployment for several months while working on rehabilitating the house. When it became clear the money was going to be gone before the house was completed, I went job hunting. For a man who had very few real-world skills other than word processing, I was in a bind to find work.

That part of Virginia is a hotbed of Republican, fundamentalist Christianity. It was not the place to be a shy homosexual with a history of administrative jobs with big companies. Nevertheless, I managed to snag an interview at James Madison University. The man who interviewed me had no intention of hiring me after he learned I didn’t attend church. How, you might ask, did he know that? Why, he asked me, of course. “What church do you go to there down in Shenandoer?”

I quickly figured I had three choices: I could lie, but I didn’t even know the name of a church; I could politely say my religious beliefs were private, or I could tell the truth, which was that I didn’t go to church. Translated, to him that meant: Satan worshiper.

The correct answer was: the Shenandoah Valley Pentecostal-Baptist Zealot Independent Church on Shifflett Hollow Road (motto: Repent or we’ll kidnap you, tie you to a herculon recliner and force you to eat pork rinds and watch episodes of Hee-Haw.)

I answered with the truth--no churc--and that was the end of that. No church, no job.

Money was running out, and I was getting desperate. Even though I only had one marketable skill, I could type like a sumbitch, as they used to say in the Valley. I had been a phototypesetter for many grueling, boring years, and I could hit 114 accurate words per minute on a good day. Surely someone would hire me.

The last place anyone seeking full-time employment goes to is a temp agency. The pay stinks. You’re always given the shit work to do. The stuck-up permanent employees assume that you’re inept and better than you because they have benefits. Signing on with a temp agency is the last, desperate act of the unemployed. And temp agencies thrive on people with low self-esteem. Perfect for me at that time in my life.

So I called Manpower in the nearest city with a stoplight to ask for information. They told me to mail in a resume, and they’d get back to me.

This was 1985, before everyone had computers and administrative work was, at least in the Valley, a woman’s job. I was so sure that, because of my gender, I wouldn’t get an interview for an office job, I sent them a resume that didn’t have my first name on it; only my initial. I also highlighted my typing speed. I realize now that this would have made for a great sitcom episode.

To my surprise, I got a callback. The first thing they requested was my first name, and I told them it was Billy. (People always think I’m a girl on the phone; I hate my voice.) I never go by Billy. But I hedged my bets by using the ambiguous nickname, hoping that they’d think I was Billie and not Billy. They never asked what sex I was, and they asked me to come in.

So I showed up early to my appointment, and it was immediately clear that I made the receptionist nervous, possibly because there had never been a Y chromosome in that room before. She was actually shaking when she was giving me the typing test.

After I produced over 90 words per minute for her, she pressed the intercom button on her phone and said, “Billy Wiley is here.”

She gestured toward the door, and I went in. I was nicely dressed in a blazer, shirt and tie, but back office lady looked at me as if I was an oozing, festering, pus-filled carbuncle.

“You’re a man!” she shrieked.

I blushed and said, “Yes.”

“Well I can’t send you out on any assignments,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“Well,” she snapped, “because our clients would just die!”

Even as a person with low self-esteem, I started to get mad. I ground my teeth.

“Why would they die?” I asked her.

“Because you’re a man!” she said, instructing the receptionist, with a sweeping hand gesture, to get me out of there.

I had sunk to a new low. If I couldn’t even get a job at a temp agency, I was unemployable. I went home and moped. Whenever I felt especially blue, I would call my mentor, my Aunt Kay in Denver. She could always cheer me up. She’s the one who once told me, “I’m so old and deaf I can’t even hear myself fart anymore.” She was 77 when I told her about my event at Manpower that day. She was as disgusted as I was. “Did you tell her you don’t need a vagina to type?” she asked.

I laughed. Of course she was right. And when you stop to think about it, wouldn’t it actually be easier to type with a penis?

A few weeks later, a copy shop advertised for a phototypesetter. I hadn’t set type in years, but I was willing to do anything, even the ultra-mundane. I ended up being hired at $5 an hour, a salary approximately two-thirds less than my job in DC. And I was grateful to get it, especially since I was a man and the owner didn’t just die.

It was a tiny shop you could barely turn around in. Like most Valley people, the owner was very religious and insisted on having prayer circles every so often to start the workday off right. He also had missing fingers, cut off during wood shop in high school, and was fond of putting his remaining fingers on some of the female employees who didn’t like it a bit. He also insisted on giving them hugs. He had a violent temper that he would display for his little children, who, along with his wife, stopped by often just to hang out and get in the way. There was always spanking and squealing and yelling whenever they were around. I worked there for several months and hated it.

Because I lived at the poverty level, I supplemented my income by breeding substandard golden retrievers and publishing gay pornographic fiction. One Monday morning my dog went into labor, and I called the office manager (a woman who let herself get touched for money), and I asked her if I could come in late, because I had to assist in the whelping of a litter of puppies. She said, “no problem,” and I guided my dog into the whelping pen and watched the birth of seven hamster-sized puppies. At least one of the pups would have died had I not been there.

When I walked in to work about 11, the office manager glared at me with a frightened look on her face, while Mr. Fingerless came at me, grabbed me by the arm and took me outside.

One of his clients was a numbers runner who every week brought in his pick cards that he distributed to illegal gamblers. The backup typesetter had not been in that day, so there was no one to do that work except Mr. Fingerless. This was basically just typing a few dozen words, printing it out, and giving it to the graphic artist to cut, paste up, and photocopy. To be fair, it was probably more taxing for him and took him a while to do it, due to his missing digits.

He read me the riot act. Words like inconsiderate, selfish, evil, un-Christian, as well as stupid asshole came flying out of his mouth. He told me he was writing me up, and it was going to go on my Permanent Record. Of a company that employed a whopping seven people. How would I ever work again?

I was humiliated. That night I went home and was too unnerved to have fun with the seven new mutts. And for the first time in my life, I let my pride overrule my need to eat. I went in to work the next day and, without any employment prospects, gave him two weeks’ notice. That would give me enough time to typeset a nice resume and embezzle reams and reams of good 100% cotton stock. He was stunned and apologetic and asked me to reconsider.

During the handholding prayer vigil on that Friday (or in his case, half-a-handholding), the boss asked Jesus to guide me to change my resignation decision and stay with his copy shop family.

A week later on my final day, I had failed to hear from Jesus, probably because I didn’t attend church, which had gotten me into trouble before. In an attempt to make me feel worse, Mr. Missing Digits told me that he had given raises to the six other employees that day, and if I had stayed, I would have received one, too. Perhaps Jesus had guided him to be so retaliatory. When five o’clock rolled around, the owner had been missing (like his fingers) for a couple of hours, but I tracked him down, hiding in the dark room, behind a locked door. I banged on the door, and he didn’t answer. I banged again, calling his name. He finally came to the door. I told him I wanted to thank him for the job and that I had no hard feelings and wished him well, even though that was a lie. He wouldn’t even look at me through his tinted glasses.

I got my next job, which lasted only weeks, because I was sleeping with the boss. When he was fired for abusing his expense account, so was I.

A high-paying Fortune 500 company had come to the Valley, and I had spit-shined my resume, which was fraught with hazy recollections and falsified timelines It completely omitted the previous job, and the copy shop job, because you never know when that Permanent Record might raise its ugly, puppy head. But there were tens of thousands of applications for only a couple of hundred jobs, so I considered that a sailed ship.

Once again I was nearly destitute and certainly desperate. I thought if I went over the mountain to the big city of Charlottesville, I would have better luck finding employment. Since I was still a bottom-feeder, I started at the bottom. Driving to another temp agency and pumping myself up along the way, I decided I was going to follow Aunt Kay’s advice if they pulled that “you’re a man!” crap again, because I really didn’t have anything to lose. Driving over the mountain, I rehearsed the line using different attitudes. (Pardon me, but I don’t think you need to have female sex organs to type. You need fingers, not a vagina to type. If you needed a vagina to type, the keyboard would be a lot bigger and curved, like a saddle. I didn’t type those hundred words a minute with a vagina, you know.)

Miraculously, this temp agency loved the fact that I was a speedy typist, even if I was a man, and they hired me on the spot. To be honest, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get the chance to say “vagina” in that office, but I quickly got over it. They sent me back to the Valley to work at the new Fortune 500 company that previously would not hire me directly, and I became, I am loathe to say, a Kelly Girl. But I was not just any Kelly Girl; I twice achieved the rank of Kelly Girl of the Month (possibly the only Kelly Girl without a vagina to do that). That honor came with a ten dollar bonus and a crappy certificate. I wish I still had them.

The pay was still lousy, but the people where I worked were nice. One morning when my boss found out that my golden was having another litter, and I had left the expectant mother alone to fend for herself, she sent me home to assist. Not much later, I got a permanent position there, and overnight my salary tripled.

With my first paycheck, I gave my dog a great gift. I took her to the vet and had her spayed. She didn’t need a vagina to do her job anymore, either.

Adventures in Wigland

2009-06-05T15:30:00.005-04:00

Once upon a time in the sixties, my mother, a brunette, without any warning, came home from work wearing a platinum blond wig. It was so white, it hurt to look at it for a long period of time. It was short and youthful, with a slight That Girl-ish flip at the ends. It looked like the haircut of a modern-day child beauty pageant contestant. That should make it clear.

My sister and I were full of questions. Why on earth would she want that? How much did she pay for it? Where was she going to wear it? Why didn’t she just dye her hair?

These questions were all answered with maximum vagueness. She bought it for her boss’ boss, a man she dated whenever he was in town from Miami. “It’s kind of a joke for him,” she said, without further explanation. It cost “around fifty dollars,” which was a gasp-producing amount. My mother never spent money frivolously. With regularity she paid the bills, bought groceries, cigarettes and bourbon and little else. We were shocked. It was real human hair, and that came at a price far higher than its lower quality synthetic, Dynel sister wigs.

And she was going to wear it to work the next day. We assumed the boss’ boss would be there for the joke, whatever it was.

As for the hair dye question, we already knew the answer to that: Only sluts dyed their hair.

Maybe she didn’t look ridiculous in it if you had never seen her brown-haired self before, but it sure looked goofy to us. And the prep work to get it to look believable was insane. She packed her own hair down against her head with a thin nylon stocking cap, and that had to be adjusted and readjusted so that you didn’t see tell-tale stocking remnants under the wig. She had it professionally washed and styled frequently, and she was always futzing with it, picking at it, combing it, trying to pave over any part that looked wiggish. And I can’t imagine how unbelievably uncomfortable it must have been under there in the humid Florida heat of summer. Nevertheless, she was determined.

She had even bought a wig stand for it. Let’s be clear on this. A wig is like a pet. It’s soft and fuzzy, but doesn’t come without needs. You wouldn’t buy a bird without a cage. We were a little put off by the extravagance of this major investment. We couldn’t get genuine Red Ball Jets sneakers when the generic JC Penney sneakers would accomplish the same foot-covering task. Fortunately, she had economized and bought the plain white Styrofoam Head wig stand, and not the more expensive one that looked like a mannequin head with an aloof expression and slutty makeup. Bitter and resentful in my Penney Ball Jets, one day while Mom was at work, I took the Styrofoam head and drew on it large crossed eyes with giant lashes and oversized lips, colored in with real lipstick. You know: slutty. She was not amused. It became a little creepy having this psychotic-looking blond head in the house, staring down at us from her tall white dresser.

Wigs were a big thing back in the 60’s, and women took their spare hair very seriously. Falls were kept in special round boxes. Switches were popular for making you look like you had more and better hair than you actually did. And dyed-to-match wiglets, from pin-in ringlets to beehive add-ons were popular with the well-to-do yacht clubbing stole-wearers.

The wig remained in our house for a few years, worn more and more infrequently, and finally ignored. It was last seen on my head during Halloween when I was sixteen. I dressed as a prostitute and paraded around the neighborhood late at night, demanding candy. “My God!” one woman explained, “What are you out for tonight, son?” That kind of threw me for a loop, and I immediately pulled out my breast-stuffing socks and ceased my trick-or-treating career forever. (And I still had to tell people, four years later, that I was gay. Were they just acting surprised?)

I was a very naïve child. My mother was morally strict with us, especially with my sister, so I never thought anything about her “dating” Mr. Butler, a married man who lived in Miami and was in town once a month or so for a night or two. The whole time they were going out, Mom insisted that it was all very innocent and genuine, strictly business, and that he didn’t know anyone else in town, so he took her to dinner to pass the time, plain and simple. I was good with that.

And I was shocked to learn years later from my sister that Mom and Mr. Butler were doing it. He always stayed at the Manger Motor Inn, a luxury hotel in downtown Tampa on the Hillsborough River. They later changed the name to the Manger Hotel to class it up a bit. We got to see the inside of his room once. I remember everything being very yellow, including the built-in rotary wall phone in the bathroom. (God, I wanted that!) I never imagined that the opulent Manger had been a house of lemon-yellow sin.

Whenever he was in town, Mr. Butler would come to the house, have a cocktail and chat with us while Mom got ready for her night out with him. He was a nice man, sweet and sensitive, and very engaging with my sister and me. He would always take Mom to Bern’s Steak House, the swankiest, most expensive restaurant in the city. My sister and I had never been there, and we loved hearing stories about it and gnawing on the leftover morsels that sometimes came home in a doggy bag.

Mr. Butler was the only man-friend of my mom’s we had to call “Mr.” That was probably because in the office, she had to as well. I liked him. And Mom brought home some scary men, including a falling-down alcoholic who would pick me up by my head and a boozer who tried to explain condoms to me while standing in front of me wearing only grimy pajama bottoms while his member dangled out the fly, unbeknownst to him. (He was the one she ended up marrying.) While my mother was recovering from surgery, Mr. Butler babysat us and took us across the bridge to eat at Wolfie’s deli in St. Petersburg. He knew I was a dyed-in-the wool Peanuts fanatic, and would from time to time bring me Peanuts-related stuff, like the Charlie Brown trash can he gave me. He took an interest, which was more than any other of Mom’s gentlemen callers did. To those guys, children were usually a liability; a roadblock that prohibited remarriage. Mr. Butler seemed to actually return our affection, and I secretly wished that he would get divorced and come to Tampa, marry my mother, and move in with us. I never asked, but I suspected the females in my family were hoping for that, too.

But it just wasn’t in the cards. I realize now that Mom finally grasped that things were not going to change, and the relationship was not going to advance. The last time he came to the house, Mom met him in the driveway and talked to him while he remained in his rental car. I knew something serious was going down as I watched from the living room window, peeking out from behind the new curtains (which were, curiously enough, yellow). When the car started, I quickly moved to another part of the house, and Mom came in the house and wept loudly. I came back into the living room, and she was on the floor, crying into the feather cushion of the camelback sofa. She looked up at me and said, “Do you understand why I’m crying?”

I said, “Because you’re not going to see Mr. Butler anymore?”

She said yes, and continued to weep.

Still naïve about the intensity of their relationship, I thought what she was really crying for was the fact that there would be no more chateaubriand from Bern’s, no more heels-and-stole wearing dress-up dates, and she would miss that. I never surmised that he was the good one she had to let go. The lost prize.

There was one time when I was in my early twenties when my mother and I actually had an adult-to-adult talk. She had come up from Florida to visit me in my apartment in the DC suburbs. It was very confessional for both of us. I admitted to her that I sometimes enjoyed smoking marijuana. She told me about the time when her husband (Mr. Penis-Poker-Outer) had given her an ultimatum: She could be with him, or she could have her son, the homosexual, but not both. Never giving it a second thought, she hopped in her car and left. He later backed down. And she also told me about her love for Tom Butler, how much she wanted him to back out of his loveless marriage and be with her. It was very touching, and I felt badly for her. Of all the men mom dated, Mr. Butler was most like my father. He was bright and intellectual, thoughtful and kind to children; soft-spoken with a delightful sense of humor. And she ended up settling for Mr. Pee-Poke, an illiterate truck driver alcoholic who accused her of raising her son to be a faggot. She sat quietly for a moment after that. Trying to brighten up the mood, I said, “So what was with the wig?”

A grin came to her face. “Tom really had a thing for blond women,” she said.

That was the first time I heard her refer to him by his first name only. “I see,” I said, although I wasn’t sure that I did.

“No, you don’t see,” Mom said. “He was impotent. I bought the wig hoping it would turn him on and enable him to be functional.”

“Did it work?” I asked.

“Not really,” she shrugged.

Some things are better left unsaid. I think I liked it better when I was young and naïve and didn’t realize my mother was teaching chastity to us while having an affair with a married man who couldn’t get it up. Whenever I think of this, I get an image in my head. Mom and Mr. Butler are in the bright yellow Manger Motor Inn with the bathroom telephone. She’s lying on the king sized Posturpedic’s banana-colored sheets, and as Mr. Butler bumbles unsuccessfully on top of her, her head moves down on the pillow, forcing that sweat-making, platinum blond baby-doll wig to inch slowly down over her forehead until she can’t see. Whenever this vision comes to me, I try to block it out with an image of my Charlie Brown trash can.

“Good Grief,” he says.

Pedro McGraw

2009-06-04T17:15:00.003-04:00

I did something immature and idiotic the other day, and bought something upon which my financial advisor would probably frown. I bought a plush toy for $69.

You’d think for that I could get a life-sized giraffe, but this one is barely 17 inches tall.

I had two fuzzy things I liked to sleep with when I was small. One was Pedro, a one-of-a-kind, handmade alpaca fur bear that my dad brought me back from Peru. In 1960 my father got lucky and got to go on a press junket to South America. While he was there, he took the opportunity of the outrageously beneficial dollar exchange rate, and he brought my mother home a vicuna stole and an enormous aquamarine ring set in platinum. My sister got a silver necklace with stone settings, and I got Pedro. It was an expensive set of gifts (at least the girl stuff was,) the likes of which we’d never seen before nor ever would see again.

My dad told me he had bought Pedro at an outdoor market in Peru. He had been hanging, pinned by his ears, to a clothesline.

During his lifetime, Pedro suffered massive abuse. My sister gave him a severe shaving in the belly, and his arms would continuously be twisted off until my aunt fixed them with a button and some heavy thread. Stuffing would often pop out from his leather-padded feet, and patches had to be made. He had a moveable red mouth that had little teeth painted on the inside, and you could make him bite by pinching his mouth shut. Otherwise Pedro always smiled and looked very happy, despite the domestic violence and repeated amputations.

Pedro was one of the few things that my father left me when he died, and I did everything I knew how to do to preserve him and keep him fresh.

Regrettably, I didn’t know that any preservation of large, furry animal skin should include mothballs.

It was like a horror movie. In the back of the closet I found I thought what sufficient protective armor for the furry bear: a black garbage bag. When I opened it up, I saw a dead, decomposing body. I think it even had a stench of decay. Swarms of moths flew out, and I gently removed the barely remaining carcass of Pedro. His face had been eaten away, and his small, stone, beady, gold and black eyes had fallen out. His torso had been eaten clean through, and when I picked him up, most of his fur fell to the floor.

There have been few times in my life where I have literally wailed. Other Bill frequently likes to bring up the time when we went to see The Joy Luck Club at the movie theatre, where I made a blubbering fool out of myself during the last scene in the movie. I don’t know what it is, but a combination of the soundtrack and the sad yet happy news at the reunion just rips me apart. I was still bawling after the credits rolled and the lights came up. People stared and pointed. Now, I can’t even think about it without starting to puddle up. It is one of the most embarrassing parts of my personality, and I cannot control it. Therefore, it’s a prime opportunity for Other Bill to use to tease me.

He has the soundtrack on his Ipod, which wakes us up every morning. When that music comes on, instead of a slow, yawny, cuddling wake-up, I bolt out of bed and run to the other room to feed the dog so I don’t go to work eye-puffy and red-faced. It’s a classic Pavlov’s dog stimulus-response. Recorder music -> memory of last scene of film -> uncontrollable wailing.

And I wailed when I found Pedro dead and beyond repair. I threw myself onto the couch and sobbed until I was dehydrated and hiccupping. The one meaningful thing I owned that my father had given me, and now it was just a mothy pile of South American fluff and North American moth eggs. Now I had nothing to remember him by except his old broken watch and his monogrammed cigarette lighter, neither of which were soft and furry and smiling. I was practically suicidal when I took his body out to the trash can and had to throw him away. I would have gladly offered myself up to the moths. I would been happy for them to chew off my arm in lieu of destroying my precious bear. I called sister and mother and reported it like a death in the family. I was 26 then. I’m sure they were thinking, “Oh, grow up!”

Five years ago I remembered there was a second fuzzy friend I used to sleep with. It was this blue Quick Draw McGraw plush toy. Although I knew that I’d never be able to replace Pedro, I was willing to bet it would be possible to get a Quick Draw clone on eBay.

Quick Draw had been second class citizen from day one. He was probably just a Christmas present from Santa one year, and I don’t recall what happened to him. He didn’t carry any sentimentality whatsoever, compared to Pedro. I assume I just outgrew him and tossed him out or handed him down to a younger second cousin or something. Nevertheless, he was a production animal, so surely there would be replacements available.

And for 5 years, every time anything went up on eBay that contained the words “Quick Draw McGraw”, my eBay robot would send me a message. There were comic books, Little Golden Books, lunch boxes, thermoses, and crappy 21st-Century-Made-in-China-And-Probably-Stuffed-with-Lead plush toys, and cereal bowls. But no blue doll.

And then, finally one showed up. I figured I’d give fifty bucks for it. Someone else paid $165. Then suddenly, more started to appear, hoping to cash in on similarly ridiculous bids. The second and third ones went for over $80. I missed the fourth one, because I neglected to read my e-mail that week. Finally I got one, and he arrived yesterday. A little dirty, but considering he was made fifty years ago, not that bad. His label says he’s washable. I believe I’ll think twice before tossing a $69 investment into my Lady Kenmore.

I tried sleeping with him last night, but he just ended up getting in the way, and I found him on the floor this morning. That is a dangerous place for him to be, judging from the chop-licking and drooling Bungee displays whenever she gets near him. I don’t want to come home and find piles of blue fluff scattered all over the house. I don’t need another horror movie or reason to wail in my house, so he will remain on a high shelf out of that dog’s reach. She’s the world’s biggest moth.

I’m a little sad to think that I am too old to sleep with something old and soft and fuzzy and stuffed. But then I remember I do that every night with Other Bill, especially on salad buffet nights. Really, though, I can only sleep on my right side so my back doesn’t hurt. I could sleep on my back, but that causes snoring, and subsequent poking and shaking and waking by you-know-who.

So you’d think I’d be happy now that I’ve reclaimed a small part of my childhood. If that’s the case, why do you suppose I receive an e-mail from my eBay robot now, whenever there’s a hit for “Peru Alpaca Fur Teddy Bear”?

C’mon. If they sold one, they had surely hand-made more.

Surviving Equality

2009-05-28T06:57:00.002-04:00

Good evening, students, and welcome to the Surviving Equality seminar. This will take about two hours, but we’ll take a little break for coffee and donuts in about forty-five minutes. So thank you for joining me today in this lovely library conference room. First, I want to I tell you a little bit about myself. Why am I qualified to teach this seminar, you might be asking. Well, as one of the thirty-six thousand some-odd people who was married in California during the 137-day window when that benefit was offered to gays and lesbians, I profess I’m not an expert at it, but I can offer you a little insight. And because this is a free seminar, what have you got to lose?

You, there! You in the back! Other Bill! Would you please wait until the break for your donut? Go ahead and finish that one, but please wait for the rest of us. I had to pay for those myself.

So class, to start, let me explain that there are more choices than being either single or married today for gays and lesbians. In the majority of American states, if you’re gay you’re not allowed to marry someone of the same sex. You can only be single or straight, which in my opinion is pretty dreadful. I wouldn’t want to be either.

In four states, if you’re gay, you can get married or be single, no matter what your sexual orientation is. Still, in some states you can register as domestic partners.

If you’re gay in California, you’re not allowed to marry anyone of the same sex, unless you got married, as I did, in between June 17 and November 4, 2008. So you can be married, but can’t get married, or you can be single, or you can register as domestic partners.

See? Choices.

As you can see by the map here, these are the four states that offer same sex marriage, the states shaded in green. The rest of the country, the white states, do not offer or recognize same sex marriage. The yellow states recognize your same-sex marriage if you were married in a green state, or the brown state, California, between June 17 and November 4, 2008, but they neither issue marriage licenses to, nor legally allow the marriage of same sex couples. Thus, the yellow.

Now I would like to create a couple of scenarios that have to do with portability of benefits.
Let’s say you’re gay, live in chilly Boston with your two adopted tweenagers and same-sex partner of 20 years who legally married you a couple of years ago. You are all tired of the snow and lack of warmth that comes with being a Massachusetts resident. Not to mention those grating accents. Because of the economy, your employer does some consolidation of responsibilities, and you are given the option of accepting a promotion to the company’s swank South Beach office, or a lateral move to a dumpy, dark building located in an unsafe neighborhood in DC. Which do you choose? Raise your hand if you choose Miami Beach. ALL of you! Wow, it’s a good thing you showed up tonight, because you are all wrong.

People, this is a no brainer. You take the lateral move to the District and work in a neighborhood full of crackheads. That’s because DC recognizes same-sex marriages that originated in other states. Florida doesn’t. And if you wanted to adopt another child, you couldn’t in Florida, because it’s illegal.

Next scenario. You’ve lived in Florida for 10 years, but just for kicks, you took a vacation to San Francisco in September of 2008 and married your same-sex partner of sixteen years. Against your better judgment, you move to New York City to pursue your dream of becoming a mime. Your donut-sucking husband—That’s your sixth cruller I count, Other Bill!—agrees to pay for your health insurance policy offered by his employer, Krispy Kreme. They reject you, citing that because you lived in Florida for the last decade, and Florida has a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, and you therefore do not qualify. What do you have to show them in order to ensure your coverage? Is it A) an official copy of your marriage certificate dated between June 17 and November 4, or B) Your Lark?

No, Other Bill, showing them that is not the correct answer. Put that away and zip it shut. Yes, class, of course the correct answer is A). That was a give-away, because I felt bad that you got the first one wrong. You all answered correctly, mainly because you don’t understand what “Show Us Your Lark” means.

So you can see by those two scenarios, portability of your rights as a married couple can be difficult. Currently, if you want to be protected under state law, your options are to move from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, or, incredibly, Iowa, to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, or, incredibly, Iowa, or states like New York, which recognize same-sex marriages from these states, or Districts like the Of Columbia, which will also recognize your vows, but apparently only if you work in Anacostia or another bad neighborhood.

Now let’s talk for a minute about domestic partnership vs. same-sex marriage, and again I will use California as an example and health insurance as the issue, but there are hundreds of additional issues at stake here. If you register as domestic partners in California, your employer is required by law to offer you all the benefits that it offers its married heterosexual employees. In the white states, some counties and cities allow you to register as domestic partners, but they do not necessarily require employers to give you benefit equality. So why do they do it? The answer is simple: because they can collect revenue to do so. The only sure way to get benefits for your same-sex partner is to go to work for a company that offers that benefit. Don’t depend on government.

As a little aside here, when I worked for Coors (as in beer), they offered domestic partner benefits only for its gay and lesbian employees. If you were unmarried, cohabitating heterosexuals, you were not given those benefits. This created a small group of straight employees who really hated me. And apparently, Coors taught this little trick to California.

California can’t make up its mind. They flip-flop back and forth between making gay marriage legal and then reversing themselves. They recently announced a compromise that will appear on the 2010 ballot: Same sex marriages will be legal on even days, illegal on odd ones. On Feb. 29 of leap years, only same-sex marriages will be legal. California issued same-sex marriage licenses in 2004, but then all those marriages were annulled and the license fees were refunded. This time, in order to hang on to the 18,000-some-odd license fees, the bankrupt state of California decided not to annul, thereby creating a unique class of people who are hated by two opposing groups: straight people who think gay marriage is wrong, and jealous gay people who want to marry but can’t. Those people are referred to as the PGL’s (Privileged Gays and Lesbians).

When I visit California, I am a privileged gay man. But when I’m home in Florida, I’m just another gay man with a ring and an useless framed marriage certificate hanging on the wall. There, I have rights but everyone hates me. Here I have no rights, but only some people hate me. When I’m in DC this September to see my nephew get married, I can call him my nephew there, because my vows are recognized, but I work with crack whores. I can’t call him my nephew here, because I work with cops.

Or something like that. It's very confusing, and I’m trying to understand. It’s difficult for a man my age. Why don’t we take a fifteen minute break, have a little snack, and I’ll try to organize my thoughts a little better.

What do you mean, Other Bill, that there are no snacks left?

Shivagit

2009-05-18T18:55:00.004-04:00

One thing that makes Other Bill and me a good fit together is that neither of us gives a shit. You can tell that by looking at our home furnishings, our clothes, the things we eat, and the way we behave.

We pretty much live for comfort, and we don’t care how that looks. We have a 30-year-old maroon leather couch in the living room that is the summer lounge for Bungee, because it sits right under an air conditioning vent. It is really comfortable. It has great lumbar support and just absorbs you when you sit in it.
Every now and then, Bungee gets curious as to just what makes that couch so damned comfortable, so she’ll slice open a worn bit of leather, pull out a tiny bit of stuffing, and then, satisfied with her answer, goes back to her gin and tonic, Eve cigarette, and another afternoon in front of the Soap Opera Channel.

Her little slices have been taped up with not-very-well-color-matched maroon duct tape. This couch is pretty much the first thing you see when you walk into the front door of our house. Does it cause us embarrassment? Not in the least. We don’t give a shit.

I would rather wear a 30-year-old threadbare t-shirt that rips every time you stretch than any other shirt in the world. Nothing feels better against my skin than soft, aged cotton, preferably so old that it weighs less than a Q-tip. After work and on the weekends, what I wear is basically fabric vapor. And usually it’s stained or holey in small areas that aren’t that noticeable. Oddly enough, my ancient t-shirts and frayed shorts are now being replicated and sold as mock-vintage stuff at stores like American Eagle and Abercrombie and Fitch. My stuff is just genuine, and usually costs and weighs about 95% less.

We don’t have nice things. We don’t want nice things. I was surprised that when the burglar broke into our house in March, he didn’t just turn around and walk out. We don’t want to spend money on new things. Our home is furnished with a mishmash of thrift and antique store furniture that doesn’t match or particularly look all that nice but is functional and comfortable. Practically everything we owned or have ever owned is secondhand. Even Bungee was used when we got her. Twice used, in fact. We could afford better stuff (including a better dog), I guess, but the thing is, we don’t give a shit, so why bother?

When I was a kid, we got plenty of hand-me-down clothes from a well-to-do family of 10, and apparently I have trouble letting go of that ritual. These days, our benefactors are Billy and Ron.

Billy and Ron’s house is immaculate. Everything is new, clean, shiny, and unblemished. Because Ron is retired, he has a lot of time for making their place lovely and downright perfect. Even though they have two dogs, they don’t have any dirt on the floor of their patio. We have one dog, and our patio floor is 45% concrete, 55% dog track-ins.

Billy and Ron have high turnover rates for their stuff. And they are always comfortable calling us to see if we want their old stuff before they put it out on the street for gypsies to take. We have their old mini-fridge sitting on top of our mini-freezer outside on the patio. When they called and offered us the fridge, even though we didn’t need it, we accepted, because you can’t just throw away a perfectly good refrigerator. So we went and picked it up, even though nothing says White Trash louder than exterior major appliances. Luckily, we don’t give a shit.

Billy and Ron are good friends, and in turn we are also their own personal Salvation Army. Other Bill and I are thinking about starting our own 501(c)3 for them just so they can get a tax credit for the stuff they give us. It’s the least we can do. It’s not like there’s anything in our house that they’re going to want. For the most part, they’ve already proven that.

We have their old patio lounge chairs now sitting in the breezeway in front of our house. Billy and Ron got a new patio floor covered in elegant earth tone paving blocks that appear to be self-vacuuming. They also bought some really nice rattan cushioned furniture, which I am praying will mildew in a year or two so we can put it on our patio. Since a lot of their possessions eventually end up in our house, you’d think they’d make it a point to take us shopping with them when they buy new stuff to make sure it’s something that would go with our motif once they’re done with it. The problem with that is, we have no motif.

They don’t know it, but when we are at their house and are not looking, we have stuck labels on many of their possessions we’d like to have. “The Bills would like to have these if you’re getting rid of them,” the labels remind them.

They also have really nice cars and pretend not to mind us being passengers whenever we go anywhere with them. On the other hand, they’ve never asked for us to drive one of our cars, for the reasons shown below. Their cars never lose the new car smell and have things like global navigation systems, roomy, orthopedic leather seating, and steering wheels that have memory positions. Other Bill drives a 12-year-old Toyota Tacoma truck, which could use a significant body work, a paint job and one of those nice cardboard deodorizers that swing from the rearview mirror, but it comes in handy for picking up hand-me-downs. I now drive a Honda Fit, which is frequently mistaken for a cockroach because of its size. Pedestrians at crosswalks frequently pull off a shoe and smack my car with it as they make their way across the street. SUV’s that pass me on the interstate often hold passengers who lean out their windows and spray me with Raid.

Recently Other Bill told Billy that when they get done with their sleek, quiet, comfortable Infiniti, we’d be happy to take it off their hands. But it was too late. They had already traded it in on this year’s model. Next time we’re over there, we’re putting labels on their new Infiniti as well as Ron’s candy-apple-red convertible Mustang, which I know for a fact never gets shoe-smacked or sprayed with toxic chemicals.

When we got married in September of 2008, we made a big mistake in the gift registry process. Having never had to face posting a list of demands for “things” that friends should spend lots of money on for us, we instead told people we were registered with Wachovia. Further illustrating our ignorance of these matters, we neglected to give people deposit slips, so we ended up getting no gifts at all. If we’d been smart, we would have informed our public that we were registered at Billy and Ron’s House of Nice Things. Maybe we would have gotten some nice granite countertops or one of the quiet-flushing toilets they have. Or even one of their nice, clean dogs.

You’d think we’d be ashamed that we have several pieces of dog-ruined furniture in our house, two of which are covered over with sheets and towels. They do go well with the taped-up couch. But because we don’t give a shit, we are shameless. In fact, we are always on the lookout for additional benefactors who have great taste, big wallets, and the ever-evolving urge to redecorate; philanthropists who would love to come over for dinner, but don’t want to be in a house that looks as if it was decorated by a group of mentally challenged NASCAR fans. Or is that redundant?

I could easily say that we are doing this for the good of the environment, that we are dedicated to recycling and saving the planet. But that’s not necessarily so. The real reason is that we just don’t give a shit. When hand-me-downs come to us, they stay here until they further decompose over time, and when it’s our turn to throw things out, the stuff usually has less than 72 hours before it disintegrates, evaporates, rusts out or rots into the earth. Our home is a holding tank, a middle ground between the retail store and the compost heap. Well, maybe a little bit to the right of the middle ground. Maybe a lot to the right. Okay, our home is the compost heap.

We both think that if you have nice stuff, the more traumatic the time will be when you spill something on it, scratch it, dent it, crack it, have it stolen, or otherwise devalue it. The great thing about not giving a shit is that the dog’s tongue can satisfactorily clean up spills adequately for your needs, and you never know if the scratch, dent, or crack came from you or if it was like that the day you unloaded it from your 12-year-old scratched, dented Toyota Tacoma. Worrying is a thing of the past, and you don’t run around your house during a party with a can of warm club soda and a sponge. You can stop being that skinny, mink-wearing in the Sixties who avoided the buffet table at The Club in order to prevent herself from dipping her stole into the Swedish meatball pan. Not giving a shit sets you free.

I can’t tell you steps to take to stop giving a shit. It’s not learned behavior. My mother gave a shit. She had a psychotic meltdown and didn’t speak to me for a week after I spilled a bottle of red ink on the new powder blue shag carpet she spent years saving for. It was a big, bloody-looking, horror-movie red stain that made it look like carpeting that was dragged out of the home of a Manson family victim. Maybe not giving a shit is something you’re born with. Nature, not nurture. When I took a razor knife to the ink stain, and cut it out and replaced it with a scrap of leftover carpeting, you could still see the outline of the hole where the ruined carpet had been. It was an improvement. It was good enough. Who gave a shit? Certainly not me.

I thought that not giving a shit was something that came with age. When I was in my twenties, I wanted everything beautiful and immaculate, matching, and awe-inspiring. I even made my bookshelves beautiful with enormous, expensive art books (which, to be honest, I stole from the library I worked at). I thought that as you age and move, you let go of things and learn to live more simply. But that’s not necessary true. Billy and Ron are a little older than we are, and they still give a shit. They give a lot of shit.

The bottom line, I guess, is that not giving a shit is the basic result of inertia. It takes work to give a shit, as well as motivation to seek better jobs that pay more money. And it takes time. You have to shop and browse catalogs and develop vision and a coordinated color palate. It’s so much more relaxing just to lean back in our sagging recliner sofa, click the remote and watch reruns of Judge Judy.

Maybe it takes retirement to have the time to give a shit. Maybe vision and the hope and possibility of living in a house that looks nice come with spare time. Maybe one day if I’m ever able to retire, I’ll experience that. If I ever learn to give a shit, I’ll call you. You can come pick it up.

The Only Way to Fly

2009-05-05T17:15:00.006-04:00

There’s a great new way to fly these days. True, the Concord is gone, and First Class is out of my price range, but I have discovered a greater way to go: unconscious.

Some people take books, portable DVD players or laptop computers for in-flight amusement and to pass the time. Me, I take Valium.

I usually have quite a high tolerance for pain medications, muscle relaxers, and the normal maintenance dose of Atavan. But give me one little Valium, and it’s Good Night, Nurse for the rest of the day.

I'm not the only one who has adopted this tactic. Watch the passengers with the bottled water. They'll pop a pill as soon as they're seated. And they always look hungry. You get an extra kick if you take it on an empty stomach.

I tell my doctor I need “a little something” each time before I go on an extended flight. And by extended flight, I mean beyond the county line. The last three trips to San Francisco have been paradise for me. Even if we have to stop for an hour and change flights, the minute the second plane lifts off, my face is in my soup. Or it would be, had I brought a bowl on board. When the flights were over, the drug seemed to have run its course, and I woke up feeling very refreshed and mellow. For me, jet lag is a thing of the past.

I no longer miss my free beverage or $2 headphones. I always make sure I pin my Do Not Resuscitate order to my shirt so the air nurse won’t wake me up. I learned this trick from my mother, who for the last few years of her life, slept under her DNR order that was taped to the wall (which she had brusquely attacked with a fluorescent highlighter and scribbled in her own addenda). When Rescue came, they ignored it anyway, but air nurses tend to be much more sympathetic. They’re thinking, “Hey, that’s just one more jerk I don’t have to wait on.”

No longer do I have to be worried about being cramped or uncomfortable in those sardine-can coach seats. When you’re as out of it as I am while under the influence of one little Valium, you can fold yourself into a pretzel shape and still be dreaming away as if you were stretched out on a king-sized Tempur-Pedic mattress.

This trip, I slept for two hours with a starlight mint in my mouth. During hour 1, I had woken up, and in order to alleviate my sleeper’s breath, popped one into my mouth. Twenty seconds later, I was back asleep, and it was still there two hours later, staining my tongue and teeth cherry red as we began our descent into Dallas.

This medication trick is not for everyone. Other Bill will Pop a Chocks before takeoff and will still be vigorously reading his book about Joni Mitchell as we prepare for landing. Frankly, I could probably read the Joni Mitchell book instead of taking the Valium, but the drugs take much less effort. Moving your eyes and comprehending can be so taxing.

I am pleased to have Other Bill in the waking world so that he can nudge me when I snore or soak up my drool with a cocktail napkin. He says he does that frequently during the flight, but I remember none of it. He could probably put me in clown makeup and pull my pants down to my knees, and I wouldn’t discover it until the captain pulled up to the gate and turned off the fasten-seatbelt sign. That's how out of it I am.

I am not saying that drugs are cool or that this method of flight will help others, but it's right for me. What I don’t understand is how people function while taking this medication. And by function, I mean simply staying awake. I’m beginning to think that Valley of the Dolls was fiction.

I am pretty certain I could have open-heart surgery while taking this medication.
All the misery of air travel can completely disappear if you pair that pill with a couple of good foam earplugs. Screaming babies? Never heard ’em. Sloppy, loud drunks molesting the air nurses? Where? On this flight?

The first time I tried this was on a 14-hour, nonstop flight from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to Kennedy in 1983. It was on a big-belly 747 that held extra fuel for extended flights. It was during some Moslem holiday when some hypocritical Saudis, the kind who drink, gamble, and play with prostitutes, flee the country for destinations where those things are easy to do.
Unfortunately, they tend to bring along their herds of Saudi toddlers and pre-schoolers, who, once the fasten-seatbelt light is turned off, are more than free to roam about the cabin. They run up and down the aisles shrieking and speaking in tongues while their parents, all five of each of them, peruse the duty free liquor magazines.

Valium, in Saudi Arabia at that time, did not require a prescription. Unfortunately, I never knew that until the day before my repatriation flight took off. I could have had a much better time there that year. I should have networked more.

So at the first sign of unruly children, I popped a 5 mg. tablet. In no time their disturbing ways stopped irritating me, and I felt really happy. I slept until the first meal came, which was after the first movie. Disturbingly, I did not at the time have a DNR order that was written in hieroglyphics from right to left, so the air nurse set food down in front of me and woke me up. I ate half of the beef, or maybe it was lamb. Whatever; dark meat in gravy, and a mouthful of baba ganoush, which I’m not fond of but love the name. It quickly led to my singing in my head a modified Beach Boys song: “Ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ganoush; Ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ganoush.” Like just about everything else, except for the black-haired babies going berserk up and down both aisles of the plane, I found that song interminably funny, and I figured I could stop my giggling and make those kids disappear with another ten milligrams. Hey, I was 26. What did I care about a slight overdose? I was going to live forever.

Two unseen movies, a skipped breakfast and eleven hours later, I woke up just as we were making our descent into New York. The captain had already illuminated the fasten-seatbelt sign, and I hadn’t peed in over fifteen hours, so I couldn't run to the back to relieve myself. Needless to say I had busting-at-the-zipper happy pants, but it also felt like I had half a dozen ice picks stabbing me in the bladder. I could only find relief by leaning forward, as if I was bracing for impact. When we docked at the gate, I couldn’t stand up until everyone had left the plane. I fled as fast as I could, bent over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I made it to a sit-down toilet. (I couldn’t stand at a urinal, or I would have poked myself in the eye with the now-extinct flush handle.)

Later that afternoon, Customs officials wanted to know why I had taken so long to get to them. I told them I’d taken Valium and fallen asleep. They bought it.

But as I said earlier, don't assume this in-flight medication will help you. I do feel, for the sake of the safety of others, that I should put in one of those prescription medication warnings here.

Valium is not for everyone. Ask your doctor if taking Valium on a jet is right for you. In some cases, Valium may make you miss your connection, cause drooling that will stain your garments, make you fall in your soup, or lie in the lap of an unknown adjacent passenger. Don't take Valium while traveling alone or without a willing passenger who will nudge you when snoring and mop your face when drooling. Valium can be habit forming among frequent travelers. Side effects of Valium include erections lasting over four hours, euphoria, and fiery bladder pain. Stop using Valium if you experience death. For more information and a discount on your first prescription, visit www.airvalium.com.

Painting for Jesus

2009-04-18T19:03:00.003-04:00

I don’t suppose anyone’s been holding their breath, but after six grueling weeks, we are about to put the cap on the exterior house painting we have been engaged in for the majority of our off-work waking daylight hours.

I never imagined it would end up taking 6 weeks. Actually it took longer, because for the last two years, I’ve been saying, “We really need to paint the house,” and then failing to act on it.
We tackled it one side at a time. After I bought the sealer, primer and paint, I started the pressure washing.

Lesson 1 learned: I will spread mulch next to the house so that if I should ever be so inclined to pressure wash the house again, I will not end up looking like I just joined a minstrel show. The backsplash of mud from the ground edge of the house was thick, severe and often painful when little pebbles splashed back and pitted my flesh.

I discovered that pressure washing does not do an adequate job of removing the old paint. Not by a long shot. We ended up buying a total of 8 single-edged razor scrapers, all of which we broke in no time, and we peeled off garbage bags full of loose paint that I know that any average painter, especially the Paintitute, would have just sprayed over.

Lesson 2 learned: Make sure you double up on your OCD meds while scraping the outside of the house. No matter how hard you try, you are not going to get every last smidgen of paint to chip off. You can see as you circumnavigate the house clockwise from the northwest corner that paint removal became less and less of a concern as the weeks passed by. Yesterday, my mantra was: To hell with it. Paint over it. Who’s going to know?

In the early days of the project, while Other Bill was away visiting family, I decided to get creative and paint Keith Haring dogs on our aluminum awnings that hang over the north side windows.

Lesson 3 learned: Don’t get creative when you paint a house. It causes massive delays. Just splash on the paint. Because there were three colors to deal with (black, white, and the green awning color) it took up to a week to paint each Keith Haring dog awning, because we had to use 4 coats of paint for it to cover. Not only was there the painting, but there was the cutting of the stencils, the tracing, the masking, and the never ending touching up. And regrettably, it was all for nothing, because I ended up painting the dogs too high up on the awnings for them to be seen. When the next hurricane approaches and the shutters go down, I’m sure our neighbors will just be delighted to see the cartoon-like replicas of our handiwork.

The first coat I applied to the house is a product called Kilz, which is a sealer and a mildew inhibitor. If you live in Florida, you need it.

Lesson 4 learned: Kilz does not wash off your body. I used a scrub brush and steel wool on parts of my body that should have never been exposed to such abrasive tactics, and the paint still stayed on me. I assume it will wear off as my skin cells are replaced. Kilz also doesn’t come off your hair. You have to shave your arms or chest to get it off. I can only assume that you would have to do the same with head hair. Perhaps I should have read the label or worn long sleeves. The label probably instructs me to wear long sleeves.

When we got done with the north side of the house and started on the east side, we had the opportunity to paint the biggest awning on the house just the color of the trim. But we had to be creative again, because we are gay, so an extra large Keith Haring dog stencil was cut, traced, and is still being painted even as we move toward completion of the south side of the house. This dog’s feet touch the bottom lip of the awning, so hopefully it will be visible from the street and will frighten off burglars, being that our living, breathing dog failed to.

Lesson 5 learned: Paint tends to sting when it gets in your eyes. So does primer. So does sealer. When you’re standing 10 feet below and painting eaves with a roller on a stick, you have to look up so you don’t roll off the house. There are devices known as goggles. Who knew? As long as we are talking lost-time accidents, there are also garments called gloves that could have prevented the near-severing of my finger while I opened a ladder with a razor blade in my hand. My finger looks like an overcooked baked potato that was just split open. Steam is still coming out. I look forward to the day when I’ll be able to bend it again.

I have to always remember that when I start a project, it tends to spawn other side-projects. Projects breed themselves like rats, and it is ever-so-complex to find abortion clinics for rats. On the front and side of our house are—or should I say, were—these evil and unhealthy plants called ixoras. They tend to stab you, grab your shoelaces and tie them together and trip you, prevent you and your ladder from passing by, and they can even penetrate orifices you stopped having penetrated years and years ago. I got so sick of being sexually molested by plants that we got out the pruning shears, then the hatchet, then shovels and dug the evil bastards out of the ground.

This spawned the project that will no doubt turn into The Re-landscaping Project. Other Bill has already put in new, less aggressive plants to take their place, and this will no doubt spawn the need for other plants to be purchased and planted. And God knows what else that will spawn. The rat is pregnant and in her last trimester and is about to whelp a massive litter of time-consuming chores that will probably fill up our summer. We once ended up remodeling the entire house because I had to install a new toilet paper holder. It’s almost biblical the way it happens. The toilet paper holder begat repainting the bathroom, which begat repainting the bedroom, which begat While You’re At It, Why Don’t You Put Up Crown Molding in the Bedroom, which begat Why Don’t You Put Up Crown Molding in Every Room and Paint Them Too, which begat I Hate This Kitchen, which begat demolition that required a trip to the emergency room, which begat hiring a cabinet maker who depleted our bank accounts and brought in termites. See how it works? Should I be thanking Jesus for this?

This is the second time in my life that I painted a house. The first house was much bigger, and when it came time to repaint the house, I opted to sell it instead. I pretty much feel the same way with this house. Unfortunately, the $60-a-gallon paint we used has a lifetime guarantee, so I might end up stuck here. The good news is that in laymen’s painting terms, “lifetime guarantee” means you’ll probably have to paint again in three years. I told Other Bill in three years I will be ready for a condo, rental apartment, or assisted living. Or, if I have to paint the house again, I will soon afterwards find a nice home in a psychiatric hospital. Doing a project of this scale used to give me a sense of pride and accomplishment. This time all I got were aches, pains, exhaustion and possibly hemorrhoids and rape trauma, thanks to the ixoras. I Googled “Ixora abuse,” and all the hits were just all about the plant itself. Isn’t that always the case?

Tonight, if it doesn’t rain, and I don’t collapse and my arthritic old hands can still grasp a brush, the last of the paint will finally be applied. And hopefully by the weekend the last freakin’ Keith Haring Dog Awning will be reinstalled, and I can finally start vacuuming up the massive amounts of paint chips that have left our lawn looking like it has been seized by a cruel snow storm.
And that will beget vacuuming the patio, which will beget re-staining the concrete, because there are paint drippings from the Haring dogs there, which will beget having the pool resurfaced, which will probably beget the need to obtain a second job, thus begetting the need for extra medication for me, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all.

Career Mistakes

2009-04-14T16:00:00.002-04:00

I’ve never, ever told anyone this, but there is one time in my life I had a definite career goal. And after that was squashed, I fell into a spiral of inertia and accepted just about every job that was offered to me. I can remember just two that I turned down.

I figure that possibly if my father lived (here we go, I hear you groaning), maybe I would have received a little more career guidance. Maybe I would have wanted to grow up and become a writer, as my dad was, instead of having this oddball assortment of jobs:

Busboy
Library Aide
Phototypesetter (4 different jobs)
Secretary
HR Rep for a year in Saudi Arabia
Financial Analyst (me, being the person who can’t balance his own checkbook)
Unemployed alcoholic (also referred to as “semi-retirement” and “construction engineer” (while I was working on rehabbing my house, when I should have been rehabbing myself)
Shipping clerk
Coordinator in a maintenance department
Technical Support geek
Buyer

Try to find the common denominator in those. You could be here all day.

It would have been nice to have worked for a newspaper, starting off as a delivery boy, then a go-fer, maybe do some time in classified ads before eventually writing puff pieces, leading to serious journalism, leading to management, leading to writing a bestseller. I just didn’t know how to go about that. A concerned family friend whose husband ran the town newspaper offered to get me an interview when I was 18, but I somehow got out of it. I was too young, too shy, too inexperienced, and it would just have been freaky working with former colleagues of my dad’s.

I don’t know if I would have been happier or sadder with an actual career instead of a string of loser jobs. Without my Saudi job, there are parts of the world I never would have seen. Without my tech support job I never would have earned enough money to buy my own home. I could have been richer. I could have been poorer. I could have been a contender. Or not. I’m not bothered by my inertia spiral and always taking the path of least resistance. I was in Saudi Arabia the first year that AIDS arrived on the scene. That alone could have prolonged my life for decades. I’m 52 and still alive, which is a lot farther than the 20-some-odd people I knew who succumbed to the disease got.

So here it is, what I’ve been postponing telling you.

I wanted to be a mime.

Now, I don’t clearly remember why I wanted to be a mime. I know that I was very moved seeing Marcel Marceau perform at the Kennedy Center, but that was long after my mime dream was out of the way. I know that Toni Allen played the role of the mime in “The Fantasticks,” one of our high school productions. Did that influence me? I don’t think so. That’s about all I know about mimes.

When I was in high school I actually thought that I could actually build a career as a mime. Hey, if Marcel Marceau could do it, why couldn’t I, I reasoned.

When you say mime, what do you think of? You think of Marcel Marceau. Have there ever been any others? Name two, and Red Skelton doesn’t really count, because he wasn’t Just A Mime.

I actually thought that I could go to college, major in theater, and then, without learning French, board a plane and attend the Compagnie De Mimodrame Marcel Marceau (or, as simple philistines called it, The Marcel Marceau School of Mime). And then after that I could go and silently perform at the Kennedy Center and have my own Playbill.

I am basically a quiet, introspective person, even though these stories might give you a different idea. Other Bill probably does 80-85% of the talking in our house, and I am happy that he does. Maybe having a career as a silent person was why I was so drawn to the mime occupation. Plus it’s a job you can do all by yourself, which then and still does appeal to me.

All I remember is that I wanted to be a goddamn mime. When I told my mother I wanted to major in theater, she basically said, “Over my dead body,” which, given my attitude, could easily have been arranged. We even marched out to the university and saw a career counselor together, also an old family friend. It was then my mother confessed she didn’t want me joining a homosexual industry. I believe those were her exact words: homosexual industry. Whenever I think of that, I can’t help but imagine a factory assembly line, off of which is rolling a bunch of skinny, bitchy queens in outrageous outfits, being packaged up and sent to major cities where homosexuals thrived: San Francisco, New York, West Hollywood, Key West.

Lee, the counselor, asked my mother why she thought only homosexuals were theater majors. Wouldn’t it be worse if I chose graphic or fashion design?

My mother said, “I just don’t want them to get their hands on him. I’ve seen them looking at him.”

“What?” I interjected, “when was this?” Homosexuals were looking at me? Why hadn’t I known? I certainly would have looked back (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

“Why, just the other day in the elevator at work,” she said.

“In the federal building? Where you work?”

“Yes,” she said, “when we were going down.”

I suppressed a smirk. At this point in time, at age 18, I had already gone down on three men.

“There were two guys obviously sizing you up. I’m surprised you didn’t notice.”

“I certainly did not,” I confirmed.

Seeing that this conversation was going to a bad place, Lee interrupted. She gave my mother a long but friendly, encouraging talk about how it was time, as much as she might hate it, to let go and let what ever would be, be. Que Sera. There was no guarantee in life that even if I chose English or journalism as a career that I wouldn’t be cruised or even recruited by homosexuals. She was very gentle, chose her words carefully, and talked on my mother’s terms. She was a brilliant, eloquent woman whom my mother respected. And Mom listened very carefully and agreed to everything she said. We showered her with thanks and complimented her wisdom.

My mother and I went down in the elevator of the building (and I remember watching men’s eyes). We got out in the muggy Florida heat, and I said, “So, is it okay if I major in theater?

“It is certainly not goddamned okay,” she snapped, and that was the end of that. She’s the one who cashed the Social Security checks that came in my name that were paying the tuition (and for a lot of bourbon for her), and since she held the purse strings, she got final say.

What was I going to do, take her to court?

I want to say she was right. A career in mime was a waste of tuition money which would only have led to the same string of loser jobs that I received as an English major grad. Either way, I would have ended up in the same place. Although going through theater classes would have been a lot more fun than reading and reporting on The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Sometimes Mom was right; a lot of times she was wrong, but most often it just didn’t matter.

Que Sera.

After doing a Google search on the Compagnie De Mimodrame Marcel Marceau, I found that the joint is closed. Marcel Marceau is dead. It does, however, have an extensive listing of links to other mime schools throughout the world. The closest one to me is near Orlando.

Am I about to ditch my latest loser job and apply for a scholarship there?

Uh, no. There’s nothing more pathetic than an Old Mime.

Unless, of course, you’re Marcel Marceau.

Lucky, Lucky Me

2009-04-08T16:23:00.001-04:00

Ever notice when you suffer a tragedy, people always try to force you to see the good side of the misfortune? Someone close to you dies, and your friends say, “At least he’s no longer in pain.” Yes, it’s true; napalm can be very uncomfortable. Other clichés include:

He’s in a better place now.
I’m so glad he didn’t suffer for long.
He had a long and wonderful life.

And then people always give you their thoughts and prayers. Sometimes they give them to you for good (“Our thoughts and prayers are always with you.”) Other times their thoughts and prayers are with you “during your time of sorrow.” After your sorrow’s gone, they want those thoughts and prayers back. Overdue charges may apply. Frankly when someone close to me dies, I don’t really want thoughts and prayers. I’ve seen a lot of death in my life, probably a lot more than most people my age. I was a hospice volunteer. I know the stages of grief and work through it. I’ll be fine. Really. So keep your thoughts and prayers and make me a nice German chocolate cake. I’d much rather hear, “Our cake and ice cream is with you until you finish it, but please return the Tupperware.” It’s even better for Other Bill if I get to keep the Tupperware. He has a bit of a burping plastic fetish.

When you get burglarized, the trite phrases everyone uses are:

It could have been a lot worse.

At least they didn’t _________ (Fill in the blank with something like: kill your dog, microwave your cat, stain your carpeting, take your Franklin Mint collections, etc.)
You were lucky.

“You were lucky” is my favorite, and I’m making that my mantra. On March 27 someone smashed the glass out of our back French door, entered the house, opened up a bunch of drawers (probably looking for jewelry, said the responding officer. Our wedding rings cost $8 each on eBay. That should give you a clue as to the important role precious metals and rocks play in our lives.) Along the way, the crooks got the new laptop, my iPod, an early 90’s era laptop, a digital camera, and a few pounds of change.

The worst, of course, was the good laptop. You worry about identity theft, emptied out bank accounts, and the pictures of you in that leather peek-a-boo teddy and stilettos being sent to your boss.

But really, I’m lucky. That laptop was ten months old and only had a dual core processor, so it was a relic. It was time to upgrade, anyway.

I keep telling myself we were lucky. I’m trying to convince myself of it.

My luckiness has failed to take away my anger at the dog. I can just picture her, sitting in her Belgian tapestry chair with her Arlene-Frances-What’s-My-Line night blinder-mask, nursing her hangover from the night before. A soothing icepack on her head, a calming Eve cigarette dangling from her lips while Yanni serenades her overconsumption consequences away. “Take anything you want, boys” she mumbles to the intruders while sipping a hair-of-the-human appletini, “just don’t touch the Iams, the icemaker, or the liquor cabinet, unless you want your blood drawn.”

Yes, I’m lucky. They didn’t kill or hurt the dog. Although once I realized she was unharmed, I wanted to. She should have at least fought them and procured a DNA sample.

I responded to this intrusion in a very girl-victim type way. The violation of it all. They went through my underwear drawer. They touched sex toys. For the first few days after the burglary, I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I’d be in the middle of work and remember something that might have been compromised, and then make a call, change a password, or cancel an account, and then completely forget about what I was doing before the panic set in. My jaw was permanently clenched, and there was a knot in my stomach. I realized that this would be a great excuse to see my doctor for some tranquilizers. He happily prescribed me 30 Ativan. I didn’t even have to show him the police report. I should get robbed more often. I’m so lucky to be able to feel as carefree as I do now.

A burglary is an eye-opening experience. You’ve been ripped off, and your smashed-opened house is compromised. So what do you do? You call a glass company to rip you off some more. We paid $900 for the set of French doors . The glass company charged us $700 to replace the glass in one of the doors. And that is WITH the law enforcement discount. Damn, I’m so lucky to work for a police department. Otherwise it would have cost $750.

Luckily, everything I’ve written for the past two years has been saved on a 16 gig thumb drive. I even had an external hard drive to back up the laptop with. So lucky me, the thieves left the backup drive. Unfortunately, just buying a backup drive doesn’t automatically give you a backup of your data. You have to actually plug it in and back it up. Ten days later, when I finally found the power cord and plugged it in to my new computer, I saw that the last backup I did was in 2006. And even then it didn’t include Other Bill’s iTunes. I didn’t want to wait that long to clone that many bytes.

Note to thieves: the computer I plugged the backup drive into is a heavy desktop model secured by a Glock lock and a kryptonite bicycle lock, secured through the hole I drilled in my 500-pound desk, and I buried most of the computer in a bucket of cement. You will need a refrigerator dolly, a forklift and dynamite to get it out of the house.

It’s taken days to get things back in order, and I’m still not done. I restored Other Bill’s Internet bookmarks last night so that he doesn’t have to hunt so hard to find his favorite porn sites. Did I say porn? I meant recipe. Now I just have to figure out how to put his iPod music into iTunes on the new computer without erasing the iPod. I’m very iPod-phobic. So I’ll down an Ativan before tackling that little job.

I’m lucky. My iPod was something I won in a drawing at work, and I never used it. I don’t like having things stuck in my ears. I appreciate silence. And I wouldn’t have backed up the music on it, either. The digital camera they stole was malfunctioning, so I am going back to my analog film camera. Nothing takes pictures better than my Minolta SRT100 camera that my aunt co-bought with me in 1972. Even better, no one wants to steal it. Lucky me!

As lucky as I am, I don’t feel that lucky. That’s because I want revenge. I totally agree with the Middle East practice of cutting off the hands of thieves. I would like to use a dull hatchet on the ones who invaded my home. Or perhaps I could fire up an electric carving knife to help drown out the thieves’ screams. If I need a chisel to cut through the bone, I am prepared for that.

Instead I have opted for a Karmic substitution to torture.

We scanned Craigslist for used laptops, and went to look at one in a really bad neighborhood. The guy had advertised an HP laptop that looked just like our stolen one. Bubba (not his real name) was clearly dealing in stolen property. When we went into his apartment (which was armed with a burglar alarm), he had us take a seat at the one table in the unit. He then went into another room, which was dark, and he shut the door behind him when he entered it. In a minute he came out with not one, but two HP laptops (neither was ours; I checked the model numbers while his back was turned). He wanted $500 each for them, which was an excellent deal. He couldn’t tell me anything about them: how long he had owned them, how much he paid for them, why he was getting rid of them. Zilch, nada, nothing. I wasn’t about to buy someone’s stolen computer which had been scrubbed clean with a fresh, probably illegal version of Vista. I told him it was too much money and that I really didn’t need that much computer or the built-in web cam.

“I have more,” he said, “What are you looking for?” he asked me.

I thanked him, shook his hand, and we left to go find some hand sanitizer.

And today I made a call to Crime Stoppers and deposited his name, address, apartment number and phone number, and most of the above paragraph explaining my experience at his burglar-alarmed apartment.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and receive a reward. It’ll probably come to nothing, but I sure felt better afterwards. Or maybe it was just the Ativan.