Books in Brief

When I was in college, I worked in the circulation department of the Tampa Public Library. One of my many duties was to empty the book drop. It was a drive-by book drop, so people could, and did, put things in there that they never would have delivered to the front desk. I should have been issued a full hazmat suit to perform this task, because people would use the book drop as both a trash can and a toilet (even though those things you probably wouldn’t flush in your home john). So in addition to pulling out books we also had to fish out and discard a lot of moist unmentionables.

People also used the book drop to donate books. The library would sell a lot of those books. You could get five paperbacks for a buck. Readers’ Digest Condensed Books were often donated and went straight into the dumpster. We, as literature snobs, referred to as these tomes as Condemned Books.

Condemned Books were made for people who didn’t enjoy reading. These were people who thought, “I’d like to know enough about the book in case it ever comes up in conversation, but I don’t want to sit through the whole thing.” Each volume of Condemned Books had four or five full length books significantly abridged of material that was viewed by editors as insignificant.

For a while, my mother subscribed to Condemned Books, but she also took Dexedrine. Talk about speed reading. Once my Uncle Harvey Horace Greeley Spaulding Derby (and if you think that’s weird, you should have met my grandmother) gave me a Condemned Book for Christmas. I am sure that it was one that he either read and regifted or didn’t like, so he pawned it off on his nephew. I remember being underwhelmed. He could have given me a Matchbox car or batteries for my Motoriffic cars, but nooo! All I remember about the book was that one of the slashed selections was The Good Earth by Pearle S. Buck, which is a really tough sell to a ten-year-old boy.

I always wondered about Condemned Books editors. They were probably people who really hated English class and found their dream job in taking a great piece of literature and mutilating it. I picture someone with a red pen crossing out all the adjectives in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, leaving only a three-panel brochure about life in the South. Take THAT, Mrs. Terry, my sophomore English teacher who forced me to read A Separate Peace and deny the fact that it contained homosexual overtones!

I’ll bet the Senior Editor in charge of those “books” was just a blocked, unpublished novelist who outsourced all the assignments to a summer intern who worked in the broom closet while he swilled Scotch on the rocks in his windowed office while periodically cursing at his arch enemy, the typewriter.

Memorandum

To: Kahil Gerbil, Senior Editor, Readers Digest Condensed Books

From: Harmonia Munk, Junior Abridger

Thank you for the books you have assigned me to read and make suggestions regarding what we can cut/modify. I have read (or at least scanned through) all of them, and here are my conclusions.

The Bible: Adam & Eve, blah, blah, blah, sleeping with a man as a woman, abomination, blah, blah, blah. To everything, Turn, Turn, Turn, etc.

Moby Dick: Call him Captain instead of Ishmael. Then just cut to the chase.

The Catcher in the Rye: Let’s skip all that stuff when Holden’s running around in New York. Change point of view to sister Phoebe’s, but in third person.

Love Story: Let’s cut out all that upper class/working class crap. Give Jenny Chronic Fatigue Syndrome instead of Leukemia. Throw in kids. Think: Preppy, I need to take a nap. You nurse the twins again.

1984: First of all, let’s change the title to 2084. Remove outdated technology. Instant pamphlet!

Deliverance: Readers’ Digest is a family publication, so we’ll pull the rape scene and give the guy poison ivy instead. And that gets relieved with some aloe the boys find now that nobody’s being raped.

The Hours: We can change it to The Hour and delete all that past hokum that makes it more than an hour read. Let's just deal with the man who jumps out the window and call it a day.

Sophie’s Choice: The Nazis agree to kill Sophie and let the kids live. We can cut out a lot of book with that one small change. Change title to Adolph’s Choice.

The Joy Luck Club: Way too much redundancy what with all those Chinese. Instead of rotating between all those families, just have one family and throw in some Uncle Ben's "best quality" rice recipes.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman: The lieutenant floats up on shore on a log. After she nurses him back to health, Miss Woodruff/Mrs. Roughwood marries him. Again, throw in a kid or two. It always works in sitcoms. Forget the back story about the actors. That’s just distracting.

The World According to Garp: Again, family publication. Remove the penile dismemberment and those annoying Ellen Jamesians. Make Roberta Muldoon, the transgendered chick, a male homosexual. They are so much more loveable.

Brideshead Revisited: First of all, where’s the prequel to this called just Brideshead? Shouldn’t we butcher that one first? If not, change one of the dudes to a chick, and make the family agnostic instead of Catholic.

In Cold Blood: Change the setting to a state where there’s no death penalty.

To Kill a Mockingbird: Can’t we just make Tom Robinson white? Cut the dog shooting scene (PETA pressure). Take Dill completely out. He serves no purpose. And make Scout a boy; otherwise the readers will think she’ll grow up to be a lesbian. Isn’t Jem redundant?

Lord of the Flies: Just give Piggy some extended wear contact lenses.

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

Games People Played

Nothing on 60’s TV spelled entertainment to me more than a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman production. I was very fond of the celebrity panel game show format. On To Tell the Truth, the celebrities were introduced, and there was nothing more contrasting than Peggy Cass and Kitty Carlisle. Peggy Cass would waddle out wearing what looked like a homemade shift, Miss Gooch glasses, a lesbian haircut and flats. She would smile, nod and take her seat. Then after Orson Bean (who always made art out of his paper vote), Kitty Carlisle would blow out wearing some flowing chiffon evening gown and over-curtsy. Her brunette hair was always perfect, sprayed stiff and looked like a mannequin wig. Her Kabuki makeup was applied with the backside of a tablespoon, and you just know she was over-saturated in some pungent eau de toilette. The panel would try to weed out the two lying impostors from the person whose life was too, too interesting. Sometimes all four panelists hit it right, and the trio of guests would go home with no cash to divide among themselves. Sometimes they were dead wrong, and the real person who, say, saw everything upside down and backwards (and proved it by writing in cursive that way) would go home and question her identity and start psychotherapy not much later.

I’ve Got a Secret was also a big hit in my book. It wasn’t so much the panel that made the show, but the freaks that they brought on with some kind of “secret” that the panelists would try their damnedest to figure out. They would flash the secret on the screen so that folks at home could see it or close their eyes until the caption disappeared. That was always the highlight of the show for me. I always kept my eyes open, because I couldn’t wait for secrets like: Raised By Pygmies, Bastard Child of Bill Cullen and Betsy Palmer, and Born with Displaced Olfactory Nerve; Can Only Smell Through Her Right Knee, Yeah, guess that secret in fifteen seconds, journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. I dare ya.

On What’s My Line, a celebrity panel tried to guess the bizarre occupation of the contestants. In the last segment, the panel was blindfolded, and a celebrity Mystery Guest came out to thunderous applause, signed in and disguised his/her voice during the panel interrogation. 

If there was extra time left over at the end of the show, written questions from people out there in TV land and “our studio audience” were read to the panel in a segment called “Honest Answers”.

In one episode, a viewer claimed to have seen Arlene Francis (with her ever-present diamond-encrusted heart pendant dangling from her neck) peeking out from underneath the bottom of her pearly blindfold at the mystery guest. You have never in your life seen such a sweet, mild-mannered panelist turn from Eve White to Eve Black so quickly. And then she got into a fight with Soupy Sales, because he was laughing. She went from tame former radio hostess to Leona Helmsley before you could say, “cheater.” Sadly, there is no YouTube documentation of this, but here is a similar incident: Arlene Controls Herself.

All game show contestants received a copy of the Home Game. All Home Games came with this subtitle: Warning: Don’t buy this because it is more fun just to Watch it on TV. Someone once gave me the home game of Concentration. It took an hour and a half just to set it up. You had to stick sixty miniscule pieces of paper into thirty slots on the board. And then for the next week you would have to pull the slot number paper out to reveal something that said “Dishwasher” or “Range” and try to remember where else on the board you’d seen that appliance. When the time came for you to guess what the once-hidden pictogram said, it was too late, because you already had thrown the whole thing at your sister and were made to vacuum up 60 paper bits, while your mother backed the station wagon over the plastic game board and made you vacuum up those shattered slivers as well.

Even if you did win the Home Game of Concentration, you didn’t really feel any sense of accomplishment. You didn’t go home with the washer-dryer, Steamset rollers or the trash compactor. First of all, you were already home. Secondly, all you got was a piece of paper that said “Blender”, “Garbage Disposal” or “Trash Compactor.” How is that fun? Take that to school for Show and Tell and see what happens.

A lot of those game shows were presented live before a studio audience, and there was always someone behind the board who had the task of turning a tile or pulling out a cardboard Jeopardy! card to reveal the question. Since everything was manual and nothing electronic, inevitably something would go wrong. You sometimes got to see the hand of the Concentration tile turner (or even his very embarrassed face if you were lucky), or the card puller’s finger probing through the grid trying to capture the torn piece of cardboard.

The remakes that cable channels produce these days always stink. The remake of I’ve Got a Secret on the Game Show Network in 2006 lasted for seven episodes before it was axed. It had a B-list panel of gay people barely in the closet. (Get it? Secret? Nudge, nudge; wink, wink.) Some shows, like The Match Game were just insipid from the very beginning. The original Match Game had two teams of three, each team led by a celebrity. When Liza Minnelli was on, the teams were asked to “Name a song that Judy Garland made famous.” I only remember this because I am a gay man. So how many contestants do you think wrote down “Easter Parade”? Even Judy’s daughter, in the ultimate sellout, wrote down, “Over the Rainbow” instead of the homosexual favorite, “Clang, Clang, Clang went the Trolley.” And if anyone knows her homosexuals, it’s Liza with a Q. The newer, bawdy version of the game, which starred Charles Nelson Reilly and Bret Somers (who the hell was she, anyway, other than Jack Klugman’s wife and Match Game employee?) was totally unwatchable, because every other word was “Boobs.” 

Goodman-Todman shows were usually funny and upbeat, (except when Arlene started snarling). But none of their shows could touch the pathos of Queen for a Day. Originally broadcast as a radio show, Queen for a Day dragged out three run-down old women and in front of everyone had them describe their suffering and tales of woe. These were miserably unhappy ladies, usually widows, their husbands dead from black lung from working in the mines, and they were left without a dime but with twelve children. They always were unable to work because they were fat diabetics confined to wheelchairs and bought saltines and lard from the money they got for the ironing they took in and pressed at a neighbor’s house because they had electricity. And they all had bills piled up and worried that their other 11 kids would come down with small pox just like the youngest one.

After all three women were paraded out and blubbering to the best of their ability, the audience voted, based on the highest volume of clapping reported by the Applause-O-Meter. The winner was given a velvet robe and rhinestone tiara and wheeled up to the throne while the host read out her list of prizes, all of them useless, like a fur coat and a new washing machine, but no extension cord to plug in to the ironing hangout. The other slightly less desperate women went home with, I don’t know, the Home Game I guess. Probably a photograph of the winner’s mink stole as well.

I’d give one of my left digits if they would bring this back as a reality show in the American Idol format. It would take weeks until the most desperate of all the down-and-out would win the season. I would love to see Jennifer Lopez say to a contestant, “Well, you sound pretty destitute and you’re a professional weeper. And I saw your brood of children backstage, and certainly all of them could be introduced to soap, warm water and a good delousing, but I also saw you with a genuine Louis Vuitton handbag, and that was no knockoff, sistah!”

The golden years of television I loved so much are dead, as are most of those contestants and celebrities, with the possible exception of Orson Bean. According to Wikipedia, Arlene Frances had her diamond heart yanked off her neck by a mugger as she got out of a taxi in 1988. Talk about the end of an era. She died in 2001 from cancer and Alzheimer’s. Chronic crankiness could also have been a contributor.

But I secretly wonder that near the end, in a semi-lucid moment of clarity she might have thought, “Maybe I did cheat.”

(photo credit: tvrage.com)

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

Choose Your Poison

The 70’s were a reckless, unfortunate time in America. I seem to remember that the minimum drinking age in Florida was changed to 18 as a result of a campaign that insisted that if you were old enough to go to Viet Nam and smoke dope and maybe die for your country, then you should be old enough to consume alcohol responsibly.

What a joke. A lot of the people I went to high school with still don’t know how to consume alcohol responsibly. Of course, in 1973 when the law was changed, there was no Mothers Against Drunk Drivers organization. Back then MADD’s acronym stood for Mothers Are Drunk Drivers. Drinking and driving among youngsters was not taken seriously, either. A lot of us who got pulled over and had booze on our breath were just dismissed by cops. I know I was, anyway. I even had an open quart of rum under my Volkswagen seat at the time.

Having started drinking at the age of 14, I was delighted when the law was changed. That meant a less than two-year wait for me until I could drink with government approval. Unfortunately, my mother (a platinum member of Mothers Are Drunk Drivers) would then start insisting that I buy my own alcohol and stop diluting her bourbon with water to make it look like I hadn’t stolen any. (When bourbon starts to look like gin, you know something is up.)

On my eighteenth birthday, I left school at lunch time with a couple of friends, because you could actually go off campus to eat back then (again, the 70’s). I drove us to the nearest liquor store (a block away from my high school) and bought a bottle of cold duck. The clerk rang it up ($1.99, as I recall, plus tax), bagged it and gave me a receipt.

“Aren’t you even going to card me?” I asked.

He shrugged, lit a cigarette and said, “Okay.”

I pulled out my driver’s license and handed it to him. “Happy fuckin’ birthday then,” he said and went back to studying his racing form. We went to my house to use my mother’s fancy champagne glasses and returned late to English class to slur aloud our essays on Canterbury Tales.

Here’s another reason why the 70’s were a decade rife with irresponsibility: Our driver’s licenses were typed up on a small, rose-colored piece of card stock. If you had a safety pin and a pica-fonted typewriter, you could easily pick out the black ink and make yourself older with just a peck of a typewriter key. The licenses were not laminated; they didn’t have our pictures on them, and holograms hadn’t been invented yet. Several people could use one forged license to get into discos and bars in one evening.

For those of us under 18, it was easy to find an older sibling or friend who would buy you the stuff as long as you gave them a buck or two.

Where I grew up, there was a liquor store that was lit up like a theme park. Enormous in size, Liquorama had actual grocery carts in the front of the store to simplify your case hauling.

When you were 18, you didn’t really have a refined enough palette to know good liquor from bad liquor. The only requirement we had of our alcohol was that it give you a nice buzz. Instead of paying a big price for Bacardi rum, we always bought Jose Gaspar rum, which was distilled and bottled in Auburndale, Florida. This is only funny if you’ve ever been to Auburndale. Who needs smooth Puerto Rican rum when for less money you can get alcohol named after a local pirate? A quart, I believe, ran 2.99, but Liquorama published coupons in the newspaper, so you never had to pay full price. And rum was the preferred booze at the time, because it naturally complimented any kid-friendly beverage, such as Coke, Hawaiian Punch, Kool-Aid, Yoo-hoo, or milk None of us drank Mad Men-style highballs at that age. My friend Richard’s favorite cocktail was Scotch and root beer. Whenever I think of that, my face wrinkles up as if I am chewing up spoiled seafood.

All of this came flashing back to me the other day when I walked in front of a liquor store window and saw a sign for cotton candy-flavored vodka. GACK! The last time I bought anything in a liquor store was 25 years ago, and I found the concept of this flavored vodka to be appalling. As far as I know, the ingredients of cotton candy are a) sugar, and b) dye. So in the interest of full disclosure, shouldn’t it be called “colored sugar flavored vodka?” Talk about younger generation appeal! I wonder if it comes in pink and blue. I can’t wait until I go to Chuck E Cheese and order up some cotton candy dipped in cotton candy flavored vodka. Oh, hey, and can I get a glass of Gerber’s strained-peas-flavored vodka for my infant here?

If they had that cotton candy vodka back when I was a teenager, I would have been their best customer, assuming, of course, that it was distilled and bottled in Auburndale and cost three bucks or less.

Take a look at the following list. Does it sound like something an ice cream parlor would serve?

Apple, Atomic Hots, Banana, Berry, Blueberry, Butterscotch, Cake, Cherry, Cherry Lemonade, Cherry Whipped, Chocolate, Chocolate Whipped, Citrus, Coconut, Cookie Dough, Grape, Gummy, Kiwi-Strawberry, Le Double Espresso, Mango, Marshmallow, Orange, Orange Whipped, Pineapple, Pomegranate, Raspberry, Tropical Punch, Vanilla, Whipped Cream, and Whipped Key Lime.

Oddly enough, this is not the lineup at your local Baskin-Robbins, but in reality they are all flavors of vodka offered by French distiller Pinnacle. So many flavors they have to alphabetize them. This brings up a few questions. What kind of Cookie Dough? What kind of cake? What kind of berry is Berry? What exactly is Gummy vodka? Something you chew? Do they even have cotton candy in France? Did someone have to fly over and go to a state fair to do research? With what beverage would you mix “Atomic Hots” vodka? Don’t say root beer, or I’ll make that face again.

I used to work for a beer company, and from time to time we would be fighting off charges that we were directing our advertising at underage drinkers. It was true that our target market was at the toddler end of the legal drinking age scale, but we never offered Rootin’ Tootin’ Raspberry infused beer. So what does this say about Pinnacle Vodka? Coming soon: Pinnacle Breast Milk Flavored Vodka. In a bottle with a nipple.

Maybe I sound like a founding member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (which, oddly enough, is still an active organization. Check out their Facebook page!) I am not a prude or a stuck-up judgmental recovering alcoholic who turns his nose up at anyone enjoying their libations. I believe that anyone should be able to drink themselves under the table, as long as they stay home and don’t drive or have children, spouses, siblings, parents or friends.

And I’m not singling out Pinnacle. Stoli and Smirnoff and other vodka makers offer Lemonhead, Sugar Babies, Blow-Pop, Necco Wafer, Pop Rock, Goober, Raisinette, Butterfinger, Teaberry, and Zagnut flavored vodkas. Or something like that. I tried looking them up, but my employer has disabled Internet access to liquor websites. And I forgot to check when I got home.

All I’m saying is this whole thing is out of control, but it’ll never be regulated, because the freedom to market dangerous things to children is guaranteed under the Constitution. That’s why we have Flintstone and gummy vitamins and Dimetapp Get Better Bears sore throat pops. Not to mention Coricidin that can easily be mistaken for M&M’s and Tums that look like Sweet Tarts.

You never see spirits flavored with things that the elderly would like. There is no vodka infused with Interferon, Viagra, prune, chewing tobacco, estrogen, testosterone, liver and onion, Botox or Just for Men. We have wants and needs too. We should start a letter-writing campaign to distilleries. And I know my friend Richard would support this. He has already written to, or someone demanded from Pinnacle root beer flavored vodka, which I did not include in list above. Now all he has to do is convince Glenfiddich or Johnny Walker to do the same thing. There goes my face again.

Luckily, I consumed my lifetime allotment of alcohol at age 30. That was also probably the last time I had cotton candy, too. Some things were just meant to be.

Photos: Women's Christian Temperance Union (wctu.org)
and Pinnacle (www.Pinnaclevodka.com)

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

Cell Division

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?

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

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

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.