There was this kid. His name was James. I never met him, but he grew up in America in the 1970s and 80s, so there are a few things about him that I can be fairly certain about. Pretty sure that somewhere in his mom’s house is a picture of him, sitting on the lap of a department store Santa or Easter Bunny, bearing what looks to all the world like a huge grin; although she knows that in reality he was screaming bloody blue murder about five seconds after the picture was taken. He probably went off to college, full of bravado and ready to take on the world, but at least once during those first few days, when no one was looking, he probably hugged himself in his bed and maybe even wept a little because he was realizing that the world is a lot scarier than he realized and he missed the solace of being home. He was from New England, so it’s fairly likely that he at least raised a glass to the Sox when they finally won the World Series.
Then, a couple of days ago, James was forced to kneel next to a thug in black pajamas and recite some vitriol against the United States. At which point, the terrorist, whose face was covered, slit his throat and cut off his head with a huge knife.
All I can do is imagine this man’s fear and anguish and terror as the last few seconds of his life unfolded. It makes me sick and creates a knot in the pit of my stomach.
We’ve seen it before. Daniel Pearl. Others. We’ll see it again, perhaps over just the next few days.
What’s happened to me, though, is that this latest atrocity, this latest murder most foul, has triggered in me a kind of crisis of faith. But not a crisis in my own faith, but in this “faith” of others. How, I am beginning to wonder, can one of the world’s “great” religions, keep engendering this kind of barbarism? Today, I realized that I do not personally know a single Muslim. I wish I did, because I need someone to sit down and discuss it with. I want to know, how do these events make the ordinary, go-to-Mosque-on-Friday, everyday Muslim feel? Are they Sunni? Are they Shiite? Do they hate the other? Do they hate the infidel?
It’s all just beyond my comprehension. I try to wrap my brain around it by translating it into terms that I can understand. Can any of us imagine blood running in the streets because the Methodists are at war with the Presbyterians? No. The concept is so absurd as to be laughable. Can we picture an army of Hindu Swamis, blowing up a Buddhist temple in Thailand as “an affront to Hinduism?”
That’s not to say that other religions are blameless. Christians committed numerous heinous acts of genocide and terror in the name of God during the crusades and the colonization of the New World. They still perpetrate crimes in the name of religion as they murder doctors and women as they exercise their right to choose. But for the most part, we’ve evolved. We’ve grown to see the value in human life, even if it belongs to a human who looks different than us or who prays to a different god.
So, lately I’ve been having these thoughts. They’re bad thoughts, unpopular thoughts, un-PC thoughts. I see images of men being herded into fields, forced into ditches and massacred; looks no different to me than what happened in the forests of Poland and the Balkans during the 1940s. I hear stories of innocent, ordinary people being given a choice to change their religion (thereby denouncing their own God), leave their homes, or die. Considering that these people have nowhere to go, it’s not much of a choice. And then I feel the pain of another American man, not all that different from me, murdered in the most grisly, horrifying, and public way imaginable. And I can’t help but wonder: is this “religion” really legitimate? I begin to think the words that nobody wants to say out loud. Is this religion really about God and Love at all? Or is it something else, something far worse, something that is, dare I say it, Evil? Where are the millions, billions, of, “righteous” Muslims, who must be appalled by all this hate and violence? Why do they not rise up?
As I said, unpopular sentiments. Dangerous, even. But these are the things I wonder. Evil does exist in this world. Could it be that one of the greatest “religions” on Earth has been a wolf in sheep’s clothing all along?
I wish someone could explain it to me.
I know that, in the end, Good will win, Love will prevail. It always does. It has to. I just don’t know how much more of this pain we can inflict on one another in the name of God.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Saturday, August 16, 2014
AUGUST 16
Today is Josh’s birthday. He is my nephew. He was born, Joshua Thomas Halley, on August 16, 1989.
Then, just a few days after Thanksgiving in 2011, I got one of those phone calls while I was at work, one of those calls that you never think you’ll get, which you can never see coming. My sister-in-law was telling me that Josh had lost his life behind the wheel of an automobile. He was only 22.
It’s hard to describe the feeling when you hear something like that. For me, it was as if my whole environment sort of changed instantly; the people and things around me suddenly lost focus and I was suddenly walking through some kind of dream world. It’s difficult to even comprehend that it is really happening at all. As a matter of fact, I finished my shift at work that day, although I have no memory of it and I can’t imagine how I was behaving. Probably like some kind of PharmTech robot.
At any rate, once reality actually set in, most of my thoughts were, and have been ever since, about my brother and Josh’s mother Beth, and my niece, Josh’s sister, Brittany. To me, the enormity of their grief somehow dwarfed my own, their loss and despair so great that I didn’t even have a frame of reference for it. So in a way, it’s been easy for me to sort of set my own feelings aside as somehow insignificant or even anecdotal.
Birthdays are weird. Other peoples’ birthdays, that is. While they’re around, birthdays are a reason for a party, a reason to cut cake, unwrap presents and make wishes. They are day to marvel at how far we’ve come. But after we’ve lost someone, their birthday becomes a bittersweet anniversary. It’s a day when we try to appreciate the gift we were given, the time we were allowed to have with that person, but it also becomes a day when old wounds can feel especially fresh, and we can really ache with the missing of that person.
So has this day become for our family. Once again, I imagine the guts of my brother and his family, tying up in knots as August 16 draws near. But even for Josh’s uncle, way up here by himself in Massachusetts, the day has gravitas. I want to write about it, but it’s exceptionally hard.
Funny, for someone like me, who finds his most eloquent voice in the written word. With inspiration, it is easy to write like a maniac, struggling for your fingers to keep up with the ideas bouncing around in your head. Other times, you can stare at the proverbial blank page for hours and- nothing.
For me, sometimes it’s easy to write flip little stories: amusing, ironic quips and the occasional clever turn of a phrase. But when it comes to writing about anything really personal and potentially distressing, it’s something I approach with trepidation, if at all. Part of the process would involve the intentional removal of carefully placed bandages to closely examine a potentially gruesome injury.
I felt this way a year or so ago, when I had spent a week in Baltimore as my father languished in the hospital. I knew, along the 10-hour train ride home, that I would probably never see my father alive again. I took out my laptop, flipped it open and turned it on, knowing that this was something I should write about. I should somehow take the things I had seen, and heard and felt over the previous week or so, and even what I was seeing and feeling at that very moment on the Amtrak train somewhere in Delaware, and write it all down. But it was too hard, too real, and too scary, like staring at your own face in the mirror on LSD. So, I watched “Skyfall” on DVD instead.
Anyway, over the past few weeks, as this day drew nearer, I would occasionally chide myself that I needed to commemorate Josh’s birthday this year the best way I could, by writing about it. But how? Every time I tried to think about it, I just kept saying to myself that I just didn’t know him well enough.
So I guess that’s what I have to write about. I didn’t know him well enough.
I flew the coop early in life. I moved out of my parents’ house for the first time when I was only 17 years old, and for the last time when I was 18. As Jimmy Somerville said in “Smalltown Boy”, “Mother will never understand why you had to leave, but the <answers you seek> can never be found at home.”
I had moved to Provincetown by the time I was 24, long before Josh was even born. I had a fabulous life going, young, single, independent, self-sufficient, all of that. But there’s always a trade-off, whether you know it or not. And my trade-off was that I was absent from my family. I suppose it still is.
Of course, like many gay people, I did feel a certain amount of alienation from my family, so I didn’t really spend much time thinking that I was missing anything. It’s only when you reach my age when you realize that while that alienation may have been real, it was, and is, to a great degree, largely self-imposed.
So, while I was here, mourning deaths, falling in love, celebrating holidays that my family knew nothing about, I was missing all those milestones back home. And now, when I think about Josh, I keep thinking, “I just didn’t know him well enough.”
One thing I did know about Josh was that he definitely had a wicked, twisted sense of humor, much like my own, and much like all the Halleys, as a matter of fact. While he was alive, I found myself thinking that I couldn’t wait until he was A Man, when he came to visit me with his wife and a couple of bratty kids, he and I would be hanging out telling funny, ironic stories about our lives that only grown-ups can relate to, or maybe laughing at the same sick movie that only he and I found funny. I kept thinking that later would be better. So I missed my chance.
There are other things which I do know about Josh. I could say that I know he liked things like Skittles and Mountain Dew, but that sort of thing just ends up sounding silly and trivial. I know that his friends called him “Cheese”, which makes me smile even though I’m not sure why they called him that. I actually asked some of his friends what it meant, at his funeral, but they just sort of looked at one another uncomfortably as if there was no way in hell they were about to explain that to some lame old man. What they don’t know is that that alone makes me smile, too.
My nephew Josh came to my wedding. That may not be a big deal to some people, in some families, but to me it’s a different story. As Politically Correct it is to be pro-Gay, pro-Marriage Equality, pro-Diversity these days, I am fully aware that “faggot” is still just about the worst epithet you can throw at a white, teenaged male in this country. Not a whole lot of young men are going to stand up proudly in the lunchroom and announce that they have an uncle in Massachusetts who is “Gay-Married”. (back then I think we were still the only state that even recognized same-sex marriage and it was still sort of a novelty) So, I applaud Josh’s courage and his own self confidence which allowed him to come and participate.
I think Josh struggled with the same stuff I have struggled with, which his dad undoubtedly struggles with. I think he had very strong ideas about his own definition of “success”, and he struggled to find the balance between living a life full of joy and pleasure and self-actualization, versus a world which demands conformity and drudgery and self-denial. I still have a hard time finding the sweet spot. But I believe that Josh knew deep down what the right answers were. I think he would have found himself a life full of beauty and prosperity both, had he only been given the time. And I think that there is where my own grief for him lies.
Josh had the most amazing eyes. Anyone who ever met him will tell you that. Their beautiful, bright blue color and the long, dark lashes I like to think he inherited from the Halley side of the family. Their beautiful, almond shape he undoubtedly got from his mom. If the eyes, as so many have said, are indeed windows to the soul, then Josh’s eyes showed us the merest glimpse of a miraculous, delightful, playful and wise spirit.
Happy birthday, Josh.
Uncle Paul
Then, just a few days after Thanksgiving in 2011, I got one of those phone calls while I was at work, one of those calls that you never think you’ll get, which you can never see coming. My sister-in-law was telling me that Josh had lost his life behind the wheel of an automobile. He was only 22.
It’s hard to describe the feeling when you hear something like that. For me, it was as if my whole environment sort of changed instantly; the people and things around me suddenly lost focus and I was suddenly walking through some kind of dream world. It’s difficult to even comprehend that it is really happening at all. As a matter of fact, I finished my shift at work that day, although I have no memory of it and I can’t imagine how I was behaving. Probably like some kind of PharmTech robot.
At any rate, once reality actually set in, most of my thoughts were, and have been ever since, about my brother and Josh’s mother Beth, and my niece, Josh’s sister, Brittany. To me, the enormity of their grief somehow dwarfed my own, their loss and despair so great that I didn’t even have a frame of reference for it. So in a way, it’s been easy for me to sort of set my own feelings aside as somehow insignificant or even anecdotal.
Birthdays are weird. Other peoples’ birthdays, that is. While they’re around, birthdays are a reason for a party, a reason to cut cake, unwrap presents and make wishes. They are day to marvel at how far we’ve come. But after we’ve lost someone, their birthday becomes a bittersweet anniversary. It’s a day when we try to appreciate the gift we were given, the time we were allowed to have with that person, but it also becomes a day when old wounds can feel especially fresh, and we can really ache with the missing of that person.
So has this day become for our family. Once again, I imagine the guts of my brother and his family, tying up in knots as August 16 draws near. But even for Josh’s uncle, way up here by himself in Massachusetts, the day has gravitas. I want to write about it, but it’s exceptionally hard.
Funny, for someone like me, who finds his most eloquent voice in the written word. With inspiration, it is easy to write like a maniac, struggling for your fingers to keep up with the ideas bouncing around in your head. Other times, you can stare at the proverbial blank page for hours and- nothing.
For me, sometimes it’s easy to write flip little stories: amusing, ironic quips and the occasional clever turn of a phrase. But when it comes to writing about anything really personal and potentially distressing, it’s something I approach with trepidation, if at all. Part of the process would involve the intentional removal of carefully placed bandages to closely examine a potentially gruesome injury.
I felt this way a year or so ago, when I had spent a week in Baltimore as my father languished in the hospital. I knew, along the 10-hour train ride home, that I would probably never see my father alive again. I took out my laptop, flipped it open and turned it on, knowing that this was something I should write about. I should somehow take the things I had seen, and heard and felt over the previous week or so, and even what I was seeing and feeling at that very moment on the Amtrak train somewhere in Delaware, and write it all down. But it was too hard, too real, and too scary, like staring at your own face in the mirror on LSD. So, I watched “Skyfall” on DVD instead.
Anyway, over the past few weeks, as this day drew nearer, I would occasionally chide myself that I needed to commemorate Josh’s birthday this year the best way I could, by writing about it. But how? Every time I tried to think about it, I just kept saying to myself that I just didn’t know him well enough.
So I guess that’s what I have to write about. I didn’t know him well enough.
I flew the coop early in life. I moved out of my parents’ house for the first time when I was only 17 years old, and for the last time when I was 18. As Jimmy Somerville said in “Smalltown Boy”, “Mother will never understand why you had to leave, but the <answers you seek> can never be found at home.”
I had moved to Provincetown by the time I was 24, long before Josh was even born. I had a fabulous life going, young, single, independent, self-sufficient, all of that. But there’s always a trade-off, whether you know it or not. And my trade-off was that I was absent from my family. I suppose it still is.
Of course, like many gay people, I did feel a certain amount of alienation from my family, so I didn’t really spend much time thinking that I was missing anything. It’s only when you reach my age when you realize that while that alienation may have been real, it was, and is, to a great degree, largely self-imposed.
So, while I was here, mourning deaths, falling in love, celebrating holidays that my family knew nothing about, I was missing all those milestones back home. And now, when I think about Josh, I keep thinking, “I just didn’t know him well enough.”
One thing I did know about Josh was that he definitely had a wicked, twisted sense of humor, much like my own, and much like all the Halleys, as a matter of fact. While he was alive, I found myself thinking that I couldn’t wait until he was A Man, when he came to visit me with his wife and a couple of bratty kids, he and I would be hanging out telling funny, ironic stories about our lives that only grown-ups can relate to, or maybe laughing at the same sick movie that only he and I found funny. I kept thinking that later would be better. So I missed my chance.
There are other things which I do know about Josh. I could say that I know he liked things like Skittles and Mountain Dew, but that sort of thing just ends up sounding silly and trivial. I know that his friends called him “Cheese”, which makes me smile even though I’m not sure why they called him that. I actually asked some of his friends what it meant, at his funeral, but they just sort of looked at one another uncomfortably as if there was no way in hell they were about to explain that to some lame old man. What they don’t know is that that alone makes me smile, too.
My nephew Josh came to my wedding. That may not be a big deal to some people, in some families, but to me it’s a different story. As Politically Correct it is to be pro-Gay, pro-Marriage Equality, pro-Diversity these days, I am fully aware that “faggot” is still just about the worst epithet you can throw at a white, teenaged male in this country. Not a whole lot of young men are going to stand up proudly in the lunchroom and announce that they have an uncle in Massachusetts who is “Gay-Married”. (back then I think we were still the only state that even recognized same-sex marriage and it was still sort of a novelty) So, I applaud Josh’s courage and his own self confidence which allowed him to come and participate.
I think Josh struggled with the same stuff I have struggled with, which his dad undoubtedly struggles with. I think he had very strong ideas about his own definition of “success”, and he struggled to find the balance between living a life full of joy and pleasure and self-actualization, versus a world which demands conformity and drudgery and self-denial. I still have a hard time finding the sweet spot. But I believe that Josh knew deep down what the right answers were. I think he would have found himself a life full of beauty and prosperity both, had he only been given the time. And I think that there is where my own grief for him lies.
Josh had the most amazing eyes. Anyone who ever met him will tell you that. Their beautiful, bright blue color and the long, dark lashes I like to think he inherited from the Halley side of the family. Their beautiful, almond shape he undoubtedly got from his mom. If the eyes, as so many have said, are indeed windows to the soul, then Josh’s eyes showed us the merest glimpse of a miraculous, delightful, playful and wise spirit.
Happy birthday, Josh.
Uncle Paul
Friday, August 8, 2014
Have you ever heard a pile-driver? No, not heard of a pile-driver, but actually heard a pile-driver? Well, a year or two after I first moved to Provincetown, which, admittedly, was a very long time ago, they did some work on MacMillan Wharf, the main pier in town. As you can imagine, the work included a pile-driver, which in layman’s terms is a giant kind of hammer-thingy designed to drive piling for the pier deep into the ground beneath the water. They are unbelievably loud, but for a few months we became accustomed to periods during the day when it sounded like someone was firing off a cannon every few seconds right in the middle of town. We eventually got sort of used to dealing with the noise, like people who live near an airport and learn to suspend their sentences for a few moments every time an Airbus A380 flies overhead.
Only slightly less deafening than a pile-driver is another tool called a masonry saw. This is a tool which is designed to cut things like bricks, concrete, porcelain and stone. They start up harmlessly enough, the somewhat benign hum of an electric motor. But that all changes the moment the blade gets down to business, as it were, and actually starts cutting brick or concrete, at which point it makes a sound I can only compare to the sound of Satan’s fingernails being dragged across the chalkboard at a reform school in hell.
Many of you who knew me in my youth may remember me as, shall we say, not exactly a morning person. As a child, also, admittedly, a very long time ago, my mother would struggle just to get me out of bed in the morning, at which point I would stumble down the stairs only to fall face-first onto the couch and fall right back to sleep. In my 20s, it wasn't unusual for me to arise at noon or even one in the afternoon; but by that point it was more often due to the fact that I hadn’t “fallen asleep” until sometime around dawn in the first place. Things have changed, though. I am over 50 now, and when it comes to sleeping habits I have grown to resemble the more mature, prune juice-and-Matlock set more than the younger, vodka-and-Red Bull crowd. That is to say, I sometimes find myself nodding off in front of the TV at 8:30 at night, and sleeping in much past 7:30am is a rare and treasured occurrence.
So, today is my day off. I swam almost to the surface of consciousness this morning some time around 8:45. It was a beautiful, crisp Cape Cod morning, the slightest breeze was blowing in the window and off in the distance morning birds chirped with the satisfaction of a belly full of early worms.
I wasn’t quite awake, only on the verge of being so, so my thoughts were not being formed in words, more in feelings and notions, and they went something like this:
“Mmmm. Warm. Dog. Pillow. Cat. Comfortable. Sleep. Sleep in! Mmmm. Zzzzz…”
“Fuck that,” said the guy with the masonry saw, working 10 feet from my bedroom window.
Only slightly less deafening than a pile-driver is another tool called a masonry saw. This is a tool which is designed to cut things like bricks, concrete, porcelain and stone. They start up harmlessly enough, the somewhat benign hum of an electric motor. But that all changes the moment the blade gets down to business, as it were, and actually starts cutting brick or concrete, at which point it makes a sound I can only compare to the sound of Satan’s fingernails being dragged across the chalkboard at a reform school in hell.
Many of you who knew me in my youth may remember me as, shall we say, not exactly a morning person. As a child, also, admittedly, a very long time ago, my mother would struggle just to get me out of bed in the morning, at which point I would stumble down the stairs only to fall face-first onto the couch and fall right back to sleep. In my 20s, it wasn't unusual for me to arise at noon or even one in the afternoon; but by that point it was more often due to the fact that I hadn’t “fallen asleep” until sometime around dawn in the first place. Things have changed, though. I am over 50 now, and when it comes to sleeping habits I have grown to resemble the more mature, prune juice-and-Matlock set more than the younger, vodka-and-Red Bull crowd. That is to say, I sometimes find myself nodding off in front of the TV at 8:30 at night, and sleeping in much past 7:30am is a rare and treasured occurrence.
So, today is my day off. I swam almost to the surface of consciousness this morning some time around 8:45. It was a beautiful, crisp Cape Cod morning, the slightest breeze was blowing in the window and off in the distance morning birds chirped with the satisfaction of a belly full of early worms.
I wasn’t quite awake, only on the verge of being so, so my thoughts were not being formed in words, more in feelings and notions, and they went something like this:
“Mmmm. Warm. Dog. Pillow. Cat. Comfortable. Sleep. Sleep in! Mmmm. Zzzzz…”
“Fuck that,” said the guy with the masonry saw, working 10 feet from my bedroom window.
Monday, June 30, 2014
I am about halfway through reading "Tibetan Peach Pie", a memoir by Tom Robbins. In my personal Pantheon of great writers, Tom Robbins is definitely in my Top 3, not only because of his wicked imagination and sense of humour, or because he is the undisputed King of Simile, but because his books and stories have actually been transformative, they have changed me and my way of thinking once I read them. The first book of his which I read was "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues", which literally turned my way of looking at the world inside-out; it showed me the power of the Female, the strength of the circular, and taught me that a wise writer can somehow weave actual Magick into the pages of a novel. After that, I was hooked.
Since then, I have hungrily scooped up each new book Robbins has written, and each one somehow got inside my mind and pushed outwards, expanding my consciousness, and in some way widened the opening in my mind which allows new thoughts to sneak in. I've always thought that while he is "just a writer", he is a writer who was placed here to somehow teach us something. Or some things.
From "Another Roadside Attraction" I learned that the Church (yes, that Church), is actually a huge, tax-free Multi-National Corporation which must be watched very closely, and that the easiest way to walk through the rain is not to fight it.
From "Still Life with Woodpecker" I learned of the power of Redheads, and the mysteries held within the Camel cigarette pack.
From "Jitterbug Perfume" I learned of the power of the beet, and that smell is 90% of love.
From "Skinny Legs and All" I learned the truth about Jezebel, that time is relative, and that a painted stick and a can o' beans can have a life and even a quest. I learned that a character called Turn Around Norman holds the key to understanding it all.
"Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas" taught me about the power of the Belt of Orion, and especially of Sirius the Dog Star.
Reading "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates" showed me that curses are real, but they only have power if you allow them to.
And "Villa Incognito" taught me that you can read an entire novel, and ten years later have no earthly idea what the hell it was about.
So now, I am reading the author's own stories about his own life. And he is referring to himself as an "octogenarian". So, this Merry Prankster, this Trickster God of Novelists, the man who, in my mind, drops acid and holds drumming circles at Burning Man, has grown old, like my dad, like me, like any other ordinary mortal. I'm sure he's still got a few things he can teach me.
Since then, I have hungrily scooped up each new book Robbins has written, and each one somehow got inside my mind and pushed outwards, expanding my consciousness, and in some way widened the opening in my mind which allows new thoughts to sneak in. I've always thought that while he is "just a writer", he is a writer who was placed here to somehow teach us something. Or some things.
From "Another Roadside Attraction" I learned that the Church (yes, that Church), is actually a huge, tax-free Multi-National Corporation which must be watched very closely, and that the easiest way to walk through the rain is not to fight it.
From "Still Life with Woodpecker" I learned of the power of Redheads, and the mysteries held within the Camel cigarette pack.
From "Jitterbug Perfume" I learned of the power of the beet, and that smell is 90% of love.
From "Skinny Legs and All" I learned the truth about Jezebel, that time is relative, and that a painted stick and a can o' beans can have a life and even a quest. I learned that a character called Turn Around Norman holds the key to understanding it all.
"Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas" taught me about the power of the Belt of Orion, and especially of Sirius the Dog Star.
Reading "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates" showed me that curses are real, but they only have power if you allow them to.
And "Villa Incognito" taught me that you can read an entire novel, and ten years later have no earthly idea what the hell it was about.
So now, I am reading the author's own stories about his own life. And he is referring to himself as an "octogenarian". So, this Merry Prankster, this Trickster God of Novelists, the man who, in my mind, drops acid and holds drumming circles at Burning Man, has grown old, like my dad, like me, like any other ordinary mortal. I'm sure he's still got a few things he can teach me.
Friday, June 20, 2014
Extemporaneous Fiction - "OUT OF JEOPARDY"
first comment: a color : green
second comment: a type of animal : porcupine
third comment: a type of job : Summer cop in P’Town
fourth comment: a city in the world : Manila
fifth comment: a famous landmark or tourist attraction : Legoland
I was standing on a stage in Culver City, California. I stood behind a podium, atop a small platform which had been adjusted so that I was the same height as the two people next to me. I was under blaring lights, and my hair kept falling into my eyes, but I just sort of left it there because I didn’t want to come off as the sort of guy who keeps fussing with his hair like some flirtatious coed. Alex Trebek was standing just a few yards away, the “think music” was playing for Final Jeopardy, and I was staring at the clue, transfixed; and yet I had no earthly idea what the correct response was. Not only that, I was already a distant third-place. I had played miserably. I had $180 in my bank. The champion, who was winning, had $24,000.
When, after 15 seconds of paralysis, the correct answer to the clue did not mercifully materialize, I scrambled to write something- anything, down.
The category was “Cities of the World”. Great. That narrows it down to mere tens of thousands.
No idea. I figured I’d try to write down something funny, something to show that I’m really the type of guy who can just laugh off a crushing humiliation like this one. The kind of guy who can just write it all off as an amusing anecdote to tell gaily at all the cocktails parties I get invited to. So, I try to think of the least densely populated city I can imagine. I scribble down, “Fargo”.
The “think music” ends.
As the de facto loser on the stage, Alex comes to me first. He is looking at me with thinly veiled disdain. “Not your day today, Steven.” That was Alex’s polite way of saying that I should indeed be deeply ashamed of my performance.
“Let’s see what you wrote down.”
They unveiled my hastily scrawled response.
“What is…looks like “Frago”,” said Alex.
“It’s “Fargo”, Alex. Fargo,” I muttered.
“Fargo? No, that’s wrong. Not a lot of Tagalog spoken in that part of North Dakota.” He shook his head in a silent indictment of me as a complete idiot. “How much will it cost you? Everything. That leaves you with zero.”
Yes, yes it does.
Finally, Alex, the robotic camera, and the focus thankfully moved to the contestant on my right, who was in second place. I hated her. I mostly hated her because her name was Melanie but she insisted on spelling it “Melany”; and when she wrote her name on the electronic display before the game began, she drew a little smiley-face after the offending ‘y’. Really, Melany? A smiley face?
They unveiled Melany’s response: “Where is MANILA?” she had written, without benefit of an emoticon.
Melany was correct, though, and she doubled her score to $18,400, still not enough to catch the champion.
Gunther, the champion, stood there inscrutably. This was his fourth game, and he had already won nearly $80,000. He could not be caught.
I imagined that people watching Gunther on TV might think he was a pretty cool guy. They might even admire him. He had the kind of casual good looks you would expect from someone named Gunther: dirty-blond, suntanned, and with an undetermined accent of some kind even though he was from Cleveland. They would all be wrong. There is nothing admirable about Gunther. He is a pompous, snotty know-it-all who drives a beat-up old Rav-4, and that unkempt hipster look is really because he hasn’t done laundry in a month. When the cameras weren’t rolling, he looked at Melany and me in a way that said, “I will crush you.” Melany didn’t seem to mind all that much. I kept finding myself wishing that a spotlight or something would fall from the space above him, crushing his Norwegian skull in a horrific accident which, while tragic, would nonetheless make for some great television. But no, he had survived through to Final Jeopardy.
“Now we come to Gunther, our champ,” said Alex, sounding for all the world like a proud papa at the Science Fair. “Let’s see what you wrote down.”
All I heard was the word “Manila” and a dollar figure of twenty-six thousand something-something-something. At that point I heard a comforting click as the electronic display on the front of my podium erased the word “Frago” , as well as my humiliating final score of $0, replacing them with the Aleve logo and my third-place prize of $1000, the “Jeopardy!” version of a Participant trophy.
At that point, the sounds around me all retreated into a kind of dull roar. I finally brushed the hair out of my face and found myself just sort of standing there numbly, just wishing and wanting the whole thing to be over.
Finally, the hot lights clicked off, jolting me back to the present. The stage manager, Phil or Bill or whatever his name was, was hurriedly moving us off of our platforms and pushing us to one corner of the stage. This is where we were to stand while the camera was to show us all chatting good-naturedly with Alex as the closing credits rolled. People around us were already putting away their headsets and clipboards and heading home for the day.
Alex came over. Without our adjustable platforms, it was now obvious that I was way shorter than both of my competitors. Alex shook my hand halfheartedly and after that, he didn’t look at me again. He stood there talking animatedly with Melany and Gunther about something lame and pretentious, like what huge Miles Davis fans they all were. I just stood there, trying to look serene and interested despite the fact that I really just wanted to go home, like that time I went to a Christmas party with my friend José and I was the only person there who didn’t speak Spanish.
Eventually, though, the last of the stage lights clicked off, the Miles Davis love fest came to a close, and Phil or Bill ushered us off the stage just seconds ahead of the guy with the broom. I was handed my belongings: my cell phone and an overcoat, which was all I had brought in with me, which somehow made me feel like I was being released from jail. I was told to stop by the cashier window near the exit to pick up my prize money.
“Nice job today,” said the cashier as she pushed an envelope towards me, without once looking up from her phone. Her name tag said that she was called Belinda and that she had been a “crew member” since 2009. I noticed that the TV behind her was tuned in to “The Bachelor.”
“Thank you, Belinda,” I said. She looked up when I said her name, wondering for an instant whether we knew one another. Her left hand brushed her name tag absent-mindedly.
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “Umm, take it easy.” She looked back down at her phone.
I pushed open the exit door and the California sun came pouring in. It was kind of a shock, like it is when you walk out of a movie theater during the daytime. I struggled to remember where I had parked, or even what kind of car I was driving. It was a rental.
Then I remembered that it was a green Kia. A horribly ugly green Kia Forté or Kia Alanté or Spumanté or some other made-up word. It was a vehicle I would never have been caught dead in back in Delaware, but at the rental agency, when the girl behind the counter asked me what color car I wanted, all I could hear was my friend Gary’s voice, saying, “Green. Green is the color of money and success.” So I answered her, “Green.” She tilted her head and looked at me for a moment, smiling benignly, as if I had just said to her that I wanted to adopt the ugliest puppy in the shelter.
Money and success my ass. Lot of good it did me. As I slid into the car, baked in the California sun to a toasty 103°, I looked down at the green tie I had worn. I rolled my eyes at my own ridiculousness, took off the tie, and as I rolled down the window, I dropped the tie out onto the sizzling parking lot.
I sat there for a minute before I started the car. I sat there, sweating in the 103° heat, thinking about the past few hours, reliving it all in my mind as if I were trying to detox in a sauna.
Well, that certainly didn’t go like I had planned, I thought. In my imagination, I would be at a supper club in L.A. right now, being toasted with Dom Perignon and fêted by Alex’s minions and a host of Jeopardy groupies. I would be making excuses for an early night as I must retire and prepare to defend my championship tomorrow. I would be planning how to spend the record-breaking amount of money I had just won in front of a spellbound audience. Somehow my vision did not include sitting in a hideous Korean car, sweating like a whore in church, Mexican music blasting from the radio, and wondering what the hell I should do now.
What indeed? I just sort of let my body go slack for a moment. My shoulders slumped, my head bowed, tried to make my body as small and humble as I felt. I wallowed, just for a minute. Then, I sat up straight, slapped my hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, and said out loud to myself, “Well. First things first. Back to the hotel.”
I programmed the GPS for the slightly shabby Super 8 where I was staying in Burbank. I rolled up the window, cranked up the air conditioning, and rolled out of there, leaving Jeopardy behind forever. A dream I had had for 27 years turned out to be just that: a dream. Instead of finally proving to the world that I was smart and funny and that the camera loved me, I only proved that I was short and could be outplayed by a 26 year-old manicurist from Ann Arbor and the guy who dresses like Thor the Thunder God every single goddam Halloween.
Goodbye, Jeopardy.
So, I was not in a particularly good place, so to speak, as I allowed the slightly British voice on the GPS to guide me through the endless maze of off-ramps, cloverleaves and Mercedes convertibles that is Greater Los Angeles. “In one quarter mile,” she says impassively, “take the motorway.” Who the fuck says “motorway”?
Before long, the lady on the GPS, whom I had named Mrs. Peale, managed to get me back to my opulent Super 8 Motel in Burbank. I carefully removed the repulsive floral polyester bedspread from the bed and stuffed it into a corner. I then flopped down face-up on the bed and just lay there for a while, closing my eyes and just letting the whole day sort of wash over me.
I allowed myself to remember bits and pieces of my disgrace. Of how my heart sank as Alex revealed the categories for each round: US Presidents, Rivers, Sports, Sports Terms, Sports Teams, 16th Century French Literature- all topics I know almost nothing about. Of how I had risked everything on a Daily Double and then answered that the fifth President of the United States was George Jefferson.
I remembered the interview portion of the program. They had asked us to write down five things about ourselves that we might like to talk about or that people might find interesting. One of the things I had written down was that I had been a bartender for a number of years.
“Says here that you were a “mixologist” at one time,” said Alex, looking down at his index card.
“That’s right, Alex,” I answered. “I worked for a few years as a bartender in a wonderful little restaurant called “Mrs. Simpson’s”.”
“And what, would you say, is your favorite drink?” he asked me.
“I wouldn’t know, Alex. I actually don’t drink alcohol.”
Alex just sort of looked at me for an instant. The expression in his eyes told me that he did not like the way this was going. “Oh, I see,” he said. In an attempt to salvage the interview, he said, “I have always loved a good Harvey Wallbanger. Can you tell me your recipe for a good Harvey Wallbanger?”
“No, Alex. I don’t know how to make a Harvey Wallbanger.”
Alex didn’t even respond. He just moved on to the manicurist.
And all the while, while I was lying there, reliving the whole wretched day in my mind, I just kept thinking that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. One doesn’t harbor a dream for 27 years just to have it turn out to be one of the most horrible experiences of one’s life. It was supposed to be wonderful and transformative, like a bride’s long-awaited fairytale wedding. Instead it was just painful and embarrassing and I felt like cannon fodder for the bloodthirsty game show audience.
I tried to remember when I first wanted to be a contestant on Jeopardy. It was 1987. I was 25 years old, and I had just graduated from the Police Academy back in Delaware. The problem was, I had graduated second-to-last in my class, which sort of limited my opportunities, career-wise. I managed to get a job, though, as a summer hire for the police department in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Talk about dreams that don’t go as planned. When someone enters the Police Academy, they are envisioning what might lie ahead: taking down crackheads in a blaze of bullets, admiring looks from women when they see you in your sharp uniform, being treated with respect as a person of authority. Well, when I hit the streets of Provincetown, I weighed in at about 125 pounds, partly due to my limited stature but also due to the fact that I’ve always been kind of a bean pole. Well, the only uniform the Provincetown Police Department had for me that summer was a 38-Long, and when I put it on I looked like Barney Fife’s younger and scrawnier brother from Mayberry. They didn’t even allow me to have a gun, and when I walked the street or stood directing traffic, instead of the girls giving me the eye and flirting, they were giggling and calling me “Goober” behind my back.
At least it was an easy job and I was never in any real danger. The main crimes we dealt with were bicycle theft and drunk-and-disorderly. Provincetown is kind of a quirky town and the people who go there tend to be a little offbeat. You tend to see a lot of guys wearing women’s clothing and carrying on in the streets, and stuff like that, which I don’t really get, myself, but whatever. Anyway, I got into the habit that summer, of turning on Jeopardy when I got home to my crappy little apartment at the end of my watch. I surprised myself as time went on, because I knew a lot of the answers. It felt good, after a day standing in the hot sun, being called Goober and having drag queens ask me where my nightstick was, to feel like there was something I was pretty good at. I began to fantasize about going on that program, and showing everyone how wrong they were about me. That I could be clever and well-read and that I knew who invented the cotton gin. Believe me, though, it’s a lot easier to play Jeopardy in your own living room, with a nice cold Sprite and a Hot Pockets than it is in front of an audience of strangers, especially when Alex Trebek seems to think you’re the Antichrist.
Anyway, after lying there for a while, I decided to snap myself out of it. I went over to my laptop and decided to see if there were any messages for me. My email only had two messages: one from my friends at Citibank to remind me that a payment is due soon, and another one promising ink and toner at 85% off retail. I deleted them both.
I wasn’t really surprised about that. I’m not the most social person, which is why I made the trip out here to California all alone in the first place. It’s not that I don’t like people or anything, it’s just that I don’t seem able to keep anyone’s interest long enough to get a friendship going. I hadn’t really told a lot of people that I was going to be on Jeopardy to begin with, so I shouldn’t have been expecting a bunch of emails or messages. I had told the girl who works at the CVS, whose name is Margaret, about it. She sent me an e-card from JibJab that she had made, showing her and her girlfriend’s cutout faces dancing to “We are the Champions” with the words “congrads and good luck!!!!” followed by like fifteen exclamation points. But that was like six weeks ago, anyway.
So, I figured I’d log on to Facebook. I have like fifteen Facebook friends. I figured that was pretty good for someone who would have trouble putting together a dinner party for four. Then I met this girl named Jessica and she told me that she had like fifteen hundred friends on Facebook.
“Really?” I asked her. “How do you get 1,500 friends?”
She looked at me incredulously. “Duh,” she said. “I went to college!”
Anyway, I had left a status update last night that said, “Looking forward to winning big tomorrow on Jeopardy!” In response, I got an “lol” from a guy I went to junior high with, and a “you are beautiful” and six little hearts from this flaky woman I met in Provincetown. Oh well, I figured, at least nobody cares that I bombed.
I looked up and noticed the little red number on my Facebook page that tells you that somebody posted something to your wall. This girl Kelly had posted a link to some viral video entitled “Porcupine Thinks It’s a Puppy (cute!!)” I don’t really know Kelly but she sent me a friend request once, and she used to date a guy I went to school with, so I accepted it.
Anyway, I clicked on the link and watched the video. It was like two and a half minutes of two girls cooing over a porcupine they had named “Mr. Stinkers” while it squirmed around and they petted the damned thing wearing heavy-duty gardening gloves.
After the video was over, I thought to myself that that video had done absolutely nothing to make me feel better about my present circumstance. I also wondered why Kelly would have ever thought that this would be something I would be even remotely interested in. I un-friended her on the spot.
And that little move felt kind of good, kind of, well, liberating. I mean, did I really have to care about what these people thought of me? I looked down the list of my fourteen remaining Facebook friends. I deleted them all, except for Margaret from the CVS because I like the funny stuff she posts.
And then I began to think a little differently about my debacle of a day. Suddenly it seemed like for all those years that I had been wanting to be on Jeopardy, maybe it had been for the wrong reasons. I had been wanting to do it to impress other people, people who, in the end, did not require impressing. I was trying to prove something to everyone else, instead of proving something to myself.
But I had, indeed, proven something to myself that day. I had proved that I could set a goal for myself and achieve it. I could leave my comfort zone and earn my place on a stage shared by no more than twelve people in the world in any given week. I could do something that other people only fantasize about doing. I could be proud to claim my fifteen minutes of cannon fodder fame.
So, I decided to break out of my funk, to stop feeling sorry for myself and start feeling proud and happy about the things I’ve done. I checked out of the Super 8 Motel and climbed into the front seat of my stylin’ green Kia Spumanté. I switched on the GPS.
“Mrs. Peale,” I said. “I have a thousand dollars to spend, and the rest of the week off. What do you suggest?”
Turns out there’s a Legoland about a hundred miles away from here in Carlsbad. I’m heading there now. And I’m feeling pretty good.
second comment: a type of animal : porcupine
third comment: a type of job : Summer cop in P’Town
fourth comment: a city in the world : Manila
fifth comment: a famous landmark or tourist attraction : Legoland
OUT OF JEOPARDY
Well, there I was, living a nightmare.I was standing on a stage in Culver City, California. I stood behind a podium, atop a small platform which had been adjusted so that I was the same height as the two people next to me. I was under blaring lights, and my hair kept falling into my eyes, but I just sort of left it there because I didn’t want to come off as the sort of guy who keeps fussing with his hair like some flirtatious coed. Alex Trebek was standing just a few yards away, the “think music” was playing for Final Jeopardy, and I was staring at the clue, transfixed; and yet I had no earthly idea what the correct response was. Not only that, I was already a distant third-place. I had played miserably. I had $180 in my bank. The champion, who was winning, had $24,000.
When, after 15 seconds of paralysis, the correct answer to the clue did not mercifully materialize, I scrambled to write something- anything, down.
The category was “Cities of the World”. Great. That narrows it down to mere tens of thousands.
YOU ARE LIKELY TO HEAR ENGLISH AND TAGALOG IN THIS CITY, THE WORLD’S MOST DENSELY POPULATED AT NEARLY 28,000 INHABITANTS PER SQUARE KILOMETER.
The “think music” ends.
As the de facto loser on the stage, Alex comes to me first. He is looking at me with thinly veiled disdain. “Not your day today, Steven.” That was Alex’s polite way of saying that I should indeed be deeply ashamed of my performance.
“Let’s see what you wrote down.”
They unveiled my hastily scrawled response.
“What is…looks like “Frago”,” said Alex.
“It’s “Fargo”, Alex. Fargo,” I muttered.
“Fargo? No, that’s wrong. Not a lot of Tagalog spoken in that part of North Dakota.” He shook his head in a silent indictment of me as a complete idiot. “How much will it cost you? Everything. That leaves you with zero.”
Yes, yes it does.
Finally, Alex, the robotic camera, and the focus thankfully moved to the contestant on my right, who was in second place. I hated her. I mostly hated her because her name was Melanie but she insisted on spelling it “Melany”; and when she wrote her name on the electronic display before the game began, she drew a little smiley-face after the offending ‘y’. Really, Melany? A smiley face?
They unveiled Melany’s response: “Where is MANILA?” she had written, without benefit of an emoticon.
Melany was correct, though, and she doubled her score to $18,400, still not enough to catch the champion.
Gunther, the champion, stood there inscrutably. This was his fourth game, and he had already won nearly $80,000. He could not be caught.
I imagined that people watching Gunther on TV might think he was a pretty cool guy. They might even admire him. He had the kind of casual good looks you would expect from someone named Gunther: dirty-blond, suntanned, and with an undetermined accent of some kind even though he was from Cleveland. They would all be wrong. There is nothing admirable about Gunther. He is a pompous, snotty know-it-all who drives a beat-up old Rav-4, and that unkempt hipster look is really because he hasn’t done laundry in a month. When the cameras weren’t rolling, he looked at Melany and me in a way that said, “I will crush you.” Melany didn’t seem to mind all that much. I kept finding myself wishing that a spotlight or something would fall from the space above him, crushing his Norwegian skull in a horrific accident which, while tragic, would nonetheless make for some great television. But no, he had survived through to Final Jeopardy.
“Now we come to Gunther, our champ,” said Alex, sounding for all the world like a proud papa at the Science Fair. “Let’s see what you wrote down.”
All I heard was the word “Manila” and a dollar figure of twenty-six thousand something-something-something. At that point I heard a comforting click as the electronic display on the front of my podium erased the word “Frago” , as well as my humiliating final score of $0, replacing them with the Aleve logo and my third-place prize of $1000, the “Jeopardy!” version of a Participant trophy.
At that point, the sounds around me all retreated into a kind of dull roar. I finally brushed the hair out of my face and found myself just sort of standing there numbly, just wishing and wanting the whole thing to be over.
Finally, the hot lights clicked off, jolting me back to the present. The stage manager, Phil or Bill or whatever his name was, was hurriedly moving us off of our platforms and pushing us to one corner of the stage. This is where we were to stand while the camera was to show us all chatting good-naturedly with Alex as the closing credits rolled. People around us were already putting away their headsets and clipboards and heading home for the day.
Alex came over. Without our adjustable platforms, it was now obvious that I was way shorter than both of my competitors. Alex shook my hand halfheartedly and after that, he didn’t look at me again. He stood there talking animatedly with Melany and Gunther about something lame and pretentious, like what huge Miles Davis fans they all were. I just stood there, trying to look serene and interested despite the fact that I really just wanted to go home, like that time I went to a Christmas party with my friend José and I was the only person there who didn’t speak Spanish.
Eventually, though, the last of the stage lights clicked off, the Miles Davis love fest came to a close, and Phil or Bill ushered us off the stage just seconds ahead of the guy with the broom. I was handed my belongings: my cell phone and an overcoat, which was all I had brought in with me, which somehow made me feel like I was being released from jail. I was told to stop by the cashier window near the exit to pick up my prize money.
“Nice job today,” said the cashier as she pushed an envelope towards me, without once looking up from her phone. Her name tag said that she was called Belinda and that she had been a “crew member” since 2009. I noticed that the TV behind her was tuned in to “The Bachelor.”
“Thank you, Belinda,” I said. She looked up when I said her name, wondering for an instant whether we knew one another. Her left hand brushed her name tag absent-mindedly.
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “Umm, take it easy.” She looked back down at her phone.
I pushed open the exit door and the California sun came pouring in. It was kind of a shock, like it is when you walk out of a movie theater during the daytime. I struggled to remember where I had parked, or even what kind of car I was driving. It was a rental.
Then I remembered that it was a green Kia. A horribly ugly green Kia Forté or Kia Alanté or Spumanté or some other made-up word. It was a vehicle I would never have been caught dead in back in Delaware, but at the rental agency, when the girl behind the counter asked me what color car I wanted, all I could hear was my friend Gary’s voice, saying, “Green. Green is the color of money and success.” So I answered her, “Green.” She tilted her head and looked at me for a moment, smiling benignly, as if I had just said to her that I wanted to adopt the ugliest puppy in the shelter.
Money and success my ass. Lot of good it did me. As I slid into the car, baked in the California sun to a toasty 103°, I looked down at the green tie I had worn. I rolled my eyes at my own ridiculousness, took off the tie, and as I rolled down the window, I dropped the tie out onto the sizzling parking lot.
I sat there for a minute before I started the car. I sat there, sweating in the 103° heat, thinking about the past few hours, reliving it all in my mind as if I were trying to detox in a sauna.
Well, that certainly didn’t go like I had planned, I thought. In my imagination, I would be at a supper club in L.A. right now, being toasted with Dom Perignon and fêted by Alex’s minions and a host of Jeopardy groupies. I would be making excuses for an early night as I must retire and prepare to defend my championship tomorrow. I would be planning how to spend the record-breaking amount of money I had just won in front of a spellbound audience. Somehow my vision did not include sitting in a hideous Korean car, sweating like a whore in church, Mexican music blasting from the radio, and wondering what the hell I should do now.
What indeed? I just sort of let my body go slack for a moment. My shoulders slumped, my head bowed, tried to make my body as small and humble as I felt. I wallowed, just for a minute. Then, I sat up straight, slapped my hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, and said out loud to myself, “Well. First things first. Back to the hotel.”
I programmed the GPS for the slightly shabby Super 8 where I was staying in Burbank. I rolled up the window, cranked up the air conditioning, and rolled out of there, leaving Jeopardy behind forever. A dream I had had for 27 years turned out to be just that: a dream. Instead of finally proving to the world that I was smart and funny and that the camera loved me, I only proved that I was short and could be outplayed by a 26 year-old manicurist from Ann Arbor and the guy who dresses like Thor the Thunder God every single goddam Halloween.
Goodbye, Jeopardy.
So, I was not in a particularly good place, so to speak, as I allowed the slightly British voice on the GPS to guide me through the endless maze of off-ramps, cloverleaves and Mercedes convertibles that is Greater Los Angeles. “In one quarter mile,” she says impassively, “take the motorway.” Who the fuck says “motorway”?
Before long, the lady on the GPS, whom I had named Mrs. Peale, managed to get me back to my opulent Super 8 Motel in Burbank. I carefully removed the repulsive floral polyester bedspread from the bed and stuffed it into a corner. I then flopped down face-up on the bed and just lay there for a while, closing my eyes and just letting the whole day sort of wash over me.
I allowed myself to remember bits and pieces of my disgrace. Of how my heart sank as Alex revealed the categories for each round: US Presidents, Rivers, Sports, Sports Terms, Sports Teams, 16th Century French Literature- all topics I know almost nothing about. Of how I had risked everything on a Daily Double and then answered that the fifth President of the United States was George Jefferson.
I remembered the interview portion of the program. They had asked us to write down five things about ourselves that we might like to talk about or that people might find interesting. One of the things I had written down was that I had been a bartender for a number of years.
“Says here that you were a “mixologist” at one time,” said Alex, looking down at his index card.
“That’s right, Alex,” I answered. “I worked for a few years as a bartender in a wonderful little restaurant called “Mrs. Simpson’s”.”
“And what, would you say, is your favorite drink?” he asked me.
“I wouldn’t know, Alex. I actually don’t drink alcohol.”
Alex just sort of looked at me for an instant. The expression in his eyes told me that he did not like the way this was going. “Oh, I see,” he said. In an attempt to salvage the interview, he said, “I have always loved a good Harvey Wallbanger. Can you tell me your recipe for a good Harvey Wallbanger?”
“No, Alex. I don’t know how to make a Harvey Wallbanger.”
Alex didn’t even respond. He just moved on to the manicurist.
And all the while, while I was lying there, reliving the whole wretched day in my mind, I just kept thinking that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. One doesn’t harbor a dream for 27 years just to have it turn out to be one of the most horrible experiences of one’s life. It was supposed to be wonderful and transformative, like a bride’s long-awaited fairytale wedding. Instead it was just painful and embarrassing and I felt like cannon fodder for the bloodthirsty game show audience.
I tried to remember when I first wanted to be a contestant on Jeopardy. It was 1987. I was 25 years old, and I had just graduated from the Police Academy back in Delaware. The problem was, I had graduated second-to-last in my class, which sort of limited my opportunities, career-wise. I managed to get a job, though, as a summer hire for the police department in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Talk about dreams that don’t go as planned. When someone enters the Police Academy, they are envisioning what might lie ahead: taking down crackheads in a blaze of bullets, admiring looks from women when they see you in your sharp uniform, being treated with respect as a person of authority. Well, when I hit the streets of Provincetown, I weighed in at about 125 pounds, partly due to my limited stature but also due to the fact that I’ve always been kind of a bean pole. Well, the only uniform the Provincetown Police Department had for me that summer was a 38-Long, and when I put it on I looked like Barney Fife’s younger and scrawnier brother from Mayberry. They didn’t even allow me to have a gun, and when I walked the street or stood directing traffic, instead of the girls giving me the eye and flirting, they were giggling and calling me “Goober” behind my back.
At least it was an easy job and I was never in any real danger. The main crimes we dealt with were bicycle theft and drunk-and-disorderly. Provincetown is kind of a quirky town and the people who go there tend to be a little offbeat. You tend to see a lot of guys wearing women’s clothing and carrying on in the streets, and stuff like that, which I don’t really get, myself, but whatever. Anyway, I got into the habit that summer, of turning on Jeopardy when I got home to my crappy little apartment at the end of my watch. I surprised myself as time went on, because I knew a lot of the answers. It felt good, after a day standing in the hot sun, being called Goober and having drag queens ask me where my nightstick was, to feel like there was something I was pretty good at. I began to fantasize about going on that program, and showing everyone how wrong they were about me. That I could be clever and well-read and that I knew who invented the cotton gin. Believe me, though, it’s a lot easier to play Jeopardy in your own living room, with a nice cold Sprite and a Hot Pockets than it is in front of an audience of strangers, especially when Alex Trebek seems to think you’re the Antichrist.
Anyway, after lying there for a while, I decided to snap myself out of it. I went over to my laptop and decided to see if there were any messages for me. My email only had two messages: one from my friends at Citibank to remind me that a payment is due soon, and another one promising ink and toner at 85% off retail. I deleted them both.
I wasn’t really surprised about that. I’m not the most social person, which is why I made the trip out here to California all alone in the first place. It’s not that I don’t like people or anything, it’s just that I don’t seem able to keep anyone’s interest long enough to get a friendship going. I hadn’t really told a lot of people that I was going to be on Jeopardy to begin with, so I shouldn’t have been expecting a bunch of emails or messages. I had told the girl who works at the CVS, whose name is Margaret, about it. She sent me an e-card from JibJab that she had made, showing her and her girlfriend’s cutout faces dancing to “We are the Champions” with the words “congrads and good luck!!!!” followed by like fifteen exclamation points. But that was like six weeks ago, anyway.
So, I figured I’d log on to Facebook. I have like fifteen Facebook friends. I figured that was pretty good for someone who would have trouble putting together a dinner party for four. Then I met this girl named Jessica and she told me that she had like fifteen hundred friends on Facebook.
“Really?” I asked her. “How do you get 1,500 friends?”
She looked at me incredulously. “Duh,” she said. “I went to college!”
Anyway, I had left a status update last night that said, “Looking forward to winning big tomorrow on Jeopardy!” In response, I got an “lol” from a guy I went to junior high with, and a “you are beautiful” and six little hearts from this flaky woman I met in Provincetown. Oh well, I figured, at least nobody cares that I bombed.
I looked up and noticed the little red number on my Facebook page that tells you that somebody posted something to your wall. This girl Kelly had posted a link to some viral video entitled “Porcupine Thinks It’s a Puppy (cute!!)” I don’t really know Kelly but she sent me a friend request once, and she used to date a guy I went to school with, so I accepted it.
Anyway, I clicked on the link and watched the video. It was like two and a half minutes of two girls cooing over a porcupine they had named “Mr. Stinkers” while it squirmed around and they petted the damned thing wearing heavy-duty gardening gloves.
After the video was over, I thought to myself that that video had done absolutely nothing to make me feel better about my present circumstance. I also wondered why Kelly would have ever thought that this would be something I would be even remotely interested in. I un-friended her on the spot.
And that little move felt kind of good, kind of, well, liberating. I mean, did I really have to care about what these people thought of me? I looked down the list of my fourteen remaining Facebook friends. I deleted them all, except for Margaret from the CVS because I like the funny stuff she posts.
And then I began to think a little differently about my debacle of a day. Suddenly it seemed like for all those years that I had been wanting to be on Jeopardy, maybe it had been for the wrong reasons. I had been wanting to do it to impress other people, people who, in the end, did not require impressing. I was trying to prove something to everyone else, instead of proving something to myself.
But I had, indeed, proven something to myself that day. I had proved that I could set a goal for myself and achieve it. I could leave my comfort zone and earn my place on a stage shared by no more than twelve people in the world in any given week. I could do something that other people only fantasize about doing. I could be proud to claim my fifteen minutes of cannon fodder fame.
So, I decided to break out of my funk, to stop feeling sorry for myself and start feeling proud and happy about the things I’ve done. I checked out of the Super 8 Motel and climbed into the front seat of my stylin’ green Kia Spumanté. I switched on the GPS.
“Mrs. Peale,” I said. “I have a thousand dollars to spend, and the rest of the week off. What do you suggest?”
Turns out there’s a Legoland about a hundred miles away from here in Carlsbad. I’m heading there now. And I’m feeling pretty good.
Friday, June 13, 2014
Sunday, May 11, 2014
MOTHERS' DAY 2014
I have reached an interesting time in my life: the time when you begin to realize that you are watching the halfway mile-marker of your lifetime, but it’s retreating in the rear view mirror, and it’s quite likely that it has been for quite some time. I mean, think about it like this: I am about 51½ years old today. If this very day were to be the halfway point of my life, that means I would be about 103 years old when I die. Now, I’m not about to speculate on how old I should be when I finally cross the Rainbow Bridge, as it were, but I somehow don’t think that 103 is a very likely number, nor am I sure that I would want it to be. Frankly, I don’t see much to look forward to at 103, except maybe being wished “Happy 102nd birthday, Mr. Paul Hadley, of Providencetown, Massachusetts!” by the weatherman on Good Morning America; or a color piece on the local news where they say things like, “Even at 103, Mr. Halley still brushes his own tooth every day, and he’s a regular feature at Senior’s Night at the local Applebee’s.”
I suppose what I’m getting at is that it has been dawning on me lately that the number of days I have in front of me are probably a lot fewer than the days behind me, and that realization seems to be changing the way I think in many ways. Today, it seems to have affected the way I think about Mothers’ Day.
For the first half of my life, my thought process about Mothers’ Day was usually something along the lines of, “What? Mothers’ Day was when? Shit.” And for the past 23 years, I am reluctant to admit, my first thought at the annual onslaught of Hallmark commercials and “He went to Jared!”, has been, “Mothers Day? Ha! I’m off the hook for that one.”
But then this morning, as I scrolled through Facebook and the inevitable Olan Mills portraits and clichéd poems about twinkling stars and roses, I began to think differently. I began to think about Mom.
What can I possibly say about Mom? How does one begin? I had just turned 28 when she died, old enough to be a grown man, but too young to be a wise one. I think about her every day. My regrets, such as they are, are usually about things like unresolved issues and not having enough time to allow life to play out. For instance, I don’t think my mother ever really came to terms with my being gay. I mean, she had accepted it, but more the way somebody accepts the price of milk or being treated like a criminal at the airport: like it’s a fact of life, something you can’t really change, although you’re not necessarily happy about it. Over the years, I’ve wondered whether she ever would have been able to embrace me as a whole person, whether the person I grew into and the changes in the world around us would have been able to convince her to finally make that leap. Would she have loved Mark, or would she smile feebly and refer to him as “that Mark person” when we talked? One can never know, one can only hope.
It’s hard to pin down something like memories of your mom. There are so many, and they are all so different. There are those early memories, when Mom was a warm hand to hold at the shopping plaza. There’s Angry Mom; yeah lots of Angry Mom. There’s the Mom who used to ride her bike to the pool club every day in the summer, and the Mom who was so frustrated a few years later because some unnamed disease had made that impossible. There’s the Mom who once in a while would spend the afternoons having one too many glasses of sherry with her girlfriends from the neighborhood; and the Mom who knew exactly which buttons to push, ‘nuff said.
There can be no doubt that I am my mother’s son. From her I have inherited my wicked sense of humor, the slightly off-center way I have of looking at the world. She taught me not to fear or disregard people because they look different than I do, or believe in a different God or speak a different language. She taught me that blind people see with their hands.
She smoked Chesterfield Kings, with no filter, right up until the day she died. Do they even make Chesterfields any more? She may have been the last person alive who smoked them. For a while, they came with coupons attached to the cigarette packs, which you could save up and redeem for things like lamps or dart boards, or, presumably with enough points, an iron lung. We had a drawer in the kitchen which was stuffed so full of these coupons that it could barely be opened. I don’t think we ever got the dart board.
One day, I was up in my bedroom and I heard what I thought was popcorn, somehow being furiously popped downstairs. When I went down to investigate, I saw that it was actually my mom, pounding away manically on the old manual Underwood typewriter we kept in the basement. Some muse or other had struck, and she was writing away, probably one of her Erma Bombeck-style commentaries about life, or a funny poem about Little League, or something like that. This is definitely a behavior I have inherited from my mother, except now I am pounding away furiously on the keys of a laptop and my husband is eyeing me dubiously, always suspicious that I’m actually conducting some kind of online affair.
My mother was always what I would call a staunch Kennedy Democrat. As a matter of fact, in our generation of Irish-Americans, Jack Kennedy was a de facto saint; every good Irish Catholic household had at least one crucifix, one plaque declaring “Erin Go Bragh” and one portrait of JFK somewhere in the house. She would have looked at the current, rather unfiltered view of Kennedy as a kind of philandering bon-vivant, as blasphemy. What all this means, though, is that she instilled in me that sort of early-1960s view of America as being full of promise, a country which at heart knows what is right and where it must head. The old “I see things that never were, and ask ‘Why not?’” mindset. What would she think of America today? Well, if she could have survived the George W. Bush presidency without committing outright rebellion, I think she would be hopeful, if not pleased.
My dad went to my wedding. I wish my Mom could have.
So, today, I will remember my mom. I will remember her at her best and at her worst all in the same moment. I will remember the things she said, which I still say; and the thousands of ways which she made me the man I am today. And I will try to remember the person she wanted me to be, and the mom who, when it was all said and done, just wanted me to be happy. And possibly give her grandchildren.
Happy Mothers’ day, Mom.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that it has been dawning on me lately that the number of days I have in front of me are probably a lot fewer than the days behind me, and that realization seems to be changing the way I think in many ways. Today, it seems to have affected the way I think about Mothers’ Day.
For the first half of my life, my thought process about Mothers’ Day was usually something along the lines of, “What? Mothers’ Day was when? Shit.” And for the past 23 years, I am reluctant to admit, my first thought at the annual onslaught of Hallmark commercials and “He went to Jared!”, has been, “Mothers Day? Ha! I’m off the hook for that one.”
But then this morning, as I scrolled through Facebook and the inevitable Olan Mills portraits and clichéd poems about twinkling stars and roses, I began to think differently. I began to think about Mom.
What can I possibly say about Mom? How does one begin? I had just turned 28 when she died, old enough to be a grown man, but too young to be a wise one. I think about her every day. My regrets, such as they are, are usually about things like unresolved issues and not having enough time to allow life to play out. For instance, I don’t think my mother ever really came to terms with my being gay. I mean, she had accepted it, but more the way somebody accepts the price of milk or being treated like a criminal at the airport: like it’s a fact of life, something you can’t really change, although you’re not necessarily happy about it. Over the years, I’ve wondered whether she ever would have been able to embrace me as a whole person, whether the person I grew into and the changes in the world around us would have been able to convince her to finally make that leap. Would she have loved Mark, or would she smile feebly and refer to him as “that Mark person” when we talked? One can never know, one can only hope.
It’s hard to pin down something like memories of your mom. There are so many, and they are all so different. There are those early memories, when Mom was a warm hand to hold at the shopping plaza. There’s Angry Mom; yeah lots of Angry Mom. There’s the Mom who used to ride her bike to the pool club every day in the summer, and the Mom who was so frustrated a few years later because some unnamed disease had made that impossible. There’s the Mom who once in a while would spend the afternoons having one too many glasses of sherry with her girlfriends from the neighborhood; and the Mom who knew exactly which buttons to push, ‘nuff said.
There can be no doubt that I am my mother’s son. From her I have inherited my wicked sense of humor, the slightly off-center way I have of looking at the world. She taught me not to fear or disregard people because they look different than I do, or believe in a different God or speak a different language. She taught me that blind people see with their hands.
She smoked Chesterfield Kings, with no filter, right up until the day she died. Do they even make Chesterfields any more? She may have been the last person alive who smoked them. For a while, they came with coupons attached to the cigarette packs, which you could save up and redeem for things like lamps or dart boards, or, presumably with enough points, an iron lung. We had a drawer in the kitchen which was stuffed so full of these coupons that it could barely be opened. I don’t think we ever got the dart board.
One day, I was up in my bedroom and I heard what I thought was popcorn, somehow being furiously popped downstairs. When I went down to investigate, I saw that it was actually my mom, pounding away manically on the old manual Underwood typewriter we kept in the basement. Some muse or other had struck, and she was writing away, probably one of her Erma Bombeck-style commentaries about life, or a funny poem about Little League, or something like that. This is definitely a behavior I have inherited from my mother, except now I am pounding away furiously on the keys of a laptop and my husband is eyeing me dubiously, always suspicious that I’m actually conducting some kind of online affair.
My mother was always what I would call a staunch Kennedy Democrat. As a matter of fact, in our generation of Irish-Americans, Jack Kennedy was a de facto saint; every good Irish Catholic household had at least one crucifix, one plaque declaring “Erin Go Bragh” and one portrait of JFK somewhere in the house. She would have looked at the current, rather unfiltered view of Kennedy as a kind of philandering bon-vivant, as blasphemy. What all this means, though, is that she instilled in me that sort of early-1960s view of America as being full of promise, a country which at heart knows what is right and where it must head. The old “I see things that never were, and ask ‘Why not?’” mindset. What would she think of America today? Well, if she could have survived the George W. Bush presidency without committing outright rebellion, I think she would be hopeful, if not pleased.
My dad went to my wedding. I wish my Mom could have.
So, today, I will remember my mom. I will remember her at her best and at her worst all in the same moment. I will remember the things she said, which I still say; and the thousands of ways which she made me the man I am today. And I will try to remember the person she wanted me to be, and the mom who, when it was all said and done, just wanted me to be happy. And possibly give her grandchildren.
Happy Mothers’ day, Mom.
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