The Whipping Boy

by Vince R. Ditrich

Part One

$2.85 an hour. That was the going wage when I was a 14 year-old working at the music store. Not just any music store, mind, but the best established and most reputable Mom & Pop shop in the whole region, the only one my Dad would ever give his patronage, the only one that, in his words, didn’t just sell “goddamn amplifiers for amateurs to make noise with their Rotten-Roll Hippie crap and smoke goddamn manure-a-hoona.” My Dad, you see, was a purist. If you couldn’t read it, you shouldn’t be allowed to play it. If you were a young guitarist, for example, and you couldn’t find B flat, or play a diminished chord, or finger A flat 7 add 9, (which you wouldn’t if you only knew 5 songs, all of them by Buck Owens) you were instantly exiled to his personal Siberia, labeled ‘an AMATEUR’ – the worst possible verdict that he could pass. No term in his lexicon was more pejorative. “Well yes, he’s an ax murderer, but at least he’s not an AMATEUR…” By the age of four I knew that if someone had been pronounced an ‘Amateur’ his days were done, at least as far approval from my Dad was concerned; his judgment was irrevocable. He was a man of unambiguous opinions. Oh, the hell he raised when the march of time and his pre-teen aged son (me) required he add ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ and ‘Knock Three Times’ to the set list. I recall he even did “My Sweet Lord”, but his face was always screwed up into a rictus of revulsion as he miserably honked through it on the Tenor sax. In retrospect I suppose he did try, at one point gamely plodding through a Tijuana Brass phase, even though he thought Herb Alpert was an abomination to man and beast alike. “Jaysus Kee-rist…He sucks on that goddamn horn like a schoolgirl…” As the time passed, he got more and more crotchety and his gun-shy sidemen fled to gigs where they could play current songs, sometimes even in the key of E, and not live in terror all night long. Work dried up and eventually Dad just hung it up for good.

I, his drummer, was left unemployed and with few prospects. Granted I was only 14, but when you’re a musician the child labour laws don’t apply. So I worked up the gumption to drop into a local music store to suggest that they keep me in mind should they ever need some help. To my surprise they called one Saturday morning.

I jumped on the city bus, fairly bursting with excitement, rode it downtown and presented myself for duty. Clearly my extensive musical background convinced them to call me. Wise of them! They’d be damn glad they’d hired me, I mused. Oh yes, I’d have the place running like a top in days! When I arrived the Boss looked me up and down over his reading glasses, said nothing intelligible but clucked and tutted with what I hoped was some form of approval and spun quickly on his heel, leaving me to be tasked by his wife. She bade me downstairs, to the deepest, darkest depths of the ‘stock room’. No ordinary storage area, this ancient, dank warren seemed to have been scraped out of the prairie hardpan as a refuge in case there were marauding Visigoths reported in the area.

It was McGee’s Closet, filled with hundreds, thousands – perhaps even millions of copies of sheet music. Books and pads and scribblers and texts and tablature and manuscript; it was piled as far as they eye could see in that dim light, looking as if it had been cargo abandoned by smugglers dumping and running, appearing for all the world like a heap of forbidden books ready for a Nazi bonfire.

“Organize this.” The Boss’s wife said, waving her hand vaguely at the squalor before me. “It’s really quite a mess.” She added, overstating obvious with pathos. Leaving me alone with my thoughts she climbed the steep, squeaky steps and went back to join the lucky above-ground elite. For a few moments I just stood there like a dunce as the realization sunk in that I was not to be the new manager of the drum department, nor a mighty sales representative. I would take out the trash, sweep floors, and categorize rubbish as either a) junk or, b) crap. I was a ‘gofer’. A ‘stock-boy’. And at $2.85 an hour I almost qualified to be a slave.

It was near the end of my very first day of work that my legend began to form. While vacuuming, I ineffectually pushed a peanut of packing foam around the rack of Al Martino records; I didn’t know I was being watched. My new co-workers were amusing themselves by wagering how long it’d be before I’d actually bend over and pick up the offending piece I appeared to be playing deck shuffleboard with. Finally the Boss’s daughter suggested that I really get aggressive with that cheap Hoover, throw it around a bit, persuade it to do its job. Throw it around I did, dutifully adhering to her injunction -- but of course I couldn’t know that this vacuum, utterly worn out and cheap in the first place, had been jury rigged countless times since its manufacture during the early part of the Protestant Reformation. The last repair had been done with scissors and scotch tape. The Hoover balked at my rough treatment and sent a few jolly shocking volts down the pipe directly into my arm. I danced a right pretty jig, sang a few Mexicano sounding ‘Aiaiaiaiaiai’ lyrics and then dropped it like a boiling spud. The high mirth exhibited at my expense by co-workers was galling, but being fourteen I mostly just got embarrassed and mumbled.

Luckily it was a family oriented kind of place where parents rented trumpets for school band or bought metronomes for their arrhythmic piano student children and not the kind of place the long-hairs frequented to buy a guitar just like Eric Clapton’s. A lady I knew worked at one of THOSE places, across town, mostly serving John Lennon hairstyle stunt-doubles back in the day when that kind of coiffure was a shocking thing to see. Her feet were firmly planted on the near side of the Generation Gap; she was well out of her depth. At one point while minding the shop alone a young man sidled up to the counter and said to her casually, “Hey lady…Can I take a peek at your fuzz box?” Her eyes widened in horror and she nearly fainted. Oh the depravity! What was the world coming to? Damn these Hippies and their loose morals! After a few moments she realized that the young man was pointing not at her unmentionables but at an electronic gadget inside the glass display case.

I was a very attentive young man, responsible, respectful, efficient, quick to learn and eager to please. Unfortunately I was also perilously ungainly, with Andre the Giant’s feet, a child’s body, and a teenager’s loins. The puberty that was underway cursed me with uncontrolled vocal yodeling, an uneven spackling of acne and a totally preposterous attempt at a moustache. I dropped things, I tripped over things, I broke things. I was St. Vitus at Dance Party USA. The Boss would just shake his head as I’d stumble by, wincing as I dumped coffee on someone’s brand new copy of Toccata and Fugue. I was an object, not of ridicule, but of fascination, a crash-to-be, erratically circling the airfield.

The store was long, narrow and high. The ceilings must have been 25 feet, leaving all sorts of room for displays on the office roofs. The Boss, in addition to bookkeeping, musical instrument repair, ordering, banking, sales, and schmoozing had also taken on the job of fitting and repairing hearing aids. He had a special office set up specifically to test the hearing of his customers, presumably the now deaf, washed-up electric guitarists that my Dad had sent packing. It was a room within a room, built in such a way that the roof was only timber cross-pieces. They always featured a drumkit up there, setting it gingerly on scrap pieces of wood that lay over the supports. It was eye-catching but out of the way.

I took it upon myself to clean up that display, the shiny drums having collected a thick coating of dust from sitting forlornly for several years. Ever so carefully I climbed up the ladder and tiptoed to the kit, moving it painstakingly from place to place, cautiously adjusting the wood ‘floor’ that I and the drums rested on. Like a cat I balanced on the beams, moving the cymbal here, the floor tom there. Confident now, not to mention out of space I brazenly balanced a cymbal stand on two of the joists. I turned back to my task but caught from the corner of my eye that it was tipping over. This cymbal on its stand, a twenty pound contraption with a razor sharp bronze edge, was headed to the floor twenty feet below, toward the head of a customer. Urgently I lunged for the falling object lest it decapitate the lady browsing the Beverly Sills LPs. And decapitate her it would have, in a split second. In the nick of time I nabbed it, preventing a messy tragedy, but my desperate lunge threw me off balance and I lost my footing.

I and the cymbal plunged through the ceiling below, my crotch bearing the full weight of the fall onto the 2 x 10 rafter. My legs dangled down into the hearing aid office and the floor below was littered with shattered acoustic tile. I was in agony, still clinging piteously to the cymbal, and balanced excruciatingly on what I was sure was an exploded scrotum. I peered down into the disaster I had caused and saw the BOSS. His bald head was sprinkled with dust. He gazed upward quizzically at the odd vision suddenly visited upon him, reading glasses as usual at the end of his nose. His eyebrows shot up for a second but all he said was, “Oh, Hi Vince.”

Banished to the basement again, I was assigned the horrible task of sorting through box after box of used screws, nuts and bolts and separating them by size. The Boss wanted it done; it’d been on his to do list for years, apparently. I was positive he just wanted to gain a measure of control over the halo of destruction surrounding me. It was said that completion of the task would be highly regarded, but the drudgery was unspeakable. I was sick with boredom. Presently I felt nature’s urge and excused myself for a few moments. I attended to my task, did up my trousers and flushed the bog. Abject horror washed over me as the toilet and its contents --formerly MY contents, backed up onto the floor and flooded everywhere. I mean everywhere. This was no garden variety malfunction of the john; it was a torrent, a cataract, a high pressure inundation. It sloshed out the door and spread inexorably. I came rushing out of the loo, waving my arms in the air in a terrible panic, frightening the customers, yelping incoherently, white as a ghost. I gesticulated wildly like a terror-stricken caveman. The ruinous stream forked in two directions, one rivulet languidly draining toward the sheet music, briefly pooling near the Puccini, and then flowing onward, perhaps drawn to Blood, Sweat & Tears by a sense of comradeship, eventually trickling all the way to the front door. The other cascaded down the stairs and through the floorboards, raining urine and huge gobs of turd on a stack of fancy, expensive clarinets. It dribbled down the wall and soaked a pegboard wall display which held thousands of spare parts in plastic bags, all of which were now filling with toilet contents: Bassoon springs, violin bow frogs, trumpet mouthpieces, flute keys, sax pads, microphones, ligatures, bass violin bridges, you name it. All were ruined. The shite came flowing down the stairs with menacing drama, in gratuitously graphic Peckinpah slo-mo, and oozed calamitously to the floor below. There was even a clump of excrement plopped malevolently on the Boss’s soldering iron. It was a fucking disaster.

Somebody awoke to the emergency and took us to panic stations; by some miracle we managed to mop it up – but the loathsome job of picking up the errant solid bits was left to me, the perpetrator, and a pair of pink rubber gloves. The clarinets at the top of the stack took the brunt of it and I cringe to this day at the thought of some poor bastard buying one and obliviously gumming on it for all these years; what a black irony that their brand name was “Buffet”…Ugh. But there was nothing we could do about the lazy, clinging pong of ancient musty broadloom mixed with wretched, nasty sewage save leave all the doors open and freeze our arses. They were all hoping that MY arse would actually freeze right off and fall into the gutter at that point. But when the Boss got back from lunch and got the awful, damning report he blinked once or twice, clucked a bit and then began to laugh and laugh and laugh. I could hear him laughing alone in his little office all day long. He laughed when he went for coffee. He laughed when he came back. He was laughing hours later when he locked up for the night. He may still be laughing today, wherever he may be, years after his passing.
It was hard to overcome that one. The plumber got me off the hook to some degree, discreetly explaining that the source of the blockage in the toilet was caused by an object that ‘couldn’t have been flushed by a man’ (it took me a bit to decipher that statement), but it didn’t really matter. I was the one whose crap had soiled the broadloom and imperiled the woodwinds. It was epic stuff.

End of Part One

1/06

The Movement

Part One
by Vince R. Ditrich

I’ve always fantasized about having my own Pub. I suppose a lot of people think it might be nice; but I take it several orders of magnitude higher. I want it, badly. I wish for it, I beseech the heavens for it. I use corners of ketchup slathered napkins to make sketches of what it could look like. I scout around for the perfect location. I want it to overlook the sea, and have a cozy inglenook on one wall. It will be dimly lit, just enough light to see the Queen’s face on the money. I guess I’ll need oak benches – those would be for visitors -- but it would have just fabulous taps, a selection that’d make you weep with joy, and a couple of dogs curled up by the fire…I guess it’s a no-brainer to include a ploughman’s lunch that’d blow the mind out of the side of your head. No damn TVs. A special area, near the fireplace, overflowing with excellent books and a few soft, inviting armchairs, reserved especially for me and my guests. It would certainly have a bay window. Did I mention it’d be built overlooking the sea? Of course I did.

It’s not where I’d spend my retirement. It’s where I’d spend nearly every waking hour of the rest of my bloody life. Laugh if you will, but secretly in his heart, every man reading these words wants exactly the same thing and his wife is terrified that his wish might be granted.

My friends endorse my big dream, because they know if my ship comes in and its cargo is a big fat lottery win, they are going to be VIPs at my Pub. A Pub is pointless if there’s no one to share it with. In fact, it’d be OUR Pub, with free rounds and countless raucous choruses of “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight” until the Mounties have to be summoned. I imagine myself in front of a cheery fire on a rainy night reveling in the experience of sipping a pint and riffling through yellowed, dusty history books. History & beer: What a perfect combo. I once wrote that I loved them both so much that you might be tempted to conclude that I like nothing more than getting pissed up and then recounting past piss-ups.

Since most people’s lives are categorized by what they do, I guess you might file me under ‘artist’. This means I am fashionably unemployed, charmingly insolvent, and possessing of a radical chic that most folks suspect is more likely an undiagnosed medical problem. It also means I dream big.

The idea of my own Pub really took root one spring after a buddy lost his wife to cancer. She was far too young. She was suddenly and capriciously taken away from us.

For a while we stood around wringing our hands, wondering what in the hell we could do to help. What do you do in a case like this? Talk about the amount of rain in May? Pretend everything is hunky-dory? Have him and the kids over for a weenie roast and pretend it puts everything back into balance? Clearly this wasn’t going to cut the mustard.

Life, as they say, had to go on. We knew this man still needed a pint now and then so we began, occasionally, to traipse over to his house and put on little socials. We were pretty cautious about it at first but eventually one of the lads said, “For God’s sake! He’s Irish. Do you really think he minds visitors dropping by laden with Guinness?”

I had to admit he had a point.

It turned out that he didn’t mind at all. And at that moment it all took on a life of its own. This beat our regular local six ways from Sunday!

It wasn’t long before we all began departing after sunset just a little too often. We’d swagger out of the house dripping with machismo, weighed down by preposterous quantities of beer, cradling tastefully presented platters of manly appetizers, and roar off without a word, provocatively revving the Volvo a few too many times as we left, leaving suspicion in our wake. We’d had to cover our tracks.

Furtive phone calls would be exchanged. “Hello?”
“…Uhh…Yeah…Meeting Friday night…”
In the background, “Who is it honey?”
“Uhh…It’s for me, Hon.” Voice lowered again, “Yeah. Friday you say?”
“…Umm…Yeah…Just a few administrative issues to discuss…Won’t keep you long…”
“Great then, see you Friday…”
“Honey, what’s happening on Friday?” She’d invariably query.
“Oh, you know. Raising money for peace ‘n stuff…”
“Peace?” She’d ask doubtfully.
“Peace? No…No…I said, ahh…P.A.C”.
Long pause.
“The P.A.C? You joined the Parent’s Advisory Commitee?”
“Did I say, uhhh, P.A.C? Ah, heh, heh, heh…No, umm, G.A.C. Greening of Atrophied Confluencies. Yes, G.A.C…We call it GAC. Feed the trees, cut down the children, you know…Just doing my part.”

Oh yes, we were slick, savvy to the necessary double-talk. Never a peep about smoked salmon, tuna sashimi, homemade blackberry pies heisted straight out of the freezer at great personal risk, vats of the sacred golden nectar, wine marinated prawns (oh, those lucky, lucky prawns), cheeses from around the globe, chicken satay, lamb brochettes. No…We knew better than to speak en clair about our secret cabal. We were Bad Boys.

* * * * * * * *
The Movement. It wasn’t a club. It wasn’t a society. It wasn’t a lodge, though we did fancy the thought of antler bedecked leopard-spotted busbies as our ceremonial garb. I tried to find some and the best I could do were plastic fireman’s helmets, but they didn’t provide the requisite élan. What we were was the grass roots of a popular movement, a unified mass of like-minded, risk taking, iron-willed men. (Don’t tell our wives.) Oh sure, they would ask how the meetings went, make oblique references to our charitable work, trying to draw us out for details, maybe trip us up. One wife, perhaps with the hope she could sneak a peek later, suggested we take written minutes of our meetings, but she never really understood that when we left the house, we were warriors, eagles, mighty jungle cats. We don’ need no stinkin’ minutes…When I came home late, smelling of whisky and Stilton-stuffed Filo, I could just pass it off on one of the lads in the group…Say for example The Barrister. “…Terrible stories of environmental abuse…Greenhouse effect…Children starving! Biafra I think it was. The Barrister…Yes, The Barrister suggested a wee dram to deaden the pain. He is my legal council, after all…”

Organizationally we were like a sleeper cell. But politically, we were loosely knit. We decided that if push came to shove we were all president, simultaneously. There’d be no other officers. We also toyed with the thought that whoever was speaking at any given time would be president until he ran out of breath, and then the next guy got to be prez. This seemed to work too. We even tossed around the idea of giving out a live chicken as a door prize; the chicken could be president. Mostly we hovered around the snack table.

Eventually word got out. Tongues were wagging. “G.A.C. Movement, huh? Did you shave the whales last night, honey? That's not the kind of movement I've come to expect from you!” Titter-titter. I’d mumble moodily in response and turn away. Damn! Where did the leak come from? It was hard to know but these wives were resourceful, they talked to each other constantly, they could garner encyclopedic knowledge on any situation from a simple 30 second phone call; and, by God, they were putting our Movement in danger! Just a little clever application of their feminine wiles and the whole thing would blow wide open and we’d be reduced to early bedtimes, zero-tolerance snacking enforcement and a distressing booze prohibition (except perhaps for a miserable bottle or two of cheap-assed beer, by special dispensation at the wakes of former Members of the Movement who died from a broken heart.) My dream of a Pub was sinking, floundering, in danger of getting swamped. I sat there feeling like G. Gordon Liddy, sipping my morning coffee and brainstorming ways to send in The Plumbers.


As my paranoia about our need for secrecy began to crest something happened that made me pause and question the fear that my own wife was part of the conspiracy to derail the Movement. Could I have been prematurely jumping to conclusions? My doubts began after a party she took me to. One guest in particular was a wild card whose penchant for things ‘herbal’ drove him way, way out into left-field, well past the turnoff to the mystical village where elfin druids prance merrily around the Maypole. As the evening progressed he got loonier, increasingly cryptic. He was friendly enough alright, but I suspected that making friends with him would involve a lot of smoking the peace pipe; he appeared to have on hand quite an impressively stocked little kit for just such a purpose. Apparently I won the lotto and was asked to accompany him outdoors wherein I presumed we would exchange crab dip recipes and comment favourably upon the décor. Oh well, I thought, I’d just go out for a few minutes. When I got outdoors in the nippy winter air it wasn’t long before the wind hit my back and I needed to relieve myself. Having just stepped outdoors I didn’t want to go back in immediately so I looked around and found a hedge nearby. He looked at me and said, “Dude, good idea…I gotta go, too.” As I stood there, hoping that our host wouldn’t come out and see me watering his hedge, Dude approached but was unaware of a huge pile of lumber beside me. He ambled up, tripped on the pile and then like a human caricature went staggering backwards exclaiming, “Whooaaaaa!” His arms were flailing in circles, like Charlie Chaplin on roller-skates; he made a din & clatter and vanished from view. I tensed up for the fall that surely had to come realizing that I’d better zip up quickly and rush to the silly fool’s aid. No sooner had this thought flashed across my mind than he re-appeared back into my field of view, still flailing and now moaning, “Duuuuude!” He tripped once-and-for-all on the pile of lumber and fell, headlong, bulls-eye, absolutely spot-on, directly -- I swear this is true -- under my stream of pee. I stood there for a couple of heartbeats, peeing on his head, utterly dumfounded, unable to believe what my eyes were telling me. “My God, man!” I finally yelped. “Are you okay?” He got up onto his hands and knees, hair dripping with my steaming urine and said, “No worries, Dude…Just lost it for a sec”.

My wife appeared to accept this utterly bizarre incident with serenity, even amusement. I scratched my head . I fully expected her to recoil in horror and demand to leave at once. I was sure she would find some appropriately Olympian way to shrink me down to short-panted kindergarten size, affix and slather me with buckets of opprobrium (as if I should have known that peeing outdoors in the proximity of Dude would entail a clear risk of outlandish water-sport mishaps), and shake her head in that way that only wives know how to do. But she didn’t. She actually chuckled. I began to cogitate upon the matter…We’d never pee on each other at a meeting of the Movement. Not even if we drank so much beer that we stripped naked, held hands and wept while watching Terms of Endearment. Not even if Ashley MacIssac popped in for a pint. So, maybe, just maybe, this would all work, unhidden, out in the open.

I gently broached the subject with some of the other lads. One was going to bring an appetizer his wife had made especially for us; she was all for our meetings. Another said she might like to get a similar Movement afoot for the wives. I was Thunderstruck!

My dream was alive!



End of Part One

Nothing But the Tooth

by Vince R. Ditrich


She was toothless. Well, actually, I think she had some teeth on the bottom; but on top there was nothing except a flapping lip. You don’t see flapping, toothless mouths too much anymore and it made me take note. The fact that the owner of this toothless mouth was the cashier at the airport cafeteria seemed significant to me. The food would be soft, I guessed, maybe pureed. Surely it’d have to come in a bowl.

It occurred to me that toothless cashiers in joyless airport cafeterias might be a new emblem for the 21st century. They are a visible reminder of how quickly times change. One day not long ago we were potential valuable customers all, where smiling, industrious (and often fully toothed) shop owners worked to win our business, looked us in the eye, thanked us for our custom, valued us so much that they’d really watch their Ps and Qs in our proximity, and maybe even dressed up a little when they came to work. Next thing I knew we needed membership cards to even set foot inside their establishments (an outrageous, surreal and completely insulting concept, but don’t get me raving) and like some new, slick, blister-packaged version of dangerously unlimited power (“Hey everybody! It’s 'Gestapo-Lite'!) we were expected to submit to inspections, questioning -- and probably even pat down searches if the evil spirit moved them, before we could leave their dismal, mass-marketed, herd-think sheep-pens (an alarming, offensive, dangerous development, but don’t get me raving).

So it went with the airlines. Oh, how they must have hated customers back in the good old days; it must have been a case of pure loathing, shuddering disgust. If we howled long enough they’d eventually have to give-in to nearly any of our insane demands – survival rations, Geneva Convention legroom and complimentary bulbs in the reading lamps. We could bankrupt them in a trice if we stuck to our guns. It was the fear of financial collapse that allowed us to keep the upper hand after the spate of hijackings to Cuba back in the 'Seventies. Flee TO Cuba? Even the airlines scratched their heads over that strategy. But after the deadly 9/11 terrorist attack they decided, like Rumsfeld salivating over a map of the Middle East, to make a clean sweep of the whole she-bang. Fix ALL the problems. No more box cutters, to be sure; but also no more 82 year-old ladies secreting nail files aboard. No more knives with your $9 snack (now you’ll have to overpower the aircrew with your spoon, goddammit.) No more complimentary pillows – you could easily smother the pilot with it, but you’re less likely to if you’ve had to pay a nominal fee. Luggage? Ha! Don’t even think of it, you stupid, worthless piece of dirt! Buy new stuff when you get to your destination. Everybody has to pay – Nobody git nuttin fer free! Exact change please, or you’ll be escorted off the aircraft by massive Mounties, stoked into a frenzy by sugary donuts and boredom. Necessity dictated we give the airlines a few inches and now they ruled. And we had their true measure; we felt their bite. Only the cashiers were toothless!

We, you and I, travelers, formerly the jet-setting customer who was always right, whose money would instantly buy comfort, convenience and glamorous adventure, who could take his business elsewhere if he didn’t like the treatment, has been reduced to zombified cattle, an inmate standing mutely in incessant lineups, mooing occasionally to pass the time, staring wall-eyed into the middle distance. We’re so far gone that we actually hope to see an automated check-in machine just so we don’t have to speak to one of THEM. A snaking chain of weary, luggage-laden passengers might only rate one attendant -- and any complaint about the situation might well result in your being clapped in irons. After all, making trouble in an airport is tantamount to Terrorism with a capital T, and that rhymes with G and that spells Dubya.

So, I distract myself by observing the slightly wobbly man in the lineup ahead with a 40-year-old piece of luggage; an aged, almost primeval, cavernous zip-up grip of tan vinyl so beaten-up and obsolete that upon seeing it farmyard animals would gladly sacrifice their own skins to save us all from having to gaze ever again upon such an eyesore. I note that, bizarrely, it has a ribbon tied to its handle to make it more obvious to its frail looking owner, who might mistake it amongst the thousands of bags which would look identical – would, that is, were he time-traveling back to the 1960s to smuggle toilet paper and bathtub plugs into the Soviet Union. I suspiciously eye the appalling toupee cocked oddly on the melon of this tremulous TJ Hooker wannabe and wonder if I’m being Punk’d.

Bored, I make a show, for my own amusement, of pawing through pockets for a breath mint. I am for a brief moment the Candy Columbo. I then amuse myself by imagining a huge American college marching band playing a jaunty up-tempo version of “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” at the Rose Bowl. Some sonofabitch would Die! Die, die, da-Die!!! Tom-Toms thunder in response. Trombones just a bit out of tune, but loud and proud nonetheless. Trumpet section does a Savardian Spin-o-Rama and the cheerleaders waggle their arses. (I imagine a number of arrangement and instrumentation options.) I try to come up with witty puns based on French language signage. I’m not very clever: ‘Hors Taxes’ has surely elicited snickering by English-speaking prats of countless generations. I calculate how long it might be before I get to the front of the line and then ask myself why in the hell I want to be next in line for the indignities to come. I look at the boarding pass really, really closely, yet again, and wonder why did the check-in attendant circle the space identifying the gate number when the space is blank? Do I just go to any old gate and hope for the best? Do I get a free sandwich on the plane if I guess right? The airline might institute such a ‘Guess for Grub’ policy to keep us all entertained and nourished! When I made this helpful suggestion the attendant gave me a flinty, glacial look and said, “Have a nice flight” with what I thought was a tone of veiled threat, as if she were mistress of a nefarious plan that had her submissive bee-atch boyfriend-pilot mischievously chanting Allahu Akbar over the intercom just before plunging into Immelman turns, reducing all the passengers into vomit spraying rag dolls, just for shits and giggles, of course. Meanwhile she’d be safely on the ground, polishing her long red fingernails and idly humming the Ride of the Valkyries with calm satisfaction. Do I really want to even go on this goddamn trip anyway?

I numbly await a nod or gesture, a brand, tattoo, stamp, firing of handguns into the air like the reckless revelry of a tinpot dictator – some signal of approval -- by the crack team of professional security screeners (read: former janitors) so that I can move along to the next queue -- where I publicly disrobe, am probed by electronic instruments, have my bags bombarded by strange rays (and, by the way, you mustn’t say ‘bombarded’ in security…It is too close to ‘bomb’, and we all know how much of a boo-boo speaking that word would be. Even Roger Ebert has to speak positively of ‘Deuce Bigalow European Gigolo’ in airport security.) But, if I have to take off my shoes and belt how come Shatner’s shaky stunt double doesn’t have to doff that inexcusable rug? It’s all so maddening. If I make it through this gauntlet, they will eventually herd me onto the aircraft.

A modern jet aircraft can routinely do things no one dared dream a hundred years ago. It’s nothing short of a technological miracle. Its seat belt, on the other hand, is not. Comparatively it’s only a little more complicated than the wooden club that cavemen mastered even before the advent of installment plan buying. From this historical perspective, standing on the shoulders of giants as it were, this plane-load of lap restraint Isaac Newtons all, I and my fellow passengers, grok the fucking ‘do-up-yer-belt concept’ already. Honestly. To a person. The 4' 10" Great-Grandmother two rows back, wearing the sari, who only speaks Hindi, can work the seatbelt flawlessly, too. She knows how to undo it, as well. I guarantee it. Brief us on the GPS system. Or the fly-by-wire technology. Or the servo-mechanisms which replaced hydraulics. Or the Heads-Up-Display. Or, here’s a good one…Brief us on Bernoulli’s Principle which explains why this big crate can achieve sufficient lift to get airborne -- once and forever banishing banal comments such as ‘I just don’t believe this thing actually gets off the ground’, as if it’s not physics but God’s Will that gets us to Heathrow. Hear me, I beg you, for all that is holy, with all the many aspects of a jet plane to choose from, the seat belt is the last one we need a briefing on. Yes, yes, like so many wanderers of our globe, we seek portals to higher realms of consciousness; ergo, we ought to be able to figure where the goddamn exit doors are. On an unrelated note, as I jackknife myself into the Herve Villechaize-sized mockery of a seat I have been assigned, I become acutely aware that I want to kick Robert Milton in the nuts as hard as possible. Be that as it may, it’s inconceivable that every adult on Earth can’t be given the benefit of the doubt on this safety briefing stuff. But we must sit through the bored-as-shit flight attendant’s perfunctory semaphore gesticulations. “…While standing on one foot, draw back the other leg and swing it forward rapidly, striking repeatedly the nuts of our CEO…” And now, une plus de fois en Français.


VRD
1/06