My Improptu Honeymoon

“You want to go?” Carol asked. She seemed anxious for a decision. We had just passed a sign reading GREY LINE TOURS: NIAGRA FALLS and we were now passing the on-ramp to the freeway, our one opportunity to reach that destination.

“I do,” I said. “But for me this is just a return to hitch-hiking days. The real question is how do you feel?”

Carol slowed the car to a crawl. “How much food do we have?”

“Well, a box a’ crackers, most of a jar of peanut butter and some of that drink mix you like.”

She chuckled. “Hey, we are all set!”

“Jack Kerouac would think so.”

“Just to be sure, Niagra’s only about seven hours from here, right?”

I was a little testy over having to repeat myself: “Again, I don’t actually know. My friends say it is though, and just to ask, does it really matter? It could be ten hours and we’d still need a day to really get there and see the place, right?”

Carol raised her eyebrows to signify a conclusion. “…And y’know what?” she said, “This’s probably gonna’ be our last chance to take this trip before gas is six bucks a gallon!” She then cranked the wheel to its leftmost position and applied new pressure to the gas pedal to take us onto the highway and adventure.

Our trip had begun as a frenzied journey to see my then-hospitalized father in Cleveland, but, finding him not merely well but lively, we made plans to visit an old college friend of mine about an hour away in the north-east corner of the state. In spite of a call beforehand though, that friend, distracted by other commitments, was not at home, and so we ultimately found ourselves in the driveway of his house, facing the prospect of either inconveniencing my parents for another night or starting the long drive back to our home in Indiana. Then we saw the sign for Niagra though, and at first we just chuckled at the notion of such a spontaneous trip, but we also began to weigh the option of just having a small adventure...and after three years of almost nothing but responsibility, we chose the excitement.

Once on our way, the road before us seemed the perfect environment for anyone in a mood for discovery. Mysteriously unidentifiable trees and bushes flanked the asphalt in the dark, and the anonymous houses, businesses and facilities passing us only added to the mystery and anticipation. The black strip before us seemed like a destiny, and, for at least a while, I anticipated its unguessable end-point with excitement.

Unfortunately though, crossing into Pennsylvania killed that mood completely. Here the land seemed exhausted, and the whole area was scrubby and unverdant, with only some run-down stores and shambled houses as signs of a mere, flickering life. I no longer saw myself heading into a place of mystery and wonder, but into some post-industrial wasteland, a place without event but still full of peril—if only that of a prolonged stranding!

On our entry into New York State though, the greater amounts of plants, people and buildings implied both economic vitality and the many small dangers of both city life and wildlife, but I was actually happy to be in this new and at least somewhat challenging place. The radio’s automatic tuner had stumbled onto a Canadian station and so it was playing music new to us, and the very unfamiliarity of those songs subliminally added to my then-current sense of strangeness and wonder, and both Carol and I fell into a swoon.

An hour down the road form the state line we crossed an arching bridge high enough to excite Carol’s acrophobia, and so I held and caressed her hand while cooing softly to calm her. Off the bridge though, we needed only twenty more minutes to reach the parking lots for the falls, and even from those concrete slabs we could hear the sound of all that vast and ceaseless water. Upon leaving the car we simply began, without saying a word, to wander directly away from the road and toward the greater volume of noise. Unfortunately though, we quickly realized that the complexity of landscape, with all its trees, buildings, hills and vales, blocked the constant roar unevenly and left us unable to guess our way.

We then stumbled on a parked police cruiser and asked the officer behind the wheel for directions. Unfortunately he had a sense of humor.

“You do know they shut the thing down at night, don’t you?” he said, but after our journey we must’ve been pictures of annoyance over encountering even so small an obstacle as his uncooperation. He looked at our faces in sad sympathy and then promised never to make that joke again.

He then explained the best path to the falls to us, and, following his directions, we quickly arrived before the twin torrents of American Falls and Horseshoe falls. After only twenty minutes, the sheer vastness of this natural wonder, the romance of the place and the insane spontaneity of our journey got to me, and I once again proposed to Carol, who, oddly, and in spite of an obvious prior agreement to the idea, refused. Her engagement ring was still back in Indiana after all, and she just wasn’t going to marry anyone, not even a current husband, without it.

After that, we just stood, staring in wonder at the incomprehensibly vast water plummeting to the ground, and I just had to ask a stupid question:

“So, do you think it can actually be prettier with the lights on?” My tone betrayed my disbelief.

“I don’t know” Carol said. “I just wonder why people feel they have add to something like this.”

I had to nod to that. Nothing in the world could actually add to the experience of The Falls. Regardless of that, though, after an hour and a half staring at this natural wonder and fending off mosquitoes we decided to take our tired selves somewhere to sleep.

Getting back in our Toyota, we found a park available for camping and tried sleeping there in our car. Unfortunately though, we soon found that even the slightest motion by either of us would rock the entire vehicle and wake us both. We therefore decided to lay ourselves on the ground under the stars, and, as a city boy unused to the sheer density of starts normal to rural skies and the utter solidity of the Milky Way overhead, I once again had to stare at the silent spectacle of it all. Even in the face of that miracle though, I began to drift to sleep....

But then there was a growling and a scratching from the bushes...

“…Carol…hey, Carol…wake up!…there’s some kind of animal out there.”

My wife did not completely wake. “…So?’ She glurg'd without opening her eyes.

“Well, we don’t know what it is. Maybe we should get back in the car.”

“Everything’s louder ‘n the woods. …T’S prol'ly jus' a ‘coon 'r a woo'f or som'th’n’.”

“You sure?”

“…Well, ‘f it’s a bear, we’re probably dead already,” and with that conclusion she rolled away from me and returned to sleep. A moment later, though, she sat up, laughing. I assumed this to be a sign that she had figured out the species of our semi-intruder and that that creature would turn out to be amazingly unthreatening. She then turned to me, still smiling.

“Do you realize what I said?”

“Well, yeah...that the ‘thingie’ over in the bushes there was probably no problem. So?"

“No, I said it was probably only just a wolf….and on hearing that, you just decided to go back to sleep.” She laughed at her realization again and rolled back on her side.

“So?” I said to her back. We had a wolf at home, originally a pet of my wife's, but now probably closer to me, and so I tend to see wolves more as friends than predators. I therefore couldn't see Carol's very obvious point. “Don’t think he’ll come’n play with us." I said. "He’d be wild! He'll keep to himself.” Carol then laughed again at my lack of alarm, and just said that she was too tired to explain the peculiarity of my comments. We both went back to sleep.

At some point those mosquitoes found us again and vampirically chased us back into the car. We awoke in the morning with huge appetites though, and, counting our few bills and coins, we decided to go to Denny’s and split a Grand-slam with grits. Now, for a guy from a largely Polish neighborhood in the citified north, grits are somehow both exotic and all-American, but unfortunately, the short-order cook behind our breakfast seemed to be taking his recipes from The All-Cholesterol Cook-Book. My bowl had nothing but undercooked corn grindings floating in melted butter, and I had to force it down

Our next day at the falls was fun but without specific incident. We saw those same vastnesess in broad daylight, and both our familiarity with them and their loss of any night-borne mystery made them seem just a little smaller to us, but the sheer clarity of our daylight view also illustrated to me that the sheer height, volume and magnitude of these natural wonders was beyond anything in my experience and that I could only pretend to understand the eternal event of The Falls through some abstraction like numbers of tons of water. We also stumbled onto Bridal Falls, plainly visible from our original perch and we felt just a little stupid for not noticing it previously, though beside theses two greater falls it did seem like a lesser attraction.

We had no money to pay admission to the caves behind the falls, or the tour boats at their foot, or the many incidental attractions in the town, and so we spent the day simply wandering and imagining ourselves to be one of the first white explorers to this area or one of the Indians living here before their arrival. After a day of this meandering though, we recognized the need to be back in Indiana by the start of work the next day and so we returned to the car, sad to leave but fully aware that responsibility was another word for necessity; and we had plenty of both! All through the long drive back to Ohio though, even the land seemed to offer me reasons to stay. The industrialized wilds of New York seemed even more interesting and alluring, and the tired, used land in of Pennsylvania seemed even less of a reason to leave this better place. Back in Cleveland we stopped again at my parents’ house and said some depressingly lasting farewells before we started lugging ourselves back home. From there the trip seemed eternal, and I wasn’t happy till I saw our house....

My Days in the Lab

My psychopharm' professor squinted at me from between his beard and his long hair. As a scientist and scholar, he liked to inspect, then dissect anything before his eyes, and I perceived myself as the current object of his analysis. I probably tensed a little. I then worked up the nerve to speak.

"Uh, Dr. Gilly..." I said, then paused, waiting for him to speak.

The pause must've carried on a little to long though..."Yes..." he said in a slight tone of irritation.

"You're basically impressed by my lab-work, right?"

Gilly's eyebrows rose in a display of both curiosity and annoyance, perhaps over a statement of the obvious. "Well, yes. Me and Dr. Scheuge both."

"And so you'd basically say that I'm competent enough to perform an experiment..."

His annoyance grew more overt. "You’ve already run experiments, John. Is there something you're trying to get to?"

I stammered a little. I wasn't expecting to get to my point so fast. "Well," I said "it’s just this: it’s is my senior year, and so after this, I'm either going to be a grad' student or a worker. In either case though, I'm probably not going to have a chance to do any really weird, wild experiments, and I didn’t want to leave my undergraduate years without having at least one...you know...'adventure in science.'”

Gilly grinned, perhaps in condescension of my intent as much as at my use of that last phrase, a slogan of science education common during both my boyhood and his. "...And the reason you're asking me?"

"I've done work with you!"

Gilly now spoke very slowly, as though speaking to someone too slow to understand his point: "No, I mean why specifically are you asking me? You've also worked with Dr. Scheuge and you did that one thing with your...what was he?...your 'developmental' prof'?"

"Well yeah, but all I've been doing with Schurge is crunching numbers, and the project with the other prof was actually a class assignment in Cognitive--"

"So, again, you've also done work with that prof.'" Gilly seemed pleased at an apparent refutation of one of my points.

"...Look, to me at least, you seem more open to new ideas. So I kind'a figured if I ever did something really wild, I'd probably have to ask you."

Gilly now grinned even more broadly, like a lawyer about to win a case. "...And the simple analysis of existing data like you've been doing with Dr. Schuege never gets that exciting, right?"

His question was at least a bit of a trap; after all, a scientist must put the pursuit of knowledge ahead of a search for even the most intellectual sort of thrills. I didn't fall for it, though. "No," I told him, "obviously, some of the greatest finds have been made by people just going through the scientific version of the daily grind. But I can spend the rest of my life crunching numbers. Like I said, this will be my one chance to do something wild. I'll admit it; this is for me."

Gilly took a moment to speak. Apparently the sheer honesty of my answer surprised him.

"So...are you hoping to create artificial life, or flat-line, or what?”

I still foresaw a set-up for rejection, and I was a little stymied. I hadn't quite thought the matter that far through. “I’m not sure yet. I know that sounds a little stupid, but I was hoping you’d have an idea.”

He nodded. "Well, I can run through a few drug catalogs and see what I find.”

He returned his attention to the reading on his desk. I didn't get up though; his answer just surprised me too much. After a moment he looked up at me again.

"Is there anything more than that?” Gilly sounded genuinely puzzled.

“Well, do we have to do another drug?” All of the prior experiments I’d been on with him had been tests of drugs."

Gilly stared at me in annoyed patience. “Well, this is the psychopharmicology lab. That’s what we do here. I take it you’re hoping for something weirder than the testing of a chemical though, right?”

“Well, basically....”

Gilly chuckled. “Trust me," he said, "I’ll find something absolutely buh-zarre!”

Gilly did live up to his promise. In Sandoz Laboratory’s large, grey, hard-bound volume listing the names, properties and molecular structure of their drugs, he found a supposed “smart pill,’ a drug called piracetam, theorized to remove certain long, inter-neural protein strands which hamper brain activity. Tests on neurally-damaged rats, chimps and humans had given mixed results, and some had praised it as the miracle cure for such problems as Alzheimer’s Disease while others had scoffed at any evidence of its effectiveness as simply so much error. Of course, in light of all this disagreement, both Gilly and I expected to have lots of fun running the tests. Nothing excites a scientist more than an actual chance to figure something out.

Gilly ordered a a large jar of the drug from the manufacturer, and receiving it a week later, he gave me two cognitively decrepit rats used in a previous study on the effects of cocaine to use as test subjects. Before taking any further action, however, he and I followed a semi-tradition in his field of science and sampled the material. It had no effect on us, however, other than a temporary excitement over the possibility of discovery.

The next day we began the experiments. Each day Gilly or I would dissolve a tablet of piracetam into a set amount of distilled water, and then he, being an actual university employee, would then inject either a measured amount of the resulting milky fluid or an equal amount of pure H2O into our rodents’ undersides. We would then put our subjects in a “vigilance box,” where they would earn a small pellet of food by pressing a bar each time a light went on. The device basically measured their ability to pay attention, a good indicator of overall cognitive function, by determining how many times they reacted to the light, and we thus compared their scores when on piracetam to those achieved without the drug.

We ran the experiments for about two months, and, frustratingly, as the results came in we found that the rats were indeed improving at their task, but that the rise in their scores was just a little too slight for us to rule out dumb luck as the cause. Gilly, the disciplined, workaday scientist, was willing simply to accept out findings as inconclusive, but, wanting to leave my academic years on a high note, I would not accept anything but a conclusion, positive or negative. Ultimately, I decided to deal with this ambiguity as many scientists before me have done, and I began to search scientific journals for an acceptable way to alter my experiment or data to produce a result. To be clear, my efforts would not falsify my experiment; any procedure in the journals has, after all, stood up to at least some scrutiny from professional scientists and is therefore valid. Furthermore, I had seen researchers, even in the hard sciences like physics, grinning somewhat cynically over a decision to re-run an experiment in a new way designed specifically to gain a desired outcome, and so I had only the smallest tremors of conciounse over the decision to take this general course . After all, like other scientists, I was trying to make a point, and like other scientists I was really just taking the logical steps to do so. Having decided on that action, however, I now had to find a specific means.

Gilly suggested running the experiment with a larger test-group. His reasoning was solid: According to The Law of Small Numbers, an experiment run on a test group of less than thirty must show a larger overall change than one on a larger group because the cause of an effect could simply be the oddness of the very few subjects involved. Unfortunately though, I didn’t have enough time before graduation to muddle through the paper-work for material and clearances needed to run our tests again. I then suggested comparing the results after injections specifically to those from before we gave any injections. Gilly rejected this idea, though, correctly pointing out that no scientist can ever simply cherry-pick his facts. At this point, I suggested just running the experiment for two more weeks without injections. We wouldn’t have to clear such a thing with the university, and I just might be able to record the rat's overall improvement since the start of the injections, a rise in overall scores that may have actually decreased the difference injection and non-injection test sufficiently to give us a false negative result.

For lack of any alternative, we adopted this idea, and interestingly, we did finally find a meaningful difference. The rats actually performed better in this last series of test than they had at any other time, and in light of this result, I even theorized that some ingredient in the capsules might be offsetting the effect of the drug itself for at least some time after administration. At this point, I would've liked to test my hypothesis by comparing the results of experiments using a powdered or seral form of piracetam to those using dissolved capsules of the stuff, but this near to graduation I would have to leave that question either unanswered or in the hands of other researchers.

As a conclusion to this drama of science, I sent the paper for the experiment to a professional psychologists’ convention for possible presentation, along with another "hipper" one on the attitudes of blacks and whites toward people of more than one race. The people in charge of that convention accepted both of them, to the somewhat insulting surprise of my Theories of Learning Prof,' but they scheduled them for simultaneous display in two inconveniently distant booths at diagonally opposite ends of a large ball room, leaving me to prove my abilities as a long-distance runner. In the end, my experiment did not "prove" anything, of course, but by the end of my days in the lab, I'd read enough of the scientific journals to know that most research ends simply in a best guess rather than an actual conclusion. In light of this though, I can still take pride in having offered science a useful and practical suggestion rather than an abstraction posing as fact. In all, my experience made me appreciate the great fallibility of any human endeavor to find the truth, but it also gave me a great respect for men like Gilly, who struggle so hard to avoid error. Gilly seemed to have reached for this goal by concentrating his efforts on testing the real-world effects of things rather than the validity of theorums, and after knowing him, I can only hope that as many scientists as possible follow his way.

A Night on the Street

So I find myself standing in front of this smiling behemoth, and he's swinging a club....

My friends had already chosen different directions of escape. I was alone in the dark. One friend with experience of prison had even stated my problem: this ape probably had more weapons, and he was probably willing to kill....

The vacant lot around offered no objects usable as weapons, and the nearest buildings were both too far to reach ahead of an attack and too featureless to offer any hiding place once there. Escape and evasion were, at best then, unlikely.

The guy already had his muscles tensed, and he had his right side toward me in preparation to attack. He had his forward knee crouched for kicking, and the elbow and fingers of his opposite arm were curled to grab and club me. Hell, he was even in colors, and wether in the reds of a crip or the blues of a cop, he posed the same problem: the willingness of gangsters, gangstuhs and heat to inflict their personal sense of justice on passer-by like me.

Now I'm not a bad fighter. If nothing else, I can certainly block the average opponent long enough to find and exploit a weakness. I did, however, lack one tactical advantage of the man before me: an apparent joy in inflicting harm. In the event of a fight, sheer glee would likely keep his attack constant, energetic and unpredictable; and both that fact and the weapon in his hand were very likely to end me up with more than one broken bone.

Well, Dr. Dre may want ta' strap on da' gat to lay da' bitch out flat, but I preferred ta' use mu' brain to dodge all dat pain. In high school one of my nick-names had been "Con-Man" due to my talent at persuasion, and current Cherokee, Lakota and Pottawatomie friends had village-named me "Smiling Pig" for the same reason. To judge from their opinion then, I did have at least a chance of pulling through on my verbal skills.

In my experience, both criminals and police are, in some way or other, acting out of insecurity. Both cops and Crips believe themselves to be the victims of a general injustice as well as the representatives of a wronged people, and both take similar actions to correct the problem, though with profoundly different legal justifications. As a part of this mentality though, both like to cast themselves in the role of protector for their supposed fellow victims. Neither side would probably find much hard evidence for this idea in this complicated world of course, but such feelings do give them a sense of power, importance and are strength.

Standing there, facing the possibility of blunt trauma to my head, I probably had no better way to deal with this belligerent than to appeal to that feeling. To avoid a battering, I would have to become a victim, like him. My first step in that plan, however, would have to be to lull him out of his animal preparedness to fight, and to do this I would have to be to appear as unthreatening as possible. Unfortunately, given this guy's probable ability to read an opponent, that appearance would have to be at least somewhat accurate.

With only slim hope for my safety, I resigned myself to this one possibility for defense. I relaxed my back In order not to seem very alert, then raised my hands, palms up, to shoulder-height in a show resigned confusion. I was no longer in a position to punch or chop in the event of an attack, but I was basically hoping for the appearance of such an unexpectable and puzzling reaction to get him to ask himself questions about the man before him and thus distract himself from the fight.

My aspiring assailant kept the same fighting stance and glaring stare, but he also seemed to slacken the muscles in his arms. Well, every cop and every criminal is, somewhere down deep, as prone to doubt as less violent types, and to judge by appearances I was reaching a little of his doubt. I didn't kid myself about the effectiveness of my deception, though. This guy could still go back into a combat mindset at any time. To get him to drop that club, I would have to do more.

Lacking any better idea than simply building on my current strategy, I shrugged my shoulders and widened my eyes in hopes of communicating my feigned puzzlement more abjectly, perhaps even strongly enough to get him talking to me. After even a short conversation, after all, I would be more of a person and less of a punching bag to him, and he would therefore find me harder to attack.

He continued to stare at me, but he also cocked his head as though inspecting me. Well, I was getting a little further through my escape plan, and he was orienting himself more to thought than to action. I would have to try to turn thinking into more of a habit for him, though. Damn it! If only he would talk....

"Didn't you hear what I said?" he announced in possibly feigned bravado, slapping his club into his hand with an authoritative smack. "I asked you what you're doing here!"

He hadn't said a word before that, but I didn't argue that point. My lame duck act was apparently working on him, and so he was probably trying to find weakness in me as a justification to teach me a violent lesson in the drawbacks of that supposed weakness. Well, I would now have to walk a conversational tight-rope. I would have to avoid seeming either bold enough to challenge him or weak enough to obey him. I decided just to try to make the question of respect irrelevant.

"I'm lost!" My tone of naive confusion was the verbal expression of the look on my face.

"You're lost!?" He exclaimed in a feigned shock intended to threaten. "Well, you better figure out where the hell you are!"

"I wish I knew." I said, continuing the appearance of simple confusion, "...You won't believe how I got here!"

"Well," he said in mocking tones, "why don't you just tell me allll about it"

Regardless of his attitude of disdain, I used his question as an excuse to tell him about my evening and myself. I was of course very careful to include enough details about me to make myself a specific individual to him, and I also made sure to talk in a style sufficiently entertaining to interest him and just confusing enough to make him ask questions. He would be less likely to damage a source of interest and entertainment.

Despite all my efforts though, his face and posture showed only limited change. He was probably seeing through my ploy to some degree, but I had expected that. Hell, according to the best con-man's logic though, I only had to appeal to a want or need of his strong enough to make that irrelevant. Unfortunately however, I just couldn't find one.

Lacking any other options, I decided to lull him by affirming his possible self-image of rightness and power. First, I began to hinge telling each further detail on his permission to do so, thus further confirming him as the decision-maker of our group of two. I also smiled at every step in the conversation, implying my actual approval of him in that role.

This process of demilitarizing him was slow of course, but by a series of separate, unconscious steps he came to stand slack shouldered beside me. I didn't kid myself about the ultimate efficacy of my actions, though. Any pacification of this man would be temporary. Still, to escape I now only had to find a way to excuse myself without re-creating his previous mood. I started looking for a conversational ploy of egress. Unfortunately however, that search distracted me somewhat from keeping in character, and I began using habits of speech somewhat peculiar to me. He reacted oddly to one:

"'On...your....watch...'" he said, repeating the final words of my last spoken sentence with a new level of snarl.

"yeah" I said, wondering at his interest in my phrasing. "...you know...on my shift at work."

"Yeah, but...on your watch!"

Did he have some kind of problem with that phrase? I had to figure that out quick. "Well, yeah, my watch--"

He glowered at me and chuckled. "Were you in the Navy?"

Was that phrase specific to that branch of the service? More importantly, could he have some weird hatred of that branch? "Uh, no...my dad was though...and a lot of his stuff just kind of...rubbed off on me."

He grinned widely. The look on his face may have been a sign of a long delayed greeting, but it also may have been a return of his earlier joy for upcoming violence. "Your dad was Navy!" he said, apparently in some sort of conclusion.

"Well, yeah"--I now had no idea what to say, but I knew enough just to keep talking--'like Jesus was the son of God! He wasn't in when I was growing up, but it affected him totally and for the rest of his life." My small witticism might bring his club down on my head, but I didn't have the option of simply saying nothing. I had to keep control of events--and if necessary, I still just might be able to spin my words and actions into something to re-pacify him.

He took a step toward me, and I tensed badly. My shoulders rose in a preparation for that strenuously avoided fight....

Seeing my tension though, he clapped me lightly on those shoulder and laughed with at least an apparent warmth.

"My dad was navy, too!" he declared like the punch-line to a favorite joke. Clearly, my father's not actually being in during my own life did not matter to him. "I know all about being a navy son! I been through it all!"

To my mind, he was now just searching for another affirmation of himself, but one as the tested son of a military sailor. With any luck, I could just use a few more bits of navy slang, affirm him in this new status, and leave on a handshake.

Unfortunately though, the man before me had other ideas. He again repeated my status as my father's son...and then asked me to breakfast.

He still seemed to want nothing more than to wallow in my affirmations, but keeping such an actively positive and affected view for another hour would be tiring and risky at best. Still, rejecting his well-armed invitation was likely to set me back to my original problem....

McDonald's was just re-opening by now, and I was very nervous as we went in. We ordered English-muffin sandwiches and coffee, and, surprisingly, my attempted assailant insisted on paying, no doubt out of both a self-opinion of magnanimity and a gratitude for someone at last seeming to understand him so completely. Then we began to talk. Interestingly, he had recently read the book The Bullet-Proof Miind and, he centered our conversation on it. At first, the idea of him reading such a heavy, intellectual tome surprised me, but I ultimately caught myself in my own ignorant presumption. He wasn't always the man before me, after all. He could've easily grown up in a perfectly normal home with an interest in ideas and only later decided to turn his current ways. Hell, he could've even grown up in the 'jects but with parents and teachers willing to foster at least some interest in the life beyond the streets. I'd met more than one such person in my life.

To judge from our conversation, he had probably not read the book so much as gotten through some part of the first chapter, but he seemed to be expecting me to give him credit for the whole job as yet another form of praise. I gave it to him by making a single, smiling nod to his every statement. He seemed to have started the thing in an effort to prove himself to himself as someone fit to face combat and military discipline. Of course, I agreed with him on this also. I couldn't afford not to use such an available way to flatter and persuade.

Oddly, over our talk, I actually began to like at least some aspects of this previous source of threat. Somewhere, down deep, he was really just another guy desperately trying to keep a good opinion of himself. He had apparently taken to his current very risky life to avoid a verdict of stupidity from himself and those around him, and part of me could honestly feel sorry for him over it.

Once out of the restaurant, we both went opposite ways down the street. I had no specific direction to go, but I was planning to find a bus stop and solve my problems from there. Interestingly, though, I had to go to no such effort. After turning the first corner I saw my wife walking jitteringly toward me at the far end of the block. Apparently, she been looking for me for most on the night and had spent the morning in frantic worry.

"I called your mom to tell her what happened, and you won't believe what she said!"--Carol's tone betrayed her agitation--"She said 'don't worry; he could talk his way out of anything!'" Ah yes, my adoptive mother was, at times, remarkably unsupportive, but always very accurate. She also seemed to understand that my genetic, Irish ancestors had not simply kissed the Blarney Stone but had, in all probability, performed intimate acts with it.

Carol went on to tell me the events of her stressful evening, and comparing her night to the genuinely genial conclusion of my own, I had to giggle. Yes, I had been in grave danger, but on some level I'd also had a thrilling adventure and ended up with a story to tell....

A Night at the Movies

...So we pulled up to this googleplex of a cinema, and the pre-fab movie-torium before me just served as another reminder, not of the wonder and surprise I had experienced as a young cinephile, but of that awful, blank feeling of entertainment as an industry and the celluloid equivalent of high-school cafeteria food.



My mood sank. God, I didn't want to see a movie! In the past week, American banking had gone through its largest collapse since the great depression, and in the face of that and other financial news, I, as a breadwinner, was worrying with the rest of the nation about the possibility of a poverty unknown among working people since my grandparents' day. In the face of this looming danger, a trip to the flicks seemed wildly irresponsible, a flippant attempt to spend cash in the face of an obvious, forthcoming need. Unfortunately though, I had no way to get out of this little trip. After all, I had been the jerk who had originally pushed not only for this outing, but for this specific picture. Worse though, unlike myself, Carol had spent the last several weeks cooped up in our house, and I couldn't exactly ignore her need not to go stir crazy.



Oh, the hell with it! We went up into the theater's lobby, a large chamber of shiny plastic surfaces meant to seem both efficient and attractively futuristic but which was really more empty and blank than anything else. Frustratingly, once at the ticket counter we found that we were actually over an hour early for the next showing....



These things happen. Carol and I live less than a hundred yards from one of the very arbitrary lines between Eastern and Central time, and occaisionally we misunderstand which time zone something is in or which one is stated. In short though, we suddenly had a lot of time to kill, and we decided on a trip to a local burger-flippery called Schoop's.



Now Schoop's was a fixture on route 66 in the days of an allegedly more innocent and adventurous America. People had sat in these very booths on their way home from France or Korea, or on their way out on a psychedelic trip to some better, freer place; and the decor definitely showed these themes. Alongside coke ads from before my birth hung posters of James Dean, glossies of Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., album covers from the sexy 70's and art photography commemorating the history of The Blues. The booths, tables, seats and counter were shiny, hygienic plastic, a previous age's vision of a possible high-tech future; and the menu, of course, featured the favorites of every roadside diner: burgers, fries, shakes, coffee and assorted quick-friable treats. Carol and I both ordered cornbread, hers with tea and mine with java, and we decided to take in the retro-pop on the sound system.



I needed to relax. Yes, on one hand Carol had spent the past three weeks as a prisoner in our home, but on the other, I'd spent those weeks sweating hard enough at work to earn a promotion. I did have to be doing at least something right then, and I supposed that, in light of all that, I could use a break. I got into the music and the food and just started to let my mind wander.



The stereo was playing a top-40 hit of the late 70's, and it took me back to my high school days. I imagined myself back in tenth grade again, also in a diner, and still having the same food but with my friends of that time. I thought about us dreaming of our intended futures as film directors, comic book writers, or science fiction novelists, and I began to miss them. My friends and I had wanted to change the world, to re-make Hollywood, comics and sci-fi into something truly worthwhile, but apparently we all got into the real world and gave up those dreams to pay the rent.



Out of nostalgia, I began to affect the slang of my teens and started discoursing on the films of Robert Altman, my favorite director back then. I hadn't talked about that sort of thing for about twenty years, but somehow I was still able to develop and defend new ideas about the art of cinema. Apparently that teen-age film-freak who I once was still lived inside me, but I was surprised and saddened to see how long we'd been out or touch. Why hadn't we talked more?



With that question in mind, however, I looked across the table to my beautiful wife. Clearly, I had not become a great writer or film-maker, but I had made a decent life for myself and our family, and after so many years together, Carol and I had literally evolved into a unity. Okay, we had done so through a long series of conflicts and unexpected rewards, but we were indeed together and basically happy. In a way my dreams of literary or show-biz success had probably been just hopes for recognition and affection, and well, now I had them both.



Heading back to the movie theater though, I continued to contemplate the views of that allegedly artsier version of me, and I couldn't help thinking about how much our personalities affects our appreciation of films, music, television and books. A few weeks ago, my pop-culture brother had sent me a wonderful gift, the first two volumes of DC comics' anthologies of its original Sgt. Rock, and, upon opening it, I had remembered reading those same stories as a young boy and thinking to myself that they gave me an incredibly tough and therefore very real view of the war my father had fought in. Now however, quite incredibly, I found these very same stories to be quite sentimental, even purposefully so; however I also found a new and rawer kind of violence in them, that of someone making an entirely unselfconscious recollection of utter brutality. The very bright grade-schooler who had read those same stories might not have been able to see that quality in the work, but the current me could. With this thought in mind then, I contemplated the idea that reviewers might want to write their reviews, not as a Consumer Reports of the movies, but as descriptions of their own personal experiences in the theater, a travelog of their latest trip to the flicks.



I was in a markedly better mood by the start of the film. True, I could not foresee the fate of the world's economy, but I could certainly enjoy a movie. In fact, tonight's fare, Duplicity, let me appreciate it in many different ways. That young film-freak still inside me could contemplate it as an interesting portrayal of the world of corporate espionage; and the simple fan of entertainment sitting in my seat could just enjoy it as just a taught-plotted thriller with all the needed twists and ironies. Lastly, my wage-earner self could just take it as a two hour break from his responsibilities. All in all, that wasn't too bad for a "B" flick.



Leaving the theater, I was inwardly laughing at both myself and my situation. in a way, this movie had, like some of the great works of cinema, let me contact some unaccessed part of myself. In another way though, that part of me was not some higher self, but merely a happier, simpler and earlier version of the current me. The flick was just some B-grade celluloid of course, but it had definitely given me more than a simple distraction. Like some great works of cinema, it had changed me just a little.

Death in the Afternoon

...I think that God doesn't want me to live any more" My cousin Joyce's voice was tinny over the long-distance lines.

Unfortunately though, like most people listening to someone else's problems, I was only paying half my attention. In my experience, including two years on a hot-line, someone invoking suicide usually does so either to dramatize their problems or to pressure others into an action, and any attempt to discuss their possible willingness to take this action almost invariably produced nothing more that denial and the accusation that I did not understand something. With this in mind then, I did not at first take her threat as anything more than simple overstatement, and I filed it in my mind as simply a sign that Joyce was having a crisis. From there, I just followed the cynical and effective wisdom of the Men Are from Mars set for dealing with women by listening without saying anything. I made a grunting noise to show my attention, but then took a long sip of coffee and and continued my mental search for a ten letter word for traffic. I would pay for that decision about a minute later., however.

"John," Joyce said suddenly, "Are you even listening to what I'm saying?"

Now, no one likes questions like that. You can never guess what someone will accept as proof that your paying attention. I had to say something, though,

"Haven't you heard me on the line?" I asked.

"I'm not saying you haven't been holding the phone next to your your ear," she said, "I'm asking if you actually know what I'm talking about."

"Well, you've been talking about how lazy and needy your husband's being and how upset you are about your son being in jail again, no?"

I could hear Joyce moan in annoyance. "Yes," she lightly hissed, "That's what I've been saying. But do you know what it all means?"

I still wasn't seeing Joyce's words as anything other than a little melodrama, and so I continued to disregard them as a reason for her question. Lacking any other idea of what to say, however, I tried to stick to the obvious and the sympathetic in hopes of keeping her talking about her problems and maybe even letting a few of them out.

"It means you're unhappy." I said. "It means that two of the most important people in your life seem to just be expecting you to meet their needs without meeting any of yours, and personally, I can sympathize with you on this. Or am I wrong about that?"

She apparently didn't find much in my claim of sympathy. "...John, is that really what you think I'm saying?"

Now, I'd already been on the line over an hour, and hearing Joyce's repetition of a question she could answer in one sentence made me wonder if she was just going to continue asking it. I decided to try something that was useful in such cases on the hotline.

"Well, it is what you said. It may or may not be what you meant though; but that's a different question. Is there something you feel I'm just not getting about what you're saying?"

Joyce sighed, and I took that to mean she was losing hope about something. "Yes, I do, and I'm starting to see that calling you was a mistake. I'm going to hang up now."

The idea of her stopping the call took me slightly aback. I felt a little insulted by her apparent judgement that I hadn't been paying attention and a little annoyed at having contributed over an hour of my time to this possibly futile effort, and so, perhaps to disprove my inattention to Joyce and perhaps just to rescue my standing effort from becoming a waste, I began to try to look for ways to keep her on the phone.

"Well, I can't stop you from doing that, obviously, but do you really think the people back where you live will have a different reaction if you have this same kind of conversation with them?"

"Don't blame me for this!" she said. "I'm not the one who isn't listening."

I purposely misunderstood her. "I'm not blaming you for anything. For me to blame you, you'd have to do something wrong, right? I mean, you haven't done anything against the law or anything, have you? I'm just saying that if you assume people who love you aren't making some kind of effort for you when they are, you may end up discouraging them from trying to help you. Now I do want to help you. If you feel there's something I haven't heard, you might have to say it more than once. You have prepared me to hear it."

Her voice was still somewhat accusative. "No," she said, "You have to figure out what you didn't hear."

Well, at least she wasn't trying to hang up....

"Look, whatever this is, you need help with it, right? Now, it's going to be a lot simpler for you to get help if you just tell me what's on your mind rather than making me play guessing games."

"Is that really what you think? I'm just playing guessing games?"

"Well, you're putting me in a position where I have to do that, whether you mean to or not."

"John, the thing I'm trying to see if you heard was something I said to you, and apparently you really didn't hear it."

"And why can't you just tell me what it is?"

"Because right now I need to know if anyone ever pays attention to me, that's why."

"Well, okay then, this must have something to do with your husband or your son. That's pretty much all you talked about, how Donny is back in reform school and Rob won't get a job and won't do anything around the house but still expects you to meet his romantic needs. I don't know if you just don't believe me or whatever, but I do sympathize with you on that--and you may not see the humor in it but I did love the part where he tries to go octopus on you and you were wearing the tenz machine." A tenz machine circulates electrical current through muscles to exercise and strengthen them. Joyce had to wear one due to a work accident, and her husband, in a recent attempt to get sex, grabbed her but received only the negative stimulus of a severe jolt.

I'd hoped my reference to her own story would make Joyce laugh, but her voice remained even. "That's not it, John, and at this point I am hanging up."

I was beginning to see that Joyce problem must be fairly large, and my interest in hearing that problem became stronger. "Well, before you go," I said,"Would you tell me what it is you wanted me to hear, just for my curiosity? If nothing else, hey, you'd have bragging rights or laughing rights on me about how I always thought that I knew what you think and feel but I got it wrong."

"You want me to share this with you just because you wonder about it!?" I'd hoped that finally showing me up for my arrogance would be a motivator for her, but apparently it wasn't.

"Well, if you're having some big kind of crisis, I must 'of screwed up in a really huge way by not figuring out what you've been saying, right? And I don't want to make that same mistake again, so I'm really just asking you to help me with that. I'm assuming you'd like to cure a little of my ignorance, and I'm asking you to be my teacher."

"Don't play me, john!"

"I'm not playing you. I'm just asking for you to do me a favor with benefits for both of us, that's all."

Joyce took quite a while before speaking. "John, you have no idea how serious what I'm going through is! If you did, you wouldn't be this jerk you're being."

I purposely made my voice as compassionate as possible, which only reflected my actual feelings. "Well, if you can tell me how serious it is, and then someone will know. Tell me, and maybe I can help you."

"...John, again, I really don't think you've been listening, and I really should just hang up and go on with my day."

I had one last idea on how to deal with this situation. 'Look, I can't actually stop you from hanging up. I will make you a deal, though. If you tell me what the problem is, I'll let you go without any bother." I was of course hoping for her to state some very small concern as the cause behind this drama, but I wasn't going to be that lucky.

"...John, I just don't think you understand. I just called because sometimes you have ideas about things that other people don't think of, and I called to see if you'd have any on the things that're happening to me right now but you don't."

"Well, this could still be one of those times." I said. "You may just have to tell me what the actual problem is, though. Certainly if I have a problem, I try to get as much input on it as possible, and I assume you're the same."

Joyce giggled, probably out of derision. "John, you never ask anyone for advice. You're a total jerk."

Well, she caught me in a lie, and I didn't even try the futile task of saving face. "Well, how 'bout just getting me off the line then? I've given you a way to do that. You just have to tell me what the hell this problem of yours is. If you don't and you have some kind of trouble with whatever this is, I'll be able to say that I could've helped you, but you wouldn't let me."

"...John, do you really want to know what the problem is?"

"Yes, I do."

"Okay, you are."

"Me?"

"You!"

"What the hell did I do?"

"Same as everybody else, you didn't listen. Nobody's listening to me, and I just don't want to put up with it anymore."

"Well...regardless of anything I did or didn't do in the past, I'm listening now. I think that I was listening to you, or at least trying to, while you were telling me all your problems, but I'm not going to argue about that. You apparently need me to hear something right now, and you feel that I haven't. I'm just going to ask you to tell me what that thing is and offer to help you the best I can."

"John, I'll say it again, I don't think that God wants me to be alive anymore. Now I said that before, and the fact that you didn't hear it the first time is probably one of the reasons why I feel this way."

"Look, I'm sorry I didn't hear that. I won't try to excuse that, but I thought you were just bitching, okay? I do want to help you with this if you'll let me. Can I at least give that a try?"

Joyce took another pause, probably one of judgement.

"I'm willing to try...."

"Okay then, this first thing I need to to ask you is do you yourself want to die?"

"No," she said. "I don't. That's why I'm on the phone with you right now."

"Well, that's a good thing right there then, cause, just to say it, I would really hurt if you died."

"...I wish I could believe that, John."

I was a little surprised to hear that. "What do you mean?"

"I mean you're just such a bullshitter. I realize you do me favors and stuff, but you're always saying things to have an effect on someone, not because it's the truth. I don't have any way of knowing whether you mean that or not."

I didn't bother trying to defend myself, but I did try to introduce just a little levity into Joyce's mood. "Well, have you ever considered that, If I'm such a great bullshitter, I could get out of doing you any favors pretty easily, so the fact that I'm willing to do things for you is at least some proof of my love for you?"--she didn't even giggle, and I decided to make other points--"To cover another question, though, you've already mentioned the fact that you feel I didn't listen to you as one of the reasons for this feeling that God wants you dead. Are there any others?" I didn't want to assume that her assorted troubles with her husband and her son were a cause, but failing to take that tack would cost me in the credibility department on my claims of caring.

"What do you think? My Ron won't get a job and can't even do a dish, but he expects me to stop whatever I'm doing him to give him sex and he's apparently too damn stupid to think a whole two minutes ahead on anything. Tommy seems to think it proves something good about him that he's doing a third stint. And I have to work and keep up the home for people who only think they're entitled to more! Can you see why I just might see your not listening to me as a sign you were more of the same?"

I was afraid of getting stuck on that one issue, especially since it kept the focus on me, but Joyce did deserve a response. "Yes...yes, I do. Look, I'll take full blame for this if you just stay on the line with me, okay?"

"I'm not blaming you. I'm just saying that you failed me."

"Okay, I failed you, but I am listening now, after whatever amount of stupidity happened, so let's just try to use me as a resource."

"So you're saying all I have to do to be heard is threaten to kill myself and you'll finally listen? Would you accept a thing like that?'

"Well, whether you believe it or not, I do want to listen to you, okay? I didn't hear your words as a threat of suicide originally. People do say things like that sometimes just to say they think they're life is crappy, and I thought that you were just doing that. I did listen, and I at least tried to understand. And I do want to help you with this. I would miss you if you died."

Joyce heard that said nothing, and in the silence I realized that I'd become another example of why 'shrinks don't treat friends and family: they become too involved to guide them. At that point I decided to change the tack we were on, but unfortunately, I chose the least persuasive approach possible, logic.

"Look Joyce, you don't have to respond to that, okay? No pressure on you. I would like to bring up a few things about this plan of yours, though. First of all, how do you actually know that it's God telling you to kill yourself?"

She took a moment to speak. "I don't."

"Well, then why in hell do you think about this at all? If you can't tell that it's God asking you to do this, then even by Christian doctrine you're under no obligation to do anything, right?"

"The Lord expects me to follow his will."

"Right, but He doesn't expect you to follow anybody else's, right? And if you can't tell if it's him telling you to do this, then you're okay."

Joyce's voice sounded weary. "It doesn't work like that. He expects me to tell the difference. 'My sheep her My voice, and others they will not follow.'"

"Well, just for the sake of argument, is it possible you're not one of His sheep? Maybe you should just pray for Him to enter your life and to guide you."

"You don't believe that!"

"Again though, what I believe isn't important. What's important is what's true. And how's this for an idea, if you agree to pray on this, I'll pray with you."

"You're just trying to make me change my plan."

"Well, yes, and obviously. It's a dumb idea. It's not going to make Ron or Tommy feel bad for how they're treating you. If they can ignore all the things you've already been through, they can ignore this. Anyway, to ask a question I've been meaning to get to, just how does the idea of God wanting you to kill yourself square with the idea that he's all good, all loving and all forgiving? Given your beliefs, isn't that a reason to doubt this thing right there?"

"...And in his perfect love he could be offering me the perfect peace and joy with him in heaven."

"Yeah, but what if you do it and it wasn't him? What if it's the other guy?"

"God is all forgiving!" she said, adding nothing .

"So live a long life and count on Him to be okay with it, even if he wanted you to croak! Since he is all forgiving, he'll cut you some slack on it."

"No, that's not what I meant."

I had to prevent myself from yelling at her. "And what do you mean then? This is kind of important."

"Look, I didn't really want to explain this, but I may just be caught between a rock and a hard place on this, okay? If this is the will of God, then I do have to follow it, but if it isn't, He may be wiling to forgive me for killing myself if I think it is."

"So, to be sure about this, are you saying that killing yourself would actually be a win-win for you?"

Joyce waited a long time before saying yes.

"...Joyce, I have to tell you that I just think you can't stand your family life right now and you're figuring this is a way out. If you take it and you're right about there being a God, then you probably just end up with a bad mark on your spiritual rap sheet. Can you hear that?"

"...Yes"

"And I'm not sure that there's a specific thing about it in the Bible, but I'm pretty sure God would mind you putting words in His mouth, which is what you just might be doing. Can you hear that little problem with what you're doing?

"...Yes, I can."

"Then why the hell don't you react to it? How 'bout the problem that you may be about to give a disbeliever another reason to figure He doesn't exist or he's a cold, mean thing that would kill his own people? If he's mean enough to punish you for not killing yourself, what do you think he's going to do about that? Answer me, Goddammit!"

Joyce spoke very slowly. "John, I hear all the points you're making, and all you're doing is making me nervous, okay? I don't want to be nervous. I called you for a solution so I could have some peace of mind."

"My solution: be a Cleveland cop! A Cleveland cop knows that if someone has profound association with the criminal element, they end up acting like the criminal element. Now your man the Devil--"

"He's not my man!"

"Well, this guy you believe exists? How's that? Anyway, the Devil, if he exists, has certainly spent a lot of time around God, I personally can't see why anybody expects us to tell which one of them did something without a witness..."

Oddly, Joyce began to giggle then. It started with a slow laugh but then grew into insistent laughter, and she even made comments about not being able to stop herself. Obviously, I hoped this was a change from her suicidal mind-set, but I wasn't counting on that.

"John, I think you may have actually helped me on this!"

"You have to know that this doesn't just mean I can let you hang up the phone after everything that's happened."

"Well, John, what else can you do? Drive her from way in Chicago?"

"Look though, I can't just assime that that one single bit of laughter could possibly change all you're going through and feeling."

"You're going to have to."

"Okay, promise me you won't kill yourself. In fact, swear it to God!"

"I can't do that."

"I'm not gonna give you any peace till you do."

"It's against the Bible!"

"So is suicide. You can do one, you can do the other."

"Okay...I promise...to God!

I was still a little unsettled about her for quite some time after that, of course, but I stayed in touch with her. About three days after that call, I rang her, but there was no answer. I tried again about fifteen minutes later without reaching anyone and then an unsuccessful third and fourth time. At that point, I called the police in her town to ask them to check up on her, but they told me I had to go to the nearest police station in my own town to request something called a well-being check. I put on my coat, and headed out to the nearest bus stop to make a time-consuming trip through public transportation. The police in Joyce's rural home-town took half and hour to reach her, then knocked on the door to find her son, on an approved home release in the family's living room. On their request, he took them to his mother, and they asked her her mood then did a cursory, noninvasive search for signs of self-inflicted wounds or drugging. In the end, they reported back to me that she was fine, and I ultimately found out that their son had simply let their cordless drain itself of power. No one had ever heard my call. Joyce did apparently put the thing back in its cradle, though. She left me a specific request to call her on getting back to my apartment.

Once back home, I called her and got a torrent of both annoyance and appreciation. On one hand, she was angry at me for an action that interrupted her sleep and left her explaining a lot of things to the police, but on the other, she also realized that this was a sign of my familial love for her. We closed the call as friends.