Hearts That Are True

   When he was alive, they lived at the gates of Graceland. It didn’t matter whether he was there or not. They’d go, anyway, to be with each other, to talk about him, to be close to the place he loved. If he was there, they’d synchronize their lives with his: sleeping by day, when he slept, so they could be at the gates at night, in case he came out.
   Sometimes he’d just drive by, on a motorcycle or in one of his spectacular cars, waving, and they’d try to follow him, and it might turn into an elaborate motorized game of hide-and-seek on the roads around Memphis. Sometimes he and his entourage, his guys, would be having one of their fireworks fights, and they’d roar down and attack the gate regulars, scaring them, thrilling them. And sometimes he’d come down to the gate and talk, sign autographs, get his picture taken, just be with them. Those were the best times, although they didn’t happen much near the end.
   Some of the gate people had jobs, but only so they could afford food and a place to sleep. Their real job, their purpose, was to be at the gates. They helped the guards—who knew them well—keep an eye on the wild fans, the nonregulars, who sometimes tried to get up to the front door.
   “We were really his best security,” says Linda Cullum, “because we would have killed anybody who we thought would have done anything to him.”
   Cullum arrived in 1964. She was in the Navy, and she had asked to be stationed in Memphis. “I didn’t even know if they had a base here,” she says. “I just knew he was here.” She’s 44 now, and she still lives nearby, as do others who were drawn to the gates in the good times. But they rarely go there anymore. These days the gates are for tourists: standing out front, getting their pictures taken, smiling the same way they’d smile in front of any other tourist attraction. You don’t see it in their eyes, the thing that haunts the eyes of the gate people, the shining sweet sadness, the burning need that still consumes 10 years after they lost him.
   “I still feel like I need to protect him,” says Cullum. “Because, you know, there’s so much you hear, so much that people say.”
   Elvis fans. A species unto themselves. A large species. The ones like Linda Cullum, the gate people, are among the most dedicated, but there are a lot more, counting the ones—and, believe me, they are all around you—who don’t talk about it. Because you might laugh. Because you don’t understand.
   These are not people who merely liked Elvis. A lot of us liked Elvis, especially when he was lean and sexy and strange and really bothered people. But then we moved on to the Beatles and the Stones and a lot of other (to us) hipper people, and Elvis, getting less scary and less lean all the time, faded into a ‘50s memory, and eventually he became, to many, a sad joke. But don’t laugh too soon, hip people. Think about this: Over a billion Elvis records have been sold. Nobody is in second place. And think about this: Today—10
   years after he died, more than 20 years after he dominated rock—there are tens of thousands of people, from all over the world, gathered in Memphis to pay tribute to him, to visit Graceland, to walk the halls of his old high school, to take bus trips down to his Mississippi birthplace, to relive and explore and discuss and celebrate every tiny detail of his life. It isn’t a one-time thing: The fans were there last year, and they’ll be there next year. This doesn’t happen for the Beatles; it doesn’t happen for Frank Sinatra; it doesn’t happen for Franklin D. Roosevelt. It doesn’t happen for anybody, that I can think of, who is not the focal point of a major religion. Just Elvis. Bruce Springsteen comes and Michael Jackson goes, but Elvis endures. His fans, his vast, quiet flock, make damn sure of that. They have heard all the stories about him, all the exposes and the Shocking Revelations about his appetites, his kinkiness, his temper, his pills. They know all about his problems. They know more about them than you do. And it makes no difference, except maybe to make them love him more, the way you draw closer, in time of trouble, to a brother or a lover. Which is what Elvis was to them. Which he still is.
   And the hell with what people say.
   The fans know what their public image is, too: fat, weeping, heavily hair-sprayed, middle-aged housewives wearing polyester pantsuits festooned with “I Love Elvis” buttons. That’s all that gets on TV, the fans say. That’s all the press sees.
   “Ah, the press,” sighs Karen Loper, 42, president of the Houston-based fan club. She was watching the Iran-contra hearings when I called her a couple of weeks ago. Like the other fan club presidents I talked to, she was very articulate. She does not wear polyester pantsuits.
   “The media—especially the TV people—always do the obligatory story,” she says. “They pick the most unflattering person, the one with a black bouffant hairdo, and they show her at the graveside crying. It’s so superficial, and nobody ever looks beyond it. But hey, I’m used to it. I’ve been putting up with this crap since I was 12 years old. First my father, always telling me Elvis wasn’t gonna last, Elvis can’t sing. Now the media. It used to bother me. I used to try to defend him. But now I realize: He doesn’t need defending.”
   This is a recurring theme with Elvis fans: They’re tired of explaining themselves. If you don’t hear what they hear, feel what they feel, that’s your misfortune. If you want, they’ll talk to you about it, but they don’t expect you to understand.
   Shirley Connell, 39, was one of the early gate people, back in the ‘60s. She had two big advantages:
   1. Her family’s backyard adjoins Graceland’s.
   2. Her mama loved Elvis, too.
   Which meant young Shirley was allowed to spend virtually all her waking time, except for school, at the gates. And, like other regulars, she
   sometimes got invited along on the outings Elvis organized. Which is how it happened that one year she and her mama went to the movies all night, almost every night, from November through March.
   Elvis regularly rented a downtown Memphis movie theater so he and his entourage could watch first-run movies (never his own, most of which embarrassed him). For years, his fans, the regulars, were allowed to join him. They weren’t exactly with him, but they were in the same room with him, and that was enough.
   “The schedule was,” Connell recalls, “he’d come in, and we’d watch anywhere from three to five movies, and he’d leave. Then I’d go home, and if given enough time, I’d catch a nap, and if not, I’d go straight to school. Then I’d come home from school at 2:30 in the afternoon, do my homework, and go straight to bed. Then I’d get up at 10 o’clock and find out what time the movie was.
   “We saw The Nutty Professor 14 times. The Great Escape was 10. Doctor Strangelove was 12. Mama would go to sleep. ... I went out and ate one time, during The Nutty Professor, I couldn’t stand it anymore. But I was just gone long enough to eat. I didn’t dare leave.”
   if you ask her why, it shows you could never understand.
   Connell still lives in the same modest ranch house. She has pictures of Elvis on the walls, and a lot of souvenirs, including one of Elvis’s custom-made silk shirts and an RCA portable radio Elvis gave her for Christmas in 1963. She has the box, the wrapping paper, the original long-dead battery.
   She took me out to her backyard one evening and dragged out a rickety old ladder so I could climb up and look over the wooden fence into the manicured grounds of Graceland. Two of Elvis’s horses were grazing there. She hasn’t looked over that fence in years.
   Graceland today is a business, a tourist attraction operated by the Presley estate. The mansion, built in 1939, sits on a small hill overlooking Route 51, which in Memphis is Elvis Presley Boulevard. When Elvis, then 22, bought Graceland in 1957 for $100,000 the area was mostly country; now the boulevard is a semi-sleazy strip, lined with car dealerships and fast-food places. (Not that this is inappropriate, cars and fast food being two things Elvis consumed in vast quantities.)
   Half a million people visit Graceland each year, but most of them are tourists, as opposed to True Fans. Most go for the same reason they would go
   to see a man wrestle an alligator: curiosity. Sure, they like Elvis, or they wouldn’t be there. But when they go through the house, stand where he stood, look at the things he owned and touched, they’re not moved. Some are even amused.
   And, Lord knows, there is plenty to be amused about. The decor is stunningly, at times hilariously, tacky, representing the Let’s-Not-Leave-a-Single-Square-Inch-Anywhere-Including-the-Ceiling-Undecorated school of interior design, featuring electric-blue drapes, veined wall mirrors, carpeting on the ceiling, etc. And it’s hard not to laugh at the earnest speeches of the clean-cut, relentlessly perky young guides, describing, say, Elvis’s collection of police badges, as though these were artifacts at Monticello.
   Scene from the tour: We’re in the TV room, which has mirrors on the ceiling and a squint-inducing navy-blue-with-bright-yellow color scheme. “You’ll notice the three TVs in front of you,” the guide says. “This is an idea Elvis got from Lyndon Johnson.”
   Now we’re in an outbuilding, originally built for Elvis’s extensive model-racing-car layout (which he quickly got bored with and gave away) and now housing a memorabilia display. We pause before a display of extravagantly over-decorated jumpsuit costumes. “Elvis found the fringe to be a problem onstage,” the guide is saying, “so he moved on to outfits that were more studded.”
   The tour ends when, in a bizarre juxtaposition, we move from Elvis’s racquetball court to his grave, out by the swimming pool. This is where the True Fans often break down.
   The tourists, though, usually just take pictures, then head back across the street to the plaza of stores selling licensed souvenirs. This is a place where good taste never even tries to rear its head. Just about anything they can put a likeness of Elvis on and sell, they do. You can get, for $2.95, a decanter shaped like Elvis wearing a karate uniform. You can get some Love Me Tender Conditioning Rinse. If you like to read, you can get a copy of I Called Him Babe—Elvis Presley’s Nurse Remembers, You can get sick.
   But here’s the thing: the True Fans don’t much like this, either. Most of them accept it, because they know that without the tourists and the souvenir dollars Graceland would have to close, and they’d lose a strong link with him. But they don’t like it. They don’t want a souvenir manufactured in Taiwan 10 years after Elvis died; they want something real.
   Like Elvis’s cigar butt. Tom Kirby got one. His friend and fellow gate regular, Debbie Brown, recalls how this came about:
   “We were good friends with Jo Smith, who was married to Elvis’s cousin, and she had always been real thoughtful, especially as far as Tom was concerned, because he had always been such a good fan. ... So they were playing racquetball or something, and [Elvis] laid his cigar down, half smoked, and then he walked out. So she picked it up, and she thought it would be a real neat souvenir for Tom. So she brings this cigar to Tom—she wrapped it up in a little tinfoil paper—and Tom is so excited, he runs over in the middle of the night, pounds on the door, and I go, ‘What,’ and he says, ‘look
   what Jo’s given me.’ And he unwraps the precious little tinfoil holding his cigar, and he goes, ‘God, Elvis’s cigar. It’s just fresh, she got it to night.’ And I go, ‘God, let me see it.’ And I grab it and stick it right in my mouth, because I know it’s been in his mouth. And Tom goes, ‘But I haven’t even put it in my mouth yet!’”
   An even more wonderful thing happened in Atlanta, where Brown, Kirby, and some other gate people went to see Elvis in concert, and where they managed to get into his actual hotel room, after he had left for his last show.
   “The keys were hanging in the presidential suite, in the door,” Brown recalls. “We instantly took the keys out, went inside, and shut the door. We went through the wastepaper cans. ... We were running around, jerking open cabinets. There was a cart there, and it had a big giant urn of the most horrible black coffee—that’s the way he liked his coffee—and the bacon there was on a large platter, and it was burned to a crisp—that’s the way he ate his bacon. Instantly we knew we had success, and we just grabbed this bacon—Elvis had this!—and we went [she makes gobbling sounds]. You know, so we can say we ate with him. He just wasn’t there, but we ate off his tray.
   “Then my girlfriend and I looked at each other, and we thought—the bed! So I ripped the sheets back, and she said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I’m looking!’ And she said, ‘For what?’ I said, ‘A pubic hair!’
   “You’d have to be a die-hard fan to appreciate that. I mean, I know it sounds sick, but wouldn’t that be the ultimate, for a female?”
   I’m driving the 93 miles down Highway 78 from Memphis to Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis was born and lived for 13 years, to see if maybe I can get a clue as to what this is all about.
   The drive feels very Rural Southern. Kudzu vines swarm everywhere. Corn is $1 a dozen. A preacher is talking on the radio.
   “I’ve been down that Long Road of Sin,” he says. “I went out and just ate the world.”
   Election campaigns are under way, in the form of signs in people’s yards.
   RE-ELECT ZACK STEWART
   HIGHWAY COMMISSIONER

Jimmy Dale Green Sheriff

   “Sometimes,” the preacher says, “we all get in that old carnality way.”
   The Birthplace is at the end of a short street lined with extremely modest homes. Shacks, really. The Birthplace is a shack, too, only it has been fixed up nice and moved a short distance to a little park, which also has a modern building where you can buy souvenirs.
   The Birthplace has only two rooms, furnished with donated items. The most authentic item there is Laverne Clayton, who sits in the bedroom and charges you $1 admission. She was born in 1935, same as Elvis; she lived next door to him for 10 years, went to school with him.
   “He liked K-Aro syrup and butter and biscuits,” she says. “He liked to play Roy Rogers. I was in the schoolroom, third grade, when he sang “Old Shep.” We thought he was silly. We didn’t pay him no mind.”
   And now she collects money from people who come from Japan just to see where he was born. And she doesn’t understand, any more than I do, why.
   “A lot of the people don’t believe Elvis is dead,” she says, shaking her head. “They tell me he’s on an island somewhere.”
   “You don’t argue with real Elvis fans. You just let them talk.”
   At the Birthplace I buy a book called Elvis Now—Ours Forever, a collection of reminiscences from True Fans edited by Bob Olmetti and Sue McCasland, who was a gate person in the mid-’70s. The book almost throbs in your hands with the intensity of the fans’ devotion.
   Jan Lancaster, Tupelo, Mississippi: “Every time I went to Memphis, I went by [Graceland]. ... Like I was eight months pregnant, and my girlfriend and I went up there with our husbands. They went to a skin flick, dropped us off, and I had a coat on so if ELvis sees me he won’t know I’m pregnant. We sat all night long—it was 22 degrees. ...”
   Linda Horr, Richmond, Indiana: “I don’t think any fan could love Elvis as much as I do, except maybe, to the fans who have actually met him, the hurt is worse. If that is so, then I thank God for sparing me that kind of pain—for the loss I feel is bad enough.”
   Part of it, of course, is his music. He really could sing, and except for a sterile period in the ‘60s when he was acting in mostly awful movies with mostly awful soundtracks, he made a whole lot of good records—”Jailhouse Rock,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Suspicious Minds” ... “Burnin’ Love,” and many more that don’t get played much on the radio. Elvis croons continuously over the P.A. system at the souvenir-store plaza across from Graceland, and as you wander around you often find yourself thinking when a new song comes on, Yeah, that was a pretty good one, too.
   Part of it was his lack of pretense. I realize that seems like an odd way to talk about a pampered, insulated superstar who performed in spangled jumpsuits, but if you watch tapes of him in concert, what strikes you—what strikes me, anyway—is that, unlike his preening, pouting, self-important impersonators, the real Elvis never seemed to take himself particularly seriously. He laughed a lot, and most of his jokes were at his own expense—muttered throwaway lines about the legendary Pelvis, the Leer, and (near the end) the Paunch. He seemed to find the adulation as inexplicable as many of the rest of us do. Watching him, I found it hard not to like him.
   “Elvis,” says Linda Cullum, veteran of many years at the gates, “was always a regular person.”
   And indeed he was, in some ways. He got very famous, and he got very rich, but he didn’t move to Monaco, didn’t collect Mausse, didn’t hang out with Society. He was a boy from the South, and he stayed in the South, and when he made it, he brought his daddy and mama and relatives and friends to live with him in and around his mansion. To the end, he hung out with good old boys, and he did the things a good old boy does, only more so.
   There’s a long-standing tradition in the American South in which getting drunk and/or stoned and chasing women and shooting off pistols and racing cars around for the sheer hell of it are normal, everyday male activities, generally accepted with a resigned or amused shrug by much of Southern society. In the show business part of this society they called this “roarin’ with the ‘billies [hillbillies].” In country music, tradition practically dictated that as soon as you got a little money, you went out and spent it on cars, clothes, rings and women, all flashy. Many in rock and roll adhered to this self-indulgent philosophy.
   Elvis was a product of this culture and when you traveled with Elvis, you were roarin’ with the No. 1 Billy.—Elvis: the final Years, by Jerry Hopkins
   The cars, the guns, the jewelry, the wild parties, the binges, the famous plane trip from Memphis to Denver in the dead of night solely to buy peanut butter sandwiches—none of this bothers the fans. Hey, it was his money. He earned it.
   Another part of it—a big part, the shrinks say—is sexual: repressed longings released by this exotic, sensual stud who dared to thrust his hips at the Wonder Bread world that was white American pop culture in the ‘50s. But that was a long time ago, and there have been plenty of sex symbols since. Why do these people remain so loyal to Elvis? Why does it seem as though their ardor has intensified, rather than cooled, since his death?
   And why are their feelings so personal, for a man some of them never saw in person, and many of them never met? Talk to a True Fan, and odds are she won’t talk about Elvis’s art, his genius, the way fans of, say, Bob Dylan will talk. Odds are she’ll tell you how, when he performed, he always seemed to be looking at her, singing to her. The True Fans really believe that Elvis loved them,just as much as they love him. They talk about how much he cared for them, how much he gave them, how, in a way, he died for them. He was under so much pressure, the True Fans say; he worked so hard to meet the demands of his public. No wonder he was sick. No wonder he turned to drugs. In some fans you sense a distinct undercurrent of guilt: If only he hadn’t kept his pain so private, if only I had known, maybe I could have helped. ...
   This devotion gets more and more confusing the longer I try to understand it. I’ve been reading books, listening to records, watching tapes, talking to fans, talking to Graceland officials. I have two notebooks full of quotes from people trying to explain the Elvis Thing. They can’t, and neither can I.
   But I’m not laughing at it, the way I used to.
   There’s a painful scene near the end of the documentary “This Is Elvis” showing Elvis in one of his final concerts, six weeks before he died. His appearance is shocking: This is a bloated, obviously sick man, his belly hanging out over the gaudy belt of his jumpsuit. He sings “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and when he gets to the talking part in the middle, he forgets the words; forgets the words to a song he must have sung a thousand times. He keeps going, stumbling and slurring, not looking at the audience, giggling to himself as he blows line after line, finally giving up.
   When, mercifully, the song ends, Elvis introduces his father, Vernon, who looks only slightly older than his son, and much healthier. And then Elvis sings “My Way,” holding a piece of paper, in case he forgets the words.
   “Sometimes,” says Debbie Brown, “I’ll drive by the gates at about 3 in the morning—that was his time—and I’ll turn my back on all the souvenir stores, and just look at the house, and it reminds me a little bit of what it was like. But I don’t really like to do that too much, because it reminds me of how empty it is now. It’s over. The fantasy’s over.
   “But just for a little time, I was part of something special. And I was special.”
   After Shirley Connell let me look over her back fence at Elvis’s horses, she showed me her photo album. It’s thick with snapshots of Elvis, many taken at the gates. Sometimes it’s just Elvis; sometimes she’s in the background; sometimes he has his arm around her. The two of them change, as you flip through the pages, he from bad-ass motorcycle rocker to Vegas headliner, she from girl to woman, the two of them growing older together.
   “I try not to even drive by the gates anymore,” she says.

Now That’s Scary

   Recently I played lead guitar in a rock band, and the rhythm guitarist was—not that I wish to drop names—Stephen King. This actually happened. It was the idea of a woman named Thi Goldmark, who formed a band consisting mostly of writers to raise money for literacy by putting on a concert at the American Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim, California.
   So she called a bunch of writers who were sincerely interested in literacy and making an unbelievable amount of noise. Among the others who agreed to be in the band were Tad Bartimus, Roy Blount, Jr., Michael Dorris, Robert Fulghum, Matt Groaning, Barbara Kingsolver, Ridley Pearson, and Amy Tan.
   I think we all said yes for the same reason. If you’re a writer, you sit all day alone in a quiet room trying to craft sentences on a word processor, which makes weenie little clickety-click sounds. After years and years of crafting and clicking, you are naturally attracted to the idea of arming yourself with an amplified instrument powerful enough to be used for building demolition, then getting up on a stage with other authors and screaming out songs such as “Land of 1,000 Dances,” the lyrics to which express the following literary theme:
   Na, na na na na, na na na na Na na na, na na na, na na na na
   So we all met in Anaheim, and for three days we rehearsed in a Secret Location under the strict supervision of our musical director, the legendary rock musician Al Kooper. This was a major thrill for me, because Kooper had been my idol when I was at Haverford College in the late 1960s. Back then I played guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, and we tried very hard to sound like a band Al Kooper was in called The Blues Project. Eventually The Federal Duck actually made a record album, which was so bad that many stereo systems chose to explode rather than play it.
   Anyway, I could not quite believe that, 25 years later, I was really and truly in a band with Al Kooper, and that he was actually asking for my opinion on musical issues. “Do you think,” he would ask, “that you could play in the same key as the rest of us?”
   So, OK, skillwise I’m not Eric Clapton. But I was louder than Eric Clapton, as well as many nuclear tests. I had an amplifier large enough to serve as public housing. It had a little foot switch, and when I pressed it, I was able to generate sound waves that will affect the global climate for years to come. We can only hope that Saddam Hussein is not secretly developing a foot switch like this.
   We practiced six long hours the first day, and at the end, Al Kooper called us together for an inspirational talk.
   “When we started this morning, we stunk,” he said. “But by this afternoon, we stunk much better. Maybe eventually we can be just a faint odor.”
   In the evenings we engaged in literary activities such as going to see the movie Alien . I was concerned about this, because when I watch horror movies I tend to whimper and clutch the person sitting next to me, who in this particular case was Stephen King. But as it turned out, the alien didn’t scare me at all; I live in Miami, and we have cockroaches that are at least that size, but more aggressive. The only scary part was when Sigourney Weaver got injected with a hypodermic needle, which on the movie screen was approximately 27 feet long. This caused me to whimper and clutch Stephen King, but I was pleased to note that he was whimpering and clutching his wife, Tabitha.
   But the real thrill came when our band finished practicing and actually played. The performance was in a big dance hall called the Cowboy Boogie, where hundreds of booksellers and publishing-industry people had drunk themselves into a highly literary mood. The show went great. The audience whooped and screamed and threw underwear. Granted, some of it was extra-large men’s Jockey briefs, but underwear is underwear. We belted out our songs, singing, with deep concern for literacy in our voices, such lyrics as:
   You got to do the Mammer Jammer If you want my love.
   Also a group of rock critics got up with us and sang a version of “Louie Louie” so dirty that the U.S. Constitution should, in my opinion, be modified specifically to prohibit it.
   Also—so far this is the highlight of my life—I got to play a lead-guitar solo while dancing the Butt Dance with Al Kooper. To get an idea how my solo sounded, press the following paragraph up against your ear:
   BWEEEOOOOOAAAAPPPPPP
   Ha ha! Isn’t that great? Your ear is bleeding.

Mustang Davey

   Recently, I was chosen to serve as a musical consultant to the radio industry.
   Actually, it wasn’t the entire industry; it was a woman named Marcy, who called me up at random one morning while I was picking my teeth with a business card as part of an ongoing effort to produce a column.
   “I’m not selling anything,” Marcy said.
   Of course when callers say this, they usually mean that they ARE selling something, so I was about to say “No thank you” in a polite voice, then bang the receiver down with sufficient force to drive phone shards deep into Marcy’s brain, when she said she was doing a survey for the radio industry about what songs should be played on the air.
   That got my attention, because radio music is an issue I care deeply about. I do a lot of singing in the car. You should hear Aretha Franklin and me perform our version of “I Say a little Prayer for You,” especially when our voices swoop way up high for the ending part that goes, “My darling BELIEVE me, for me there is nooo WAHHHHHAAANNNN.” My technique is to grip the steering wheel with both hands and lift myself halfway out of the seat so that I can give full vocal expression to the emotion that Aretha and I are feeling, which is a mixture of joyous hope and bittersweet longing and the horror of realizing that the driver of the cement truck three feet away is staring at me, at which point I pretend that I am having a coughing seizure while Aretha finishes the song on her own.
   I think they should play that song more often on the radio, along with “Brown-Eyed Girl,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” and of course the Isley Brothers’ version of “Twist and Shout,” which, if you turn it up loud enough, can propel you beyond mere singing into the stage where you have to get out of the car and dance with tollbooth attendants.
   On the other hand, it would not trouble me if the radio totally ceased playing ballad-style songs by Neil Diamond. I realize that many of you are huge Neil Diamond fans, so let me stress that in matters of musical taste, everybody is entitled to an opinion, and yours is wrong. Consider the song “I Am, I Said,” wherein Neil, with great emotion, sings:
   I am, I said To no one there And no one heard at all Not even the chair.
   What kind of line is that? Is Neil telling us he’s surprised that the chair didn’t hear him? Maybe he expected the chair to say, “Whoa, I heard THAT.” My guess is that Neil was really desperate to come up with something to rhyme with “there,” and he had already rejected “So I ate a pear,” “Like Smokey the Bear,” and “There were nits in my hair.”
   So we could do without this song. I also believe that we should use whatever means are necessary—and I do not exclude tactical nuclear weapons—to prevent radio stations from ever playing “Honey,” “My Way,” “I Write the Songs,” “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” and “Watchin’ Scottie Grow.” I have holes in my car radio from stabbing the station-changing button when these songs come on. Again, you may disagree with me, but if you know so much, how come the radio industry didn’t randomly survey you?
   The way the survey worked was, Marcy played two-second snippets from about two dozen songs; after each snippet I was supposed to say whether I liked the song or not. She’d play, for example, “Don’t Worry, Baby” by the Beach Boys and I’d shout “YES! PLAY THE WHOLE THING!” and she’d say, “OK, that’s a ‘like.’ Or she’d play “Don’t You Care” by the Buckinghams, and I’d make a noise like a person barfing up four feet of intestine, and Marcy would say, “OK, that’s a ‘don’t like.’”
   The problem was that I wasn’t allowed to suggest songs. I could only react to the generally mediocre candidates that were presented. It was just like the presidential elections. This is too bad, because there are a lot of good songs that never get played. My wife and I are constantly remarking on this. I’ll say, “Do you remember a song called ‘Boys’?” And Beth, instantly, will respond, “Bop shoo-bop, boppa boppa SHOO-bop.” Then both of us, with a depth of emotion that we rarely exhibit when discussing world events, will say, “They NEVER play that!”
   I tried suggesting a couple of songs to Marcy. For example, after she played the “Don’t Worry, Baby” snippet, I said, “You know there’s a great Beach Boys song that never gets played called “Custom Machine.” The chorus goes:
   Step on the gas, she goes WAA-AAA-AAHH I’ll let you look But don’t touch my custom machine!
   I did a good version of this, but Marcy just went “Huh” and played her next snippet, which was “I Go to Pieces” by a group that I believe is called Two British Weenies. I don’t care for that song, and I told Marcy as much, but I still keep hearing it on the radio. Whereas I have yet to hear “Custom Machine.” It makes me wonder if the radio industry really cares what I think,
   or if I’m just a lonely voice crying out, and nobody hears me at all. Not even the chair.

The Whammies

   In a recent column I noted that certain songs are always getting played on the radio, despite the fact that these songs have been shown, in scientific laboratory tests, to be bad. One example I cited was Neil Diamond’s ballad “I Am, I Said,” in which Nell complains repeatedly that nobody hears him, “not even the chair.” I pointed out that this does not make a ton of sense, unless Neil has unusually intelligent furniture. (“Mr. Diamond, your BarcaLounger is on line two.”)
   Well, it turns out there are some major Neil Diamond fans out there in Readerland. They sent me a large pile of hostile mail with mouth froth spewing out of the envelope seams. In the interest of journalistic fairness, I will summarize their main arguments here:
   Dear Pukenose: just who the hell do you think you are to blah blah a great artist like Neil blah blah more than 20 gold records blah blah how many gold records do YOU have, you scum-sucking wad of blah blah I personally have attended 1,794 of Neil’s concerts blah blah What about “Love on the Rocks” Huh? What about “Cracklin’ Rosie”? blah blah if you had ONE-TENTH of Neil’s talent blah blah so I listened to “Heart Light” 40 times in a row and the next day the cyst was GONE and the doctor said he had never seen such a rapid blah blah. What about “Play Me”? What about “Song Sung Blah”? Cancel my subscription, if I have one.
   So we can clearly see that music is a matter of personal taste. Person A may hate a particular song, such as “Havin’ My Baby” by Paul Anka (who I suspect is also Neil Sedaka), and Person B might love this song. But does this mean that Person B is wrong? Of course not. It simply means that Person B is an idiot. Because some songs are just plain bad, and “Havin’ My Baby” is one of them, and another one is “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”
   That’s not merely my opinion: That’s the opinion of many readers who took time out from whatever they do, which I hope does not involve operating machinery, to write letters containing harsh remarks about these and other songs. In fact, to judge from the reader reaction, the public is a lot more concerned about the issue of song badness than about the presidential election campaign (which by the way is over, so you can turn on your TV again).
   And it’s not just the public. It’s also the media. I put a message on the Miami Herald’s computer system, asking people to nominate the worst rock song ever, and within minutes I was swamped with passionate responses. And these were from newspaper people, who are legendary for their cold-blooded noninvolvement (“I realize this is a bad time for you, Mrs. Weemer, but could you tell me how you felt when you found Mr. Weemer’s head”). Even the managing editor responded, arguing that the worst rock song ever was “whichever one led to the second one.”
   Other popular choices were “A Horse with No Name,” performed by America; “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” by Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods; “Kung Fu Fighting,” by Carl Douglas; “Copacabana,” by Barry Manilow; “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo,” by Lobo; “Seasons in the Sun,” by Terry Jacks; “Feelings,” by various weenies; “Precious and Few” by some people who make the weenies who sang “Feelings” sound like Ray Charles; “The Pepsi Song,” by Ray Charles; “Muskrat Love,” by The Captain and Tennille; every song ever recorded by Bobby Goldsboro; and virtually every song recorded since about 1972.
   “It’s worse than ever” is how my wife put it.
   Anyway, since people feel so strongly about this issue, I’ve decided to conduct a nationwide survey to determine the worst rock song ever. I realize that similar surveys have been done before, but this one will be unique: This will be the first rock-song survey ever, to my knowledge, that I’ll be able to get an easy column out of.
   So I’m asking you to consider two categories: Worst Overall Song and Worst lyrics. In the second category, for example, you might want to consider a song I swear I heard back in the late 1950s, which I believe was called “Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys Do.” I’ve been unable to locate the record, but the chorus went:
   Won’t you take a look at me now You’ll be surprised at what you see now I’m everything a girl should be now Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-Five!
   I’m sure you can do worse than that.
   Send your card today. Be in with the “in” crowd. We’ll have joy, we’ll have fun. So Cracklin’ Rosie, get on board, because Honey, I miss you. AND your dog named Boo.

The Worst Songs Ever Recorded

   BAD SONG SURVEY
   PART ONE
   Before I present the results of the Bad Song Survey, here’s an important BRAIN TAKEOVER ALERT: Be advised that this column names certain songs that you hate and have tried to suppress, but as soon as you read their names your brain will start singing “Yoouunngg girl, get out of my mind; my love for you is way out of line” ... over and over AND YOU CAN’T STOP IT AIEEEEEEE. Thank you.
   First, I have NEVER written a column that got a bigger response than the one announcing the Bad Song Survey. Over 10,000 readers voted, with cards still coming in. Also, wherever I went people expressed their views to me, often gripping my shirt to emphasize their points. (“You know that song about
   pina coladas? I hate that song. I HATE IT!”) Song badness is an issue that Americans care deeply about. Second, you Neil Diamond fans out there can stop writing irate unsigned letters telling me that I am not worthy to be a dandruff flake on Neil’s head, OK? (Not that I am saying Neil has dandruff.) Because you have convinced me: Neil Diamond is GOD. I no longer see anything but genius in the song where he complains that his chair can’t hear him. Unfortunately, a lot of survey voters are not so crazy about Neil’s work, especially the part of “Play Me” where he sings: ... song she sang to me, song she brang to me ...
   Of course I think those lyrics are brilliant; however, they brang out a lot of hostility in the readers. But not as much as “Lovin’ You,” sung by Minnie Riperton, or “Sometimes When We Touch,” sung by Dan Hill, who sounds like he’s having his prostate examined by Captain Hook.
   Many people still deeply resent these songs. Many others would not rule out capital punishment for anyone convicted of having had anything to do with Gary Puckett and the Union Gap (“Woman,” “Young Girl,” and “This Girl Is a Man Now,” which some voters argue are all the same song).
   Likewise there are boiling pools of animosity out there for Barry “I Write the Songs” Manilow, Olivia “Have You Never Been Mellow” Newton-John, Gilbert “Alone Again, Naturally” O’Sullivan, The Village “YMCA” People, Tony “Knock Three Times” Orlando, and of course Yoko “Every Song I Ever Performed” Ono. And there is no love lost for the Singing Nun.
   The voters are ANGRY. A typical postcard states: “The number one worst piece of pus-oozing, vomit-inducing, camel-spitting, cow-phlegm rock song EVER in the history of the solar system is ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.’” (Amazingly, this song was NOT performed by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.)
   Here are some other typical statements:
   * “I’d rather chew a jumbo roll of tinfoil than hear ‘Hey Paula’ by Paul and Paula.”
   * “Whenever I hear the Four Seasons’ ‘Walk Like a Man,’ I want to scream,
   ‘Frankie, SING like a man!’”
   * “I wholeheartedly believe that ‘Ballerina Girl’ is responsible for 90
   percent of the violent crimes in North America today.”
   * “I nominate every song ever sung by the Doobie Brothers. Future ones also.”
   * “Have you noticed how the hole in the ozone layer has grown progressively larger since rap got popular?”
   Sometimes the voters were so angry that they weren’t even sure of the name of the song they hated. There were votes against “These Boots Are Made for Stomping”; the Beach Boys’ classic “Carolina Girls”; “I’m Nothing But a Hound Dog”; and “Ain’t No Woman Like the One-Eyed Gott.” A lot of people voted for “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” offering a variety of interpretations of the chorus, including: “Weem-o-wep,” “Wee-ma-wack,” “Weenawack,” “A-ween-a-wap,” and “Wingle whip.”
   Many readers are still very hostile toward the song “Wildfire,” in which singer Michael Murphy wails for what seems like 97 minutes about a lost pony. (As one voter put it: “Break a leg, Wildfire.”) Voter Steele Hinton particularly criticized the verse wherein there came a killing frost, which causes Wildfire to get lost. As Hinton points out: ... ‘killing’ in ‘killing frost’ refers to your flowers and your garden vegetables, and when one is forecast you should cover your tomatoes ... Nobody ever got lost in a killing frost who wouldn’t get lost in July as well.”
   There was also a solid vote for Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a real fun party song. Several voters singled out the line: “As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most.”
   Speaking of bad lyrics, there were votes for:
   * Cream’s immortal “I’m So Glad,” which eloquently expresses the feeling of being glad, as follows: “I’m so glad! I’m so glad! I’m glad, I’m glad,
   I’m glad!” (Repeat one billion times.)
   * “La Bamba,” because the lyrics, translated, are: “I am not a sailor. I am a captain, I am a captain, I am a captain.” And he is probably glad.
   * “Johnny Get Angry,” performed by Joanie Sommers, who sings: “Johnny get angry, Johnny get mad; Give me the biggest lecture I ever had; I want a
   BRAVE man, I want a CAVE man ...”
   * “Take the Money and Run,” in which Steve Miller attempts to rhyme “Texas” with “what the facts is,” not to mention “hassle” with “El Paso.”
   * “Torn Between Two lovers.” (Reader comment: “Torn, yes, hopefully on the rack.”)
   * “There Ain’t Enough Room in My Fruit of the Looms to Hold All My Love for You.” (This might not be a real song, but I don’t care.)
   Certainly these are all very bad songs, but the scary thing is: Not one song I’ve named so far is a winner. I’ll name the winners next week, after your stomach has settled down. Meanwhile, here are some more songs you should NOT think about: “Baby I’m-a Want You,” “Candy Man,” “Disco Duck,” “I Am Woman,” “Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” “Last Kiss,” “Patches,” “The Night Chicago Died,” “My Ding-a-Ling,” and “My Sharona.” Just FORGET these songs. Really.
   P.S. Also “Horse with No Name.”

And The Winner Is ...

   BAD SONG SURVEY
   PART Two
   I hope you haven’t had anything to eat recently, because, as promised last week, today I am presenting the winners of the Bad Song Survey.
   In analyzing these results, I had to make a few adjustments. For example, the Bob Dylan song “Lay Lady Lay” would have easily won as Worst Overall Song, with 17,006 votes, except that I had to disallow 17,004 votes on the grounds that they were cast by my Research Department, Judi Smith, who tabulated the votes and who HATES “Lay Lady Lay.”
   To win, a song had to be known well enough so that a lot of people could hate it. This is a shame in a way, because some obscure songs that people voted for are wonderfully hideous. One reader sent a tape of a song called “Hooty Sapperticker,” by a group called Barbara and the Boys. This could be the worst song I’ve ever heard. It consists almost entirely of the Boys singing “Hooty! Hooty! Hooty!” and then Barbara saying: “Howdy Hooty Sapperticker!”
   Several readers sent in an amazing CD from Rhino Records called Golden Throats, which consists of popular actors attempting to sing popular music, including William Shatner attempting “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Leonard Nimoy attempting “Proud Mary,” Mae West attempting “Twist and Shout,” Eddie
   Albert attempting “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and—this is my favorite—jack “Mr. Soul” Webb attempting “Try a Little Tenderness.” You need this CD.
   But now for our results. Without question, the voters’ choice for Worst Song—in both the Worst Overall AND Worst Lyrics category—is ... (drum roll ...
   “MacArthur Park,” as sung by Richard Harris, and later remade, for no comprehensible reason, by Donna Summer.
   It’s hard to argue with this selection. My 12-year-old son Rob was going through a pile of ballots, and he asked me how “MacArthur Park” goes, so I sang it, giving it my best shot, and Rob laughed so hard that when I got to the part about leaving the cake out in the rain, and it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again, Rob was on the floor. He didn’t believe those lyrics were real. He was SURE his wacky old humor-columnist dad was making them up.
   The clear runner-up, again in both categories, is “Yummy Yummy Yummy (I Got Love in My Tummy),” performed by Ohio Express. (A voter sent me an even WORSE version of this, performed by actress Julie London, who at one time—and don’t tell me this is mere coincidence—was married to Jack Webb.)
   Coming in a strong third is “(You’re) Having My Baby” by Paul Anka. This song is deeply hated. As one voter put it: “It has no redeeming value whatsoever—except my friend Brian yelled out during the birth scene in the sequel to The Fly, in full song, ‘Having my maggot!’
   Honorable mention goes to Bobby Goldsboro, who got many votes for various songs, especially “Honey.” One voter wrote: “why does everybody hate Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Honey’? I hate it too, but I want to know why.”
   Why? Consider this verse: “She wrecked the car and she was sad; And so afraid that I’d be mad, but what the heck; Tho’ I pretended hard to be; Guess you could say she saw through me; And hugged my neck.”
   As one reader observed: “Bobby never caught on that he could have bored a hole in himself and let the sap out.”
   A recent song that has aroused great hostility is “Achy Breaky Heart,” by Billy Ray Cyrus. According to voter Mark Freeman, the song sounds like this: “You can tell my lips, or you can tell my hips, that you’re going to dump me if you can; But don’t tell my liver, it never would forgive her, it might blow up and circumcise this man!”
   Many voters feel a special Lifetime Bad Achievement Award should go to Mac Davis, who wrote “In the Ghetto,” “Watchin Scotty Grow,” AND “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me,” which contains one of the worst lines in musical history: “You’re a hot-blooded woman, child; And it’s warm where you’re touching me.” That might be as bad as the part in “Careless Whisper” where George Michael sings: “I’m never gonna dance again; Guilty feet have got no rhythm.”
   Speaking of bad lyrics, many voters also cited Paul McCartney, who, ever since his body was taken over by a pod person, has been writing things like: “Someone’s knockin’ at the door; Somebody’s ringin’ the bell; (repeat); Do me a favor, open the door, and let him in.”
   There were strong votes for various tragedy songs, especially “Teen Angel” (“I’ll never kiss your lips again; They buried you today”) and “Timothy,” a song about—really—three trapped miners, two of whom wind up eating the third.
   Other tremendously unpopular songs, for their lyrics or overall badness, are: “Muskrat Love,” “Sugar Sugar,” “I’m Too Sexy,” “Surfin’ Bird,” “I’ve Never Been to Me,” “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,” “Afternoon Delight,” “Feelings,” “You Light Up My Life,” and “In the Year 2525” (violent hatred for this song).
   In closing, let me say that you voters have performed a major public service, and that just because your song didn’t make the list, that doesn’t mean it isn’t awful (unless you were one of the badly misguided people who voted for “The Tupperware Song”). Let me also say that I am very relieved to learn that there are people besides me who hate “Stair-way to Heaven.” Thank you. P.S. Also “I Shot the Sheriff.”

Reader Alert

   This is the last section; like the first one, it’s mostly family stuff. It includes a column I wrote when my son got hit by a car, which was very scary; and one about his reaching adolescence, which veteran parents have assured me will be even scarier. There is also some important advice in here for young people, who represent our nation’s Hope for the Future. I myself plan to be dead.

The Old-Timers Game

   My son got his ear pierced. He’s 12. For 12 years I worked hard to prevent him from developing unnatural bodily holes, then he went out and got one on purpose. At a shopping mall. It turns out that minors can have their earlobes assaulted with sharp implements by shopping-mall-booth personnel who, for all we know, have received no more formal medical training than is given to burrito folders at Taco Bell. And the failed Clinton administration is doing nothing.
   You’re probably saying: “Don’t blame the government! As a parent, YOU must take responsibility! You and your wife, Beth, should sit your son down and give him a stern reprimand.”
   Listen, that’s a great idea, except for one teensy little problem, which is that BETH IS THE PERSON WHO DROVE HIM TO THE PIERCING PLACE. This is the same woman who, when Rob was 6, allowed him to get a “punk” style haircut that transformed him in just a few minutes from Christopher Robin into Bart Simpson; the same woman who indulges his taste for clothes that appear to have been dyed in radioactive Kool-Aid.
   No, Beth is not on my side in the ongoing battle I have waged with my son to keep him normal, defined as “like me, but with less nose hair.”
   Now you’re probably saying: “Who are YOU to be complaining? When you were young, didn’t YOU feel you had the right to do things that your parents disapproved of?” Perhaps you are referring to the time in ninth grade when Phil Grant, Tom Parker, and I decided that pipe-smoking was cool, so we got hold of some pipes and stood around spewing smoke, thinking we looked like urbane sophisticates, when in fact we looked like the Junior Fred MacMurray Dork Patrol. I will admit that when my parents found out about this (following a minor desk fire in my room) and told me to stop, I went into a week long door-slamming snit, as though the right of ninth graders to smoke pipes was explicitly stated in the U.S. Constitution.
   But we cannot compare these two situations. In the case of my pipe-smoking, my parents were clearly overreacting, because the worst that could have happened was that I would have burned the house down and got cancer. Whereas I have a very good reason to object to Rob’s earlobe hole: It makes me feel old. Rob wears a little jeweled ear stud, and it’s constantly winking at me and saying: “Hey there, old-timer! YOU’D never wear an ear stud! And neither would Grandpa Walton!”
   I am also being rapidly aged by Rob’s choice of radio stations. The one he now prefers is operated by one of the most dangerous and irresponsible forces on Earth, college students. I was concerned about what they might be playing, so I tuned it in on my car radio. The first song I heard didn’t sound so bad, and I said to myself. “Hey! Perhaps I am still fairly hip after all!” And then the deejay came on and said, apologetically: “I realize that song was mainstream.” He said “mainstream” the way you would say “composed by Phoenicians.” Then he played a song entitled—I am not making this up—”Detachable Penis.”
   Yes, college students are in on the plot with my son to make me feel old. Not long ago I was sitting on a beach near a group of male college students who were talking about a bungee-jumping excursion they had taken. They were bragging about the fact that they had leaped off the tower in the only cool way, which is headfirst and backward. They spoke with great contempt about a group of fathers—that’s the term they used, “fathers,” making it sound as though it means “people even older than Phoenicians”—who had jumped off feet-first, which the college students considered to be pathetic.
   This made me feel extremely old, because I personally would not bungee-jump off the Oxford English Dictionary. My son, on the other hand, would unhesitatingly bungee-jump off the Concorde. And he’s only 12. Who KNOWS how old he’ll make me feel by the time he’s 14. What if he wants a nose ring? I won’t allow it! I’m going to put my foot down! I’m going to take charge!
   I’m going to steal Beth’s car keys.

Breaking The Ice

   As a mature adult, I feel an obligation to help the younger generation, just as the mother fish guards her unhatched eggs, keeping her lonely vigil day after day, never leaving her post, not even to go to the bathroom, until her tiny babies emerge and she is able, at last, to eat them. “She may be your mom, but she’s still a fish” is a wisdom nugget that I would pass along to any fish eggs reading this column.
   But today I want to talk about dating. This subject was raised in a letter to me from a young person named Eric Knott, who writes:
   I have got a big problem. There’s this girl in my English class who is really good-looking. However, I don’t think she knows I exist. I want to ask her out, but I’m afraid she will say no, and I will be the freak of the week. What should I do?
   Eric, you have sent your question to the right mature adult, because as a young person I spent a lot of time thinking about this very problem. Starting in about eighth grade, my time was divided as follows:
   Academic Pursuits: 2 percent. Zits: 16 percent. Trying to Figure Out How to Ask Girls Out: 82 percent.
   The most sensible way to ask a girl out is to walk directly up to her on foot and say, “So, you want to go out? Or what?” I never did this. I knew, as Eric Knott knows, that there was always the possibility that the girl would say no, thereby leaving me with no viable option but to leave Harold C. Crittenden Junior High School forever and go into the woods and become a bark-eating hermit whose only companions would be the gentle and understanding woodland creatures.
   “Hey, ZITFACE!” the woodland creatures would shriek in cute little Chip ‘n’ Dale voices while raining acorns down upon my head. “You wanna DATE? HAHAHAHAHAHA.”
   So the first rule of dating is: Never risk direct contact with the girl in question. Your role model should be the nuclear submarine, gliding silently beneath the ocean surface, tracking an enemy target that does not even begin to suspect that the submarine would like to date it. I spent the vast majority of 1960 keeping a girl named Judy under surveillance, maintaining a minimum distance of 50 lockers to avoid the danger that I might somehow get into a conversation with her, which could have led to disaster:
   JUDY: Hi. ME: Hi. JUDY: JUST in case you have ever thought about having a date with me, the answer is no. WOODLAND CREATURES: HAHAHAHA.
   The only problem with the nuclear-submarine technique is that it’s difficult to get a date with a girl who has never, technically, been asked. This is why you need Phil Grant. Phil was a friend of mine who had the ability to talk to girls. It was a mysterious superhuman power he had, comparable to X-ray vision. So, after several thousand hours of intense discussion and planning with me, Phil approached a girl he knew named Nancy, who approached a girl named Sandy, who was a direct personal friend of Judy’s and who passed the word back to Phil via Nancy that Judy would be willing to go on a date with me. This procedure protected me from direct humiliation, similar to the way President Reagan was protected from direct involvement in the Iran-contra scandal by a complex White House chain of command that at one point, investigators now believe, included his horse.
   Thus it was that, finally, Judy and I went on an actual date, to see a movie in White Plains, New York. If I were to sum up the romantic ambience of this date in four words, those words would be: “My mother was driving.” This made for an extremely quiet drive, because my mother, realizing that her presence was hideously embarrassing, had to pretend she wasn’t there. If it had been legal, I think she would have got out and sprinted alongside the car, steering through the window. Judy and I, sitting in the backseat about 75
   feet apart, were also silent, unable to communicate without the assistance of Phil, Nancy, and Sandy.
   After what seemed like several years we got to the movie theater, where my mother went off to sit in the Parents and Lepers Section. The movie was called North to Alaska, but I can tell you nothing else about it because I spent the whole time wondering whether it would be necessary to amputate my right arm, which was not getting any blood flow as a result of being perched for two hours like a petrified snake on the back of Judy’s seat exactly one molecule away from physical contact.
   So it was definitely a fun first date, featuring all the relaxed spontaneity of a real-estate closing, and in later years I did regain some feeling in my arm. My point, Eric Knott, is that the key to successful dating is self-confidence. I bet that good-looking girl in your English class would LOVE to go out with you. But YOU have to make the first move. So just do it! Pick up that phone! Call Phil Grant.

Consumers From Mars

   Recently I was watching TV, and a commercial came on, and the announcer, in a tone of voice usually reserved for major developments in the Persian Gulf, said: “Now consumers can ask Angela Lansbury their questions about Bufferin!”
   As a normal human, your natural reaction to this announcement is: “Huh?” Meaning: “What does Angela Lansbury have to do with Bufferin?” But this commercial featured several consumers who had apparently been stopped at random on the street, and every one of them had a question for Angela Lansbury about Bufferin. Basically what they asked was, “Miss Lansbury, is Bufferin a good product that I should purchase, or what?” These consumers seemed very earnest. It was as if they had been going around for months wringing their hands and saying, “I have a question about Bufferin! If only I could ask Angela Lansbury!”
   What we are seeing here is yet another example of a worsening problem that has been swept under the rug for too long in this nation: the invasion of Consumers from Mars. They look like humans, but they don’t act like humans, and they are taking over. Don’t laugh. We know that Mars can support life. We know this because Vice President for Now Dan Quayle, who is the administration’s No. 1 Man in the space program, once made the following famous statement, which I am not making up:
   “Mars is essentially in the Same orbit ... somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.”
   You cannot argue with that kind of logic. You can only carry it to its logical conclusion, which is that if there are canals, that means there are boats, and if there are boats, that means there are consumers, and apparently they are invading the Earth and getting on TV commercials.
   I saw another commercial recently wherein a middle-age man gets off an airplane and is greeted by his wife, who says something like: “What did you bring back from your trip?” And the man replies: “Diarrhea.” Yes. He probably hasn’t seen his wife in a week, and the first thing out of his mouth, so to speak, is “Diarrhea.” Is this the behavior of a regular (ha ha!) human? Of course not. This is clearly another invading consumer from Mars, just like the ones that are always striding into drugstores and announcing at the top of their lungs that they have hemorrhoids.
   The worst thing is that, as Martian consumers take over, they’re starting to influence the way businesses think. I received chilling evidence of this recently from alert reader Rick Johansen, who sent me an Associated Press article by David Kalish about food manufacturers who are putting less food into packages, but not reducing prices. One example was Knorr brand leek soup and recipe mix: The old box contained four eight-ounce servings, but the new box, which is slightly larger, contains only three eight-ounce servings. The story quotes a spokesperson for the manufacturer, CPC International, as saying that this change was made because—pay close attention here—there were “a lot of complaints from American consumers that we were giving them too much in the box.”
   Sure! We believe that! We believe that all over America, consumers were sitting around their dinner tables, saying, “You know Ralph, I am sick and tired of getting so much soup in a box. I’m going to write in and demand that they put less in without lowering the price.”
   “Good idea!” Ralph would answer, pounding his fist on the table. “And then let’s tell Angela Lansbury about our hemorrhoids!”
   No, those were not American consumers who complained to CPC International; those were Martians. Also, most product instructions are now written for Martians. Alert reader Mark Lindsay sent me the instructions for the Sunbeam Dental Water jet; under the heading IMPORTANT SAFEGUARDS is the statement—I am still not making this up—”Never use while sleeping.” Don’t try to tell me that’s for Earthlings.
   And how about all those manufacturers’ coupons featuring Exciting Offers wherein it turns out, when you read the fine print, that you have to send in the coupon PLUS proof of purchase PLUS your complete dental records by registered mail to Greenland and allow at least 18 months for them to send you ANOTHER coupon that will entitle you to 29 cents off your next purchase of a product you don’t really want? Do you think anybody besides extraterrestrials ever actually does that?
   I have here a package sent in by alert reader Roger Lyons, who purchased a Revlon Pedi-Care Toe Nail Clip device for $2.19 at a Giant Supermarket in Washington, D.C. On the package is Revlon’s Full Lifetime Guarantee, which states that if you find any defects, you should follow this procedure:
   Wrap securely in a box or mailing tube ... Mail insured and POSTAGE PAID ... Notify us within six months if implement is not returned ... GUARANTEE IS NOT APPLICABLE if implement has been serviced by other than Revlon, has been abused or allowed to rust. Keep lightly oiled in a dry place to avoid rusting ...
   And so on. Who would DO this? Who would ever think of saving the package so he or she would know HOW to do this? Only Martians! Face it, human consumers: They have taken over. It’s too late to do anything about it. Your best bet is to stay calm, remain indoors, maybe oil your toenail clippers. Me, I have to set up the landing lights on my lawn. Zorkon is bringing in a new group tonight.

Say Uncle

   Summer vacation is almost over, so today Uncle Dave has a special back-to-school “pep talk” for you young people, starting with these heart-felt words of encouragement: HA HA HA YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL AND UNCLE DAVE DOESN’T NEENER NEENER NEENER.
   Seriously, young people, I have some important back-to-school advice for you, and I can boil it down to four simple words: “Study Your Mathematics.”
   I say this in light of a recent alarming Associated Press story stating that three out of every four high-school students—nearly 50 percent—leave school without an adequate understanding of mathematics. Frankly, I am not surprised. “How,” I am constantly asking myself, “can we expect today’s young people to understand mathematics when so many of them can’t even point their baseball caps in the right direction?”
   I am constantly seeing young people with the bills of their baseball caps pointing backward. This makes no sense, young people! If you examine your cap closely, you will note that it has a piece sticking out the front called a “bill.” The purpose of the bill is to keep sun off your face, which, unless your parents did a great many drugs in the ‘60s (Ask them about it!), is located on the FRONT of your head. Wearing your cap backward is like wearing sunglasses on the back of your head, or wearing a hearing aid in your nose. (Perhaps you young people are doing this also. Uncle Dave doesn’t want to know.)
   So to summarize what we’ve learned: “FRONT of cap goes on FRONT of head.” Got it, young people? Let’s all strive to do better in the coming school year!
   But also we need to think about getting these math scores up. A shocking number of you young people are unable to solve even basic math problems, such as the following:
   A customer walks into a fast-food restaurant, orders two hamburgers costing $2 apiece, then hands you a $5 bill. How much change should you give him? a. $2 b. $3 c. None, because the question doesn’t say you WORK there. You could just take the money and run away.
   The correct answer, of course, is that you should give the customer: d. Whatever the computerized cash register says, even if it’s $154,789.62.
   You young people must learn to handle basic mathematical concepts such as this if you hope to ever become a smug and complacent older person such as myself. I was fortunate enough to receive an excellent mathematical foundation as a member of the Class of 196.5 Billion Years Ago at Pleasantville High School, where I studied math under Mr. Solin, who, in my senior year, attempted to teach us calculus (from the ancient Greek words calc, meaning “the study of,” and ulus, meaning “something that only Mr. Solin could understand”).
   Mr. Solin was an excellent teacher, and although the subject matter was dry, he was able to keep the class’s attention riveted on him from the moment the bell rang until the moment, several minutes later, when a large girls’ gym class walked past the classroom windows, every single day, causing the heads of us male students to rotate 90 mathematical degrees in unison, like elves in a motorized Christmas yard display. But during those brief periods when we were facing Mr. Solin, we received a solid foundation in mathematics, learning many important mathematical concepts that we still use in our professional lives as employees of top U.S. corporations. A good example is the mathematical concept of “9,” which we use almost daily to obtain an outside line on our corporate telephones so that we can order Chinese food, place bets, call 1-900-BOSOMS, and perform all of the other vital employee functions that make our economy what it is today.
   You young people deserve to have the same advantages, which is why I was so pleased to note in the Associated Press story that some university professors have received a $6 million federal grant to develop new ways to teach math to high-school students. The professors know this will be a challenge. One of them is quoted as saying: “There is a mentality in this country that mathematics is something a few nerds out there do and if you don’t understand mathematics, it’s OK—you don’t need it.”
   This is a bad mentality, young people. There’s nothing “nerdy” about mathematics. Contrary to their image as a bunch of out-of-it huge-butted Far Side-professor dweebs who spend all day staring at incomprehensible symbols on a blackboard while piles of dandruff form around their ankles, today’s top mathematicians are in fact a group of exciting, dynamic, and glamorous individuals who are working to solve some of the most fascinating and challenging problems facing the human race today (“Let’s see, at $2.98 apiece, with a $6 million federal grant, we could buy ... OA! That’s 2,013,422.82
   POCKET PROTECTORS!”).
   So come on, young people! Get in on the action! Work hard in math this year, and remember this: If some muscle-bound Neanderthal bullies corner you in the bathroom and call you a “nerd” you just look them straight in the eye and say, “Oh YEAH? Why don’t you big jerks ... LET GO! HEY. DON’T PUT MY HEAD IN THE TOILET! HEY!” And tell them that goes double for your Uncle Dave.
   PUNCTUATION ‘R’ EASY
   It’s time for another edition of “Ask Mister Language Person,” the column that answers your questions about grammar, vocabulary, and those little whaddyacallem marks.
   Q. What are the rules regarding capital letters?
   A. Capital letters are used in three grammatical situations:
   1. At the beginning of proper or formal nouns. EXAMPLES: Capitalize “Queen,”
   “Tea Party,” and “Rental Tuxedo.” Do NOT capitalize “dude,” “cha-cha,” or “boogerhead.”
   2. To indicate a situation of great military importance. EXAMPLE: “Get on the
   TELSAT and tell STAFCON that COMWIMP wants some BBQ ASAP.”
   3. To indicate that the subject of the sentence has been bitten by a badger.
   EXAMPLE: “I’ll just stick my hand in here and OUCH!”
   Q. Is there any difference between “happen” and “transpire”?
   A. Grammatically, “happen” is a collaborating inductive that should be used in predatory conjunctions such as: “Me and Norm here would like to buy you two happening mommas a drink.” Whereas “transpire” is a suppository verb that should always be used to indicate that an event of some kind has transpired. wRONG: “Lester got one of them electric worm stunners. RIGHT: “What transpired was, Lester got one of them electric worm stunners.”
   Q. Do you take questions from attorneys?
   A. Yes. That will be $475.
   Q. No, seriously, I’m an attorney, and I want to know which is correct: “With regards to the aforementioned” blah blah blah. Or: “With regards to the aforementioned” yak yak yak.
   A. That will be $850.
   Q. Please explain the expression: “This does not bode well.”
   A. It means that something is not boding the way it should. It could be boding better.
   Q. Did an alert reader named Linda Bevard send you an article from the December 19, 1990, Denver Post concerning a Dr. Stanley Biber, who was elected commissioner in Las Animas County, and who is identified in the article as “the world’s leading sex-change surgeon”?
   A. Yes.
   Q. And what did Dr. Biber say when he was elected?
   A. He said, quote: “We pulled it off.”
   Q. Please explain the correct usage of “exact same.”
   A. “Exact same” is a corpuscular phrase that should be used only when something is exactly the same as something. It is the opposite (or “antibody”) of “a whole nother.”
   EXAMPLE: “This is the exact same restaurant where Alma found weevils in her
   pie. They gave her a whole nother slice.”
   Q. I am going to deliver the eulogy at a funeral, and I wish to know whether it is correct to say: “Before he died, Lamont was an active person.” Or: “Lamont was an active person before he died.”
   A. The American Funeral Industry Council advises us that the preferred term is “bought the farm.”
   Q. Where should punctuation go?
   A. It depends on the content.
   EXAMPLE: Hi Mr Johnson exclaimed Bob Where do you want me to put these punctuation marks Oh just stick them there at the end of the following sentence answered Mr Johnson OK said Bob
   The exception to this rule is teenagers, who should place a question mark after every few words to make sure people are still listening.
   EXAMPLE: “So there’s this kid at school? Named Derrick? And he’s like kind of weird? Like he has a picture of Newt Gingrich carved in his hair? So one day he had to blow his nose? like really bad? But he didn’t have a tissue? So he was like sitting next to Tracy Steakle And she had this sweater? By like Ralph Lauren? So Derrick takes the sleeve? And he like ...”
   PROFESSIONAL WRITING TIP: In writing a novel or play, use “foreshadowing” to subtly hint at the outcome of the plot.
   WRONG: “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” RIGHT: “O Romeo, Romeo! I wonder if we’re both going to stab ourselves to death at the end of this plot?”

You’ve Gotta Be Kidding

   Today’s scary topic for parents is: What Your Children Do When You’re Not Home.
   I have here a letter from Buffalo, New York, from working mom Judy Price, concerning her 14-year-old son, David, “who should certainly know better, because the school keeps telling me he is a genius, but I have not seen signs of this in our normal, everyday life.”
   Judy states that one day when she came home from work, David met her outside and said: “Hi, Mom. Are you going in?”
   (This is a bad sign, parents.)
   Judy says she considered replying, “No, I thought I’d just stay here in the car all night and pull away for work in the morning.”
   That actually would have been a wise idea. Instead, she went inside, where she found a large black circle burned into the middle of her kitchen counter. “DAVID,” she screamed. “WHAT WERE YOU COOKING?”
   The soft, timid reply came back: “A baseball.”
   “A baseball,” Judy writes. “Of course. What else could it be? How could I forget to tell my children never to cook a baseball? It’s my fault, really.”
   It turns out that according to David’s best friend’s cousin—and if you can’t believe HIM, who CAN you believe?—you can hit a baseball three times as far if you really heat it up first. So David did this, and naturally he put the red-hot pan down directly onto the countertop, probably because there was no rare antique furniture available.
   For the record: David claims that the heated baseball did, in fact, go farther. But this does NOT mean that you young readers should try this foolish and dangerous experiment at home. Use a friend’s home.
   No, seriously, you young people should never heat a baseball without proper adult supervision, just as you should never—and I say this from personal experience—attempt to make a rumba box.
   A rumba box is an obscure musical instrument that consists of a wooden box with metal strips attached to it in such a way that when you plunk them, the box resonates with a pleasant rhythmic sound. The only time I ever saw a rumba box was in 1964, when a friend of my parents named Walter Karl played one at a gathering at our house, and it sounded great. Mr. Karl explained that the metal strips were actually pieces of the spring from an old-fashioned wind-up phonograph. This gave my best friend, Lanny Watts, an idea. Lanny was always having ideas. For example, one day he got tired of walking to the end of his driveway to get the mail, so he had the idea of hanging the mailbox from a rope-and-pulley system strung up the driveway to his porch, where he hooked it up to a washing-machine motor. When the mailman came, Lanny simply plugged in the motor, and whoosh, the mailbox fell down. The amount of time Lanny spent unsuccessfully trying to get this labor-saving device to work was equivalent to approximately 5,000 trips to get the actual mail, but that is the price of convenience.
   So anyway, when Lanny heard Mr. Karl explain the rumba box, he realized two things:
   1. His parents had an old-fashioned wind-up phonograph they hardly ever used.
   2. They both worked out of the home.
   So Lanny and I decided to make our own rumba box. Our plan, as I recall it, was to take the phonograph apart, snip off a bit of the spring, then put the phonograph back together, and nobody would be the wiser. This plan worked perfectly until we removed the metal box that held the phonograph spring; this box turned out to be very hard to open.
   “Why would they make it so strong?” we asked ourselves.
   Finally, recalling the lessons we had learned about mechanical advantage in high-school physics class, we decided to hit the box with a sledge hammer.
   Do you remember the climactic scene in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Nazis open up the Ark of the Covenant and out surges a terrifying horde of evil fury and the Nazis’ heads melt like chocolate bunnies in a microwave? Well, that’s similar to what happened when Lanny sledge-hammered the spring box. It turns out that the reason the box is so strong is that there is a really powerful, tightly wound, extremely irritable spring in there, and when you let it out, it just goes berserk, writhing and snarling and thrashing violently all over the room, seeking to gain revenge on all the people who have cranked it over the years.
   Lanny and I fled the room until the spring calmed down. When we returned, we found phonograph parts spread all over the room, mixed in with approximately 2.4 miles of spring. We realized we’d have to modify our Project Goal slightly, from making a rumba box to being in an entirely new continent when Lanny’s mom got home.
   Actually, Mrs. Watts went fairly easy on us, just as Judy Price seems to have been good-humored about her son’s heating the baseball. Moms are usually pretty good that way.
   But sometimes I wonder. You know how guys are always complaining that they used to have a baseball-card collection that would be worth a fortune today if they still had it, but their moms threw it out? And the guys always say, “Mom just didn’t know any better.”
   Well, I wonder if the moms knew exactly what they were doing. Getting even.

Sexual Intercourse

   Today’s Topic for Guys is: Communicating with Women.
   If there’s one thing that women find unsatisfactory about guys—and I base this conclusion on an extensive scientific study of the pile of Cosmopolitan magazines where I get my hair cut—it is that guys do not communicate enough.
   This problem has arisen in my own personal relationship with my wife, Beth. I’ll be reading the newspaper and the phone will ring; I’ll answer it, listen for 10 minutes, hang up, and resume reading. Finally Beth will say: “Who was that?” And I’ll say, “Phil Wonkerman’s mom.” Phil is an old friend we haven’t heard from in 17 years. And Beth will say, “Well?” And I’ll say, “Well what?” And Beth will say, “What did she SAY?”
   And I’ll say, “She said Phil is fine,” making it clear by my tone of voice that, although I do not wish to be rude, I AM trying to read the newspaper here, and I happen to be right in the middle of an important panel of “Calvin and Hobbes.”
   But Beth, ignoring this, will say, “That’s all she said?”
   And she will not let up. She will continue to ask district attorney-style questions, forcing me to recount the conversation until she’s satisfied that she has the entire story, which is that Phil just got out of prison after serving a sentence for a murder he committed when he became a drug addict because of the guilt he felt when his wife died in a freak submarine accident while Phil was having an affair with a nun, but now he’s all straightened out and has a good job as a trapeze artist and is almost through with the surgical part of his sex change and just became happily engaged to marry a prominent member of New Kids on the Block, so in other words he is fine, which is EXACTLY what I told Beth in the first place, but is that enough? No. She wants to hear every single detail.
   We have some good friends, Buzz and Libby, whom we see about twice a year. When we get together, Beth and Libby always wind up in a conversation, lasting several days, during which they discuss virtually every significant event that has occurred in their lives and the lives of those they care about, sharing their innermost feelings, analyzing and probing, inevitably coming to a deeper understanding of each other, and a strengthening of a cherished friendship. Whereas Buzz and I watch the playoffs.
   This is not to say Buzz and I don’t share our feelings. Sometimes we get quite emotional.
   “That’s not a FOUL??” one of us will say.
   Or: “YOU’RE TELLING ME THAT’S NOT A FOUL???”
   I don’t mean to suggest that all we talk about is sports. We also discuss, openly and without shame, what kind of pizza we need to order. We have a fine time together, but we don’t have heavy conversations, and sometimes, after the visit is over, I’m surprised to learn—from Beth, who learned it from Libby—that there has recently been some new wrinkle in Buzz’s life, such as that he now has an artificial leg.
   (For the record, Buzz does NOT have an artificial leg. At least he didn’t mention anything about it to me.)
   I have another good friend, Gene, who’s going through major developments in his life. Our families recently spent a weekend together, during which Gene and I talked a lot and enjoyed each other’s company immensely. In that entire time, the most intimate personal statement he made to me is that he has reached level 24 of a video game called Arkanoid. He has even seen the Evil Presence, although he refused to tell me what it looks like. We’re very close, but there is a limit.
   I know what some of you are saying. You’re saying my friends and I are Neanderthals, and a lot of guys are different. This is true. A lot of guys don’t use words at all. They communicate entirely by nonverbal methods, such as sharing bait.
   But my point, guys, is that you must communicate on a deeper level with a woman, particularly if you are married to her. Open up. Don’t assume that she knows what you’re thinking. This will be difficult for guys at first, so it would help if you women would try to “read between the lines” in determining what the guy is trying to communicate:
   GUY STATEMENT: “Do we have any peanut butter?” INNER GUY MEANING: “I hate my job.” GUY STATEMENT: “Is this all we have? Crunchy?” INNER GUY MEANING: “I’m not sure I want to stay married.”
   If both genders work together, you can have a happier, healthier relationship, but the responsibility rests with you guys, who must sincerely ... Hey, guys, I’m TALKING to you here. Put down the sports section, OK? HEY! GUYS!

Nerds ‘R’ Us

   COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS TO THE HIGH-SCHOOL GRADUATING CLASS OF 1992: As I look out over your shining faces, I am reminded of the Bartlett’s familiar quotation by the great Greek philosopher Socrates, who said, “Eventually your skin will clear up and your faces won’t shine so much.”
   As is so often the case with great philosophers, he was lying. Your skin is a lifelong enemy, young people. It has millions of hardy zit cells that will continue to function perfectly, long after the rest of your organs have become aged and decrepit. Remember Ronald Reagan? No? Well, he used to be the president, off and on, and in 1985, after undergoing a medical procedure on his nose, he met with the press and made the following two statements, which I swear to you young people that I am not making up:
   1. “It is true I had—well, I guess for want of a better word—a pimple on my nose.”
   2. “I violated all the rules. I picked at it and I squoze it and so forth and messed myself up a little.”
   And President Reagan was no spring chicken at the time. I believe that, at one point in his acting career, he actually was in a movie with Socrates. The point I am making, young people, is that your skin will never “clear up.” People have been known to break out with embarrassing blemishes at their own funerals.
   But postmortem acne is not what you young people should be thinking about today as you prepare to go out into the world, leaving behind the hallowed halls of your school, but not before sticking wads of gum on virtually every hallowed surface. Perhaps you think you have gotten away with this. You may be interested to learn that, thanks to a Used Gum Tracing procedure developed by the FBI, school authorities can now analyze the DNA in the dried spit molecules and, by cross-referencing with your Permanent Record, determine exactly who was chewing every single wad. This means that someday in the future—perhaps at your wedding—burly officers of the Gum Police will come barging in and arrest you and take you off to harsh prisons where you will be forced to eat food prepared by the same people who ran your high-school cafeteria.
   Yes, young people, modern technology promises an exciting future. But you must also learn from the wisdom of your elders, and if there is one piece of advice that I would offer you, it is this: Burn your yearbook right now. Because otherwise, years from now, feeling nostalgic, you’ll open it up to your photo, and this alien GEEK will be staring out at you, and your children will beg you to tell them that they’re adopted.
   it is a known science fact that, no matter how good your yearbook photo looks now, after 15 years of being pressed up against somebody else’s face in the dark and mysterious yearbook environment, it will transmutate itself into a humiliating picture of a total goober. This is true of everybody. If, in
   early 1991, the U.S. government had quietly contacted Saddam Hussein and threatened to publish his yearbook photo in the New York Times, he would have dropped Kuwait like a 250-pound maggot.
   Yes, young people, old yearbook photos can be a powerful force for good. Yet the horrifying truth is that sometimes newspapers publish the yearbook photos of totally innocent people. Yes! In America! I know what I’m talking about, young people, because it happened to me. The March 1992 issue of Panther Tracks, the newspaper of my alma mater, Pleasantville (New York) High School, has an article about me, and although I definitely remember looking normal in high school, there’s a photograph of this solemn little junior Certified Public Accountant wearing glasses sold by Mister Bob’s House of Soviet Eyewear.
   People I hadn’t heard from in years mailed me this picture, along with heartwarming and thoughtful notes.
   “Dave!” they’d say. “I forgot what a Dweeb you were!”
   Or: “Who styled your hair? Bigfoot?”
   This is unfair, Class of ‘92. Let me assure you that I was very “hip” in high school. I distinctly remember an incident in 1964, when Lanny Watts and I got a stern lecture from the assistant principal, Mr. Sabella, because we showed up at a school dance with our sport-jacket collars turned under, so the jackets looked like they didn’t HAVE collars, because this was the style worn by the Dave Clark Five. Remember the Dave Clark Five, young people? No? Sure you do! You must! They had that big hit with the drum part that went: NAIHOMPA NAIHOMPA OMPA. Wasn’t that a great song, young people? Hey, are you laughing at me? STOP LAUGHING AT ME, YOU LITTLE ZITFACES!
   Thank you.

Uneasy Rider

   It’s 6 P.m., and we’re waiting for our 12-year-old son, Rob, to return from a quick bike ride. We’re going to go out to dinner to celebrate the fact that, for the 1,000th consecutive night, we have figured out an excuse to not cook at home.
   We’re locking up the house when a young man comes to the door and asks if we have a son. “There’s been an accident,” he says.
   “Is it bad?” Beth asks.
   “There’s blood everywhere,” he says.
   Sometimes I wonder if parenthood is such a good idea. Sometimes I envy fish and frogs and lobsters and other animals that just emit their young in egg form, then swim or hop or lobster-scoot away from the scene, free of responsibility, immune from anguish. I can remember when there was nobody in my world as important to me as me. Oh, I loved other people—my wife, my
   family, my friends—and I would have been distraught if something bad happened to them. But I knew I’d still be here. And that was the really important thing.
   Rob changed that. Right at birth. When he came out, looking like a cranky old prune, he didn’t cry. Beth, instantly a mom, kept saying, through her haze of labor pain, “Why isn’t he crying? Why isn’t he crying?” The nurse said sometimes they don’t cry, but I could see that the doctor thought something was wrong, because he was trying to do something with Rob’s mouth, and he was having trouble. He whispered something to the nurse and took Rob away, and the nurse kept saying this was routine, but we knew it wasn’t. I stood there, wearing my goofy hospital outfit, holding Beth’s hand, trying to cope with two staggering thoughts: First, I had a child—I had a child—and second, maybe my child was in trouble.
   That was the most sickeningly vulnerable feeling I’d ever felt. And I didn’t even know Rob yet.
   It turned out he was OK—just a little blockage. The doctor gave him back to us, and we quickly became traditional first-time parents, wrapped in a woozy cocoon of joy and exhaustion, taking a genuine intellectual interest in poop, marveling at the thrill we felt, the connection, when our son’s tiny hand squeezed our fingers.
   But the feeling of vulnerability didn’t go away. It only got worse, always lurking inside, forcing me to accept that I wasn’t in control anymore, not when I knew my universe could be trashed at any moment because of unpredictable, uncontrollable developments on this newborn comet, zooming through. When he was happy, I was happier than I’d ever been; but when he was in trouble ... I can remember every detail of the time when, at 10 months, he got a bad fever, 106 degrees, his tiny body burning, and I carried him into the hospital, thinking I can’t take this, please, let me be able to stop this, please, give me this fever, take it out of this little boy and put it in me, please....
   But you can’t do that. You can’t make it happen to you. You have to watch it happen to your child, and it never gets any easier, does it?
   Now Beth and I are in the car, and I’m driving too fast, but I have to; I have to see what I don’t want to see. Up ahead some people are gathered on the side of the road, and a woman is kneeling—she has blood on her dress, a lot of blood—and lying in front of her, on his back, his face covered with blood is ...
   “Oh God,” says Beth. “Oh God.”
   This is where it ends, for some parents. Right here, on the roadside. My heart breaks for these parents. I don’t know that I could survive it.
   Now I’m opening the door, stumbling out of the car toward Rob. He’s moving his right hand. He’s waving at me. He’s giving me a weak, bloody smile, trying to reassure me.
   “It’s my fault,” he’s saying. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
   “It’s OK!” I’m saying. “It’s OK!”
   Please let It be OK.
   “I’m sorry,” the bloody-dress woman is saying. “I’m so sorry.” She was driving the car that collided with Rob. He went through the windshield, then was thrown back out onto the road, 40 feet, according to the ambulance guys.
   “This is my worst nightmare,” the woman is saying.
   “I’m sorry,” Rob is saying.
   “It’s OK!” I’m saying. “You’re going to be OK!”
   Please.
   He was OK. A broken leg, some skin scraped off, a lot of stitches, but nothing that won’t heal. He’ll be getting out of his cast in a couple of months, getting on with his ever-busier life, his friends, his school, his stuff, he’ll be growing bigger, moving faster, this bright comet-boy who streaked into my universe 12 years ago and is already starting to arc his way back out, farther from me, from my control, from my sight.
   But that little hand will never let go of my finger.
   I’m sorry. This was supposed to be a hilarious column about how Beth and I were getting ready to go out for a nice dinner at 6 P.m. and wound up eating lukewarm cheeseburgers at 11 P.m. on a table in the Miami Children’s Hospital emergency room; and how Rob, after politely thanking a very nice nurse for helping him sit up, threw up on her; and other comical events. But this is how the column turned out. Next week I promise to return to Booger journalism.
   In closing, here’s a Public Service Message for you young readers from Rob Barry, who won’t be walking for a while but can still operate a keyboard:
   I know that bike helmets look really nerdy, and that was my argument. But I don’t think I’ll ever say that again. Make SURE you wear your helmets. And WATCH OUT FOR CARS.

Dave’s Real World

   The reason I agreed to be in an episode of a TV situation comedy was that the role was perfect for me. You want to choose your roles carefully, as an actor. You want to look for roles in which you can display the range, the depth, the infinitely subtle nuances of your acting talent.
   “It’s just one word,” the director said. “You say ‘Howdy.’”
   “I’ll do it,” I said. A role like that comes along once in a lifetime.
   The TV show—which might even still be on the air as you read this—is called “Dave’s World.” It’s loosely based on a book and some columns I wrote. I use the term “loosely” very loosely. There’s no way they could just take my columns and turn them directly into a TV series; every episode would last four minutes, and end with all the major characters being killed by an exploding toilet. So they have professional writers supplying dramatic elements that are missing from my writing, such as plots, characters, and jokes that do not involve the term “toad mucus.”
   (Lest you think I have “sold out” as an artist, let me stress that I have retained total creative control over the show, in the sense that, when they send me a check, I can legally spend it however I want.)
   I worked hard on “Howdy,” memorizing it in just days. Depending on the scene, I could deliver the line with various emotional subtexts, including happiness (“Howdy!”), sorrow (“Howdy!”), anger (“Howdy!”), and dental problems (“Hmpgh!”).
   Then, just before I flew to Los Angeles for the filming, the director called to tell me that they had changed my role. In my new role, I played a man in an appliance store who tries to buy the last air conditioner but gets into a bidding war for it with characters who are based, loosely, on me and my wife, played by Harry Anderson and DeLane Matthews. (Harry Anderson plays me. Only taller.)
   In my new role, I had to say 17 words, not ONE of which was “Howdy!” I was still memorizing my part when I got to the studio. It was swarming with people—camera people, light people, sound people, bagel people, cream-cheese people, people whose sole function—this is a coveted union job, passed down from father to son—is to go “SSHHH!” You, the actor, have to say your lines with all these people constantly staring at you, plus the director and the writers keep changing the script. The actors will do a scene, and the director will say, “OK, that was perfect, but this time, Bob, instead of saying ‘What’s for dinner?’ you say, ‘Wait a minute! Benzene is actually a hydrocarbon!’ And say it with a Norwegian accent. Also, we think maybe your character should have no arms.”
   My lines didn’t change much, but as we got ready to film my scene, I was increasingly nervous. I was supposed to walk up to the appliance salesman and say: “I need an air conditioner.” I had gone over this many times, but as the director said “Action!” my brain—the brain is easily the least intelligent organ in the body—lost my lines, and began frantically rummaging around for them in my memory banks. You could actually see my skull bulging with effort as I walked onto the set, in front of four TV cameras, a vast technical crew, and a live Studio Audience, with no real idea what I was going to say to the appliance salesman (“I need a howdy”).
   But somehow I remembered my lines. The director seemed satisfied with my performance, except for the last part, where Harry Anderson, outbidding me for the air conditioner, hands the salesman some takeout sushi and says, “We’ll throw in some squid,” and I become disgusted and say, “Yuppies.” (If you recognize this dialogue, it’s because it’s very similar to the appliance-buying scene in Hamlet.)
   “That was perfect, Dave,” said the director. (This is what directors say when they think it sucked.) “But when you say ‘yuppies,’ make it smaller.”
   So we redid the scene, and as we approached my last line, I was totally focused on doing a smaller “yuppies.” Then I noticed that (a) the other actors weren’t saying anything, and (b) everybody in the studio was staring at me, waiting. I had clearly messed up, but I had no idea how. This was a time to think fast, to improvise, to come up with a clever line that would save the scene. So here’s what I did: I fell down. (It’s a nervous habit I have. Ask my wife.)
   When I got up, I explained that I’d been waiting for Harry to say the squid line.
   “They took that out,” somebody said.
   “They took out the squid?” I said. “The squid is gone?”
   It turned out that everybody else knew this, including probably the Live Studio Audience. So we had to do that part again, with my brain feverishly repeating “No squid! Smaller yuppies!” (This would be a good slogan for a restaurant.)
   That time we got through it, and my television career came to an end, and I went back to being, loosely, a newspaper columnist. I have not, however, ruled out the possibility of starring in a spinoff. I am thinking of a dramatic action series about a hero who, each week, tries to buy an air conditioner. I have a great line for ending this column, but I can’t remember what it is.

A Failure To Communicate

   Now that my son has turned 13, I’m thinking about writing a self-help book for parents of teenagers. It would be a sensitive, insightful book that would explain the complex, emotionally charged relationship between the parent and the adolescent child. The title would be: I’m a jerk; You’re a jerk.
   The underlying philosophy of this book would be that, contrary to what you hear from the “experts,” it’s a bad idea for parents and teenagers to attempt to communicate with each other, because there’s always the risk that one of you will actually find out what the other one is thinking.
   For example, my son thinks it’s a fine idea to stay up until 3 A.m. on school nights reading what are called “suspense novels,” defined as “novels wherein the most positive thing that can happen to a character is that the Evil Ones will kill him before they eat his brain.” My son sees no connection between the fact that he stays up reading these books and the fact that he doesn’t feel like going to school the next day.
   “Rob,” I tell him, as he is eating his breakfast in extreme slow motion with his eyes completely closed, so that he sometimes accidentally puts food into his ear, “I want you to go to sleep earlier.”
   “DAD,” he says, using the tone of voice you might use when attempting to explain an abstract intellectual concept to an oyster, “you DON’T UNDERSTAND. I am NOT tired. I am ... PLOOS!” (sound of my son passing out facedown in his Cracklin’ Oat Bran).
   Of course psychologists would tell us that falling asleep in cereal is normal for young teenagers, who need to become independent of their parents and make their own life decisions, which is fine, except that if my son made his own life decisions, his ideal daily schedule would be:
   Midnight to 3 A.m.—Read suspense novels. 3 A.M. to 3 P.m.—Sleep. 3:15 P.m.—Order hearty, breakfast from Domino’s Pizza and put on loud hideous music recorded live in hell. 4 P.m. to midnight—Blow stuff up.
   Unfortunately, this schedule would leave little room for, say, school, so we have to supply parental guidance (“If you don’t open this door RIGHT NOW I will BREAK IT DOWN and CHARGE IT TO YOUR ALLOWANCE”), the result being that our relationship with our son currently involves a certain amount Of conflict, in the same sense that the Pacific Ocean involves a certain amount of water.
   At least he doesn’t wear giant pants. I keep seeing young teenage males wearing enormous pants; pants that two or three teenagers could occupy simultaneously and still have room in there for a picnic basket; pants that a clown would refuse to wear on the grounds that they were too undignified. The young men wear these pants really low, so that the waist is about knee level and the pants butt drags on the ground. You could not be an effective criminal wearing pants like these, because you’d be unable to flee on foot with any velocity.
   POLICE OFFICER: We tracked the alleged perpetrator from the crime scene by following the trail of his dragging pants butt. PROSECUTOR: And what was he doing when you caught up with him? POLICE OFFICER: He was hobbling in a suspicious manner.
   What I want to know is, how do young people buy these pants? Do they try them on to make sure they DON’T fit? Do they take along a 500-pound friend, or a mature polar bear, and buy pants that fit HIM?
   I asked my son about these pants, and he told me that mainly “bassers” wear them. “Bassers” are people who like a lot of bass in their music. They drive around in cars with four-trillion-watt sound systems playing recordings of what sound like above-ground nuclear tests, but with less of an emphasis on melody.
   My son also told me that there are also people called “posers” who DRESS like “bassers,” but are, in fact, secretly “preppies.” He said that some “posers” also pose as “headbangers,” who are people who like heavy-metal music, which is performed by skinny men with huge hair who stomp around the stage, striking their instruments and shrieking angrily, apparently because somebody has stolen all their shirts.
   “Like,” my son said, contemptuously, “some posers will act like they like Metallica, but they don’t know anything about Metallica.”
   If you can imagine.
   I realize I’ve mainly been giving my side of the parent-teenager relationship, and I promise to give my son’s side, if he ever comes out of his room. Remember how the news media made a big deal about it when those people came out after spending two years inside Biosphere 2? Well, two years is nothing. Veteran parents assure me that teenagers routinely spend that long in the bathroom. In fact, veteran parents assure me that I haven’t seen anything yet.
   “Wait till he gets his driver’s license,” they say. “That’s when Fred and I turned to heroin.”
   Yes, the next few years are going to be exciting and challenging. But I’m sure that, with love and trust and understanding, my family will get through them OK. At least I will, because I plan to be inside Biosphere 3.

About The Author

   Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dave Barry’s best-selling books Include: Dave Barry Does Japan, Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up, and Dave Barry Turns 40. Championed by the New York Times as “the funniest man In America,” Barry’s syndicated column for The Miami Herald now reaches over 250 newspapers across the country. Television has even succumbed to his wit—the popular sitcom “Dave’s World” is based on his life and columns.

Dave Barry Slept Here

Dave Barry

Dedication
Introduction
Early Explorations
Chapter One. Deflowering A Virgin Continent
Discussion Questions
Chapter Two. Spain Gets Hot
The Fortunate Invention Of Certain Navigational Aids
The Age Of Exploration
The Decline Of Spain
Discussion Questions
Make A Simple Compass
Chapter Three. England Starts Some Fun Colonies
The Establishment Of The Lost Colony
The Story Of The Puritans
Discussion Questions
Chapter Four. The Colonies Develop A Life-Style
The England-Holland Rivalry
The Development Of Trade
Friction With The French
The French And Indian War
Discussion Questions
Chapter Five. The Birthing Contractions Of A Nation
The Situation Turns Ugly
Discussion Questions
Chapter Six. Kicking Some British Butt
The Declaration Of Independence
The Turning Point
Discussion Questions
Chapter Seven. The Forging Of A Large, Wasteful Bureaucracy
The U.S. Constitution
The Bill Of Rights
The Election Of The First President
Discussion Questions
Chapter Eight. A Brash Young Nation Gets Into Wars And Stuff
The Election Of 1792
The Rise Of Political Parties
The Louisiana Purchase
The War Of 1812
The Treaty Of Ghent
Discussion Questions
Fascinating Historical Sidenote To History
Chapter Nine. Barging Westward
The Federal Banking Crisis Of 1837
Culture
The Formation Of Texas
The Rush To California
Discussion Questions
Chapter Ten. The Civil War: A Nation Pokes Itself In The Eyeball
Highlights Of The Fillmore Administration
The Origins Of Abraham Lincoln
The Civil War
Reconstruction
Discussion Questions
Fun Classroom Project
Chapter Eleven. The Nation Enters Chapter Eleven
The Rise Of Heavy Industry
The Settlement Of The West
Discussion Questions
Chapter Twelve. Groping Toward Empire
The Awakening Of Imperialism
The Spanish-American War
Theodore Roosevelt
The Panama Canal
Discussion Questions
Chapter Thirteen. Deep International Doo-Doo
The Suffragette Movement
The Causes Of International Tension
The Actual War Itself
The Treaty Of Versailles
The Russian Revolution
Discussion Questions
Chapter Fourteen. A Nation Gets Funky
Teapot Dome Scandal
Discussion Questions
Chapter Fifteen. Severe Economic Bummerhood
The Underlying Causes Of The Crash
The Great Depression
The Hawley-Smoot Tariff
Discussion Questions
Chapter Sixteen. Major Nonhumorous Events Occur
World War Ii
The Turning Point
The Final Stages Of The War
The United Nations
Trick Discussion Question
Chapter Seventeen. International Tension City
The Cold War
The Berlin Crisis
The Berlin Airlift
The Red Scare
1948 Presidential Election
The Korean War
Discussion Questions
Extra-Credit Project
Chapter Eighteen. The Fifties: Peace, Prosperity, Brain Death
Culture In The Fifties
The Presidential Election Of 1956
The Suez Crisis
The Sputnik Crisis
The U-2 Crisis
Discussion Questions
Extra Credit
Bonus Question
Chapter Nineteen. The Sixties: A Nation Gets High And Has Amazing Insights, Many Of Which Later On Turn Out To Seem Kind Of Stupid
The 1960 Presidential Election
The Kennedy Administration
The Bay Of Pigs
The Berlin Crisis
A Long String Of Bummers
The Nixon Comeback
The Nixon Presidency
Discussion Questions
Chapter Twenty. The Seventies: A Relieved Nation Learns That It Does Not Actually Need A President
The Watergate Scandal
Highlights Of The Ford Administration
“Jimmy” Carter
Highlights Of The Carter Administration
Discussion Questions
Chapter Twenty-One. The Reagan-Bush Years: Napping Toward Glory
The 1980 Presidential Election Campaign
The Reagan Revolution
The War In Grenada
The Second Reagan Term
The 1988 Presidential Election
Discussion Questions
Index
About The Author