It’s A Gas

   Recently, I received a letter from a justice of the United States Supreme Court concerning a product called Beano.
   I absolutely swear I am not making this up. The letter, written on official U.S. Supreme Court stationary, comes from Justice John Paul Stevens, who states:
   “Having long been concerned about the problem of exploding cows, it seemed imperative to pass on to you the enclosed advertisement, the importance of which I am sure will be immediately apparent to you.” Justice Stevens enclosed an advertisement from Cooking Light magazine for Beano, which, according to the manufacturer, “prevents the gas from beans.” The advertisement includes pro-Beano quotations from various recognized intestinal-gas authorities, including (I am still not making this up) the New York Times, the Idaho Statesman, and Regis Philbin. The advertisement calls Beano “a scientific and social breakthrough,” and states: “It’s time to spill the Beano.”
   I was already aware of this product. I don’t wish to toot my own horn, so to speak, but thanks to the efforts of hundreds of alert readers, my office happens to be the World Clearinghouse for information relating to gas buildups that cause explosions in animals, plants, plumbing, humans, etc. In recent months I’ve received newspaper reports of explosions involving a flounder, a marshmallow, a mattress, two wine bottles, several pacemakers (during cremation), countless toilets, a flaming cocktail called a “harbor light,” chicken livers, snail eggs, a turkey, a tube of Poppin’ Fresh biscuits, a raccoon, and a set of breast implants.
   So needless to say, many readers had already alerted me about Beano. Several of them had sent me actual samples of Beano, which comes in a small plastic bottle, from which you squirt drops onto your food. But until I got Justice Stevens’s letter, I had not realized that this was a matter of concern in the highest levels of government. When you see the Supreme Court justices, they always appear to be extremely solemn, if not actually deceased. It never occurs to you that, under those robes, they have digestive systems, too. But they do, as can be seen by a careful reading of the transcript of a recent court hearing:
   CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Is the court to understand, then, that the counsel’s interpretation of the statute is ... All right! Who sliced the Limburger? (He glares at the other justices.)
   JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, I am not naming names, but I happened to be glancing at the liberal wing of the court, and I definitely saw some robes billow, if you catch my drift.
   JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, sure, and I suppose the conservative wing doesn’t sound like the All-Star Kazoo Band over there. My opinions are blowing off the bench.
   JUSTICE O’CONNOR: Oh, yeah? Well, why don’t you take your opinions and ...
   This is bad for America. We need our highest judicial body to stop this childish bickering and get back to debating the kinds of weighty constitutional issues that have absorbed the court in recent years, such as whether a city can legally force an exotic dancer to cover her entire nipple, or just the part that pokes out.
   So I decided, as a tax-deductible public service, to do a Beano Field Test. To make sure the test was legally valid, I asked a friend of mine, Paul Levine, who’s a trained attorney as well as an author, if he’d participate. Paul is a selfless, concerned citizen, so I was not surprised at his answer.
   “Only if you mention that my critically acclaimed novel To Speak for the Dead is now available in paperback,” he said.
   “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” I said. But Paul agreed to participate in the Field Test anyway, because that is the kind of American he is. My wife, Beth, also agreed to participate, although I want to stress that, being a woman, she has never, ever, in her entire life, not once, produced any kind of gaseous digestive byproduct, and when she does she blames it on the dogs.
   To make this the most demanding field test possible, we went to a Mexican restaurant. Mexican restaurants slip high-octane beans into virtually everything they serve, including breath mints. It is not by mere chance that most of Mexico is located outdoors.
   Paul, Beth, and I applied the Beano to our food as directed—three to eight drops per serving—and we ate it. For the rest of the evening we wandered around to various night spots, awaiting developments. Other people at these night spots were probably having exciting, romantic conversations, but ours went like this:
   ME: So! How’s everyone doing? BETH: All quiet! PAUL: Not a snap, crackle, or pop!
   Anyway, the bottom line is that Beano seems to work pretty well. Paul reported the next day that all had been fairly calm, although at 3:30 A.m. he was awakened by an outburst. “You’re familiar with the Uzi?” was how he put it. I myself was far safer than usual to light a match around, and Beth reported that the dogs had been un usually quiet.
   So this could be an important product. Maybe, when you go to a restaurant, if you order certain foods, the waiter should bring Beano to your table, instead of those stupid utility-pole-sized pepper grinders. “Care for some Beano?” the waiter could say. “Trust me, you’ll need it.”
   And getting back to Justice Stevens’s original concern, I think federal helicopters should spray massive quantities of Beano on the nation’s dairy farms, to reduce the cow methane output. And of course it should be mandatory in the dining rooms of the United States Congress. I’m sure the Supreme Court will back me up on this.

The Unkindest Cut Of All

   I want to warn you right away that today’s topic involves an extremely mature subject matter that might offend your community standards, if your community has any.
   I became sensitive about community standards recently when, at the suggestion of no less than a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, I wrote a column about a ground-breaking antiflatulence product called Beano. Some newspapers—and I do not wish to name names, but two of them were the Portland Oregonian and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—refused to print this column on the grounds that it was tasteless and offensive. Which of course it was, although it was nothing like the disgusting trash you hear from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
   Anyway, those readers who have community standards should leave the room at this time, because today’s topic is: circumcision. This is a common medical procedure that involves—and here, in the interest of tastefulness, I am going to use code names—taking hold of a guy’s Oregonian and snipping his Post-Dispatch right off. This is usually done to tiny guy babies who don’t have a clue as to what is about to happen. One minute a baby is lying happily in his little bed, looking at the world and thinking what babies think (basically, “Huh?”), and suddenly along comes a large person and snip WAAAAHHH the baby is dramatically introduced to the concept that powerful strangers can fill his life with pain for no apparent reason. This is excellent training for dealing with the Internal Revenue Service, but it’s no fun at the time.
   Most of us guys deal with this unpleasant experience by eventually erasing it from our conscious minds, the way we do with algebra. But some guys never get over it. I base this statement on a San Jose Mercury News article, written by Michael Oricchio and mailed to me by many alert readers, concerning a group of men in California who are very upset about having been circumcised as babies. They have formed a support group called RECAP. In the interest of good taste I will not tell you what the P in RECAP stands for, but the “RECA” part stands for “Recover A.”
   According to the article, the members (sorry!) of RECAP are devoted to restoring themselves to precircumcision condition “through stretching existing skin or by surgery.” I swear I am not making this up. Here is a quotation from RECAP co-founder R. Wayne Griffiths:
   “There are a lot of men who are enraged that they were violated without their consent and they want to do something about it. I’ve always been fascinated by intact men. I just thought it looked nicer. I had friends growing up who were intact. I thought, ‘Gee, that’s what I’d like to be.’”
   The article states that, to become intact again, Griffiths invented a 7-1/2-ounce skin-stretching device that “looks like a tiny steel barbell,” which he taped to the end of his Oregonian and wore for “four to 12 hours every day, except weekends, for a year.” Using this method, he grew himself an entirely new Post-Dispatch. Other RECAP members are involved in similar efforts. They meet regularly to discuss technique and review their progress.
   I’m not sure how I feel about all this. I’m a middle-age white guy, which means I’m constantly reminded that my particular group is responsible for the oppression of every known minority PLUS most wars PLUS government corruption PLUS pollution of the environment, not to mention that it was middle-age white guys who killed Bambi’s mom. So I’m pleased to learn that I myself am an oppressed victim of something. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t get enraged about it. I’ve asked other guys about this.
   “Are you enraged about being circumcised?” I say.
   “What?” they say.
   So I explain about RECAP.
   “WHAT??” they say.
   I have yet to find a guy who’s enraged. And nobody I talked to was interested in miniature barbells, let alone surgery. Most guys don’t even like to talk about medical procedures involving the Oregonian region. One time my wife and I were at a restaurant with two other couples, and one of the women, Susan, started describing her husband Bob’s vasectomy, which she had witnessed.
   “NO!” we guys shouted, curling our bodies up like boiled shrimp. “Let’s not talk about that!”
   But our wives were fascinated. They egged Susan on, and she went into great detail, forcing us guys to stick wads of French bread in our ears and duck our heads under the table. Periodically, we’d come up to see if the coast was clear, but Susan would be saying, “And then the doctor picked up this thing that looked like a big crochet needle ...” And BONK we guys would bang our heads together ducking back under the table.
   So Post-Dispatchwise, I think I’m going to remain an oppressed victim. But don’t let me tell the rest of you guys what to think; it’s your decision. This is a free country. In most communities.

Tarts Afire

   The thing I like best about being a journalist, aside from being able to clip my toenails while working, is that sometimes, through hard work and perseverance and opening my mail, I come across a story that can really help you, the consumer, gain a better understanding of how you can be killed by breakfast snack food.
   This is just such a time. I have received, from alert reader Richard Rilke, an alarming article from the New Philadelphia (Ohio) Times headlined: OVERHEATED POPTARTS CAUSE DOVER HOUSE FIRE, OFFICIALS SAY. The article states that fire officials investigating a house fire in Dover, Ohio, concluded that “when the toaster failed to eject the Pop-Tarts, they caught fire and set the kitchen ablaze.”
   According to the article, the investigators reached this conclusion after experimenting with Pop-Tarts and a toaster. They found that “strawberry Pop-Tarts, when left in a toaster that doesn’t pop up, will send flames ‘like a blowtorch’ up to three feet high.”
   Like most Americans, I have long had a keen scientific interest in combustible breakfast foods, so I called up the Dover Fire Department and spoke to investigator Don Dunfee. He told me that he and some other investigators bought a used toaster, rigged it so it wouldn’t pop up, put in some Kellogg’s strawberry Pop-Tarts, then observed the results.
   “At five minutes and 55 seconds,” he said, “we had flames shooting out the top. I mean large flames. We also tried it with an off-brand tart. That one broke into flames in like 3-1/2 minutes, but it wasn’t near as impressive as the Kellogg’s Pop-Tart.”
   A quality you will find in top investigative journalists such as Woodward and Bernstein and myself is that before we publish a sensational story, we make every effort to verify the facts, unless this would be boring. So after speaking with Dunfee I proceeded to my local K-mart, where I consulted with an employee in the appliance sector.
   ME: What kind of toaster do you recommend for outdoor use? EMPLOYEE: A cheap toaster.
   I got one for $8.96. I already had Kellogg’s strawberry Pop-Tarts at home, because these are one of the three major food groups that my son eats, the other two being (1) pizza and (2) pizza with pepperoni.
   Having assembled the equipment, I was ready to conduct the experiment.
   WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT THE FOLLOWING EXPERIMENT YOURSELF. THIS IS A DANGEROUS EXPERIMENT CONDUCTED BY A TRAINED HUMOR COLUMNIST UNDER CAREFULLY CONTROLLED CONDITIONS, NAMELY, HIS WIFE WAS NOT HOME.
   I conducted the experiment on a Saturday night. Assisting me was my neighbor, Steele Reeder, who is a Customs broker, which I believe is a mentally stressful occupation, because when I mentioned the experiment to Steele he became very excited, ran home, and came back wearing (this is true) a bright yellow rubber rain suit, an enormous steel hat, and a rope around his waist holding a fire extinguisher on each hip, gun-slinger-style. He also carried a first-aid kit containing, among other things, the largest tube of Preparation H that I have ever seen.
   Also on hand was Steele’s wife, Babette, who pointed out that we had become pathetic old people, inasmuch as our Saturday Night Action now consisted of hoping to see a toaster fire.
   Using an extension cord, we set the toaster up a safe distance away from the house. I then inserted two Kellogg’s strawberry Pop-Tarts (“With Smucker’s Real Fruit”) and Steele, wearing thick gloves, held the toaster lever down so it couldn’t pop up. After about two minutes the toaster started to make a desperate rattling sound, which is how toasters in the wild signal to the rest of the herd that they are in distress. A minute later the Pop-Tarts started smoking, and at 5 minutes and 50 seconds, scary flames began shooting up 20 to 30 inches out of both toaster slots. It was a dramatic moment, very similar to the one that occurred in the New Mexico desert nearly 50 years ago, when the awe-struck atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project witnessed the massive blast that erupted from their first crude experimental snack pastry.
   We unplugged the extension cord, extinguished the blaze, and determined that the toaster’s career as a professional small appliance was over. It was time to draw conclusions. The obvious one involves missile defense. As you are aware, President Clinton has decided to cut way back on Star Wars research, so that there will be more money available for pressing domestic needs, such as creating jobs and keeping airport runways clear for urgent presidential grooming. But by using currently available electronic and baking technology, we could build giant toasters and place them around the U.S., then load them with enormous Pop-Tarts. When we detected incoming missiles, we’d simply hold the toaster levers down via some method (possibly involving Tom and Roseanne Arnold) and within a few minutes WHOOM the country would be surrounded by a protective wall of flames, and the missiles would either burn up or get knocked off course and detonate harmlessly in some place like New Jersey.
   Anyway, that’s what I think we should do, and if you think the same thing, then you have inhaled too many Smucker’s fumes.

Insect Aside

   Recently, I had to pay several hundred dollars to get my car started, and do you want to know why? Nature, that’s why. It’s getting out of control.
   Now before I get a lot of angry mail on recycled paper, let me stress that, generally, I’m in favor of nature. I’m even in favor of scary nature, such as snakes, because I know that snakes play a vital role in the ecosystem (specifically, the role of Boonga the Demon Creature).
   But nature should stay in its proper context. For example, the proper context for snakes is Asia. A snake should not be in your yard unless it has your written permission. A snake should definitely not be climbing your trees, although this is exactly what one was doing outside my window a few days ago. I looked out and there it was, going straight up the trunk, looking casual, Mr. Cool-Blooded. It was impressive. I’m always amazed that snakes can move on the ground, without arms or legs. You try lying on your stomach and moving forward merely by writhing. My friend Buzz Burger and I did this for an hour at the MacPhersons’ 1977 New Year’s Eve party and never got out of the kitchen.
   Nevertheless I was alarmed to see the snake, because according to top snake scientists, there’s only one known scientific reason why a snake would go up a tree, namely, so it can leap onto your head and strangle you.
   This particular snake had been watching me for several days. I’d seen it on the lawn earlier when I was out with my two dogs, Earnest and Zippy, who were trotting in front, looking alert and vigilant, providing protection. The snake was holding very still, which is a ploy that a snake will use to fool the observer into thinking that it’s a harmless object, such as a garden hose or a snake made out of rubber. This ploy is effective only if the observer has the IQ of a breath mint, so it worked perfectly on my dogs, who vigilantly trotted right past the snake. Earnest actually stepped over part of the snake.
   Of course, if the snake had been something harmless, the dogs would have spotted it instantly. Zippy, for example, goes into a violent barking rage whenever he notices the swimming-pool chlorine dispenser. This is a small, benign plastic object that floats in the pool and has never made a hostile move in its life. But Zippy is convinced that it’s a malignant entity, just waiting for the right moment to lunge out of the water, jaws-like, and dispense lethal doses of chlorine all over its helpless victims.
   I tried to notify the dogs about the snake. “Look!” I said, pointing. “A snake!” This caused the dogs to alertly trot over and sniff my finger in case there was peanut butter on it. The snake, continuing to hold still, was watching all this, thinking: “This person will be easy to strangle.”
   So now I find myself glancing up nervously whenever I walk across my yard. I’m thinking maybe I should carry an open umbrella at all times, as a Snake Deflector. But that is not my point. By now you have forgotten my point, which involves my car. One day it wouldn’t start, and it had to be towed to our garage, which has two main characters: Bill, who is responsible for working on the car; and Sal, who is responsible for giving you a dramatic account of what was wrong.
   “At first we thought it was the (something),” Sal told me, when it was all over. “But when we tried to (something) the (something), all we got was (something)! Can you believe it?”
   “No,” I assured him.
   “So then,” said Sal, starting to gesture, “we tested the (something), but ...”
   He continued for 10 minutes, attracting a small but appreciative audience. Finally, he reached the crucial dramatic moment, where Bill had narrowed the problem down to a key car part, called the “something.” Carefully, Bill removed this part. Slowly, he opened it up. And there, inside, he found: ants.
   Yes. An ant squadron was living in my car part and eating the wires. I am not making this up.
   “Oh, yes,” said Sal. “Ants will eat your wires.”
   This gave me a terrible feeling of what the French call doi vu, meaning “big insect trouble.” Because just a month earlier, the water in our house stopped running, and a paid professional plumber came out and informed us that—I am still not making this up—there were ants in our pump switch.
   This is what I mean by nature getting out of hand. It’s not natural for ants to eat car and pump parts. Ants should eat the foods provided by the ecosystem, such as dropped Milk Duds. Something is wrong.
   And here’s another scary but absolutely true fact: Lately, I’ve noticed ants going into the paper slot of my computer’s laser printer. Ask yourself. What natural business would ants have with a laser? You can bet that whatever they’re up to, it’s not going to benefit mankind, not after all the stuff i’ve sprayed on them.
   So I’m worried. I’m worried in my car; I’m worried in my house; and above all I’m worried when I cross my yard. I’m afraid that one day I’ll disappear, and the police will search my property, and all they’ll find will be a snake who obviously just ate a large meal and is pretending to be a really fat garden hose; and maybe some glowing ants munching on, say, the microwave oven; and of course Zippy, Mr. Vigilant, barking at the chlorine dispenser.

Invasion Of The Money Snatchers

   Sometimes, even though we love America, with its amber waves of purple mounted majesties fruiting all over the plains, we get a little ticked off at our government. Sometimes we find ourselves muttering: “All the government ever seems to do is suck up our hard-earned money and spew it out on projects such as the V-22 Osprey military aircraft, which the Pentagon doesn’t even want, and which tends to crash, but which Congress has fought to spend millions on, anyway, because this will help the reelection efforts of certain congresspersons, who would cheerfully vote to spend millions on a program to develop a working artificial hemorrhoid, as long as the money would be spent in their districts.”
   I mutter this frequently myself But we must not allow ourselves to become cynical. We must remember that for every instance of the government’s demonstrating the intelligence of a yam, there is also an instance of the government’s rising to the level of a far more complex vegetable, such as the turnip.
   Today I’m pleased to tell you the heartwarming story of a group of 10 men whose lives have been changed, thanks to prompt, coordinated government action. I got this story from one of the men, Al Oliver, a retired Navy chaplain. In fact, all 10 are retirees (or, in Al Oliver’s words, “chronologically disadvantaged”).
   The men live in the Azalea Trace retirement center in Pensacola, Florida. For years they’ve gathered every morning to drink coffee and talk. In 1988, they formed a pact: Each would buy a Florida lottery ticket every week, and if anybody won, they’d all split the money. They called themselves the Lavender Hill Mob, and stamped that name on their lottery tickets.
   For three years they won nothing. Then, in 199 1, one of their tickets had five out of six winning numbers, for a prize of $4,156. Oliver took the ticket to the state lottery office in Pensacola, where he had to fill out Form 5754, indicating who was to get the money. He wrote down “Lavender Hill Mob.”
   A while later, he got the form back from the state, along with a letter informing him that the Lavender Hill Mob was a partnership and could not be paid until it obtained an Employer Identification Number, or EIN, from (ominous music starts here) ... the Internal Revenue Service.
   At this point you readers are like an audience watching the scene in a horror movie wherein the woman trapped alone in the house at night is about to go down into the basement.
   “NO! NO!” you’re shouting to Al Oliver. “Don’t get involved with the IRS! Better to just throw the ticket away!”
   But Oliver went to an IRS office and applied for the EIN by filling out Form SS-4. “I had to list everything on all 10 of us except I believe our cholesterol count,” he recalls. The IRS then gave him the EIN, which he sent along with Form 5754 to the state lottery, which sent him the check, which he took to the bank, which, after balking a little, finally gave him 10 cashier’s checks for the Lavender Hill Mob members.
   Now you’re thinking: “OK, so it was an annoying bureaucratic hassle, but everything turned out fine.”
   Please try not to be such a wienerhead. Of COURSE everything did not turn out fine. In February, Oliver began receiving notices from the IRS demanding to know where exactly the hell were the Lavender Hill Mob’s 1065
   forms showing partnership income for 1989, 1990, and 1991. So Oliver went to his CPA, who filled out the forms with zeros and sent them in.
   Of course this only angered the IRS, because here the Lavender Hill Mob was just now getting around to filing forms for as far back as 1989, which means these forms were LATE. You can’t allow that kind of flagrant disregard for the law. You let the Mob members slide on that, and the next thing you know they’re selling crack on the shuffleboard court.
   So in June the IRS notified the Mob members that, for failing to file their 1989 Form 1065 on time, they owed a penalty of $2,500. Oliver’s CPA, who is not working for free, wrote a letter to the IRS attempting to explain everything. Then in July the Mobsters got another notice, informing them that they owed $2,500 PLUS $19.20 in interest charges, which will of course continue to mount. The notice states that the government may file a tax lien against the Mobsters and adds: “wE MUST ALSO CONSIDER TAKING YOUR WAGES, PROPERTY OR OTHER ASSETS.”
   That’s where it stood when I last heard from Oliver. Since this whole thing is obviously a simple misunderstanding, we can safely assume that it will never be resolved. The wisest course for the Mobsters would be to turn all their worldly goods over to the government right now. Because if they keep attempting to file the correct form, they’re going to wind up in serious trouble, fleeing through the swamps around Pensacola, pursued by airborne IRS agents in the new V-22 Osprey, suspended via steel cables from some aircraft that can actually fly.

Reader Alert

   This next section is more or less about traveling. It includes an account of my visit to Communist China, where I spent almost an entire day, thereby qualifying as an authority.
   There’s also a column I wrote about people who are obnoxious on airplanes. This column was very popular with flight attendants; for quite a while after it was published, whenever I’d take a plane, the attendants would give me free beers. That’s why I got into journalism in the first place: to help people.

Hell On Wings

   I’m in an airplane, strapped into my seat, no way to escape. For an hour we’ve been taxiing around Miami International Airport while lightning tries to hit us. Earlier I was hoping that the plane might at some point actually take off and fly to our intended destination but now I’m starting to root for the lightning, because a direct strike might silence the two women sitting in front of me. There’s only one empty seat between them, but they’re speaking at a decibel level that would be appropriate if one of them were in Cleveland. Also, they both have Blitherers Disease, which occurs when there is no filter attached to the brain, so that every thought the victim has, no matter how minor, comes blurting right out. This means that the rest of us passengers are being treated to repartee such as this:
   FIRST WOMAN: I PREFER A WINDOW SEAT. SECOND WOMAN: OH, NOT ME. I ALWAYS PREFER AN AISLE SEAT. FIRST WOMAN: THAT’S JUST LIKE MY SON. HE LIVES IN NEW JERSEY, AND HE ALWAYS
   PREFERS AN AISLE SEAT ALSO. SECOND WOMAN: MY SISTER-IN-LAW WORKS FOR A DENTIST IN New Jersey. HE’S AN
   EXCELLENT DENTIST BUT HE CAN’T PRONOUNCE HIS R’S. HE SAYS, “I’M AFWAID
   YOU NEED A WOOT CANAL.” FIRST WOMAN: MY BROTHER-IN-LAW JUST HAD THAT ROOT CANAL. HE WAS BLEEDING ALL
   OVER HIS NEW CAR, ONE OF THOSE JAPANESE ONES, A WHADDYACALLEM, LEXIT. SECOND WOMAN: I PREFER A BUICK, BUT LET ME TELL YOU, THIS INSURANCE, WHO CAN
   AFFORD IT? FIRST WOMAN: I HAVE A BROTHER IN THE INSURANCE BUSINESS, WITH ANGINA. HE
   PREFERS A WINDOW SEAT. SECOND WOMAN: OH, NOT ME. I ALWAYS PREFER AN AISLE. NOW MY DAUGHTER ...
   And so it has gone, for one solid hour, a live broadcast of random neural firings. The harder I try to ignore it, the more my brain focuses on it. But it could be worse. I could be the flight attendant. Every time she walks past the two women, they both shout “MISS?” It’s an uncontrollable reflex.
   “MISS?” they are shouting. “CAN WE GET A BEVERAGE HERE?” This is maybe the fifth time they have asked this.
   “I’m sorry,” says the flight attendant, with incredible patience. “We can’t serve any beverages until after we take off.”
   This answer never satisfies the women, who do not seem to be fully aware of the fact that the plane is still on the ground. They’ve decided that the flight attendant has a bad attitude. As she moves away, they discuss this in what they apparently believe is a whisper.
   “SHE’S VERY RUDE,” they say, their voices booming through the cabin, possibly audible in other planes. “THEY SHOULD FIRE HER.”
   “YES, THEY SHOULD.”
   “THERE’S SUPPOSED TO BE BEVERAGE SERVICE.”
   “MISS??”
   It’s a good thing for society in general that I’m not a flight attendant, because I would definitely kill somebody no later than my second day. Recently, I sat on a bumpy, crowded flight and watched a 40-ish flight attendant, both arms occupied with a large stack of used dinner trays, struggling down the aisle, trying to maintain her balance, and a young man held out his coffee cup, blocking her path, and in a loud, irritated voice said, quote: “Hon? Can I get a refill Like maybe today, Hon?”
   She smiled—not with her eyes—and said, “I’ll be with you as soon as I can, sir.”
   Sir.
   Oh, I’d be with him soon, all right. I’d come up behind him and strangle him with the movie-headphone cord. “Is that tight enough for you, sir” would be the last words he’d ever hear. Then I’d become a legendary outlaw flight attendant. I’d hide in the overhead luggage compartment and watch for problems, such as people flying with small children and making no effort to control them, people who think it’s cute when their children shriek and pour salad dressing onto other passengers. When this happened, BANG, the luggage compartment would burst open and out would leap: the Avenging Flight Attendant of Doom, his secret identity concealed by a mask made from a barf bag with holes in it. He’d snatch the child and say to the parents, very politely, “I’m sorry, but FAA regulations require me to have this child raised by somebody more civilized, such as wolves.” If they tried to stop him, he’d pin them in their seats with dense, 200-pound airline omelets.
   Insane? Yes, I’m insane, and you would be, too, if you were listening to these two women.
   “MISS??” they are saying. “IT’S TOO HOT IN HERE.”
   “CAN WE GET SOME BEVERAGE SERVICE?”
   “MISS?”
   And now the pilot is making an announcement. “Well, folks” is how he starts. This is a bad sign. They always start with “Well, folks” when they’re going to announce something bad, as in: “Well, folks, if we dump the fuel, we might be able to glide as far as the mainland.”
   This time the pilot announces that—I swear I am not making this up—lightning has struck the control tower.
   “We could be sitting here for some time,” he says.
   “MISS????” say the women in front of me.
   No problem. I can handle it. I’ll just stay calm, reach into the seat pocket, very slowly pull out the headphone cord ...

The Great Mall Of China

   The World’s Great Capitalists Market to the Old Butchers Who Run China.
   They’ve Promised to Be Nice.
   If you listen hard, as you wander around Hong Kong, you can almost hear the clock.
   Tick tick tick tick tick, it says, over the rushed city sounds of the traffic, the boats, the people.
   Tick tick tick tick tick ...
   Get ready. It’s coming.
   Midnight, June 30, 1997. This will be a very big day for Hong Kong. The biggest ever. Hotel space is already selling out. A lot of people want to be there, to remember what Hong Kong was, to get a glimpse of what it will be.
   Then the sightseers will check out and go home, leaving Hong Kong to face ... whatever comes next. Nobody knows for sure what it will be. But it’s coming.
   Tick tick tick tick tick ...
   Some background. Although Hong Kong is geographically part of China, right now it’s a colony of Great Britain. This arrangement dates back to the 19th-century Opium Wars, which you recall from your high school World History class.
   You liar. Probably the only event you remember from World History class is the time Jeffrey Brunderman made a spitball so large that he couldn’t get it out of his mouth without emergency medical assistance. To refresh your memory: In the early 19th century, British traders were making big money getting opium from India and selling it, illegally, in China. In 1839, the Chinese emperor tried to put a stop to this. Britain, which at the time had a vast empire and a major butt-kicking navy, was outraged that some pissant emperor would dare to interfere with the activities of legitimate British businessmen just because they were smuggling drugs.
   So Britain sent a fleet to attack. The Chinese were quickly defeated and forced to sign a treaty under which, among other things, Britain got Hong Kong. Over the years Britain added more land to the Hong Kong colony which is ruled by a governor appointed by the crown. Historically, the Hong Kong residents, who are overwhelmingly Chinese, have had virtually no say in their government.
   But for a long time Hong Kong didn’t concern itself much with politics, because there was a lot of money to be made. There still is. Hong Kong today is a major international trade and financial center. It’s a busy place—410
   square miles supporting six million people, most of them jammed together around the spectacular, hard-working Hong Kong harbor, which we travel writers are required, by law, to describe as “teeming.”
   And it is teeming. All day, all night, the dirty brown water is churned
   by boats, all sizes and shapes, barely missing each other as they bustle in all directions on urgent boat errands. Many are ferryboats, which cross the harbor constantly, carrying the teeming masses of people—mostly well-dressed, prosperous-looking people—to and from the downtown business district, which looks like a full-size version of an Epcot Center scale model of the City of Tomorrow: dozens of breathtakingly tall, shiny, modernistic buildings, none of which appears to be more than a few days old, with newer ones constantly going up. Connecting these buildings, over the teeming streets, are teeming walkways, which lead to vast, staggeringly opulent shopping centers with gleaming floors and spotless stores teeming with cameras, electronics, silks,jewelry, and other luxury items of all kinds.
   This is not a place for quiet reflection. This is the Ultimate Shopping Mall. This is a place where everything is for sale, and you can bargain your brains out. This is a place where you can feel your credit cards teeming in your wallet, hear their squeaky little plastic voices calling, “Let us out! Let us OUT!!” This is a place so rich and modern and fast-paced and sophisticated that it makes New York seem like a dowdy old snooze of a town.
   In short, this is a place that screams: “We’re RICH, SUCCESSFUL CAPITALISTS, and we’re DAMNED PROUD OF IT!”
   And on June 30, 1997, Britain is going to give it all—the whole marvelous money machine, and all its human dependents—to the People’s Republic of China. China has long claimed that Britain has no right to Hong Kong, and in 1984, after much negotiation between the two nations, Britain agreed to get out in 1997.
   So in a little over five years, the people of Hong Kong—Who never got to vote on any of this—will simply be handed over to China, as though they were some kind of commodity, nothing but a load of pork bellies being traded. The Chinese leaders have promised that they won’t make any drastic changes in Hong Kong, but nobody believes this. These are, after all, the same fun dudes who gave us the Tiananmen Square massacre.
   Tick tick tick tick tick ...
   So today Hong Kong is nervous. People with money or connections are fleeing by the thousands. But millions more can’t leave, or don’t want to abandon their homeland. They’re staying, and waiting. Nobody is sure what’s coming, but it’s definitely coming. Five years. About 2,000 days, and counting. This knowledge hangs over Hong Kong like a fog, giving the city an edgy, quietly desperate, Casablanca-like feel.
   Tick tick tick tick tick ...
   Or maybe not. Maybe my imagination was just hyperactive from drinking San Miguel beer on a moody gray day and watching the harbor being whipped into whitecaps by a typhoon named-really-Fred. The truth is that, most of the time, daily Hong Kong life seemed pretty normal. People were teeming and working and shopping and eating and laughing just the way people would if they weren’t doomed to be turned over to a group of hard-eyed old murderers.
   While my family and I were there, in August, the big news story, aside from Typhoon Fred, was the trial of Hong Kong businessman Chin Chiming, accused of blackmailing actresses into having sex with him. The Hong Kong media was covering the heck out of this trial. Here’s an excerpt from the South China Morning Post story concerning a witness identified as “Mrs. D” being cross-examined by defense attorney Kevin Egan:
   Mr. Egan started by asking Mrs. D if she had noticed whether Chin’s organ was erect while they were in bed. The witness said it was.
   Mr. Egan then asked if it was “fully” erect, but prosecutor, Mr. Stuart Cotsen, objected to the question on the grounds that the witness could not be expected to know.
   Mr. Egan said the objection meant he had to ask the witness to describe Chin’s sexual organ as fully as possible.
   So apparently life goes on in Hong Kong. I highly recommend it as a travel destination, at least until 1997, although you may feel a little intimidated by the crowds until you learn how to teem. You have to get your elbows into it. I learned this one afternoon when we decided to take a ferry to Macao, which is the other non-Communist territory in China, about 40 miles west of Hong Kong. Macao is an old colony belonging to Portugal, which will turn it over to China in 1999. Gambling is legal in Macao, and a lot of Hong Kong residents regularly teem over there on ferries and go to the casinos.
   One day we went over, and when our ferry landed, the other passengers tried to kill us. OK, technically they weren’t trying to kill us; they were trying to be first in line to get through Immigration and Customs. But they did not hesitate to shove us violently out of the way. We were bouncing around like kernels in a popcorn maker and quickly became separated. Occasionally, through the crowd, I’d see my wife and son, expressions of terror on their faces, being jostled off in the general direction of the Philippines.
   I tried being polite. “Hey!” I said to a middle-age, polite-looking man behind me who was thoughtfully attempting to hasten my progress by jabbing me repeatedly in the spine with his umbrella tip. “Excuse me! I SAID EXCUSE ME, DAMMIT!”
   But we quickly learned that the only way to function in these crowds was to teem right along with everybody else. When it came time to purchase return ferry tickets, I was practically a professional. I got into the “line,” which was a formless, milling mass of people, and I leaned hard in the general direction of the ticket window. I finally got close to it, and it was clearly my turn to go next, when an old man—he had to be at least 75—started making a strong move around me from my left. I had a definite age and size advantage, but this man was good. He shoved his right elbow deep into my gut while he reached his left arm out to grasp the ticket window ledge. I leaned hard on the man sideways, and then—you can’t teach this kind of thing; you have to have an instinct for it—I made a beautiful counterclockwise spin move that got me to the window inches ahead of him. I stuck my face smack up against the window, confident I had won, but then the old man, showing great resourcefulness, stuck his head under my arm and shoved his face into the window, too. We were cheek to cheek, faces against the glass, mouths gaping and eyes bulging like two crazed carp, shouting ticket orders. unfortunately he was shouting in Chinese, which gave him the advantage, and he got his ticket first. But I was definitely making progress.
   However, I never really did adjust to Chinese food. I like Chinese food the way they make it here in the U.S., where you order from an English menu and the dishes have reassuring names such as “sweet and sour pork” and you never see what the food looked like before it was killed and disassembled. This is not the kind of Chinese food that actual Chinese people eat. For one thing, before they order something at a restaurant, they like to see the prospective entree demonstrate its physical fitness by swimming or walking around.
   One afternoon we were wandering through the narrow, zigzagging (and of course teeming) side streets of Macao, and we came to a group of small stalls and shops; in front of each one were stacks of big glass tanks containing murky water filled with squirming populations of fish, eels, squids, turtles, etc. At first we thought we’d entered the Aquarium Supplies District, but then we saw tables behind the tanks, and we realized that these were all restaurants. People were eating these things. You, the diner, would select the eel that you felt best exemplified whatever qualities are considered desirable in an eel, such as a nice, even coating of slime, and the restaurant owner would haul it out of the tank so you could take a closer look, and if it met with your approval—WHACK—dinner would be served.
   We walked by one restaurant just as a man reached into a tank and hauled out what looked like the world’s biggest newt. It had legs and a tail and buggy eyes, and I swear it was the size of a small dog. The man displayed it to some diners, who looked at this thing, thrashing around inches from their faces, and instead of sprinting to a safe distance, as I definitely would have, they were nodding thoughtfully, the way you might approve a bottle of Chablis.
   A few minutes later, we came to a larger restaurant that had an elaborate window display, with colored spotlights shining on an arrangement of strange, triangular, withered, vaguely evil-looking things.
   Shark fins,” said my wife, who reads all the guidebooks. “They’re very popular.”
   At least they were dead. Around the corner we found another restaurant window display, consisting of a jar full of—I am not making this up—snakes.
   “Come on in!” was the basic message of this display. “Have some snake!”
   So as you can imagine we were a tad reluctant to eat local cuisine. But one night in Hong Kong we decided to give it a try, and we asked a bouncer outside a bar to recommend a medium-priced Chinese restaurant. He directed us down a side street to a little open-air place decorated in a design motif that I would call “about six old card tables.” Several men were eating out of
   bowls. We sat down, and the waitress, a jolly woman who seemed vastly amused by our presence, rooted around and found a beat-up hand-written English menu for us. Here are some of the entrees it listed:
   Ox Offal and Noodle Sea Blubber Sliced Cuttle Fish Sliced Pork’s Skin Pig’s Trotters Clam’s Meat Goose’s Intestines Preserved Pig’s Blood
   Using our fluent gesturing skills, we communicated that we wanted chicken, beef, and pork, but definitely not Preserved Pig’s Blood. We also ordered a couple of beers, which the waitress brought out still attached to the plastic six-pack holder. Our food arrived maybe a minute later, and the waitress stayed to watch us eat it. Several of the other diners also got up and gathered around, laughing and gesturing. We were big entertainment.
   My dish, which was probably pork, tasted pretty good. My son refused to eat his dish, which I would describe as “chicken parts not really cooked.” My wife’s dish was apparently the beef; she said it was OK, although it was very spicy and caused her nose to run. There were no napkins, but the restaurant did provide a tabletop roll of toilet paper in a nice ceramic dispenser, which we thought was a classy touch. The whole meal, including a generous tip, cost about eight U.S. dollars. We were glad we hadn’t asked the bouncer to recommend an inexpensive restaurant.
   I should stress here that Hong Kong is famous for fine dining, and has a mind-boggling array of restaurants offering a vast variety of cuisines, including many that even provincial wussies like ourselves can eat. I should also stress that there are other things to do in Hong Kong besides eat and shop. You can ride the ferries, which are cheap and romantic and exciting. You can teem around the streets and pretend that you are some kind of slick international businessperson. You can take a tram that seems to go straight up the side of a mountain—in the old days, Chinese servants used to carry their British masters up this mountain on sedan chairs—and look down on an indescribably glorious view of the city and harbor, and be moved to say, in unison with 350 other tourists, “Look at that VIEW!” And you can take a day trip to the People’s Republic of China, future landlords of Hong Kong. We took such a trip. Here’s how it went:
   HONG KONG, 7 A.M.
   The tour-company bus picks us up at our hotel early on a day that promises to be rainy and blustery, thanks to the tail end of Typhoon Fred. We’re each given a sticker to wear on our clothing; it has the name of the tour company and the words “IF NOT PICKED, CALL 544-5656.” At various other hotels we gather the rest of our group, about 20 people from the U.S., Australia, and England. We’re taken to a ferry terminal, where we stand next to a sign that says BEWARE YOUR OWN PROPERTY, waiting for our guide.
   “Don’t lose your sticker,” an American man is saying to his family. “If you lose your sticker, you have to stay in China.” This is of course a joke, we hope.
   Finally, our guide arrives—a very tall, thin, easygoing young Hong Kong man who says we should call him Tommy. (We found that guides identified themselves to us by Western nicknames, on the assumption, no doubt correct, that we’d have trouble pronouncing their real names.) Tommy briefs us on our itinerary.
   “Because we have only one day to see China, maybe our tour will be a little bit rushed,” he points out.
   After an hour’s ride on a hydrofoil ferry, we arrive in the People’s Republic at a city called Shekou, which Tommy tells us means “mouth of the snake.” We line up to go through Immigration and Customs, next to signs warning us not to try to bring in any hot peppers or eggplants. I personally would not dream of attempting such a thing. God knows what this country does to eggplant smugglers.
   Next to the Immigration area is a counter where you can buy duty-free cognac and American cigarettes. This strikes us as a pretty decadent enterprise for the People’s Republic to be engaging in.
   Outside Customs Tommy introduces us to another guide, John, who’ll be escorting us around the People’s Republic in an aging bus driven by Bill. John is an earnest young man who possesses many facts about the People’s Republic and an uncontrollable urge to repeat them. He tells us that our first stop is a museum where we’ll see the World Famous Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses, which have been called—at least 20 times in our tour bus alone—”The Eighth Wonder of the World.” These are life-size clay statues of horses and warriors; 8,000 of these statues were buried with a Chinese emperor in 221 B.C., to protect him. This was before the invention of burglar alarms.
   A few dozen statues have been placed on display in the Shekou museum, which is actually the second floor of a commercial-type building. On the first floor is a store that sells industrial equipment; the window has a nice display entitled “Compressed Air Breathing Apparatus.”
   The museum itself, in terms of space allocation, is about 25 percent exhibit and 75 percent gift shops. Aside from our group, the only visitors are sticker-wearing tourists from other tour buses. We look briefly at the exhibit of World Famous Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses, then browse through a half-dozen shops selling jewelry, silks, jade, souvenirs, postcards, and other authentic cultural items. Your money or credit cards are more than welcome here in the People’s Republic.
   Back on the bus, John informs us, over and over, that Shekou is part of a Special Economic Zone that the People’s Republic has set up to encourage economic development. The relatively few Chinese who are lucky enough to live inside the Special Economic Zone, he says, are allowed to engage in all kinds of wild and crazy economic activities such as actually choosing their own jobs and maybe even own small businesses—in short, they’re totally free to do just about anything except say or do the wrong thing, in which case they’ll be run over by tanks. (John doesn’t state this last part explicitly.)
   John also discusses the plan for the “recovery” of Hong Kong in 1997.
   “Hong Kong will enjoy a high degree of autonomous,” he assures us.
   Our next stop is what John calls the “free market,” which turns out to be a line of about 25 fruit vendors who are aiding in the development of the Chinese economy by selling apples and pears to busloads of sticker-wearing tourists for what I suspect is 10 times the local price. We dutifully file off the bus in a pelting rain and walk over to the vendors, who are attracting us via the marketing technique of waving pieces of fruit and shouting “Hello!” Being a savvy free-market Westerner, I am able, using shrewd bargaining techniques, to purchase an apple for what I later calculate is two American dollars.
   Back on the bus, John starts reviewing the concept of the Special Economic Zone for the benefit of those who missed it the first five or six times. This gives me an opportunity to stare out the window in terror at the traffic. China has achieved a totally free-market traffic system, as far as I can tell. There are virtually no traffic lights, and apparently anybody is allowed to drive anywhere, in any direction. Everybody is constantly barging in front of everybody else, missing each other by molecules. The only law seems to be that if your horn works, you have to provide clear audible proof of this at least once every 30 seconds.
   If you didn’t know that Shekou was a Special Economic Zone, you probably wouldn’t be very impressed by it. The buildings are mostly grim, industrial, and dirty; many seem to be crumbling. The roads are uneven, sometimes dirt, always potholed. But this area is turning into a manufacturing monster. Encouraged by the Chinese government, many foreign companies have located factories here, and China now exports more than $60 billion worth of goods a year. The United States buys a quarter of this, all kinds of items, including a tenth of our shoes and a third of our toys. They are big-time, Most-Favored-Nation trading partners of ours, the Chinese.
   Our tour does not include a manufacturing stop. Instead we go to what John says is the largest kindergarten in Shekou, where we’re going to see the children put on a show. We arrive just as another group of sticker-wearers is leaving. We sit on tiny chairs, and a dozen heart-rendingly cute children, even cuter than the animated figures in the It’s a Small World After All boat ride, play instruments and dance for us while we take pictures like crazy. Fond memories of the People’s Republic.
   As we leave, we learn that school isn’t actually in session; the children are here just to entertain the tourists.
   Getting back on the bus, my son has an insight. “Really,” he says, “all kids are in a communism country, because they have to obey orders and they get pushed around.”
   I agree that this is true, but he will still have to take out the garbage.
   Now John is telling us how this city came to be called “the mouth of the snake.” It’s a long, old legend involving a snake that came here on a rainy day and turned into a beautiful woman (why not?), and a man lent her his umbrella, and they fell in love, and then needless to say this attracted the attention of the Underwater Dragon King. It’s a very complex legend, and I hope there isn’t going to be a quiz. Outside the window we see a large group of dogs, all tethered to a post, looking around with the standard earnest, vaguely cheerful dog expression. Some men are looking the dogs over, the way supermarket shoppers look over tomatoes. John is back on the endlessly fascinating topic of the Special Economic Zone, telling us how many square kilometers it is. This is not what I’m wondering about. What I’m wondering is: Are they going to eat those dogs? But I don’t ask, because I don’t really want to know. Now we’re going through a security checkpoint, leaving the Special Economic Zone and its many freedoms. Now we’re in the real People’s Republic, which makes the Special Economic Zone look like Epcot Center. Everywhere there are half-finished buildings, seemingly abandoned years ago in midconstruction, some of them with laundry hanging in them. There are also people everywhere, but nobody seems to be doing anything. I admit this is purely an impression, but it’s a strong one. The primary activities seem to be:
   1. Seeing how many bundles you can pile on a bicycle and still ride it, and
   2. Sitting around.
   We go through a line of tollbooths—our booth was manned by six people—and get on an extremely surreal expressway. Picture a major, semi-modern, four-lane, interstate-type highway, except that it has every kind of vehicle—mostly older trucks and buses, but also motorcycles, tractors, bicycles with bundles piled incredibly high, even hand-drawn carts. Also you come across the occasional water buffalo, wandering along. Yes! Water buffalo! On the interstate! Bear in mind that this is the industrially advanced region of China.
   Of course, all the vehicles, including the water buffalo, freely use both lanes. So our bus is constantly weaving and honking, accelerating to a top speed of about 45 miles per hour, then suddenly dropping to zero. We pass a truck with a flat tire; somebody has removed the wheel and thoughtfully left it in the traffic lane. We pass an overturned pig truck, with the pigs still in it, looking concerned. A group of people has gathered to sit around and watch. We pass two more overturned trucks, each of which has also attracted a seated audience. Maybe at some point the trucks here just spontaneously leap up and right themselves, and nobody wants to miss it.
   All the while, John is talking about square kilometers and metric tons, but we tourists are not paying attention. We’re staring out the window, fascinated by the highway drama.
   After about an hour we arrive in Dongguang, where we’re going to stop for lunch.
   “People here like to eat poisonous snakes,” John informs us. This makes me nervous about what we’re having for lunch, especially after the scene with the dogs. Plus, I can’t help thinking about an alarming development in Chinese cuisine that I read about a few days earlier in a newspaper story, which I will quote from here:
   Beijing (AP)—Health officials closed down 92 restaurants in a single city (Luoyang) for putting opium poppy pods in food served to customers, an official newspaper has reported ... in an attempt to get customers addicted to their food ... health officials started getting suspicious when they saw that some noodle shops and food stalls were attracting long lines of customers while others nearby did little business.
   So I’m concerned that they’re going to offer us some delicacy whose name translates to “Poodle and Viper Stew with ‘Can’t Say No’ Noodles.” I’m relieved when John tells us we’re having Peking Duck. We pull up to a hotel and enter the dining room, where, lo and behold, we find that we’ll be dining with the very same sticker-wearing people that we encountered at the museum, the free market, and the kindergarten. This is indeed an amazing coincidence, when you consider how big China reportedly is.
   The Peking Duck is pretty good, but not plentiful, only a couple of small pieces per person. John informs us that in China, when you eat Peking Duck, you eat only the skin.
   “Sure,” mutters an Australian woman at our table. “And they’ll tell the next group that you eat only the meat.”
   After lunch we’re back on the bus, on the road to the major city of Guangzhou, which most Westerners know as Canton. John is pointing out that we are passing many shops, which is true, but the vast majority of them seem to be either (a) permanently under construction or (b) selling used tires.
   In a few minutes we encounter dramatic proof that China’s population is 1.1 billion: At least that many people are in a traffic jam with us. I have never seen a traffic jam like this—a huge, confused, gear-grinding, smoke-spewing, kaleidoscopic mass of vehicles, on the road and on the shoulders, stretching for miles and miles, every single driver simultaneously honking and attempting to change lanes. Our driver, Bill, puts on a wondrous show of skill, boldly bluffing other drivers, displaying lightning reflexes and great courage, aiming for spaces that I would not have attempted in a go-kart. Watching him, we passengers become swept up in the drama, our palms sweating each time he makes yet another daring, seemingly impossible move that will, if it succeeds, gain us maybe two whole feet.
   We pass an exciting hour and a half this way, finally arriving at the source of the problem, which is, needless to say, a Repair Crew. Providing security are a half-dozen men who look like police officers or soldiers, standing around smoking and talking, ignoring the crazed traffic roiling past them. The work crew itself consists of eight men, seven of whom are watching one man, who’s sitting in the middle of the highway holding a hammer and a chisel. As we inch past, this man is carefully positioning the chisel on a certain spot on the concrete. It takes him a minute or so to get it exactly where he wants it, then, with great care, he raises the hammer and strikes the chisel. I can just barely hear the ping over the sound of the honking. The man lifts the chisel up to evaluate the situation. I estimate that, barring unforeseen delays, this particular repair job should easily be completed in 12,000 years. These guys are definitely qualified to do highway repair in the U.S.
   We are running late when we get to Canton, where we have a happy reunion with our fellow sticker-wearing, museum-going duck-skin-eaters from the other buses at the Canton Zoo. I don’t want to sound like a broken record here, but this is a grim and seedy zoo, an Animal’s Republic of China, all cracked concrete and dirty cages. The other zoo-goers seem more interested in us tourists than in the animals, staring as we pass. We’re shepherded to the pandas and the monkeys, then into a special, foreigners-only area to buy souvenirs. I buy my son a little green hat styled like the one Chairman Mao used to wear, with a red star on the front. Radical chic.
   Back on the bus, we drive through Canton’s streets, which are teeming with people on bicycles, forming major bicycle traffic jams. Imagine all the bicycles in the world, then double this amount, and you have an idea of Canton at rush hour. We pass a large market, where, John assures us, you can buy any kind of snake you want. Fortunately, we don’t stop; we’re going to see the Temple of the Six Banyans, which no longer has any banyans, although it does have three large brass statues of Buddha, which John claims are the largest brass Buddha statues in Guangzhou Province, and I don’t doubt it for a minute. Next we head for the Dr. Stin Yat-Sen Memorial Hall, which is quite impressive and which boasts the largest brass statue of any kind in Guangzhou Province. Out front is a sign recounting the hall’s history in English, including this mysterious sentence: “In 1988, the Guangzhou municipality had allocated funds for get rid of the hidden electrical danger in the hall Comprehensively.”
   Next we’re scheduled to see the Statue of the Five Goats, but we’re running out of time, which is a shame because I’m sure it’s the largest statue of the five goats in Guangzhou Province. Instead we go to the Hotel of the Western-Style Toilets, the lobby of which is bustling with sticker-wearers rushing to get to the restrooms and back to the buses. There’s only one more train back to Hong Kong tonight, and nobody wants to miss it.
   We reach the train station in a heavy downpour. Led by our Hong Kong guide, Tommy, we press our way through the crowds to the security checkpoint, then board Train No. 97 for Hong Kong. It’s a fascinating train, a long way from the sterile, snack-bar ambience of Amtrak. Train No. 97 has funky old coaches with wide aisles, through which women push carts offering food, drinks, snacks, and duty-free cognac. The train also has a crowded, smoky dining car, a kitchen, people in uniform watching you, people who are not in uniform but are still watching you, and various little rooms and passages with people going in and out. It’s a mysterious little world unto itself, Train No. 97. Walking through the rocking cars as night falls over the rice paddies outside, I feel like a character in a melodrama. The Last Train to Hong Kong. Two of my fellow sticker-wearers walk past me, smiling, one of them wearing a souvenir Mao-style hat. This is cool, being on a train in Red China. As long as you can get out.
   In three hours we’re back in Hong Kong, which felt so foreign this morning but which now feels familiar and safe, like Des Moines. I rip my sticker off, a free man. I still don’t know anything about China. I’m just one more superficial sheep-like bus-riding tourist. But I know this: I don’t want to be in Hong Kong after June 30, 1997.
   Tick tick tick tick tick ...
   As we’re saying good-bye to Tommy, I ask him what he’s going to do. He answers instantly.
   “I’m going to marry a Westerner and get out of here,” he says. He’s laughing, but I’m not sure that he’s kidding.
   The next morning we read in the Hongkong Standard about two things that happened on the day we were in China:
   * The chief of public security for the area we visited was executed. He’d been found guilty of corruption the previous day (none of those pesky appeals in the People’s Republic). Among other things, he accepted bribes in exchange for letting people get out of China.
   * In Beijing, the People’s Dally ran a front-page editorial calling for a
   “great wall of iron” to protect China from “hostile forces,” particularly democracy. The editorial said that if China’s 1989 prodemocracy movement had succeeded, it would have been a catastrophe for the people and a step back for history.”
   Those wild and crazy Chinese leaders! Those happy-go-lucky, fun-loving, Most-Favored-Nation guys! They’re going to have a ball with Hong Kong. My advice is, see it while you can.
   Tick tick tick tick tick ...
   And if anybody out there is in the market for a tall, likable English-speaking Chinese husband, I know of a guy who might be available.

Haute Holes

   You’ll be pleased to learn that I have thought up yet another way to revive our nation’s sagging economy by making myself rich.
   To understand my concept, you need to be aware of an important fashion trend sweeping the entire nation (defined as “parts of New York and San Francisco”). Under this trend, sophisticated urban persons, seeking leisure wear, are purchasing used, beat-up, worn, ripped, raggedy cowboy garments that were previously owned by actual cowboys. People are actually paying more for damaged cowboy jeans than for new ones.
   I found out about this trend through the alertness of reader Suzanne Hough, who sent me an article by Maria Recio of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The article states that used cowboy jeans are selling briskly at $50 a pair in San Francisco and $65 a pair in New York. The ones with holes are considered most desirable. Here are two quotes about this trend from the article:
   FROM THE OWNER OF A NEW YORK CITY STORE THAT SELLS THE JEANS: “It gives a bit of romance.”
   FROM AN ACTUAL TEXAS COWBOY: “It sounds pretty stupid.”
   Of course it is exactly this shortsighted lack of fashion consciousness on the part of cowboys that keeps them stuck in dead-end jobs where they must become involved with actual cows. Meanwhile your fashion visionaries such as Mr. Ralph “Hombre” Lauren—people who truly understand the spirit of the West—have made so much money in recent years selling designer lines of Pretend Cowboy clothing that they can afford to build large tasteful pretend ranch estates with color-coordinated sagebrush.
   But now we have gone, as a nation, beyond Pretend Cowboy fashions, and into Formerly Real Cowboy fashions. I called several stores, and they told me the demand for used jeans is very strong.
   “People want holes in the knees, crotch, and buns,” stated Murray Selkow, a Philadelphia native who now owns the Wild Wild West store in San Francisco. “What’s very popular is two tears right at the bottom of the buns.”
   To locate the source of cowboy jeans I called Montana, a large cow-intensive state located near Canada. I spoke with Judy MacFarlane, who owns a company called Montana Broke, located outside a small town called (really) Manhattan. She buys used jeans from cowboys and sells them to stores such as Wild Wild West.
   “I will not accept any jeans unless they’re from a bona fide cattle rancher, rodeo rider, or sherriff’s posseman,” she told me. She said each pair of Montana Broke jeans comes with a label explaining the occupation of the cowboy who owned it, plus a “Tracking Guide,” which shows the purchaser how to figure out which specific cowboy activities caused the various holes, stains, and worn spots on the jeans. I’m sure this provides hours of enjoyment for urban professionals, who, after a hard day of wrangling sales reports, can mosey back to their condominiums, rustle up a mess o’ sushi, and spend an old-fashioned Western-style evening analyzing their jean damage. (“Oh, look, Jennifer! This brown mark on the knee occurred when the cowboy branded a calf! Or fell into a cow pie!” “Oh, Brad! That just makes me want to roll back the Oriental rug and initiate a hoedown!”)
   This trend is not limited to jeans. The store owners I talked to said there is also a strong demand for used cowboy jackets, shirts, boots, and hats. This leads me to my money-making idea, which is going to seem so obvious when I tell you that you’re going to smack yourself in the forehead for not thinking of it first. My idea is to sell used cowboy underwear by mail. Don’t laugh. This is the logical next step, and I’m going to be out front on it. My brand will be called: Buckaroo Briefs. Each brief will come with an authentic piece of old-looking paper with a diagram explaining how the briefs came to look the way they do (“This particular stain occurred when the cowboy got chased by a bull”).
   The only problem I see, looking ahead, is that with the increasing big-city demand for authentic Western garments of all kinds, and the relatively small number of actual rural Westerners, we’re going to reach a point fairly soon where the entire population of Montana is running around naked. Fortunately, I’ve thought of a way to solve this problem via ANOTHER money-making concept, namely: Sell urban professionals’ used business attire to cowboys. Why not? Cowboys in suits! Carrying their lassos in briefcases! It might catch on. You could probably even charge them more for the suits with really exciting histories (“This rip occurred when Thad, rushing to an important budget meeting, caught his sleeve on the fax machine”).
   Pretty sharp idea, huh? I don’t see how it can miss. The only possible flaw is that cowboys are not nearly stupid enough to pay extra for somebody else’s used and damaged clothing. I doubt that even the cows are.

Courtroom Confessions

   Like most people, I can always use an extra $7 or $8 million, which is why today I have decided to write a blockbuster legal thriller.
   Americans buy legal thrillers by the ton. I was in many airports over the past few months, and I got the impression that aviation authorities were making this announcement over the public-address system: “FEDERAL REGULATIONS PROHIBIT YOU FROM BOARDING A PLANE UNLESS YOU ARE CARRYING THE CLIENT BY JOHN GRISHAM.” I mean, everybody had this book. (“This is the captain speaking. We’ll be landing in Seattle instead of Detroit because I want to finish The Client.”)
   The ironic thing is that best-selling legal thrillers generally are written by lawyers, who are not famous for written communication. I cite as Exhibit A my own attorney, Joseph DiGiacinto, who is constantly providing me with shrewd advice that I cannot understand because Joe has taken the legal precaution of translating it into Martian. Usually, when people send you a fax, they send a cover page on top of it, which conveys the following information: “Here’s a fax for (your name).” But Joe’s cover page features a statement approximately the length of the U.S. Constitution, worded so legally that I can’t look directly at it without squinting. It says something like: “WARNING: The following document and all appurtenances thereto and therein are the sole and exclusionary property of the aforementioned (hereinafter ‘The Mortgagee’) and may not be read, touched, spindled, fondled or rebroadcast without the expressively written consent of Major league Baseball, subject to severe legal penalties (hereinafter ‘The Blowtorch Noogie’) this means YOU.”
   And that’s just Joe’s cover page. Nobody has ever dared to read one of his actual faxes, for fear of being immediately thrown into prison.
   Nevertheless, some lawyers are hugely successful writers, and I intend to cash in on this. I am not, technically, a lawyer, but I did watch numerous episodes of “Perry Mason,” and on one occasion, when I got a traffic ticket, I represented myself in court, successfully pleading nolo contendere (Latin, meaning “Can I pay by check?”). So I felt well qualified to write the following blockbuster legal thriller and possible movie screenplay:

Chapter One

   The woman walked into my office, and I instantly recognized her as Clarissa Fromage, charged with murdering her late husband, wealthy industrial polluter A. Cranston “Bud” Fromage, whose death was originally reported as a heart attack but later ruled a homicide when sophisticated laboratory tests showed that his head had been cut off.
   “So,” she said. “You’re a young Southern lawyer resembling a John Grisham protagonist as much as possible without violating the copyright.”
   “That’s right,” I replied. “Perhaps we can have sex.”
   “Not in the first chapter,” she said.

Chapter Two

   “Ohhhhhhh,” she cried out. “OOOHMIGOD.”
   “I’m sorry,” I said, “but that’s my standard hourly fee.”

Chapter Three

   The courtroom tension was so palpable that you could feel it.
   “Detective Dungman,” said the district attorney, “please tell the jury what you found inside the defendant’s purse on the night of the murder.”
   “Tic-Tacs,” said Dungman.
   “Was there anything else?”
   “No, I can’t think of ... Wait a minute. Now that you mention it, there was something.”
   “What was it?”
   “A chain saw.”
   A murmur ran through the courtroom and, before the bailiff could grab it, jumped up and bit Judge Webster M. Tuberhonker on the nose. “That’s going to hurt,” I told my client.

Chapter Four

   With time running out on the case, we returned to my office for a scene involving full frontal nudity.

Chapter Five

   A hush fell over the courtroom, injuring six, as I approached the witness.
   “Dr. Feldspar,” I said. “You are an expert, are you not?”
   “Yes,” he answered.
   “And you are familiar with the facts of this case, are you not?”
   “Yes.”
   “And you are aware that, as a trained attorney, I can turn statements into questions by ending them with ‘are you not,’ are you not?”
   “Yes.”
   “And is it not possible that, by obtaining genetic material from fossils, scientists could clone NEW dinosaurs?”
   “OBJECTION!” thundered the district attorney. “He’s introducing the plot from the blockbuster science thriller and motion picture Jurassic Park!”
   The judge frowned at me over his spectacles. “In the movie,” he said, “whom do you see playing the defendant in Chapter Four?”
   “Sharon Stone,” I answered.
   “I’ll allow it.”

Chapter Six

   “And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I said, “only ONE PERSON could have committed this murder, and that person is ...”
   The guilty party suddenly jumped up, causing the courtroom to nearly spit out its chewing gum.
   “THAT’S RIGHT!” the guilty party shouted. “I DID IT, AND I’M GLAD!”
   It was Amy Fisher.

Reader Alert

   Except for the column about zebra mussels clinging to the giant brassiere, this next section is about boating. I own a motorboat, named Buster, who appears a couple of times in this section. In fact, Buster appears in this section considerably more often than he appears in the actual water. Buster spends most of his time sitting in my driveway. Every now and then I’ll try to start him, thereby causing a couple of his key engine parts to fall off. Then I call the smiling mechanic, who tows Buster away, fixes him, and tows him back to my driveway, where he (Buster) sits for a couple of months, chuckling softly and slowly working his engine parts loose for the next time that I try to start him. The sea: It’s my life.

Over His Head

   Summer is here again, and as the official spokesperson for the recreational boating industry, I’ve been asked to remind you that boating is a fun and relaxing family activity with very little likelihood that your boat will sink and you’ll wind up bobbing helplessly in the water while sharks chew on your legs as if they were a pair of giant Slim Jims, provided that you follow proper nautical procedures.
   Fortunately, I can tell you what these procedures are, because I am a veteran “salt” and the owner of a small motorboat, named Buster Boat. I spend many happy hours at Buster’s helm, and I always feel totally safe, because I know that (a) most nautical dangers can be avoided through careful preparation, good seamanship, and common sense; and (b) Buster is sitting on a trailer in my yard. The biggest danger there is spiders, which like to make webs on Buster’s seats because they’ve figured out that, statistically, Buster is less likely to wind up in the water than our house is.
   Sometimes, when I’m sitting at the helm, killing spiders with the anchor, scanning the horizon of my yard for potential boating hazards, I turn on Buster’s radio and listen to the Marine Forecast, which is always saying things like: “Barometer leaning to the southwest at 15 to 37 knots.” As a recreational boater, you should be familiar with these nautical terms. For example, a “knot” means about a mile an hour.” There is a sound nautical reason why they don’t come right out and say “about a mile an hour,” namely, they want you, the recreational boater, to feel stupid. They used to be less subtle about it: In the old days, the Marine Forecast consisted entirely of a guy telling recreational-boater jokes. (“How many recreational boaters does it take to screw in a light bulb?” “They can’t! Sharks have chewed off their arms!”)
   The Marine Forecast is always telling you obvious things, such as which way the wind is blowing, which you can figure out for yourself just by watching the motion of your spider webs. They never tell you about the serious boating hazards, which are located—write down this Boating Safety Tip—under the water. It turns out that although the water is basically flat on top, underneath there are large hostile objects such as reefs and shoals (or “forecastles”) that have been carelessly strewn around, often smack-dab in the path of recreational boaters.
   I discovered this shocking fact recently when some friends visited us in Miami, and in a foolish effort to trick them into thinking that we sometimes go out on our boat, we actually went out on our boat. It was a good day for boating, with the barometer gusting at about 47 liters of mercury, and we had no problems until I decided to make the boat go forward. For some reason, motorboats are designed to go at only two speeds: “Virtually Stopped” and “Airborne.” We were traveling along at Virtually Stopped, which seemed inadequate—barnacles were passing us—so I inched the throttle forward just a teensy bit and WHOOOOMM suddenly we were passengers on the Space Shuttle Buster. Every few feet Buster would launch himself completely out of the water and attain such an altitude that at any moment you expected flight attendants to appear with the beverage cart, and then Buster would crash down onto a particularly hard patch of water, causing our food and possessions and spiders to bounce overboard, forming a convenient trail for the sharks to follow. (“Look!” the sharks were saying. “A set of dentures! It won’t be long now!”)
   In this relaxing and recreational manner we lurched toward downtown Miami, with me shouting out the various Points of Interest. “I THINK THAT’S A DRUG DEALER!” I would shout. Or: “THERE GOES ANOTHER POSSIBLE DRUG DEALER!” I was gesturing toward these long, sleek motorboats with about 14 engines apiece that you see roaring around the Miami waters driven by men with no apparent occupation other than polishing their neck jewelry.
   So it was a pleasant tropical scene, with the wind blowing and the sea foaming and the sun glinting off the narcotics traffickers. As the captain, I was feeling that pleasant sense of well-being that comes from being in total command and not realizing that you are heading directly toward a large underwater pile of sand. I would say we hit it at about 630 knots, so that when Buster skidded to a cartoon-style stop, we were in about six inches of water, a depth that the U.S. Coast Guard recommends for craft classified as “Popsicle sticks or smaller.” This meant that, to push Buster off the sand, my friend John and I had to go into the water, which lapped threateningly around our lower shins. Probably the only thing that saved our lives was that the dreaded Man-Eating But Really Flat Shark was not around.
   So we did survive, and I’m already looking forward to our next recreational boating outing, possibly as soon as the next century. Perhaps, if you’re a boater, you’ll see me out there! I’ll be the one wearing shin guards.

Moby Dave

   You can’t explain it, this need that men have to go to sea. I sure can’t explain it. One day it just seized me, like a case of the hives.
   “Beth,” I said to my wife. “Let’s take Buster to Bimini.”
   Buster is our boat. It usually sits on a trailer in our backyard, forming an ideal natural habitat for spiders. Spiders come from as far away as Brazil to make their homes on Buster.
   Bimini is a place out in the Atlantic Ocean. The main thing I knew about Bimini was that it was where Gary Hart went to establish himself as a leading former presidential contender. I wasn’t even 100 percent sure what country, legally, Bimini belonged to. But I did know that people regularly went there from Miami in their boats. When I announced that I was going to Bimini, many people felt compelled to tell me confidence-building anecdotes about their trips.
   “Oh, yeah,” they’d say. “One time I was halfway there, and this storm came up and the wind was 83 miles an hour and there were 27-foot waves and the engine conked out and the radio broke and we all got sick and my wife suddenly went into labor even though she wasn’t even pregnant and a huge tentacle came out of the water and snatched Ashley and ...”
   The reason this kind of thing can happen is that, even though Bimini is only about 50 miles from Miami, to get to it you have to go right through the famous Bermuda Triangle, which is formed by drawing lines between Bermuda, the Bahamas, and my driveway. Terrible things happen constantly in this area, with I-95 being only one example. Also, flowing right through the Bermuda Triangle, between Miami and Bimini, is the famous Gulf Stream, which serves as a giant, natural rapid mass-transit system for sharks.
   So I knew that, before I attempted to cross to Bimini, I had to get Buster Boat into shape. Step one was to take him to a mechanic, because several things had gone wrong with him while he’d been sitting on his trailer. This is normal. A major law of physics is that things decay faster on a boat than in any other environment. Scientists have attempted to measure this phenomenon, but their instruments keep breaking. If a screw falls off your boat, and you go to a marine-supply store to buy a replacement—which will cost you several times as much as an ordinary civilian screw, because of course it has to be a marine screw—you can sometimes see your new screw actually dissolving on the counter while you’re still paying for it.
   So I took Buster to the mechanic, Dan, and he got everything working, and while I was writing the check I mentioned that I was going to Bimini.
   Dan gave me a concerned look.
   “You’re going to Bimini?” he asked.
   “Yes,” I said, over the sound of Buster decaying in the background.
   “You better get some spare parts,” he said. He started naming things like “transgressor nodule” and “three-sixteenths retribution valve.” I wrote it all down, went to the marine-supply store, and dutifully purchased every item on the list, although it would have been simpler to just pick up the Big Economy Box O’ Random Parts, because my mechanical skills are limited to annually installing the new registration decal on my car license plate. If Buster conked out in the Gulf Stream, I would sit in the exact center of the boat and throw engine parts at the sharks.
   But I was as ready as I was going to get. So early one Friday morning in July, Beth and I arose and—as bold seafaring people have done for thousands of years—went to a bakery. “Never attempt to cross the Gulf Stream without fresh pastries” is one of the Coast Guard’s Rules for Safe Boating. Then we drove to where we’d put Buster into the water earlier, climbed aboard, and headed out to sea, with fear in our hearts and crumbs in our laps.
   At this point I need to get technical for a moment and explain how to navigate to Bimini. Bimini is roughly east of Miami, so the simplest approach would be to steer a compass course of approximately 90 degrees Fahrenheit longitude. However, you also have to consider the fact that the Gulf Stream flows northward at an average of 2.5 amps, although this varies in certain areas depending on local shark motion. And then there are your winds, your tides, your barometric pressure, your jellyfish, your big, disgusting wads of floating seaweed, and your solar eclipses, one of which had occurred the day before we left. Taking all of these factors into consideration, I examined the charts, did a few navigational calculations, and decided that the best way to get to Bimini would be to follow Steele’s boat.
   Steele is Howard Steele Reeder II, a friend of ours who had graciously agreed to lead us to Bimini. He’s a boating enthusiast, although that phrase seems too weak to describe the level of his interest, kind of like describing someone as a “heroin fancier.” Steele, like most boating enthusiasts, is always in the process of simultaneously (a) fixing something on his current boat and (b) thinking about trading it in for another boat with a new and different set of decaying parts. For the Bimini voyage, he had to borrow his brother’s boat, because his own boat, which he had just bought, had already broken. Soon the marine industry will develop a boat that is prebroken right at the factory. When they finish building it, they’ll just tow it out into the middle of the Gulf Stream and sink it, then hand you the bill of sale. Boating enthusiasts will be in heaven.
   On board with Steele were his wife, Babette, and another couple, Linda and Olin McKenzie. Olin is a dentist. “Never attempt to cross the Gulf Stream without a qualified dentist” is another one of the Coast Guard’s Rules for Safe Boating. Too many maritime tragedies could easily have been avoided if the victims had been more aware of the insidious dangers of plaque formation.
   But the most important passenger on Steele’s boat was the Loran unit. This is a little electronic device that somehow, we think by magic, knows where Bimini is. “It’s over there!” says the Loran, via little electronic arrows. This is a truly wonderful navigational aid, and I hope that someday it will be installed in every automobile, because it would be pretty funny to see thousands of cars driving 55 miles per hour into the Atlantic Ocean.
   So Steele followed the Loran, and we followed Steele, bouncing along in Buster. Buster is not one of those big, heavy, Orson Welles-style boats that plow sedately through the sea. Buster is a small, light, Richard Simmons-style boat that likes to skip gaily across the tops of the waves, churning your internal organs into pudding.
   So we bounced through Biscayne Bay and out into the Atlantic. The tall buildings of downtown Miami grew smaller and smaller behind us (actually, they stayed the same size; they only appeared to get smaller, because of the Greenhouse Effect). There was nothing in front of us except water, which was dark blue, because the Gulf Stream is approximately 23.6 million feet deep. Anything could be lurking down there. There could be things down there with eyeballs the size of your entire boat. It’s best not to think about it. It’s best not to look ahead, either, because there’s an alarming quantity of nothing out there. It’s best to look wistfully back at Miami, getting smaller and smaller and smaller. At times, in the past, I had been critical of Miami, but out there at sea I was becoming a major civic booster. I was realizing that Miami has a lot of excellent qualities, the main one being that it is not located in the Gulf Stream. If your engine breaks down in Miami, all you have to do is pull your car over to the side of the road, put the hood up, and wait for a passing motorist to take a shot at you. But that seemed safer than being out in the ocean, relying entirely on two smallish boats and a little electronic device. What if the Loran wasn’t pointing us to Bimini at all? What if Steele’s brother forgot to pay his loran bill, and the device, chuckling electronically to itself, was steering us to Iceland?
   These thoughts ran through my mind as I munched pensively on a poppy-seed muffin and Miami got smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and finally ... Miami was gone. There was nothing behind us, nothing ahead of us, nothing on either side, except water. I didn’t look down because I didn’t want to catch even a glimpse of a giant eyeball. I kept my eyes Krazy Glued to the back of Steele’s boat, trusting that he would ... HEY. What the hell is Steele doing? He’s STOPPING! Out HERE!! “WHAT IS IT?” I shouted.
   “FISH!” Steele said.
   That’s right: There we were, in extremely deep water, completely out of sight of civilization, probably miles off course, possibly with icebergs drifting our way, and Steele and Olin had decided to try to catch fish, which are readily available in cooked form at any decent restaurant. So for the longest 10 minutes of my life, Steele and Olin fished while I circled them. I didn’t dare stop Buster, for fear that he’d decide the trip was over and refuse to go again.
   Finally, thank God, Olin caught a fish, which he released because it was too small. Your true sportsperson prefers a fish that is large enough so that when you cut it open, it spews slime all over the entire boat. But the fish had satisfied Olin’s and Steele’s urge to angle, and soon we were off again.
   We bounced along for another hour, with nothing appearing on the horizon. At one point, Steele and Olin went through an elaborate pantomime for my benefit: They got out a chart, looked at it, shrugged elaborately, pointed in opposite directions, and had a big arm-waving argument. This was of course highly entertaining to me. “What a pair of wacky cut-ups!” I said to myself. “If we ever reach land, I will kill them with my emergency signal flare gun!”
   Finally, after 21/2 hours, which in a small, bouncing boat feels approximately as long as the Reagan administration, Steele pointed to the horizon ahead. I looked out, and experiencing the same emotion that Columbus must have felt when he first caught sight of the Statue of liberty, I saw: nothing. But a few minutes later I thought I saw something dark and low against the sky, so I strained my eyeballs and ... Yes! There it was! Bimini! Or possibly Iceland! I didn’t care. At least we were somewhere.
   “Good boy, Buster,” I said, patting him on his compass. Praise is crucial to proper boat maintenance.
   A half hour later we reached Bimini harbor, arriving at the same time as a Chalk’s seaplane, which got there from Miami in about 25 minutes (this is known, among us nautical sea salts, as the Wussy Method). The harbor was full of huge recreational boats that cost millions of dollars and burn hundreds of gallons of fuel per afternoon so that sportspersons, equipped with thousands of dollars worth of tackle and tens of thousands of dollars worth of electronic equipment, can locate and sometimes even catch fish worth up to $3.59 per pound.
   A lot of people go to Bimini to find fish, especially the wily bonefish. There are many local guides who will take you out looking for bonefish; they’re all nicknamed “Bonefish,” as in Bonefish Willie, Bonefish Sam, Bonefish Irving, Bonefish E.E. Cummings, etc. While in Bimini I tried hard to get my traveling companions to refer to me as “Bonefish Dave,” but it never caught on.
   It turns out that Bimini is part of the Bahamas, which is, technically, a completely different country. This meant that we had to go through Immigration and Customs. I have never understood the point of this process. I assume they want to make sure you’re not bringing in bales of cocaine, or an undesirable person such as Charles Manson, or some agricultural threat such as the Deadly Bonefish Rot. But in most places they hardly even look at you. In Bimini they didn’t even look at our boats. Instead they handed us a bunch of forms, which we spent about an hour and a half filling out and getting stamped by various uniformed officials. (They’re big on stamping things; I imagine that about once a week a big ink tanker steams into the harbor to replenish the supply.)
   If I designed Customs forms, they’d have questions like:
   1. Are you bringing in any cocaine?
   2. How about Charles Manson?
   And so on. But the Bahamas’ forms didn’t ask anything like this. Instead, they asked—this is a real question—”Has plague occurred or been
   suspected among rats or mice on board during the voyage, or has there been unusual mortality among them?” How are you supposed to answer a question like that? Go down into the bowels of the boat, locate a spokesrat or spokesmouse, and say, “Any unusual mortality around here?” So I answered: No. I figured that if Buster contained any kind of animal life, it would be spiders, and they would be too severely vibrated to cause any problems.
   The worst part of the Bimini Customs and Immigration procedure was that periodically one of the officials would ask me, in front of other boaters, the name of my boat (or, as they put it, my “vessel”). The other boaters all had bold masculine boat names like Sea Biceps and Testosterone Torpedo, so I felt inadequate:
   CUSTOMS OFFICIAL: What is the name of the vessel? ME (quietly): Buster Boat. CUSTOMS OFFICIAL (loudly): Buster Boat? ME (very quietly): Yes. CUSTOMS OFFICIAL: And you are the master of the vessel? ME: Well, I was steering it, yes, but I was basically following Steele, because ... CUSTOMS OFFICIAL: What is the name of the vessel again?
   Finally they decided that we were not a serious threat to the Bahamian national security, so they let us in. And I’m glad they did, because Bimini is wonderful. The most wonderful thing about it is that, because of the prevailing winds, currents, tides, rum supply, etc., Bimini is located smack-dab in the center of what scientists believe to be the world’s most powerful Lethargy Zone. It is extremely difficult to remain tense there. The moment you arrive, lethargy waves start washing over you, seeping into your body, turning your skeletal system into taffy. You stop worrying about things like your job, your mortgage, your kids, whether the recession will last, whether your fly is unzipped, etc. You function on a more basic level, concerning yourself with issues such as: Should I scratch my armpit now? Or later? If you stand in one place too long, you can become so relaxed that you sink to the ground and form a very carefree puddle.
   “See that puddle over there?” people will say, pointing to a blob of flesh on the dock. “That used to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He was supposed to stop in Bimini for just a couple of hours—this was in 1958—but the lethargy got to him before he even got off the dock. We think there’s still a pair of wing-tipped shoes under there somewhere. Twice a day we pour a pitcher of daiquiris on him, and he’s happy.”
   If you want objective proof of the Lethargy Zone’s effects, take a look at the famous photograph of Gary Hart in Bimini, sitting against a dock piling with Donna Rice on his lap. Notice how relaxed his body is. Notice the goofy smile on his face. Here’s a guy thinking, “OK, on the one hand, I have a serious shot at becoming president of the United States, leader of the Free World, the most powerful person on the face of the Earth; on the other hand, I can sit here with a hot babe on my lap.” On Bimini, this is an easy choice.
   Geographically, Bimini is divided into two major parts:
   1. The water.
   2. The land.
   The water is clear and warm and blue and beautiful. It contains numerous scenic fish as well as some highly relaxed conchs and the occasional airplane that crashed while attempting to bring in illegal narcotics at night back in the Bad Old ‘80s, before the government cracked down, when smuggling was a major local industry. (I wonder what those pilots put on their Customs questionnaires? Maybe: “There was unusual mortality among the mice and rats caused by the plane hitting the water at 120 mph.”)
   But the land is my favorite part. It’s really just a few little islands, altogether less than 10 square miles, with about 1,500 residents, 75 liquor licenses, and a group of friendly, casual, closely related dogs. Most of the development is on North Bimini, along a strip of land narrow enough that you could probably throw a rock from one side to the other, if you weren’t feeling so lethargic. At the south end of the island is Bimini’s metropolitan hub, Alice Town, which consists of a few dozen stores, T-shirt stands, restaurants, and Hat-out bars. Most of the buildings’ front doors open right onto the narrow street, which has no sidewalk, so that when you step outside, you’re basically standing in the middle of the main island road. “Never step out of a bar in Bimini without carefully looking both ways, especially if you have been drinking the legendary Bahama Mama rum drink,” is one of the Coast Guard’s Rules for Walking Around Bimini.
   Fortunately, there’s not much traffic, and the drivers, many of them on motor scooters, cheerfully weave and beep their way through the pedestrians, usually missing everybody, which is a lot more than you can say for drivers in Miami. People in Bimini are friendly. This is a generalization, but it’s true, anyway. People tend to say hi to you even if you’re a flagrant tourist.
   The Bimini stores give new meaning to the term “small business.” Some of them could easily fit into a dressing room at Bloomingdale’s. The window displays are eclectic—Bimini mugs, T-shirts, conch shells, a roll of film manufactured during the Carter administration—generally covered with a nice, relaxed layer of dust. A number of buildings are boarded up or missing key architectural elements such as a roof. Men were working inside one bright blue building called The Chic Store (“Bimini’s Oldest, Established 1935”). A hand-lettered sign in the window said: SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE. CLOSED FOR RENERVATIONS.
   The Chic Store was just down the street from Melvin’s Fashion Center, which featured a nice selection of T-shirts, and Priscilla’s Epicurean Delights (“To Thrill the Gourmet Palate”), which featured conch. Conch is one of Bimini’s major palate thrills, served in fritters and salads, or as a main course. It’s delicious, especially if you don’t think about what it looked like before they cooked it. “Never think about the fact that a conch is basically a large underwater snail” is one of the Coast Guard’s Rules for Eating Conch. Bimini also has a locally baked bread, sweet and heavy and highly addictive.
   My favorite spot in downtown Bimini is an arch erected on the side of the road. It says:
   BIMINI—GATEWAY TO THE BAHAMAS
   THE YOUTH DEPARTMENT
   THE ORDER OF ELKS OF THE
   WORLD (I.B.P.O.E. OF W.)
   WELCOMES THE TOURIST
   TO BIMINI
   Underneath the arch is a little shrine-like display, featuring an arrangement of conch shells surrounding a toy rake, shovel, and hoe, pointing aloft. Next to this display is a small, mysterious sign that says:
   TO BE AWARDED TROPHY FOR BEST KEPT YARD.
   To one side is a rusting antique hand fire-fighting pump. (Why not?) Across the street is a sign that says:
   GLENDA’S SCOOTER RENTAL AND THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
   Yes. Not only does Bimini have scooter rentals, but the Fountain of Youth is located there, over on South Bimini, according to legend. You can take tours to it. We didn’t bother, because of being in the Lethargy Zone. We figured, hey, if we got young again, we’d have to go through young adulthood again—zits, career-building, etc.—and it just sounded so tiring that we decided to skip eternal youth and have some beers and conch fritters instead. We did this at one of Bimini’s most famous social spots, the Compleat Angler hotel and bar, which is where famed novelist and macho hombre Ernest Hemingway used to hang out. One room is a sort of museum, with pictures of Hemingway all over the walls, including one with the following caption: “ERNEST HEMINGWAY SHOOTING THOMPSON MACHINE GUN, BIMINI DOCK.” He liked to shoot guns at sharks. One time he got so excited, shooting at a shark, that—this is true—he shot himself in both legs. That’s the kind of sportsperson Ernest was.
   I have not begun to describe all the things you can see and do just in metropolitan Bimini. I have not mentioned the plaque commemorating the late congressperson Adam Clayton Powell, who spent a great deal of time in Bimini, drinking scotch and milk and no doubt thinking up ways to better represent his New York City constituents; or the Chalk’s Seaplane Terminal with the antenna that looks like a Science Fair project made from coat hangers, where you can watch the plane come in and taxi right across the main road to discharge its passengers; or the End of the World Bar, whose floor is sand and whose walls seem to be made entirely of graffiti; or the Bimini bus, a van equipped with numerous bumper stickers and what appears to be a radar antenna. What with all the things to see, plus the lethargy factor, plus the beer, it took us a little over four hours to walk through Alice Town and back, a distance of several hundred yards. Of course, on the way back we were fighting a strong tide of passengers who had been released from the SeaEscape cruise ship for the afternoon and were sweeping down the island, snorking up rum and T-shirts.
   Bimini attracts all kinds of people. One morning we watched as three men pulled up to a dock in a loooooooong motorboat, the kind shaped like a floating marital aid with numerous large engines on the back. They picked up a young woman wearing a practical nautical outfit consisting of an extremely tight, extremely short dress and spike-heeled shoes. She could barely move. She couldn’t climb into the boat without causing her undergarments to be visible from Fort Lauderdale, so one of the men had to lift her into the boat like a large, high-heel-wearing sausage. Then off they roared, out to sea. Probably planning to do some snorkeling.
   Bimini offers a wide range of nightlife activities. You can eat. You can drink. You can walk around the docks and watch sportspersons on large expensive boats slice fish apart and get slime and flies all over themselves and seem genuinely happy. You can eat some more. You can, if you are very fortunate, see Steele Reeder do his impression of how a conch looks at you when you have removed it from its shell (“Now what” the conch says). You can drink some more. You can dance, with or without a partner, in a bar or right on the street.
   On Saturday night Olin and I were sitting at an outdoor bar, listening to a band called Glenn Rolle and the Surgeons. Three young women were dancing with each other. A man came dancing in off the street, nattily attired in shorts and an artificial leg. He danced up and joined the women, smiling blissfully. The four of them danced for a minute, then the man danced off, waving his artificial leg around in a manner that can only be described as joyful.
   “There’s a short story in there somewhere,” remarked Olin.
   I was so impressed by Glenn Rolle and the Surgeons that I went up to Rolle and asked if they had any record albums, and he sold me one for $5. When I got back to my table, I sensed that the album might be defective, inasmuch as it had a big bend in the middle, so you could easily fold it in half. Rolle cheerfully exchanged it for a new one, which I played when I got home. The album is called Steal Away. Side One consists of one song, called “Steal Away, which is a little over six minutes long. Side Two is also “Steal Away,” but it’s the instrumental version, which is identical to Side One but without the vocals. All in all, I think Steal Away is an excellent name for this album.
   We honestly had planned to do more than just eat and drink and swim and laze on the beach and buy straw hats and walk around very slowly while burping during our stay in Bimini. We honestly intended to do some serious research on local points of interest, such as the Mysterious Underwater Thing Possibly Built by Aliens from Space. I am not making this point of interest up. It’s called the Bimini Road, and it consists of hundreds of big, flat rocks forming a half-mile-long, fairly regular pattern, shaped like a backward J in 18 feet of water a half mile from Bimini. It was discovered in 1968, and many respected loons think that it has something to do with the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Others think it must have been aliens from space. It’s a big mystery. How did it get there? What is it for?
   My theory is that the space aliens were going to write a giant under-water backward message of advice for humanity starting with J, possibly “JUST DO IT.” But after a short while in the Lethargy Zone they decided to knock off, maybe have a Bahama Mama, and before they knew it a couple of million years had passed and they had to return to their planet, leaving the message unfinished. Closed for renevations.
   We were in a similar situation. Before we knew it, it was Sunday, time to head back to Miami, assuming that Miami still existed. There was no way to know for sure, because the Bimini phone system had been out of order the whole time we were there. I’m not sure telephones would have been all that effective, anyway. The speed of electricity on Bimini is probably around 10
   miles per hour.
   Anyway, we had children and jobs to get back to, and we were getting dangerously close to forming permanent flesh puddles. So after a well-balanced breakfast of about 17,000 pieces of Bimini-bread toast, we set out for home, with me, Master of the Vessel Buster, once again following Bonefish Howard Steele Reeder II, who was once again following the Loran.
   In a couple of hours, Miami was on the horizon again, apparently intact, but I didn’t dare to relax, because I knew that ahead of us lay the greatest maritime challenge of all, a hazard so dangerous that no sane boatperson would dream of attempting it: Biscayne Bay on a Sunday afternoon. You know how sometimes you’re driving on I-95 in heavy traffic, and some substance abuser driving a car whose windows are tinted with what appears to be roofing tar weaves past you at 127 miles per hour, using all available lanes plus the median strip, and you say to yourself: “Why don’t they get that lunatic OFF THE ROAD??” Well, trust me, on Sunday afternoon he is off the road. He and all his friends from the South Florida Maniac Drivers Club are all out on Biscayne Bay, roaring around in severely overpowered boats, looking for manatees to turn into Meatloaf of the Sea.
   But we made it through without getting killed, which was too bad because it meant we had to go through the U.S. Customs procedure, which is even sillier than the Bahamian one. It was developed by the hardworking Federal Bureau of Irritating Procedures That May Seem Pointless But Actually Accomplish Nothing. The way it works is, you have to report in from a special U.S. Customs telephone. The phone we went to is right next to a dock at the Crandon Park marina. But you can’t stop at the dock unless you’re buying fuel there. So the boat pulls up, and the captain gets off, and the boat has to leave—ideally with somebody driving it—and drift around the marina with all the other incoming motorboats, sailboats, Cuban refugee rafters, etc., while the captain gets in line to wait for the phone. It can take an hour or more for your turn, and when you finally get to talk to the Customs people, they want to know things like your Social Security number and birth date. How this information helps them protect the borders is beyond me. I suppose that if
   you have something really important to tell them, such as that you’re carrying illegal aliens or a bale of hashish, it’s your responsibility to blurt this information out. Then I imagine you’re supposed to put handcuffs on yourself, take a taxi to a federal prison, ring the bell, and wait until they find time to let you in.
   Eventually, they decided that our Social Security numbers had enough digits, or whatever criterion they use, and they let us back into the United States, and we went home. But we’ve already decided we’re going back to Bimini. I think everybody should go to Bimini from time to time. I think President Bush and whoever is governing the Soviet Union this afternoon should meet there. They would definitely have a more relaxed kind of summit.
   A NICE TOWN, BAHAMAS—IN a surprise development, the leaders of the two superpowers announced today that they have learned all the words, in English AND Russian, to “Conch Ain’t Got No Bone.”
   Maybe you should go to Bimini, too. Maybe I’ll even see you there, and we can wave to each other, if we’re not feeling too lethargic. Please address me as “Bonefish Dave.”

Shark Bait

   It began as a fun nautical outing, 10 of us in a motorboat off the coast of Miami. The weather was sunny and we saw no signs of danger, other than the risk of sliding overboard because every exposed surface on the boat was covered with a layer of snack-related grease. We had enough cholesterol on board to put the entire U.S. Olympic team into cardiac arrest. This is because all 10 of us were guys.
   I hate to engage in gender stereotyping, but when women plan the menu for a recreational outing, they usually come up with a nutritionally balanced menu featuring all the major food groups, including the Sliced Carrots group, the Pieces of Fruit Cut into Cubes Group, the Utensils Group, and the Plate group. Whereas guys tend to focus on the Carbonated Malt Beverages Group and the Fatal Snacks Group. On this particular trip, our food supply consisted of about 14 bags of potato chips and one fast-food fried-chicken Giant Economy Tub o’ Fat. Nobody brought, for example, napkins, the theory being that you could just wipe your hands on your stomach. Then you could burp. This is what guys on all-guy boats are doing while women are thinking about their relationships.
   The reason the grease got smeared everywhere was that four of the guys on the boat were 10-year-olds, who, because of the way their still-developing digestive systems work, cannot chew without punching. This results in a lot of dropped and thrown food. On this boat, you regularly encountered semignawed pieces of chicken skittering across the deck toward you like small but hostile alien creatures from the Kentucky Fried Planet. Periodically a man would yell “CUT THAT OUT!” at the boys, then burp to indicate the depth of his concern. Discipline is vital on a boat.
   We motored through random-looking ocean until we found exactly what we were looking for: a patch of random-looking ocean. There we dropped anchor and dove for Florida lobsters, which protect themselves by using their tails to scoot backward really fast. They’ve been fooling predators with this move for millions of years, but the guys on our boat, being advanced life forms, including a dentist, figured it out in under three hours.
   I myself did not participate, because I believe that lobsters are the result of a terrible genetic accident involving nuclear radiation and cockroaches. I mostly sat around, watching guys lunge out of the water, heave lobsters into the boat, burp, and plunge back in. Meanwhile, the lobsters were scrabbling around in the chicken grease, frantically trying to shoot backward through the forest of legs belonging to 10-year-old boys squirting each other with gobs of the No. 191,000,000,000 Sun Block that their moms had sent along. It was a total Guy Day, very relaxing, until the arrival of the barracuda.
   This occurred just after we’d all gotten out of the water. One of the men, Larry, was fishing, and he hooked a barracuda right where we had been swimming. This was unsettling. The books all say that barracuda rarely eat people, but very few barracuda can read, and they have far more teeth than would be necessary for a strictly seafood diet. Their mouths look like the entire $39.95 set of Ginsu knives, including the handy Arm Slicer.
   We gathered around to watch Larry fight the barracuda. His plan was to catch it, weigh it, and release it with a warning. After 10 minutes he almost had it to the boat, and we were all pretty excited for him, when all of a sudden ...
   BA-DUMP ... BA-DUMP ...
   Those of you who read music recognize this as the soundtrack from the motion picture Jaws. Sure enough, cruising right behind Larry’s barracuda, thinking sushi, was: a shark. And not just any shark. It was a hammerhead shark, perennial winner of the coveted Oscar for Ugliest Fish. It has a weird, T-shaped head with a big eyeball on each tip, so that it can see around both sides of a telephone pole. This ability is of course useless for a fish, but nobody would dare try to explain this to a hammerhead.
   The hammerhead, its fin breaking the surface, zigzagged closer to Larry’s barracuda, then surged forward.
   “Oh ****!” went Larry, reeling furiously.
   CHOMP went the hammerhead, and suddenly Larry’s barracuda was in a new weight division.
   CHOMP went the hammerhead again, and now Larry was competing in an entirely new category, Fish Consisting of Only a Head.
   The boys were staring at the remainder of the barracuda, deeply impressed.
   “This is your leg,” said the dentist. “This is your leg in Jaws. Any questions?”
   The boys, for the first time all day, were quiet.

Captains Uncourageous

   There comes a time in a man’s life when he hears the call of the sea. “Hey, YOU!” are the sea’s exact words.
   If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediately. That’s what I should have done recently when I was called to sea by my friends Hannah and Paddy, who had rented a sailboat in the Florida Keys. They love to sail. Their dream is to quit their jobs and sail around the world, living a life of carefree adventure until their boat is sunk by an irate whale and they wind up drifting in a tiny raft and fighting over who gets to eat the sun block. At least that’s the way I see it turning out. The only safe way to venture onto the ocean is aboard a cruise ship the size of a rural school district. Even then you’re not safe, because you might become trapped in your cabin due to bodily expansion. Cruise ships carry thousands of tons of high-calorie food, and under maritime law they cannot return to port until all of it has been converted into passenger fat. So there are at least eight feedings a day. Crew members often creep into cabins at night and use high-pressure hoses to shoot cheesecake directly down the throats of sleeping passengers.
   But on cruise ships you rarely find yourself dangling from poles, which is more than I can say for the sailboat rented by Hannah and Paddy. The captain was a man named Dan, who used to be a race-car driver until he had heart trouble and switched from fast cars to sailboats, which are the slowest form of transportation on Earth with the possible exception of airline flights that go through O’Hare. Sometimes I suspect that sailboats never move at all, and the only reason they appear to go from place to place is continental drift.
   Nevertheless, we were having a pleasant day on Captain Dan’s boat, the Jersey Girl, doing busy nautical things like hoisting the main stizzen and mizzening the aft beam, and meanwhile getting passed by other boats, seaweed, lobsters, glaciers, etc. The trouble arose when we attempted to enter a little harbor so we could go to a bar featuring a band headed by a large man named Richard. This band is called—really—Big Dick and the Extenders. We were close enough to hear them playing when the Jersey Girl plowed into what nautical experts call the “bottom.”
   The problem was an unusually low tide. Helpful people in smaller boats kept telling us this.
   “It’s an unusually low tide!” they’d shout helpfully as they went past. They were lucky the Jersey Girl doesn’t have a cannon.
   We’d been sitting there for quite a while when Captain Dan suggested, with a straight face, that if some of us held on to a large pole called the boom and swung out over the water, our weight might make the boat lean over enough to get free. I now realize that this was a prank. Fun-loving sailboat captains are probably always trying to get people out on the boom, but most people aren’t that stupid.
   We, however, had been substantially refreshed by beverages under a hot sun, so we actually did it. Four of us climbed up, hung our stomachs over the boom, kicked off from the side of the boat, and NOOOOOO ...
   Picture a giant shish-kebab skewer sticking out sideways from a boat 10
   feet over the water, except instead of pieces of meat on it, there are four out-of-shape guys, faces pale and sweating, flabby legs flailing, ligaments snapping like rifle shots. We instantly became a tourist attraction. A crowd gathered on shore, laughing and pointing. Some of them were probably sailboat captains.
   “Look!” they were probably saying. “Captain Dan got FOUR of them out on the boom! A new record!”
   Meanwhile, next to me, Paddy, a middle-aged attorney who is not, let’s be honest, built like an Olympic gymnast, who is in fact built a lot like a gym, was saying, in an unusually high voice, “We better bring the boom back now. OK? Now? OK?? WE BETTER BRING THE BOOM BACK NOW! BRING-THE-BOOM-BACK-NOW!! I SAID ...”
   “HANG ON!” Captain Dan was shouting. “She’s about to move!”
   People on shore were now taking pictures.
   “IT’S AN UNUSUALLY LOW TIDE!” a helpful boater was shouting.
   “Please,” Paddy was saying, very quietly now.
   “I think she’s moving!” Captain Dan sang out.
   In fact, the Jersey Girl was exhibiting no more flotation than central Nebraska. As I clung to the boom, listening to Paddy whimper, two thoughts penetrated my pain: (1) He was paying for this experience; and (2) If you have to die, you want it to be for a noble cause. You don’t want it to be for Big Dick and the Extenders.
   It turned out we didn’t die. We finally got swung back onto the boat and began thinking about leading our lives without moving any muscles ever again. And eventually Captain Dan got the boat unstuck. He needed the help of a motorboat. I am certain this was also true of Columbus.

The Living Bra

   I had hoped that we could get the new year under way without any reports of ecologically dangerous shellfish attacking women’s undergarments, but I see now that I was a fool.
   I have here an alarming news article written by Christopher Taylor of the Watertown (New York) Dally Times and sent in by several alert readers. The headline, which I am not making up, says: LARGE COLONY OF ZEBRA MUSSELS FOUND CLINGING TO BIG BRASSIERE.
   In case you haven’t heard, the zebra mussel is a hot new environmental threat. Forget the killer bees. Oh, sure, they got a lot of scary headlines—KILLER BEES SIGHTED IN MEXICO; KILLER BEES SIGHTED IN TEXAS; KILLER BEES BECOME AMWAY DISTRIBUTORs—but they never lived up to their potential. Whereas at this very moment, the zebra mussel is raging out of control in the Great Lakes region. Well, OK, maybe “raging” is a strong term. As a rule, mussels don’t rage. You rarely hear swimmers being advised: “If you see a mussel, try to remain calm, and whatever you do, don’t provoke it.”
   Nevertheless, we have reason to fear the zebra mussel, which gets its name from the fact that it roams the plains of Africa in giant herds.
   No, seriously, it gets its name from the fact that it has a striped shell, which grows to about an inch long. About five years ago a group of zebra mussels, possibly carrying forged passports, came from Europe to the Great Lakes in the bilge water of a European ship, and they’ve been reproducing like crazy ever since. They are the Sex Maniacs of the Sea. Here’s a quote from an August 1991 Washin ton Post article:
   “Each female can produce 30,000 eggs a year, leading to huge colonies of billions of the animals clinging to every available surface. Recently, marine biologists have discovered concentrations reaching 700,000 mussels a cubic yard. ...”
   So apparently spaying them on an individual basis is out of the question. But something has to be done, because zebra mussels are clogging up water-supply pipes, and they’re spreading fast. Controlling them could cost billions of dollars—money that will have to come out of the pockets of the scumballs who wrecked the savings-and-loan industry.
   No! That was another joke! The money will of course come from low-life taxpayers such as yourself, which is why you need to stay informed about this story, especially the giant-brassiere angle. Here are the key quotes from the Watertown Daily Times story:
   A large brassiere pulled from waters near the Genesee River at Rochester was carrying the largest colony of zebra mussels found so far in Lake Ontario. ...
   The brassiere—and the mussels—are now under observation at the Department of Environmental Conservation Fisheries Research Station at Cape Vincent.
   DEC Supervisory Aquatic Biologist Gerard C. LeTendre said the bra was scooped up while DEC staff were trawling for dead lake trout near the Genesee River ... Because of the size of the garment, Mr. LeTendre said, more than 100 mussels had managed to attach themselves to it.
   “Whoever that bra belonged to was of large proportions,” Mr. LeTendre said. “It was huge.”
   This episode raises a number of troubling questions, including:
   * They were trawling for dead trout?
   * Is that sporting?
   * Could it possibly be that the zebra mussels have become carniverous and ate the original bra occupant?
   * Has anybody seen Dolly Parton in person recently?
   In an effort to get to the bottom of this, I called the research station and grilled Gerard LeTendre.
   “Is it true,” I said, “that you have a large brassiere under observation?”
   “It’s really just in a box in my office,” he said. “The newspaper made it sound like we have it in an aquarium.”
   He also said they still don’t know who owns the bra.
   “We know it’s a four-hook bra,” he said. “But it didn’t belong to a large person. It was just a very well-endowed person.
   He said that many people have offered suggestions about what to do with the bra, including “holding a Cinderella-type contest to see who it fits.”
   For now, however, the mystery remains unsolved. Meanwhile, the zebra mussels continue to multiply. Even as you read these words, a huge colony of them could be clustering ominously around a Sears catalog that fell overboard, nudging it open to the foundation-garments section. It is a chilling thought, and until the authorities come up with a plan of action, I am urging everybody to take the sensible precaution of developing a nervous facial tic. Also, if you must wear a brassiere, please wear it on the outside, where the Department of Environmental Conservation can keep an eye on it. Thank you.

Reader Alert

   This section contains several true-life adventures, including the incident wherein Calvin Trillin and I came within inches of being savagely attacked by a dangerous and heavily armed criminal. Or possibly not. (I should note for the record that Trillin claims he acted much more heroically than the way he is depicted in this column; my feeling about that is, if he wants to appear heroic, he should write his own column about it.)
   This section also contains the column I wrote about my first encounter with the world-famous Lawn Rangers precision lawnmower drill team of Arcola, Illinois. Since then I’ve returned to Arcola twice to march with this proud unit in the annual Broom Corn parade, a wonderful small-town, heartland event that features a tremendous outpouring of what can only be described as “beer.”

Crime Busters

   Somebody has got to do something about crime in the streets. Every day it seems as though there are more criminals running loose out there, and the quality of their work is pathetic.
   I base this statement on a crime experience I had recently in the streets of New York City while visiting Calvin Trillin, who lives in New York and divides his time pretty much equally between being a well-known writer and trying to park his car. This experience, which I am not making up, occurred as we were returning to Calvin’s house at about 1 A.M. after an evening of business-related nonpersonal tax-deductible literary research. Just as we reached his door, a criminal appeared from out of the darkness and attempted to rob us. Up to that point, I have no criticism of the criminal’s technique. He had done an excellent job of victim selection: In terms of physical courage, Calvin and I were probably the two biggest weenies abroad in Manhattan at that hour. A competent criminal, armed with any plausible weapon, including a set of nail clippers, could have had us immediately begging for mercy and handing over our wallets and promising to raise additional cash first thin in the morning by applying for second mortgages.
   But this criminal had a terrible plan of action. He had both hands in his jacket pockets, and he was thrusting the jacket material out toward us, the way the bad guy’s jacket sticks out on TV when he has a gun in his pocket and he doesn’t want everybody to see it. Clearly Calvin and I were supposed to think that the criminal had two guns pointing at us.
   Here’s what the criminal said: “I’ll blow both of your heads off.”
   Later on, in our detailed post-crime critique, Calvin and I found numerous flaws in this approach. For one thing, if the criminal really had two guns, why on earth would he hide them? As Calvin pointed out: “You would definitely want to show your guns to a couple of schlubs like us.”
   Also, two guns was definitely overkill. According to my calculations, two guns figures out to one gun per hand, which raises the question: How was the criminal planning to take our wallets? Was he going to ask us to hold one of his guns for him? Was he going to have us stick the wallets in his mouth? If so, he would have had trouble giving us our post-robbery instructions, such as “Don’t try following me!” or “Don’t try anything funny!”
   CRIMINAL (with his hands in his pockets and our wallets in his mouth): Donghh ghry angyghing ghunny! ME: What CRIMINAL (getting angry): DONGHH GHRY ANGYGHING GHUNNY! CALVIN: I think he’s saying “Don’t I have a big tummy.” ME (hastily): No! You’re very sueve! Really! Sir!
   But the criminal’s silliest move, in my opinion, was threatening to blow both of our heads off. That would be an absurd waste of bullets. A much more efficient way to gain our cooperation would have been to simply blow Calvin’s head off. I would then have cooperatively handed over Calvin’s wallet.
   So it was a very poorly planned robbery. I would like to say that Calvin and I, even as we were staring down the menacing barrels of the criminal’s jacket pockets, instantly detected all the flaws with our computerlike brains. But frankly, due to the amount of literary research we had done that evening, our brains were not so much in computer mode as in Hubble Space Telescope mode, if you get my drift.
   Nevertheless, I’m very proud of how we handled the situation. Actually, it was Calvin who took charge. You never really know what kind of gumption a man has, what kind of spine, what kind of plain old-fashioned “guts,” until you see how he handles himself when the chips are down and all the marbles are on the line. Calvin looked at the criminal and he looked at me, and then, drawing on some inner reserve of strength and courage, he pressed the intercom button and said, “Alice, let us in.”
   Alice is Calvin’s wife. She buzzed the door lock, and we opened the door and went inside, leaving the criminal out there with his jacket pockets still pointing at us. He never did blow our heads off, although the next morning I wished that he had.
   Anyway, it was a pretty sorry performance, and if he is in any way representative of the criminals out there today, this is yet another area where the United States is heading down the tubes. I hope that the criminal, if he is reading this, has enough self-respect to learn from the criticisms I’ve outlined here and get his act together. Although in all fairness I should warn him that Calvin and I have given our performance some thought, and if this criminal ever tries to rob us again, he might be in for a little surprise. Because next time we’re going to take strong, decisive action. Next time we’re going to have Alice come out and give him a piece of her mind.

False Alarm

   The man was standing right outside our master bathroom. He couldn’t see Beth and me, standing in the hallway, but we could see him clearly. His face was covered with a stocking mask, which distorted his features hideously. He was dressed all in black, and he had a black plastic bag stuck in his back pocket.
   He was using a screwdriver to open our sliding glass door.
   You always wonder what you’re going to do in a situation like this. Run? Fight? Wet your pants?
   I’m not experienced with physical violence. The last fight I had was in eighth grade, when I took on John Sniffen after school because he let the air out of my bike tires. Actually, I didn’t know that he did this, but he was the kind of kid who would have, and all the other suspects were a lot larger than I was.
   The man outside our house was also larger than I am. He jerked the screwdriver sideways and opened the door. Just like that, he was inside our house, maybe six feet from where Beth and I were standing.
   Then he saw us. For a moment, nobody spoke. “CUT!” yelled the director.
   “Way to go, Ozzie!” I said to the stocking-masked man. “Looking good! Looking criminal!”
   “I’m wondering if his bag is too dark to show up,” said Beth.
   Everybody wants to be a director.
   Anyway, as you have guessed, Ozzie wasn’t a real burglar. He was part of a production crew that was using our house to shoot a promotional video for the company that installed our burglar alarm. Here in South Florida it’s standard procedure to have burglar alarms in your house, your car, your workplace, and, if you’ve had expensive dental work, your mouth.
   I like having an alarm in our house, because it gives me the security that comes from knowing that trained security personnel will respond instantly whenever I trigger a false alarm. I do this every day at 6 A.M., when I get up to let out our large main dog, Earnest, and our small emergency backup dog, Zippy. I’m always in a big hurry, because Zippy, being about the size of a hairy lima bean (although less intelligent), has a very fast digestive cycle, and I need to get him right outside.
   So I fall out of bed, barely conscious, and stagger to the back door, where both dogs are waiting, and I open the door and realize that I have failed to disarm the alarm system.
   Now I have a problem. Because, within seconds, the voice of the Cheerful lady at the alarm company is going to come out of the alarm control panel, asking me to identify myself, and unless I give her the Secret Password, she’s going to cheerfully notify the police. So I stagger quickly over to the panel. But this leaves Earnest and Zippy alone out on the patio. Theoretically, they can get from the patio to our backyard all by themselves. They used to be prevented from doing this by a screen enclosure around the patio, but thanks to Hurricane Andrew, most of this enclosure is now orbiting the Earth. The hurricane did NOT blow away the screen door, however. It’s still standing there, and the dogs firmly believe that it’s the only way out. So—I swear I’m not making this up—instead of going two feet to the left or right, where there’s nothing to prevent them from simply wandering out into the yard, they trot directly to the door, stop, then turn around to look at me with a look that says “Well?”
   “GO OUTSIDE!” I yell at them as I lunge toward the alarm control panel. “THERE’S NO SCREEN ANYMORE, YOU MORONS!”
   “I beg your pardon?” says the Cheerful Alarm lady, because this is not the Secret Password.
   “Bark,” says Earnest, who is trotting back toward the house, in case I am telling her that it’s time to eat.
   “Grunt,” says Zippy, as his internal digestive timer reaches zero and he detonates on the patio.
   We do this almost every morning. We’re very dependable. In fact, if some morning I DIDN’T trigger a false alarm, I think the Cheerful Alarm lady would notify the police.
   “You’d better check the Barry residence,” she’d say. “Apparently something has happened to Mr. Barry. Or else he’s strangling one of his dogs.”
   So the alarm people have been very nice to us, which is why we let them use our house for the video. It had a great Action Ending, wherein Ozzie runs out our front door, and an armed security man drives up, screeches to a halt, leaps out, puts his hand on his gun, and yells “FREEZE!” This is Ozzie’s cue to freeze and look concerned inside his stocking. They shot this scene several times, so there was a lot of commotion in our yard. Fortunately, in South Florida we’re used to seeing people sprint around with guns and stocking masks, so the activity in our yard did not alarm the neighbors. (“Look, Walter, the Barrys planted a new shrub.” “Where?” “Over there, next to the burglar.”)
   Anyway, the point is that our house is well protected. The alarm system is there in case we ever need it, which I doubt we will, because—thanks to Zippy—only a fool would try to cross our patio on foot.

The World’s Fastest Lawn Mower

   When I hear some loudmouth saying that the United States is no longer a world technology leader, I look him in the eye and say: “Hey! There’s a worm pooping on your shirt!” Then, when he looks down, I spit on the top of his head and sprint away. I’m not about to stand still while somebody knocks my country, not when we’re still capable of achievements such as the World’s Fastest Lawn Mower.
   That’s right: The World’s Fastest Lawn Mower is produced right here in the U.S.A. by Americans just like yourself except that you are probably normal, whereas they put a jet-powered helicopter engine on a riding lawn mower. I know this is true because—call me a courageous journalism pioneer if you must—I drove it on my own personal lawn.
   This event was arranged by Ken Thompson, a Miami-based sales representative for the Dixie Chopper brand of lawn mower. He wrote me a letter saying that the Dixie Chopper people had a special customized jet-powered model touring around the country making personal appearances, and it would be in my area, and he thought it would be a good idea if they brought it to my house in a sincere humanitarian effort to get free publicity. As a professional journalist trained to be constantly on the alert for stories that I can cover without leaving home, I said sure.
   I’ve had an interest in lawn mowers since I was 10 years old, and I used to earn money attempting to mow neighbors’ lawns with our lawn mower, which was powered by the first gasoline engine ever built. I believe this was actually a stone engine. The only person who could start it consistently was my father, and he could do this only by wrapping the rope around the starter thing and yanking it for the better part of the weekend, a process that required more time and energy than he would have expended if he’d cut the entire lawn with his teeth.
   By about the 1,000th yank, he’d be dripping with sweat, ready to quit, and the lawn mower, sensing this, would go, and I quote: Putt. Just once. But that was enough to goad my father into a furious yanking frenzy, transforming himself, wolf-man-like, from a mild-mannered, gentle Presbyterian minister into a violent red-faced lunatic, yanking away at this malevolent stone, which continued to go putt at exactly the right tactical moment, until finally it got what it wanted, which was for my father to emit a burst of extremely mild profanity. Then the lawn mower, knowing that it now had a funny story to tell down at the Lawn Mower Bar, would start.
   Sometimes, in an effort to earn money, I’d push the stone lawn mower next door and ask Mrs. Reed if she wanted me to mow her lawn. She’d say yes, and I’d yank on the starter thing for a while, then sit down, exhausted and discouraged, and Mrs. Reed, who had been watching from her kitchen, would come out and give me a quarter. It was a living. Lawn mower technology has come a long way since then, as I discovered when the Dixie Chopper trailer pulled up at my house and the crew wheeled out the World’s Fastest Lawn Mower. It’s a normal-looking commercial riding lawn mower except that it has what looks like a large industrial coffee-maker mounted horizontally on the back. This is a 150-horsepower turbine engine from a U.S. military Chinook helicopter. According to the crew, Warren Evans and Mark Meagher, it can easily make the lawn mower go more than 60 miles per hour. God alone knows what it could do in a Cuisinart.
   After briefing me on the controls, the crew started the engine, which sounded like a giant vacuum cleaner, getting louder and louder like this: whooOOOMMMM until it was shrieking and shooting flames out the back and causing all the wildlife creatures in South Florida to start fleeing north, which is fine with me because most of them sting, anyway. Then I put on some ear protectors, climbed into the driver’s seat, pushed the controls forward, and NMOOOAAAAA ...
   Let me say, in all journalistic objectivity, that I have never before experienced that level of acceleration in a lawn mower, or for that matter a commercial aircraft. Rocketing around my yard, watching concerned Dixie Chopper people leap out of the way, I was thinking: This is GREAT! I want to take this baby out on the INTERSTATE! I want to ... WHUMP.
   OK, so I hit a tree. But the mower was undamaged, and so was I, and the tree is expected to recover. The bottom line is, if you’re interested in extremely high-speed lawn care, this is the lawn mower for you. The Dixie Chopper people said they’ll make one for you just like it for only $29,000, which, according to my calculations, you could easily earn by simply not mowing Mrs. Reed’s lawn 1 1 6,000 times.
   WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?
   Recently I had the honor of marching with the world-renowned Lawn Ranger precision power lawn-mower drill team at the famous Arcola Broom Corn Festival. Just in case you never heard of this famous event, let me explain that Arcola is a town in Illinois, just north of Mattoon. Arcola (slogan: “Amazing Arcola”) claims the proud distinction of having formerly been “one of the nation’s top producers of broom corn, the primary ingredient in brooms.” The town is still a major power in the broom industry.
   Each September Arcola holds the Broom Corn Festival, featuring, among other events, a parade. For 11 years one of the key marching units has been the lawn Rangers, who are considered by many observers who have had a couple of beers to be the finest precision lawn-mower drill team in the world.
   When the Rangers invited me to march this year, I accepted eagerly, although I was concerned about being able to live up to the unit’s high standards, as explained in this excerpt from the official Ranger newsletter, written by Ranger co-founder Pat Monahan:
   “As always, we will be living our motto, ‘You’re only young once, but you can always be immature.’ This is a fine motto, but it can be carried to excess. Here I am thinking of Peewee Herman.”
   On the day of the parade, Monahan picked me up at the Champaign, Illinois, airport and drove me through large quantities of agriculture to Arcola. In addition to some nice grain elevators, Arcola boasts the nation’s largest collection of antique brooms and brushes, as well as an establishment called the French Embassy, which is a combination gourmet restaurant and 12-lane bowling alley. I swear I am not making any of this up.
   En route, Monahan explained the philosophy of the Lawn Rangers, which is that it is possible for a group of truly dedicated men to have a lot of fun yet at the same time do absolutely nothing useful for society. The Rangers’ arch-enemy marching organization is the Shriners, who engage in worthwhile activities and are therefore regarded by the Rangers as being dangerously responsible.
   Ranger Orientation took place in the garage of Ranger Ted Shields. About 50 Rangers were gathered around a keg, engaging in intensive mental preparation as well as “shanking,” which is when you sneak up behind somebody and yank down his shorts. Next we had the annual business meeting, which I can’t describe in a family newspaper except to say that at one point a Ranger, using a strategically placed ear of corn, gave a dramatic interpretation of the song “Shine On, Harvest Moon” that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
   Then it was time for Rookie Camp. We rookies were each given a power lawn mower and a broom and told to line up on the street, where we received intensive instruction in precision-drill maneuvers.
   “LISTEN UP, YOU GRAVY-SUCKERS!” shouted our Column Leaders, who carried long-handled toilet plungers to denote their rank. “ALL MANEUVERS WILL START WITH THE BROOMS-UP POSITION! THE BROOMS WILL ALWAYS COME UP ON THE CURB SIDE!”
   We learned two maneuvers: Walking the Dog, which is when you hold your broom up while turning your lawn mower in a circle; and Cross and Toss, which is when you cross paths with another Ranger, then each of you tosses his broom to the other. These maneuvers require great precision, and we rookies were forced to train in the grueling sun for nearly two full minutes before we could perform them to the Rangers’ exacting standards.
   Finally it was time to march. We formed two columns, each of us wearing a cowboy hat and a Lone Ranger-style mask. We were pushing a wide variety of customized lawn mowers, one of which had a toilet mounted on it. As we neared the main parade street, we stopped, gathered together, and put our hands into a huddle, where Monahan delivered an inspirational speech that beautifully summed up the meaning of Rangerhood:
   “Remember,” he said, “you guys are NOT SHRINERS.”
   Thus inspired, we turned down the parade route, went to the brooms-up position, and executed the Cross and Toss with total 100 percent flawless perfection except for a couple of guys dropping their brooms. Some onlookers were so awed by this electrifying spectacle that they almost fell down.
   When it was over I stood with my fellow Rangers, engaging in further mental preparation and accepting the compliments of the public (“Do you guys have jobs?”). At that moment I knew that I was part of something special, something important, something that someday, I hope, can be controlled by medication. But until then, Amazing Arcola, Illinois, will serve as a shining example of why America is what it is. Whatever that may be.

Reader Alert

   This section is about music. It starts with a semiserious piece about Elvis and the mystery of why his fans feel as deeply about him as they do. It then moves to my experience in the Rock Bottom Remainders, a group of authors who discovered that, even though they had very little musical training, they were nevertheless able, with a little practice and a lot of heart, to turn themselves into a profoundly mediocre band.
   Speaking of bad music: This section also presents the results of my Bad Song Survey, which attracted more mail than anything else I’ve ever written. People are still writing to tell me how much they hate, for example, “Running Bear.” As you read this section, please bear in mind that the survey is over, OK We already have our winners, so there is no need to write to me. Just read the results and get the bad songs stuck inside your brain so you can quietly hum them over and over until you go insane. Thank you.