DAVE BARRY IS NOT MAKING THIS UP

By

Dave Barry

CARTOONS BY JEFF MacNELLY

FAWCETT COLUMBINE

NEW YORK

Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright (C) 1994 by Dave Barry

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

conventions.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random

House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada

Limited, Toronto.

This edition published by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

The essays in this collection were originally published in The Miami Herald.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-90797

ISBN: 0-449-90973-5

Cover design by Kristine Mills

Cover photo by Bill Wax

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Ballantine Books Edition: May 1995

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is

coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or destroyed"

and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

ALSO BY DAVE BARRY

The Taming of the Screw

Babies and Other Hazards of Sex

Stay Fit and Healthy Until You're Dead

Claw Your Way to the Top

Bad Habits

Dave Barry's Guide to Marriage and/or Sex

Homes and Other Black Holes

Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

Dave Barry Turns 40

Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need

Dave Barry Talks Back

Dave Barry Does japan

DEDICATION

To Earnest, who was a big help;

and to Zippy, who was a small emergency backup help

CONTENTS

Introduction................................................................XI

Food for Thought.............................................................2

Father Faces Life............................................................6

Pumped Up...................................................................13

Dirty Dancing...............................................................17

A Left-Handed Compliment....................................................21

A Space Odyssey.............................................................26

Plumber's Helper............................................................46

Watch Your Rear.............................................................50

It's a Gas..................................................................54

The Unkindest Cut of All....................................................59

Tarts Afire.................................................................63

Insect Aside................................................................67

Invasion of the Money Snatchers.............................................71

Hell on Wings...............................................................76

The Great Mall of China.....................................................80

Haute Holes................................................................100

Courtroom Confessions......................................................104

Over His Head..............................................................110

Moby Dave..................................................................114

Shark Bait.................................................................131

Captains Uncourageous......................................................135

The Living Bra.............................................................139

Crime Busters..............................................................144

False Alarm................................................................148

The World's Fastest Lawn Mower.............................................152

Who Was That Masked Man?...................................................156

Hearts That Are True.......................................................161

Now That's Scary...........................................................174

Mustang Davey..............................................................178

The Whammies...............................................................182

The Worst Songs Ever Recorded..............................................186

And the Winner Is ... .....................................................191

The Old-timers Game........................................................197

Breaking the Ice...........................................................201

Consumers from Mars........................................................205

Say Uncle..................................................................210

Punctuation 'R' Easy.......................................................215

You've Gotta Be Kidding....................................................219

Sexual Intercourse.........................................................224

Nerds 'R' Us...............................................................228

Uneasy Rider...............................................................232

Dave's Real World..........................................................237

A Failure to Communicate...................................................241

INTRODUCTION

People often say to me: "Dave, you are a leading journalism professional

and not as short as I expected. What is your secret of success?"

The answer is that, throughout my career, I have always kept one vital

journalistic principle foremost in my mind: try not to leave the house. A

journalist who leaves his or her house can run into all kinds of obstacles,

including:

* Editors.

* Members of the public.

* News events involving actual facts.

All of these obstacles can seriously interfere with the basic work of

journalism, which is sitting around and thinking stuff up. This is what I

mainly do, which is why I have been able to achieve a level of high-quality

journalistic productivity, as measured in booger jokes, that a guy like David

Broder can only dream about.

Nevertheless, every now and then a situation will come up wherein a story

of major importance is breaking somewhere other than in my office, and I have

no choice but to go and cover it. For example, in this book you will find a

column concerning an incident in 1992 when I left my house and traveled,

without regard for my personal convenience or safety, all the way to my yard,

to see the World's Fastest Lawn Mower. That's the kind of dedicated

professional I am.

The result is that this book contains a number of columns based on real

events. There are also some longer articles, most of which originally

appeared in the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic; these also contain an

unusually high (for me) level of factual content. That's why this book is

called Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up.* I want to stress, however, that

this title does not mean that this is a serious book. This book also contains

a lot of "tongue-in-cheek" social commentary and satire, by which I mean lies.

I hope you don't find this mixture of fact and fiction to be confusing. If,

in reading the following pages, you are uncertain as to whether a specific

statement is meant seriously or not, simply apply this rule of thumb: If the

statement makes you consider filing a lawsuit, I was kidding. Ha ha!

* In an effort to boost sales, we were going to call it Rush Limbaugh Is

Not Making This Up, but there was some kind of legal problem.

READER ALERT

The following section, which is mostly about family stuff, contains the

article that pretty much launched my writing career: the story of my son's

"natural" birth. When I wrote it back in 1981, Beth and I were living in Glen

Mills, Pennsylvania, and I had a job teaching effective business-writing

seminars.* I wrote the article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and it got

reprinted in many other newspapers, including the Miami Herald, which ended up

hiring me. So in a way you could say that I owe my job to my son. Although

if you consider the amount of money I wound up spending just on He-Man action

figures, I have more than paid him back.

* This could be why we got so far behind Japan.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

It's getting late on a school night, but I'm not letting my son go to bed

yet, because there's serious work to be done.

"Robert!" I'm saying, in a firm voice. "Come to the kitchen right now

and blow-dry the ant!"

We have a large ant, about the size of a mature raccoon, standing on our

kitchen counter. In fact, it looks kind of like a raccoon, or possibly even a

mutant lobster. We made the ant out of papier-mach, a substance you create by

mixing flour and water and newspapers together into a slimy goop that drips

down and gets licked up by your dogs, who operate on the wise survival

principle that you should immediately eat everything that falls onto the

kitchen floor, because if it turns out not to be food, you can always throw it

up later.

The ant, needless to say, is part of a Science Fair project. We need a

big ant to illustrate an important scientific concept, the same concept that

is illustrated by all Science Fair projects, namely: "Look! I did a Science

Fair project!"

(I know how we can solve our national crisis in educational funding:

Whenever the schools needed money, they could send a letter to all the parents

saying: "Give us a contribution right now, or we're going to hold a Science

Fair." They'd raise billions.)

Our Science Fair project is due tomorrow, but the ant is still wet, so

we're using a hair dryer on it. Science Fair judges hate a wet ant. Another

problem is that our ant is starting to sag, both in the front (or, in

entomological terms, the "prognosis") and in the rear (or "butt"). It doesn't

look like one of those alert, businesslike, "can-do" ants that you see

striding briskly around. It looks depressed, like an ant that has just been

informed that all 86,932 members of its immediate family were crushed while

attempting to lift a Tootsie Roll.

While Robert is drying the ant, I get a flashlight and go outside to

examine the experiment portion of our project, which is entitled "Ants and

junk Food." On our back fence we put up a banner that says, in

eight-inch-high letters, WELCOME ANTS. Under this is a piece of cardboard

with the following snack substances scientifically arranged on it: potato

chips, a spicy beef stick, a doughnut, a Snickers candy bar, chocolate-filled

cookies, Cheez Doodles, Cocoa Krispies, and Screaming Yellow Zonkers. If you

were to eat this entire experiment, you would turn into a giant pimple and

explode.

We figured this experiment would attract ants from as far away as

Indonesia, and we'd note which junk foods they preferred, and this would prove

our basic scientific point ("Look! I did a Science Fair project!"). Of

course you veteran parents know what actually happened: The ants didn't show

up. Nature has a strict rule against cooperating with Science Fair projects.

This is why, when you go to a Science Fair, you see 200 projects designed to

show you how an electrical circuit works, and not one of them can actually

make the little bulb light up. If you had a project that was supposed to

demonstrate the law of gravity using heavy lead weights, they would fall up.

So when the ants saw our banner, they said: "Ah-hah! A Science Fair project!

Time for us to act in a totally unnatural manner and stay away from the food!"

The irony is, I knew where some ants were: in my office. They live in

one of the electrical outlets. I see them going in there all day long. I

think maybe they're eating electrons, which makes me nervous. I seriously

considered capturing one of the office ants and carrying it out to the science

experiment, and if necessary giving it broad hints about what to do ("Yum!

Snickers! "). But I was concerned that if I did this, the ants might become

dependent on me, and every time they got hungry they'd crawl onto my desk and

threaten to give me electrical stings if I didn't carry them to a snack.

Fortunately, some real outdoor ants finally discovered our experiment,

and we were able to observe their behavior at close range. I had been led to

believe, by countless public-television nature shows, that ants are very

organized, with the colony divided into specialized jobs such as drones,

workers, fighters, bakers, consultants, etc., all working together with

high-efficiency precision. But the ants that showed up at our experiment were

total morons. You'd watch one, and it would sprint up to a Cocoa Krispie,

then stop suddenly, as if saying: "Yikes! Compared with me, this Cocoa

Krispie is the size of a Buick!" Then it would sprint off in a random

direction. Sometimes it would sprint back; sometimes it would sprint to

another Cocoa Krispie and act surprised again. But it never seemed to do

anything. There were thousands of ants behaving this way, and every single

time two of them met, they'd both stop and exchange "high-fives" with their

antennas, along with, I assume, some kind of ant pleasantries ("Hi Bob!" "No,

I'm Bill!" "Sorry! You look just like Bob!"). This was repeated millions of

times. I watched these ants for two days, and they accomplished nothing. It

was exactly like highway construction. It wouldn't have surprised me if some

ants started waving orange flags to direct other insects around the area.

But at least there were ants, which meant we could do our project and get

our results. I'd tell you what they were, but I really think you should do

your own work. That's the whole point of a Science Fair, as I keep telling my

son, who has gone to bed, leaving me to finish blow-drying the ant.

FATHER FACES LIFE:

A Long-Overdue Attack on

Natural Childbirth

Let's take just a quick look at the history of baby-having. For

thousands of years, only women had babies. Primitive women would go off into

primitive huts and groan and wail and sweat while other women hovered around.

The primitive men stayed outside doing manly things, such as lifting heavy

objects and spitting.

When the baby was born, the women would clean it up as best they could

and show it to the men, who would spit appreciatively and head off to the

forest to throw sharp sticks at small animals. If you had suggested to

primitive men that they should actually watch women have babies, they would

have laughed at you and probably tortured you for three or four days. They

were real men.

At the beginning of the 20th century, women started having babies in

hospital rooms. Often males were present, but they were professional doctors

who were paid large sums of money and wore masks. Normal civilian males

continued to stay out of the baby-having area; they remained in waiting rooms

reading old copies of Field and Stream, an activity that is less manly than

lifting heavy objects but still reasonably manly.

What I'm getting at is that, for most of history, baby-having was mainly

in the hands (so to speak) of women. Many fine people were born under this

system. Charles Lindbergh, for example.

Things changed, though, in the 1970s. The birth rate dropped sharply.

Women started going to college and driving bulldozers and carrying briefcases

and freely using such words as "debenture." They just didn't have time to

have babies. For a while there, the only people having babies were unwed

teenage girls, who are very fertile and can get pregnant merely by standing

downwind from teenage boys.

Then, young professional couples began to realize their lives were

missing something: a sense of stability, of companionship, of responsibility

for another life. So they got Labrador retrievers. A little later, they

started having babies again, mainly because of the tax advantages. These days

you can't open your car door without hitting a pregnant woman. But there's a

catch: Women now expect men to watch them have babies. This is called

"natural childbirth," which is one of those terms that sounds terrific but

that nobody really understands. Another one is "ph balanced."

At first, natural childbirth was popular only with hippie-type,

granola-oriented couples who lived in geodesic domes and named their babies

things like Peace Love World Understanding Harrington-Schwartz. The males,

their brains badly corroded by drugs and organic food, wrote smarmy articles

about what a Meaningful Experience it is to see a New Life Come Into the

World. None of these articles mentioned the various other fluids and solids

that come into the world with the New Life, so people got the impression that

watching somebody have a baby was just a peck of meaningful fun. At cocktail

parties, you'd run into natural-childbirth converts who would drone on for

hours, giving you a contraction-by-contraction account of what went on in the

delivery room. They were worse than Moonies or people who tell you how much

they bought their houses for in 1973 and how much they're worth today.

Before long, natural childbirth was everywhere, like salad bars; and now,

perfectly innocent civilian males all over the country are required by federal

law to watch females have babies. I recently had to watch my wife have a

baby.

First, we had to go to 10 evening childbirth classes at the hospital.

Before the classes, the hospital told us, mysteriously, to bring two pillows.

This was the first humiliation, because no two of our pillowcases match and

many have beer or cranberry-juice stains. It may be possible to walk down the

streets of Kuala Lumpur with stained, unmatched pillowcases and still feel

dignified, but this is not possible in American hospitals.

Anyway, we showed up for the first class, along with about 15 other

couples consisting of women who were going to have babies and men who were

going to have to watch them. They all had matching pillowcases. In fact,

some couples had obviously purchased tasteful pillowcases especially for

childbirth class; these were the trendy couples, wearing golf and tennis

apparel, who were planning to have wealthy babies. They sat together through

all the classes, and eventually agreed to get together for brunch.

The classes consisted of sitting in a brightly lit room and openly

discussing, among other things, the uterus. Now I can remember a time, in

high school, when I would have killed for reliable information on the uterus.

But having discussed it at length, having seen actual full-color diagrams, I

must say in all honesty that although I respect it a great deal as an organ,

it has lost much of its charm.

Our instructor was very big on the uterus because that's where babies

generally spend their time before birth. She also spent some time on the

ovum, which is near the ovaries. What happens is the ovum hangs around

reading novels and eating chocolates until along comes this big crowd of

spermatozoa, which are very tiny, very stupid one-celled organisms. They're

looking for the ovum, but most of them wouldn't know it if they fell over it.

They swim around for days, trying to mate with the pancreas and whatever other

organs they bump into. But eventually one stumbles into the ovum, and the

happy couple parades down the Fallopian tubes to the uterus.

In the uterus, the Miracle of Life begins, unless you believe the Miracle

of Life does not begin there, and if you think I'm going to get into that,

you're crazy. Anyway, the ovum starts growing rapidly and dividing into lots

of little specialized parts, not unlike the federal government. Within six

weeks, it has developed all the organs it needs to drool; by 10 weeks, it has

the ability to cry in restaurants. In childbirth class, they showed us actual

pictures of a fetus developing inside a uterus. They didn't tell us how these

pictures were taken, but I suspect it involved a great deal of drinking.

We saw lots of pictures. One evening, we saw a movie of a woman we

didn't even know having a baby. I am serious. Some woman actually let

movie-makers film the whole thing. In color. She was from California.

Another time, the instructor announced, in the tone of voice you might use to

tell people they had just won free trips to Hawaii, that we were going to see

color slides of a cesarean section. The first slides showed a pregnant woman

cheerfully entering the hospital. The last slides showed her cheerfully

holding a baby. The middle slides showed how they got the baby out of the

cheerful woman, but I can't give you a lot of detail here because I had to go

out for 15 or 20 drinks of water. I do remember that at one point our

instructor cheerfully observed that there was "surprisingly little blood,

really." She evidently felt this was a real selling point.

When we weren't looking at pictures or discussing the uterus, we

practiced breathing. This is where the pillows came in. What happens is that

when the baby gets ready to leave the uterus, the woman goes through a series

of what the medical community laughingly refers to as "contractions." If it

referred to them as "horrible pains that make you wonder why the hell you ever

decided to get pregnant," people might stop having babies and the medical

community would have to go into the major-appliance business.

In the old days, under President Eisenhower, doctors avoided the

contraction problem by giving lots of drugs to women who were having babies.

They'd knock them out during the delivery, and the women would wake up when

their kids were entering the fourth grade. But the idea with natural

childbirth is to try to avoid giving the woman a lot of drugs, so she can

share the first, intimate moments after birth with the baby and the father and

the obstetrician and the pediatrician and the stand-by anesthesiologist and

several nurses and the person who cleans the delivery room.

The key to avoiding drugs, according to the natural childbirth people, is

for the woman to breathe deeply. Really. The theory is that if she breathes

deeply, she'll get all relaxed and won't notice that she's in a hospital

delivery room wearing a truly perverted garment and having a baby. I'm not

sure who came up with this theory. Whoever it was evidently believed that

women have very small brains. So, in childbirth classes, we spent a lot of

time sprawled on these little mats with our pillows while the women pretended

to have contractions and the men squatted around with stopwatches and

pretended to time them. The trendy couples didn't care for this part. They

were not into squatting. After a couple of classes, they started bringing

little backgammon sets and playing backgammon when they were supposed to be

practicing breathing. I imagine they had a rough time in actual childbirth,

unless they got the servants to have contractions for them.

Anyway, my wife and I traipsed along for months, breathing and timing,

respectively. We had no problems whatsoever. We were a terrific team. We

had a swell time. Really.

The actual delivery was slightly more difficult. I don't want to name

names, but I held up my end. I had my stopwatch in good working order and I

told my wife to breathe. "Don't forget to breathe," I'd say, or, "You should

breathe, you know." She, on the other hand, was unusually cranky. For

example, she didn't want me to use my stopwatch. Can you imagine All that

practice, all that squatting on the natural-childbirth classroom floor, and

she suddenly gets into this big snit about stopwatches. Also, she almost

completely lost her sense of humor. At one point, I made an especially

amusing remark, and she tried to hit me. She usually has an excellent sense

of humor.

Nonetheless, the baby came out all right, or at least all right for

newborn babies, which is actually pretty awful unless you're a fan of slime.

I thought I had held up well when the doctor, who up to then had behaved like

a perfectly rational person, said, "Would you like to see the placenta?" Now

let's face it: That is like asking, "Would you like me to pour hot tar into

your nostrils?" Nobody would like to see a placenta. If anything, it would

be a form of punishment:

JURY: We find the defendant guilty of stealing from the old and the crippled.

JUDGE: I sentence the defendant to look at three placentas.

But without waiting for an answer, the doctor held up the placenta, not

unlike the way you might hold up a bowling trophy. I bet he wouldn't have

tried that with people who have matching pillowcases.

The placenta aside, everything worked out fine. We ended up with an

extremely healthy, organic, natural baby, who immediately demanded to be put

back into the uterus.

All in all, I'd say it's not a bad way to reproduce, although I

understand that some members of the flatworm family simply divide into two.

PUMPED UP

You want to know what's wrong with America? I'll tell you what's wrong:

too many kinds of sneakers.

This problem was driven home to me dramatically when my 10-year-old son

decided to join a track club. At first I was in favor of this, because I was

a track man myself back at Pleasantville High School, where in 1965--and I

hope I do not sound too boastful here--I set a New York State record for

Shortest Time on a Track Team Before Quitting.

My original goal was to obtain a varsity letter. I needed one because at

the time I was madly in love with Ann Weinberg, who would have been the ideal

woman except for one serious flaw: She was an excellent athlete. On an

average afternoon she would win the state championship in about nine sports.

When we had the annual school awards assembly, various teams would troop on

and off the auditorium stage, but Ann would just remain up there, getting

honored, until all you could see was a large, Ann-shaped mound of trophies.

This caused painful feelings of inadequacy in me, a small, chestless, insecure

male whose only recognized high-school athletic achievement was the time when,

through an amazing physical effort, I managed to avoid ralphing directly onto

the shoes of the principal as he was throwing me out of a pep-rally dance for

attempting to sleep under the refreshments table. Unfortunately this is not

the kind of achievement for which you get a varsity letter.

So in a desperation effort to impress Ann, I joined the track team. This

meant I had to go into the locker room with large, hairy jocks who appeared

way too old for high school. I bet you knew guys like that. At the time I

thought that they had simply matured faster than I had, but I now realize that

they were actually 40-year-old guys who chose to remain in high school for an

extra couple of decades because they enjoyed snapping towels at guys like me.

They are probably still there.

I was under the impression that all you had to do, to obtain your varsity

letter, was spend a certain amount of time in the locker room, but it turned

out that they had a picky rule under which you also had to run or jump or hurl

certain objects in an athletic manner, which in my case was out of the

question, so I quit.

However, during my brief time on the team I did learn some important

lessons that have stayed with me throughout life, the main one being that if

you are on the track-team bus, and the coach comes striding down the aisle and

demands to know which team member hurled the "moon"--which is NOT one of the

approved objects that you hurl in track--out the bus window at the police

officer who is now threatening to arrest the entire team, you should deny that

you saw anything, because it's better to go to jail than to betray the sacred

trust of your teammates and consequently be forced to eat a discus.

So I was glad that my son became interested in this character-building

sport, until he announced that he needed new sneakers. This troubled me,

because he already HAD new sneakers, which cost approximately as much as an

assault helicopter but are more technologically advanced. They are the

heavily advertised sneakers that have little air pumps inside. This feature

provides an important orthopedic benefit: It allows the manufacturer to jack

the price way up. Also it turns the act of walking around into a highly

complex process. "Wait!" my son will say, as we're rushing off to school,

late as usual. "I have to pump more air into my sneakers!" Because God

forbid you should go to school underinflated.

So I figured that high-powered sneakers like these would be fine for

track, but both my wife and my son gently informed me that I am a total idiot.

It turns out you don't run in pump sneakers. What you do, in pump sneakers,

is PUMP your sneakers. For running, you need a comPletely different kind of

sneakers, for which you have to pay a completely different set of U.S.

dollars.

Not only that, but the sneaker salesperson informed me that, depending on

the kind of running my son was going to do, he might need several kinds of

sneakers. The salesperson's tone of voice carried the clear implication that

he was going to call the Child Abuse Hotline if I didn't care enough, as a

parent, to take out a second mortgage so I could purchase sufficient

sneakerage for my son.

I have done a detailed scientific survey of several other parents, and my

current estimate is that sneakers now absorb 83 percent of the average U.S.

family income. This has to stop. We need Congress to pass a law requiring

the sneaker industry to return to the system we had when I was growing up,

under which there was only one kind of sneakers, namely U.S. Keds, which were

made from Army surplus tents and which cost about $10, or roughly $1 per

pound. This simple act would make our nation strong again. Slow, but strong.

Probably your reaction is, "Dave, that's an excellent idea, and you should

receive, at minimum, the Nobel Prize." Thank you, but as an American, I am

not in this because I seek fame and glory. All I seek, as an American, is a

varsity letter.

DIRTY DANCING

My son, who is 11, has started going to dance parties. Only minutes ago

he was this little boy whose idea of looking really sharp was to have all the

Kool-Aid stains on his He-Man T-shirt be the same flavor; now, suddenly, he's

spending more time per day on his hair than it took to paint the Sistine

Chapel.

And he's going to parties where the boys dance with actual girls. This

was unheard of when I was 11, during the Eisenhower administration. Oh, sure,

our parents sent us to ballroom-dancing class, but it would have been equally

cost-effective for them to simply set fire to their money.

The ballroom in my case was actually the Harold C. Crittenden junior High

School cafeteria. We boys would huddle defensively in one corner, punching

each other for moral support and eyeing the girls suspiciously, as though we

expected them at any moment to be overcome by passion and assault us. In fact

this was unlikely. We were not a fatally attractive collection of stud

muffins. We had outgrown our sport coats, and we each had at least one

shirttail elegantly sticking out, and the skinny ends of our neckties hung

down longer than the fat ends because our dads had tied them in the only way

that a person can tie a necktie on a short, fidgety person, which is by

standing behind that person and attempting several abortive knots and then

saying the hell with it. Many of us had smeared our hair with the hair-smear

of choice in those days, Brylcreem, a chemical substance with the natural look

and feel of industrial pump lubricant.

When the dance class started, the enemy genders were lined up on opposite

sides of the cafeteria, and the instructor, an unfortunate middle-aged man who

I hope was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, would attempt to teach

us the Fox Trot.

"ONE two THREE four ONE two THREE four," he'd say, demonstrating the

steps. "Boys start with your LEFT foot forward, girls start with your RIGHT

foot back, and begin now ONE ..."

The girls, moving in one graceful line, would all take a step back with

their right foot. At the same time, on the boys' side, Joseph DiGiacinto, who

is now an attorney, would bring his left foot down firmly on the right toe of

Tommy Longworth.

"TWO," the instructor would say, and the girls would all bring their left

foot back, while Tommy would punch Joe sideways into Dennis Johnson.

"THREE," the instructor would say, and the girls would shift their weight

to the left, while on the other side the chain reaction of retaliation had

spread to all 40 boys, who were punching and stomping on each other, so that

our line looked like a giant centipede having a Brylcreem-induced seizure.

This was also how we learned the Waltz, the Cha Cha, and--this was the

instructor's "hep cat" dance step--the Lindy Hop. After we boys had

thoroughly failed to master these dances, the instructor would bring the two

lines together and order the boys to dance directly with the girls, which we

did by sticking our arms straight out to maintain maximum separation, lunging

around the cafeteria like miniature sport-coat-wearing versions of

Frankenstein's monster.

We never danced with girls outside of that class. At social events,

girls danced the Hop with other girls; boys made hilarious intestinal noises

with their armpits. It was the natural order of things.

But times have changed. I found this out the night of Robby's first

dance party, when, 15 minutes before it was time to leave for the party, he

strode impatiently up to me, wearing new duds, looking perfect in the hair

department, and smelling vaguely of--Can it be? Yes, it's Right Guard!--and

told me that we had to go immediately or we'd be late. This from a person who

has never, ever shown the slightest interest in being on time for anything, a

person who was three weeks late to his own birth.

We arrived at the dance-party home at the same time as Robby's friend

T.J., who strode up to us, eyes eager, hair slicked.

"T.J.!" I remarked. "You're wearing cologne!" About two gallons, I

estimated. He was emitting fragrance rays visible to the naked eye.

We followed the boys into the house, where kids were dancing. Actually,

I first thought they were jumping up and down, but I have since learned that

they were doing a dance called the jump. We tried to watch Robby, but he

gestured violently at us to leave, which I can understand. If God had wanted

your parents to watch you do the Jump, He wouldn't have made them so old.

Two hours later, when we came back to pick him up, the kids were

slow-dancing. Of course the parents weren't allowed to watch this, either,

but by peering through a window from another room, we could catch glimpses of

couples swaying together, occasionally illuminated by spontaneous fireballs of

raw hormonal energy shooting around the room. My son was in there somewhere.

But not my little boy.

A LEFT-HANDED COMPLIMENT

I was feeling good that morning. I woke up to the happy discovery that

not a single one of our major home appliances had broken during the night and

we still had running water, which is highly unusual in our household. Then I

got both dogs all the way outside without getting the Wee-wee of joy on my

feet. It looked like it was going to be a great day.

Then, like a fool, I picked up the newspaper. You should never pick up a

newspaper when you're feeling good, because every newspaper has a special

department, called the Bummer Desk, which is responsible for digging up

depressing front-page stories with headlines like DOORBELL USE LINKED TO

LEUKEMIA and OZONE LAYER COMPLETELY GONE DIRECTLY OVER YOUR HOUSE.

On this particular morning the story that punched me right in the

eyeballs was headlined: LEFTIES' LIVES SHORTER STUDY SAYS SO. YOU probably

read about this. Researchers did a study showing that left-handed people live

an average of nine years less than right-handed people. This was very

alarming to me because I'm left-handed, along with 10 percent of the

population, as well as many famous historical figures such as Napoleon,

Leonardo da Vinci, Sandy Koufax, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, and Flipper. President

Bush is also left-handed, which has raised a troublesome constitutional issue

because every time he signs a bill into law he drags his hand through his

signature and messes it up. Nobody knows whether this is legal. "This

doesn't look like a signature," observed the Supreme Court, in one recent

case. "This looks like somebody killed a spider on the Federal Highway

Authorization Act."

Because of the way we write, most of us lefties go through life with big

ink smears on the edges of our left hands. In fact, when I first saw the

newspaper article about lefties dying sooner, I thought maybe the cause would

be ink absorption. Or maybe it would be related to the fact that we spent our

entire academic careers sitting with our bodies twisted clockwise so we could

write on those stupid right-hand-only desks. I have this daydream wherein the

inventor of those desks is shipwrecked on a remote island, and some natives

come out of the jungle, and he waves at them in what he thinks is a friendly

manner, unaware that this is the fierce Wagoondi tribe, and if you wave at

them with your left hand, they treat you like a god, but if you wave with your

right hand, they play the Happy Snake Game with your intestines. Not that I

am bitter. Nor am I bitter about the fact that I always got bad grades in art

class because I couldn't work scissors designed for right-handed people. On

Parents' Night, when all the children's art projects were put up for display,

mine was the one that looked as though the paper had been chewed to pieces by

shrews.

Nor am I bitter about gravy ladles. And if you don't understand why I'm

not bitter about gravy ladles, just try using one with your left hand.

But I have to admit that I AM a little bitter about this business of

dying nine years early. According to the researchers, a major reason for this

is that left-handers have a lot more accidents than right-handers. I know why

this is: We read books backward. Really. When left-handers pick up books,

they tend to start reading from the last page. This saves us a lot of time

with murder mysteries, but it's a bad habit when we're reading, say, the

instructions for operating a barbecue grill, and we begin with "STEP 147:

IGNITE GAS."

I myself have always been accident-prone, especially when I attempt to

use tools designed for right-handed people, the extreme example being chain

saws, which should not even be legal to sell to left-handers. I had one back

during the Energy Crisis, when I had installed a wood-burning stove in our

fireplace in an effort to reduce our energy consumption by covering the entire

household with a thick, insulating layer of soot. Near our house was a large

tree, which I realized could supply our soot needs for the better part of the

winter. So one day I strode out and, drawing on my skills as an English

major, started making strategic cuts designed to cause the tree to fall away

from the house. I even called my wife out to watch the tree fall, and of

course those of you who are familiar with situation comedies have already

figured out what happened: The tree, which was clearly right-handed, fell in

the exact wrong direction, chuckling audibly all the way down and missing the

living room by maybe six inches.

My wife, who thought I had planned to have the tree do this, said, "That

was great!" And I replied, "Wurg," or words to that effect, because my brain

was busy trying to get my heart going again. Speaking of which: Some

scientists think that left-handed people's brains work completely differently

from right-handed people's brains. I read an article once that theorized that

left-handers are a different species from right-handers. Isn't that silly?

As if we were aliens or something. What nonsense! Planet foolish this over

take will we day one.

READER ALERT

What follows is a story I wrote in 1988 about a spate of UFO sightings in

the town of Gulf Breeze, Florida. The sightings eventually gained national

attention, and there are still a lot of people in the UFOlogy community who

believe that Gulf Breeze is frequented by extraterrestrials. The guy I

identified only as "Ed" in this story is Ed Walters; he became a big name on

the UFO circuit and wrote a book. A number of people have claimed that

Walters perpetrated a hoax; in 1990, a man living in Walters's former house

said he found a model of a UFO--which looked like the one in Walters's

photos--in the attic.

A SPACE ODYSSEY

OK, there is definitely something strange going on in Gulf Breeze,

Florida. The two most likely explanations are:

1. Somebody is perpetrating a hoax and a bunch of other people, through

inexperience, imagination, or ignorance, are falling for it.

2. Intelligent beings from elsewhere in the universe, driving craft with

fantastic capabilities, have come to Earth, and they are observing us,

and they have a Paralysis Ray and--this is going to make some South

Floridians nervous--they apparently speak Spanish.

After spending a few days in Gulf Breeze checking things out, I've

decided for myself which of these two possible explanations is closest to the

truth. Here's the story as far as I know it; see what you think.

THE WIRE STORY

On December 3, the Herald published this item in a roundup of

wire-service stories from around the state:

GULF BREEZE--Pictures of what was labeled as a glowing unidentified

flying object published in the November 18 edition of the Sentinel of Gulf

Breeze have prompted a half-dozen residents to report similar sightings.

Duane B. Cook, editor and publisher of the weekly, said the object looks

like the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, but he hopes it's an alien

spacecraft. He said the state's Mutual UFO Network will examine the three

photos taken November 11 near the town that appeared with a letter written by

the anonymous photographer.

Here at Tropic we are always on the lookout for stories of potentially

intergalactic significance, so I immediately checked the Herald files to see

if any other strange unexplained phenomena had been reported in the Gulf

Breeze area. You can imagine how my pulse quickened when I discovered that:

On December 5, at The Zoo, a privately operated zoo in Gulf Breeze, a

wedding ceremony was held for giraffes. This really happened. Their names

are Gus and Gigi.

On August 19, a Gulf Breeze man was bitten by a pygmy rattlesnake as he

(the man) examined a potted plant in the garden shop of the Wal-Mart store in

nearby Fort Walton Beach. Just two days later, at a Wal-Mart in North Fort

Myers, a woman examining a potted hibiscus was bitten by another pygmy

rattlesnake. Wal-Mart officials were unable to explain this rash of

pygmy-rattler attacks and described it as "unusual."

Well, of course, I needed no further convincing. I grabbed my

camera--you have to be ready--hopped on a plane and was off to conduct my

investigation.

THE TOWN OF GULF BREEZE

Gulf Breeze is a small residential community just across a bridge from

Pensacola, way at the far western end of Florida, almost in Alabama. It is

the opposite of Miami, geographically and in many other ways. It is not even

in the same time zone as Miami. Miami is in the Eastern Time Zone and Gulf

Breeze is in about 1958. In Gulf Breeze, when you buy something at a store,

the counterperson usually smiles and says, "Y'all come back 'n' see us now,

n'kay?" Whereas in Miami, the counterperson doesn't usually say anything

because he or she is having a very important personal telephone conversation

that cannot be interrupted just for some idiot customer.

I begin my investigation by driving through downtown Gulf Breeze. Even

at slow speed, this takes less than five minutes. It appears to be a normal

beach-oriented town, very quiet in the off-season. There are a lot of things

in the sky, because this is an area of extremely heavy air traffic: Nearby,

besides the commercial airport in Pensacola, are the Pensacola Naval Air

Station, Eglin Air Force Base, and several other airfields. Almost any time

you look up, you see a plane or a helicopter. In looking around, however, the

only phenomenon I notice that does not seem to have an obvious earthly

explanation is a bumper sticker that sayS BUSH 88.

But you never can tell. As you know if you ever watched "The Twilight

Zone," there are times when everything seems to be perfectly normal, and then

suddenly, without warning, something happens, something that you know is

somehow ... wrong, and you start to hear that piercing high-pitched

electronic-sounding "Twilight Zone" music--deedeedeedee deedeedeedee--and the

hairs on the back of your neck, even if you use extra-hold styling mousse,

stand on end.

Little do I realize, as I drive through the quiet town of Gulf Breeze,

that before I leave, I am going to experience that very feeling. More than

once.

THE NEWSPAPER

My first stop is the Gulf Breeze Sentinel. The Sentinel is a weekly

newspaper with a circulation of 3,500, soaring to 4,500 in the summer. It is

not the kind of paper that practices the kind of snide, cynical, city-slicker

style of journalism exemplified by this article. It's the kind of newspaper

where many stories consist mostly of local people's names. You can get into

the Sentinel merely by having your birthday. Also there are many photographs

of local boards, clubs, civic groups, etc., engaging in planning activities.

In the November 19 issue, there's a front-page photograph of a man smiling and

holding up, for no apparent reason, bags of Hershey's Kisses, accompanied by

the caption:

Dave Bozeman, manager of the Piggly Wiggly, is planning now for the

Annual Gulf Breeze Christmas Parade. Piggly Wiggly plans to have several

entries, including the Folgers Race Cars and, of course, the Pig!

In short, the Sentinel seems to be your basic small hometown paper doing

hometown stories about hometown people. Except that in the same November 19

issue, right above the Piggly-Wiggly manager, is a story headlined:

UFO SIGHTED OVER GULF BREEZE

Below this are three photographs of this thing, shaped roughly like a fat

disk with a glowing, tapered bottom and a small, glowing protrusion on top.

There are regularly spaced dark marks going around the side. The thing is in

fairly clear focus. It appears to be hovering in the evening sky; you can see

the dark blurred shapes of trees in the foreground.

The "story" accompanying the photographs consists entirely of the text of

an anonymous letter to the newspaper, allegedly written by the photographer,

who says he took five Polaroid pictures of the thing from his yard on the

night of November 11.

"I was reluctant at first to show [the photographs] to any one, says the

letter, but my wife convinced me to show them to Ed. Ed in turn said that the

photos should be shown to the press. ... I am a prominent citizen of the

community, however, and need anonymity at this time. I know what I saw and

would feel much better if I knew I was not alone.

"Let me reassure you that this is not a hoax."

It was "Ed" who brought the photographs to the Sentinel, according to

Duane Cook, the editor and publisher. Cook, 43, is a former computer salesman

who took over the paper from his stepfather in 1980. Cook thought the

pictures looked convincing, and "Ed," whom Cook knows, said the photographer

was responsible. So Cook decided to go ahead with the story, but he was still

"nervous a little" about it until the morning of November 19, when the paper

was just about to go to press. On that day Cook's stepfather and predecessor

as editor, Charles Somerby, and his wife (Cook's mother), Doris Somerby,

stopped by the paper. Cook showed them the Polaroids.

They did not act surprised. They said they had seen the same object. On

the same night.

Deedeedeedee deedeedeedee

"I lost all fear of going to press with it," Cook says.

THE WITNESSES

If you called up Central Casting and asked for two people to play the

parts of the Reliable Witnesses, they would send you Charlie and Doris

Somerby. He's 69 and, before his newspaper career, served as a naval

communications officer in World War II and Korea. She's 67 and holds the

world indoor record for grandmotherliness (when I visit their home to

interview them, she has an actual apple pie cooling on the kitchen table).

The Somerbys say that on November 11, while taking a walk at sundown,

they saw an object out over the bay headed toward Gulf Breeze. It made no

sound, they say, and it did not look like any kind of aircraft they had ever

seen. They watched for some mention of it on the evening TV news, but there

was none. Until Cook showed them the photographs, they had not planned to say

anything about it.

I ask them, several times and in several ways, if they're sure that the

thing they saw over the bay looks the same as the object in the photographs.

They say they're sure. Driving away, I am convinced they're telling the

truth.

THE STORY SPREADS

When the Sentinel published the UFO pictures, people started calling.

"We got a half a dozen calls from people who saw something that night," says

Cook. His staff started collecting these reports, and ran them as a

front-page story in the November 25 issue. A local TV station did a story

about the UFO, showing one of the Polaroids blown way up. "That was

impressive," says Cook.

Then another local TV station did a story about it.

Then United Press International did a story about it.

And then it happened, the event that distinguishes an interesting but

basically local story from a story with potentially shocking Worldwide

Implications: The National Enquirer called.

Yes. The paper that is frequently way ahead of the media pack on major

Hollywood divorces; the paper that obtained and published the now-historic

photograph showing Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart's lap because he was too

much of a gentleman to push her off; the paper that once offered a reward of

$1 million for "positive proof" that extraterrestrial spacecraft are visiting

the Earth; this paper was now calling Duane Cook of the Breeze Sentinel.

The Enquirer sent a reporter, who wanted to take the photographs back to

the paper's home base in Lantana, Florida, for further analysis. But by that

point Cook had been in touch with the state director of the Mutual UFO Network

(more on this later), who had advised Cook that these photographs could be

very valuable and he should not let them out of his sight. So the Enquirer

flew Cook down to Lantana, where, Cook says, "They gave [the photographs] the

most thorough going-over, and they couldn't find any flaws." They made Cook

an offer: $5,000 for the right to publish the photographs before anybody

else--if the Enquirer decided to use them. But before they made that

decision, they wanted a second opinion. So they flew Cook and his photographs

all the way to the world-famous NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory at Cal Tech in

Pasadena, California. There, Cook says, "they took a series of photographs of

the photographs," the idea being that they would analyze them further and give

the results to the Enquirer.

Five thousand dollars. NASA. This was getting very exciting. And there

was more to come.

THE NEW EVIDENCE

Two more photographs arrived at the Sentinel. These were taken with a

35mm camera, and although the quality is worse than that of the Polaroids,

they appear to show the same object. An anonymous letter claims the

photographs were taken in June of 1986--over a year before the Polaroids were

allegedly taken.

Then somebody stuffed a manila envelope into the Sentinel mailbox

containing nine more photographs; again the quality is poor, but they appear

to show the same object. The accompanying letter is signed "Believer Bill,"

who claims he took the pictures with a toy camera--which also was stuffed into

the envelope--that his children had left in his car.

Then "Ed"--remember "Ed"? The one who brought in the original

photographs--gave the Sentinel a very clear Polaroid that he says he took in

his backyard; it shows, very clearly, three of the objects.

At this point the Sentinel was turning into the Galactic Clearing House

for UFO Evidence. The photographs had become so common that the last two

sets, which seemed to suggest that a regular alien invasion was going on right

there in Gulf Breeze, ran on page four of the December 24 issue. The page-one

story was the Christmas parade.

But Duane Cook, the editor, is hoping that the UFO story isn't over.

"I would be delighted if, whoever they are, they have decided to

communicate, because they've been watching us for some time now," he tells me.

"My main fear is that we won't be adult enough to welcome them. My

contribution would be to condition people's minds to the possibility that they

do exist, so that we can learn from them. In fact, maybe ..."--Cook pauses,

then shakes his head. "No, that sounds grandiose."

"What?" I ask.

"Well," he says, looking at me carefully, "maybe that's why I'm here."

Deedeedeedee deedeedeedee

THE UFO PEOPLE

Duane Cook is not alone. A lot of people are convinced that

extraterrestrials are watching us. There are more than 200 UFO-oriented

organizations worldwide, according to The UFO Encyclopedia, which bills itself

as "a comprehensive A-to-Z guide to the UFO phenomenon" and which cheerfully

and uncritically passes along all kinds of fascinating UFO stories. Here, for

example, is an excerpt from the entry about a "contactee"--a person who claims

to receive regular visits from extraterrestrials--named Howard Menger:

According to Menger, a rash of sightings around his New Jersey home was

followed by regular social visits from the Space People. He performed favors

for his alien friends and even acted as their barber, cutting their long blond

hair in order that they could pass unnoticed among the earthlings. Menger was

rewarded with a trip to the moon, where he breathed easily in a surface

atmosphere similar to Earth's. He brought back some lunar potatoes, which

reportedly contained five times the protein found in terrestrial potatoes.

Their nutritive value could not be proved, however, because Menger had

supposedly handed them over to the U.S. government, which was keeping them a

secret.

Not all the UFO believers, however, are Froot Loops. A lot of people who

definitely qualify as Responsible Citizens have claimed they saw something

strange in the sky. in 1973, Jimmy Carter, then the governor of Georgia,

reported that he had seen a UFO in 1969, just before a Lions Club meeting

(although we should bear in mind that, as president, Carter claimed he was

attacked by a large swimming rabbit). Other celebrities who, according to The

UFO Encyclopedia, have reported UFO sightings include: Jackie Gleason,

Muhammad Ali, John Travolta, Elvis Presley, Orson Bean, and, of course,

William Shatner.

Many "sightings" have turned out to be hoaxes. Many others have turned

out to be man-made or natural objects--airplanes, weather balloons,

satellites, planets, stars, etc. And some remain unexplained. The mainstream

scientific community tends to believe these are probably ordinary phenomena

that could, with sufficient information, be identified. The UFOlogists tend

to believe they are evidence that extraterrestrials are here. The debate

rages on.

The federal government has, reluctantly, played a major role in the UFO

controversy. The Air Force, in an operation called Project Blue Book,

collected and investigated UFO reports from 1948 until 1969, when the project

was dropped because, the government says, it was a waste of time. Many

UFOlogists, however, argue that the government wasn't really trying to solve

the mystery but to discredit the witnesses, and is now engaged in a massive

conspiracy to cover up evidence of extraterrestrial visits, just as it has

refused to release the lunar potatoes. Some of the conspiracy theories are

pretty spooky, as we will see.

THE MAN FROM MUFON

On my second day in Gulf Breeze, I drive out to Fort Walton Beach, about

40 miles east, to visit Donald Ware, the Florida state director for the Mutual

UFO Network (MUFON). MUFON describes itself as "an international scientific

organization composed of people seriously interested in studying and

researching" in an effort to provide "the ultimate answer to the UFO enigma."

Ware, who spent 26 years in the Air Force and flew two combat tours as a

fighter pilot, appears to be a very straight arrow, a serious man with serious

eyes. And he takes the Gulf Breeze sightings very seriously. After a MUFON

field investigator--there are more than 50 in the state--examined the

Polaroids and interviewed some of the witnesses, MUFON released a "preliminary

evaluation" stating that the Polaroids show "an unknown of great

significance."

Ware tells me that this is going to be "an important case that will be

discussed by UFOlogists all over the world." As he talks, he backs up various

points by pulling papers from his files, which he began amassing back in 1952,

when he saw lights over Washington, D.C., in what turned out to be a famous

UFO incident.

"After 12 years of study," he says, "I decided that somebody was watching

us. After 10 more years of study, I concluded that someone in our government

has known this since 1947."

Solemnly, Ware hands me a book containing a reproduction of what are

alleged to be Top Secret U.S. government documents. These documents state

that in 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, the U.S. government secretly recovered

a crashed flying saucer and four alien bodies.

And President Harry Truman set up a secret group of top scientists,

called "Majestic 12," to study the aliens and their craft.

And this whole thing has been kept secret ever since.

Ware is looking at me intently.

"Well!" I say brightly. "Thanks very much for your help!"

THE KEY HERE

I'm sitting in my motel room, thinking. The more I think, the more it

seems to me that, whatever is going on in Gulf Breeze, the Key Figure is "Ed."

He's the one who brought the first set of Polaroids to the Sentinel, allegedly

on behalf of the photographer. He's the one, according to Duane Cook, who

took the later Polaroid showing three objects. He's the only photographer who

isn't totally anonymous. I decide I need to talk to him. I call Cook, the

Sentinel editor, and ask him to ask "Ed" to please get in touch with me.

Less than an hour later, I hear a tapping at my motel window.

THE VISIT

"Ed" does not introduce himself, except to say: "I'm the guy you're

looking for." He's about my age, 40. He's articulate, mechanically inclined,

and very sharp.

We talk for about an hour. Right away he admits he took the first set of

Polaroids. He says he invented the story about being the intermediary because

he was afraid that if his name got in the paper, he'd be ridiculed. "I have a

family," he says. "I'm a successful businessman. Everyone in this town knows

me."

"I know what I saw is real," he says.

He becomes more agitated as he talks. He tells me he has seen the UFO

six times. He says that what has been published in the Sentinel is only the

beginning of the story.

"There is more," he says. "But it's scary."

He leans forward.

"There is this thing," he says, "and it can shoot a blue beam out of it.

I got a picture of it doing it."

He shows me the picture. It's another Polaroid, showing the now-familiar

object, with what appears to be a faint bluish ray of light coming out of the

hole in the bottom.

Now the conversation gets weird. "Ed" says he was once trapped in the

beam. Frozen. Paralyzed. Couldn't move a muscle.

While he was in the beam, "Ed" believes, the UFO beings put some kind of

"mental input" into his brain, so they could communicate with him, but

something--jets, maybe--scared them off, and now the beings keep coming around

because they're trying to get the mental input back. He knows when they're

nearby. "I can hear a hum," he says.

He also hears voices, speaking in Spanish and some kind of strange

"consonant language." He has heard the voices at night, near his house, out

by his pool pump. He wishes that, whoever they are, they would hurry up and

take their mental input back and leave him alone.

"This has f-ed up the last two months of my life," he says.

I tell him that a lot of people would say he was crazy, or lying.

He says he knows that, but he has something that will shut everybody up.

He says he has a videotape.

Deedeedeedee deedeedeedee

THE VIDEOTAPE

Later that day, shortly past dusk, a Herald photographer and I go to see

"Ed." He lives in a comfortable suburban house in a tidy development. His

wife is in the kitchen, cooking dinner. She doesn't come out to greet us. I

get the impression she's not thrilled that we're there.

"Ed," on the other hand, is very cordial. He laughs a lot. He bustles

around, showing us a drawing he made of the UFO and getting out more

photographs of it. He seems to have a lot more of them. He shows us the

camera he uses, an old, battered Polaroid held together with tape.

Then the three of us sit on his living room floor, and he shows us the

videotape, which he shot with his Sony home video camera. The tape was

apparently taken in his backyard, from behind some bushes, which can be heard

rustling as the photographer moves around. The tape shows the same object,

just above the tree line, moving kind of jerkily from right to left, then back

again. It lasts only a minute or two.

"Ed" shows it to us again, then looks at us.

"That's incredible," we say, almost simultaneously.

THE QUESTIONS

As soon as we leave, the photographer tells me that something is wrong.

The film "Ed" uses in his Polaroid has an ASA rating of 80, which means it is

relatively slow to react to light. This means that the shutter must stay open

a relatively long time, especially in low light. And this in turn means that

a moving object, even if photographed by a skilled photographer, would look

blurred. "Ed" has stated repeatedly that the object moves almost

constantly--as it does in the videotape--and yet in almost all of his

photographs, the object is in fairly sharp focus.

"It just doesn't look right," says the photographer.

Neither does the videotape, at least to my eyes. The jerky motion of the

object makes it appear small, almost toy-like, and fairly close, although "Ed"

insists it is "as big as a house."

Some other things are strange. Why, if "Ed" could sense the impending

arrival of the object, didn't he ever call his neighbors to be witnesses? And

why, when he realized the object was visiting repeatedly, didn't he get a

better camera? I asked him both of these questions several times; he never

really answered.

But the most troubling evidence is "Ed" himself. He acts agitated,

manic. Not to put too fine a point on it, he acts a little crazy. Of course,

maybe this is normal behavior if aliens have put a mental input in your head.

But still, I am getting skeptical. And I am not alone.

THE SKEPTIC

Philip Klass is the nation's, if not the world's, leading UFO skeptic.

The UFOlogists do not like him (MUFON's Donald Ware suggested to me that Klass

has a "mental problem"). Klass retired last year after 35 years as senior

electronics editor of Aviation Week magazine, but his involvement with UFOs is

through an organization called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation

of Claims of the Paranormal, of which he is chairman of the UFO subcommittee.

In that capacity, he has spent a lot of time debunking various UFO claims.

For example, he recently issued a report charging that the "Majestic 12"

documents--the ones that allegedly prove that the government has dead aliens

stashed away--are obvious forgeries. I must admit I found that story a tad

hard to believe myself. It's not that I don't believe the government would

try to hide dead aliens; it's that I don't think the government would succeed,

since every time the government tries to do anything secretly, as in the

Iran-contra arms deal, it winds up displaying all the finesse and stealth of

an exploding cigar at a state funeral. If there really were dead aliens, I

figure, there also would be daily leaks about it from High-Level Officials,

and huge arguments among influential congresspersons over whose district the

multimillion-dollar Federal Dead Alien Storage Facility would be located in.

Anyway, Klass, as you might imagine, is very dubious about the claim that

UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors.

"I can think of no more exciting story," he says, "than to say I have

investigated a UFO case for which there was no earthly explanation. In the 22

years I have been investigating, I have never found a single such case."

But what about the photographs?

"Photographs are the easiest things in the world to fake," says Klass.

"Even the UFO believers are very, very skeptical of them." Klass is

especially suspicious of Polaroids, because they have no negatives, which are

often useful in the detection of hoaxes. He thinks it's suspicious that no

negatives were included with any of the photographs anonymously submitted to

the Sentinel.

"The odds against those photographs being authentic are jillions to one,"

he says.

But what about the witnesses?

"Once the report gets out that there are UFOs in the area, you get all

kinds of me-tooers," Klass says. "Ninety-eight percent of all people who

report seeing UFOs are trying to be honest. But we've been brainwashed by

what we've read and been told. And eyewitness testimony is notoriously

unreliable."

That's also the opinion expressed by astronomer Robert Young in a letter

to the newsletter of the Astronomical League. Young says that, having

investigated "a couple of hundred UFO reports"--all of which turned out to

have prosaic explanations--he has concluded that "no eyewitness report of a

UFO can be taken at its face value." He adds that "waves" of UFO sightings

"end when editors tire of them. ... My experience is that when news stories

stop, the calls stop too."

THE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY

I call Dr. Robert Nathan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He's the one

the Enquirer flew the Polaroids, Duane Cook and all, out to see. He's the one

who's supposed to be doing the scientific photographic analysis. Only he's

not. He says he's suspicious of the photographs, both because of the way they

look and because more than one set of them came from the same source.

"I'm way off in the nonbeliever corner on this one," says Dr. Nathan.

"Unless something changes, I don't care to use government equipment on this.

I have the feeling that somebody is perpetrating a hoax."

THE RAY PEOPLE

If it is a hoax, the question is, Why? I am no psychiatrist, but I think

the answer is suggested by John Keel, author of several UFO books. Keel

argues that the modern era of UFO sightings was launched by a pulp

science-fiction magazine called Amazing Stories, edited by a man named Raymond

Palmer. In 1947, Palmer published a story about fiendish alien beings

controlling life on Earth through the use of rays. Suddenly, Amazing Stories

was deluged with mail from readers who insisted that the story was true,

because they had been affected by the beings.

"Palmer had accidentally tapped a huge, previously unrecognized

audience," writes Keel. "Nearly every community has at least one person who

complains constantly to the local police that someone--usually a neighbor--is

aiming a terrible ray gun at their house or apartment. This ray, they claim,

is ruining their health, causing their plants to die, turning their bread

moldy, making their hair and teeth fall out and broadcasting voices into their

heads. Psychiatrists are very familiar with these 'ray' victims and relate

the problem with paranoid schizophrenia.

"In earlier times, [the paranoiacs] thought they were hearing the voice

of God and/or the devil. Today they often blame the CIA or space beings for

their woes. ... Ray Palmer unintentionally gave thousands of these people

focus for their lives."

THE CALL

Back in Miami, I call "Ed" one morning. I tell him my theory, which is

that he really does think he's being hounded by aliens but that he has faked

all the photographs, using different cameras, in an effort to get others to

believe him.

"Ed" tells me that since I last saw him, he was attacked by the beam

while he was driving alone. "I was blown off the road and had to crawl

underneath the truck," he says. He says he gave a full report on this to the

people at MUFON, for their ever-growing data bank.

He also says that two armed men from the "Special Security Services" of

the Air Force (he didn't get their names) came around with a "material seizure

warrant" and demanded his photographs. He says he didn't want to send them to

Duane Cook, so he told them he gave the photographs to me.

So that's the situation in Gulf Breeze, as far as I know it. Of course,

there are some unanswered questions. For example, if "Ed" is faking the

photographs, how is he doing it? And--this one still bothers me--what did the

Somerbys see?

As of this writing, I haven't seen anything about this in the National

Enquirer. I also haven't heard from the Air Force.

I expect, however, that I'll hear from you out there in Readerland. One

thing nobody disputes is that stories about UFOs generate reports about UFOS.

But listen: If you have anything to report, the place to send it is:

The Miami UFO Center

P.O. Box 313

Opa-Locka, Fl, 33054

The important thing is: Don't call me. OK. It's not that I don't

believe you. It's that my life is already filled with bizarre, inexplicable

phenomena, such as the way the right rear speaker in my car never works except

when they play songs I hate. Deedeedeedee deedeedeedee

READER ALERT

This next section is mostly columns about Amazing but True things that I

found out about thanks to mail from alert readers. One of these readers, as

you will see, is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, who alerted me about a

ground-breaking new antiflatulence product called Beano. This resulted in a

column that some newspapers found too offensive to print, a fact that resulted

in another column, which was either about censorship or circumcision, I am

still not sure which.

This section also contains vital information about an issue that

everybody needs to think about more, namely, toilet snakes.

PLUMBER'S HELPER

Here at the Bureau of Animal Alarm we have received a disturbing

Associated Press photograph sent in by alert journalist Russ Williams of the

Asheville, North Carolina, Citizen-Times (motto: "A Newspaper Whose Staff Has

Too Much Spare Time"). This photo shows a goat, looking fairly calm under the

circumstances, hanging by its horns from a rope going through a pulley

attached to the side of a building. Two men in a window are holding the other

end of the rope. Here is the caption, which we are not making up:

SPAIN--A goat hangs by his horns from the bell tower of the church in

Manganeses de la Polvorosa, some 200 miles northwest of Madrid. Villagers,

who open the religious festival of St. Vincent by dropping a goat from the

church belfry, attacked police who tried to block the tradition. The goat was

uninjured as villagers caught the goat with a tarp.

As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be

in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when

these people clearly are raving space loons. We are sure that the people of

Manganeses de la Polvorosa would be amused by some common American religious

practices.

"We may drop goats from belfries," they'd probably say, "but at least we

don't thank the Lord for touchdowns."

Nevertheless, we here at the Bureau feel that the Immigration authorities

should keep a sharp lookout for Manganeses de la Polvorosa tour groups coming

to the United States, particularly New York. Because they might decide to

visit the Empire State Building, and while they're up on the observation deck

they might suddenly smack their foreheads and realize that it's time to open

the festival of St. Vincent, and the next day's New York Post might print the

following tragic headline:

TERRIFIED CROWD FLEES 120 MPH DEATH BUTT

Another animal menace that we all need to be more concerned about is

giant toilet snakes. This is a growing problem, as can be seen by the

following statistics:

Number of Articles About Giant Toilet Snakes We Received Prior to 1992: Zero.

Number of Articles About Giant Toilet Snakes We Have Received in 1992: One.

Statistically, this represents an increase of infinity percent in the

number of giant toilet-snake reports. The most recent one, sent by alert

reader Jack Sowers, was written by reporter Mike Leggett for the Austin

(Texas) American Statesman. It concerns a man named Steve Ashenfelter, who

used to manage an Oklahoma hunting and fishing club. One day he went into the

clubhouse bathroom, and, in his words, "there was a big snake lying in the

toilet. As soon as he saw me he just swirled around and went down the pipes."

So Ashenfelter did exactly what you would do; namely, he moved to another

continent.

No, really, he followed standard toilet-snake procedure, which is to go

around flushing the three clubhouse toilets in an effort to get the snake to

come out.

"I went in the bathroom upstairs, and there he was, lying in the toilet

up there," Ashenfelter recalled. "So I went and flushed all the toilets, and

he came back up in the toilet where I saw him the first time."

Eventually, Ashenfelter got the snake, but it took him two days, and he

ended up using--we are still not making this up--two fishing poles, chlorine

bleach, muskrat traps in all three toilets, an eight-foot piece of lumber,

rope, and heavy metal hooks. The snake turned out to be over seven feet long.

We do not wish to create a nationwide panic, but apparently there is a

new breed of large, commode-dwelling snakes that have figured out how to move

from toilet to toilet, which means they could easily travel across the country

via the Interstate Plumbing System. This has serious ramifications,

especially if you're a parent trying to potty-train a small child.

Psychologists agree that the best way to handle this situation is: lie.

"Don't worry!" you should tell the small child many times, "A big snake won't

come out of the toilet!" This is the approach Mister Rogers is taking.

Meanwhile, however, something must be done. One practical approach would

be for the government to require all U.S. citizens to put muskrat traps in

their commodes. The only problem here is that if the trap is not removed

prior to commode usage, there could be severe consequences for guys of the

male gender. On the other hand, many women might view this as a fair

punishment for all the billions of times that guys have left the seat up.

It's definitely something to think about as each of us, in his or her own way,

prepares to celebrate the festival of St. Vincent.

WATCH YOUR REAR

As you are aware if you follow international events, over the past year I

have written a number (two) of columns about the worldwide epidemic of snakes

in toilets. As a result I have received many letters from people who have had

personal toilet-snake encounters, to the point where I now consider it

newsworthy when somebody reports NOT finding a snake in a toilet.

But now I am getting nervous. I say this because of a recent alarming

incident wherein a woman, attempting to use her commode, was attacked in an

intimate place--specifically, Gwinnett County, Georgia--by a squirrel. I have

here an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, written by Gail Hagans

and sent in by a number of alert readers. The headline--a textbook example of

clear journalism--states: Squirrel somehow makes way into commode, scratches

Gwinnett woman's behind. I am not making this headline up.

The woman is quoted as follows: "I went to the bathroom and lifted the

lid and sat down. That's when I felt something scratching my behind."

So, following the recommended "Jump, Slam, Call, and Tell" emergency

procedure, she jumped up, slammed the lid down, called her husband at work,

and told him to come home immediately, which he of course did. We may live in

an age of gender equality, but men have a protective instinct that dates back

millions of years, to when they would have had to defend their mates from such

vicious predators as the saber-toothed tiger and the mastodon (toilets were

much bigger in those days).

Unfortunately, by the time the husband got home, the squirrel had

drowned, forcing us to once again ask WHEN the failed Clinton administration

will demand that ALL commodes be equipped with tiny life preservers. But that

is not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is that the squirrel apparently

got into the plumbing system via a roof vent, which means that if you, like so

many people, have a roof, your toilet is vulnerable to any organism with a

long, narrow body, including (but not limited to) otters, weasels, dachshunds,

squids, and international fashion models with only one name, such as Iman.

But that is by no means the only major toilet development. There is also

the Mystery Toilet in Texas that produces ballpoint pens. I am not making

this up, either. According to a story in the Wichita Falls (Texas)

Times/Record News, written by Steve Clements and sent in by several alert

readers, a man named David Garza of Henrietta, Texas, has fished 75 Paper Mate

ballpoint pens out of his toilet over the past two years, sometimes as many as

five pens per day. Garza has no idea where they're coming from, and neither

do the local sewer authorities.

The story was accompanied by a photograph of Garza sitting on the bathtub

next to the Mystery Toilet, holding a pen, looking like a successful angler.

I called him immediately. "What's the status of the toilet" I asked.

"It's still a mystery," he said. He said he hadn't found any new pens

since the newspaper story, but that he has become something of a celebrity.

This is understandable. People naturally gravitate to a man who has a Mystery

Toilet.

"Everywhere I go," he said, "people say to me, 'Have you got a pen?'"

I asked him if the pens still write, and he said they do.

"Paper Mate ought to make a commercial out of this," he said. "The

slogan could be, 'We come from all over and write anywhere.' You know, like

Coca-Cola, 'It's there when you need it.'"

Actually, I don't think that's Coca-Cola's slogan. But Garza's statement

got me to thinking about a possible breakthrough TV commercial wherein an

athlete is standing in the locker room, sweating, thirsty as heck, and the

toilet gurgles, and up pops a nice refreshing can of Coke. Yum! A commercial

like that might be exactly what Coca-Cola needs to counteract all the free

media attention Pepsi got recently with the syringe thing.

But the question is: Why are Paper Mate pens showing up in this toilet?

There's only one logical explanation--I'm sure you thought of it--alien

beings. David Garza's toilet is apparently connected to some kind of

intergalactic sewage warp, through which aliens are trying to establish

communication by sending Paper Mate pens (which are for sale everywhere).

Probably they want us to write down our phone number on a piece of Charmin and

flush it back to them.

Speaking of toilets and communication, you need to know about a TV-review

column from the Daily Yomiuru, an English-language newspaper published in

Japan. The column, sent in by alert reader Chris Graillat, states that

there's a children's TV show in Japan called "Ugo Ugo Ruga," which features--I

am still not making this up--an animated character with heavy eyebrows called

Dr. Purl Purl (Dr. Stinky), a piece of talking excrement that keeps popping up

from the toilet bowl to express strange platitudes only an adult can fathom.

You're thinking: "Hey! Sounds like Henry Kissinger!"

No, seriously, you're thinking that there are indeed some scary worldwide

developments occurring in toilets, and the international authorities had

better do something about it. And then they'd better wash their hands.

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.

HEARTS THAT ARE TRUE

When he was alive, they lived at the gates of Graceland. It didn't

matter whether he was there or not. They'd go, anyway, to be with each other,

to talk about him, to be close to the place he loved. If he was there, they'd

synchronize their lives with his: sleeping by day, when he slept, so they

could be at the gates at night, in case he came out.

Sometimes he'd just drive by, on a motorcycle or in one of his

spectacular cars, waving, and they'd try to follow him, and it might turn into

an elaborate motorized game of hide-and-seek on the roads around Memphis.

Sometimes he and his entourage, his guys, would be having one of their

fireworks fights, and they'd roar down and attack the gate regulars, scaring

them, thrilling them. And sometimes he'd come down to the gate and talk, sign

autographs, get his picture taken, just be with them. Those were the best

times, although they didn't happen much near the end.

Some of the gate people had jobs, but only so they could afford food and

a place to sleep. Their real job, their purpose, was to be at the gates.

They helped the guards--who knew them well--keep an eye on the wild fans, the

nonregulars, who sometimes tried to get up to the front door.

"We were really his best security," says Linda Cullum, "because we would

have killed anybody who we thought would have done anything to him."

Cullum arrived in 1964. She was in the Navy, and she had asked to be

stationed in Memphis. "I didn't even know if they had a base here," she says.

"I just knew he was here." She's 44 now, and she still lives nearby, as do

others who were drawn to the gates in the good times. But they rarely go

there anymore. These days the gates are for tourists: standing out front,

getting their pictures taken, smiling the same way they'd smile in front of

any other tourist attraction. You don't see it in their eyes, the thing that

haunts the eyes of the gate people, the shining sweet sadness, the burning

need that still consumes 10 years after they lost him.

"I still feel like I need to protect him," says Cullum. "Because, you

know, there's so much you hear, so much that people say."

Elvis fans. A species unto themselves. A large species. The ones like

Linda Cullum, the gate people, are among the most dedicated, but there are a

lot more, counting the ones--and, believe me, they are all around you--who

don't talk about it. Because you might laugh. Because you don't understand.

These are not people who merely liked Elvis. A lot of us liked Elvis,

especially when he was lean and sexy and strange and really bothered people.

But then we moved on to the Beatles and the Stones and a lot of other (to us)

hipper people, and Elvis, getting less scary and less lean all the time, faded

into a '50s memory, and eventually he became, to many, a sad joke. But don't

laugh too soon, hip people. Think about this: Over a billion Elvis records

have been sold. Nobody is in second place. And think about this: Today--10

years after he died, more than 20 years after he dominated rock--there are

tens of thousands of people, from all over the world, gathered in Memphis to

pay tribute to him, to visit Graceland, to walk the halls of his old high

school, to take bus trips down to his Mississippi birthplace, to relive and

explore and discuss and celebrate every tiny detail of his life. It isn't a

one-time thing: The fans were there last year, and they'll be there next year.

This doesn't happen for the Beatles; it doesn't happen for Frank Sinatra; it

doesn't happen for Franklin D. Roosevelt. It doesn't happen for anybody, that

I can think of, who is not the focal point of a major religion. Just Elvis.

Bruce Springsteen comes and Michael Jackson goes, but Elvis endures. His

fans, his vast, quiet flock, make damn sure of that. They have heard all the

stories about him, all the exposes and the Shocking Revelations about his

appetites, his kinkiness, his temper, his pills. They know all about his

problems. They know more about them than you do. And it makes no difference,

except maybe to make them love him more, the way you draw closer, in time of

trouble, to a brother or a lover. Which is what Elvis was to them. Which he

still is.

And the hell with what people say.

The fans know what their public image is, too: fat, weeping, heavily

hair-sprayed, middle-aged housewives wearing polyester pantsuits festooned

with "I Love Elvis" buttons. That's all that gets on TV, the fans say.

That's all the press sees.

"Ah, the press," sighs Karen Loper, 42, president of the Houston-based

fan club. She was watching the Iran-contra hearings when I called her a

couple of weeks ago. Like the other fan club presidents I talked to, she was

very articulate. She does not wear polyester pantsuits.

"The media--especially the TV people--always do the obligatory story,"

she says. "They pick the most unflattering person, the one with a black

bouffant hairdo, and they show her at the graveside crying. It's so

superficial, and nobody ever looks beyond it. But hey, I'm used to it. I've

been putting up with this crap since I was 12 years old. First my father,

always telling me Elvis wasn't gonna last, Elvis can't sing. Now the media.

It used to bother me. I used to try to defend him. But now I realize: He

doesn't need defending."

This is a recurring theme with Elvis fans: They're tired of explaining

themselves. If you don't hear what they hear, feel what they feel, that's

your misfortune. If you want, they'll talk to you about it, but they don't

expect you to understand.

Shirley Connell, 39, was one of the early gate people, back in the '60s.

She had two big advantages:

1. Her family's backyard adjoins Graceland's.

2. Her mama loved Elvis, too.

Which meant young Shirley was allowed to spend virtually all her waking

time, except for school, at the gates. And, like other regulars, she

sometimes got invited along on the outings Elvis organized. Which is how it

happened that one year she and her mama went to the movies all night, almost

every night, from November through March.

Elvis regularly rented a downtown Memphis movie theater so he and his

entourage could watch first-run movies (never his own, most of which

embarrassed him). For years, his fans, the regulars, were allowed to join

him. They weren't exactly with him, but they were in the same room with him,

and that was enough.

"The schedule was," Connell recalls, "he'd come in, and we'd watch

anywhere from three to five movies, and he'd leave. Then I'd go home, and if

given enough time, I'd catch a nap, and if not, I'd go straight to school.

Then I'd come home from school at 2:30 in the afternoon, do my homework, and

go straight to bed. Then I'd get up at 10 o'clock and find out what time the

movie was.

"We saw The Nutty Professor 14 times. The Great Escape was 10. Doctor

Strangelove was 12. Mama would go to sleep. ... I went out and ate one time,

during The Nutty Professor, I couldn't stand it anymore. But I was just gone

long enough to eat. I didn't dare leave."

if you ask her why, it shows you could never understand.

Connell still lives in the same modest ranch house. She has pictures of

Elvis on the walls, and a lot of souvenirs, including one of Elvis's

custom-made silk shirts and an RCA portable radio Elvis gave her for Christmas

in 1963. She has the box, the wrapping paper, the original long-dead battery.

She took me out to her backyard one evening and dragged out a rickety old

ladder so I could climb up and look over the wooden fence into the manicured

grounds of Graceland. Two of Elvis's horses were grazing there. She hasn't

looked over that fence in years.

Graceland today is a business, a tourist attraction operated by the

Presley estate. The mansion, built in 1939, sits on a small hill overlooking

Route 51, which in Memphis is Elvis Presley Boulevard. When Elvis, then 22,

bought Graceland in 1957 for $100,000 the area was mostly country; now the

boulevard is a semi-sleazy strip, lined with car dealerships and fast-food

places. (Not that this is inappropriate, cars and fast food being two things

Elvis consumed in vast quantities.)

Half a million people visit Graceland each year, but most of them are

tourists, as opposed to True Fans. Most go for the same reason they would go

to see a man wrestle an alligator: curiosity. Sure, they like Elvis, or they

wouldn't be there. But when they go through the house, stand where he stood,

look at the things he owned and touched, they're not moved. Some are even

amused.

And, Lord knows, there is plenty to be amused about. The decor is

stunningly, at times hilariously, tacky, representing the

Let's-Not-Leave-a-Single-Square-Inch-Anywhere-Including-the-Ceiling-Undecorated

school of interior design, featuring electric-blue drapes, veined wall

mirrors, carpeting on the ceiling, etc. And it's hard not to laugh at the

earnest speeches of the clean-cut, relentlessly perky young guides,

describing, say, Elvis's collection of police badges, as though these were

artifacts at Monticello.

Scene from the tour: We're in the TV room, which has mirrors on the

ceiling and a squint-inducing navy-blue-with-bright-yellow color scheme.

"You'll notice the three TVs in front of you," the guide says. "This is an

idea Elvis got from Lyndon Johnson."

Now we're in an outbuilding, originally built for Elvis's extensive

model-racing-car layout (which he quickly got bored with and gave away) and

now housing a memorabilia display. We pause before a display of extravagantly

over-decorated jumpsuit costumes. "Elvis found the fringe to be a problem

onstage," the guide is saying, "so he moved on to outfits that were more

studded."

The tour ends when, in a bizarre juxtaposition, we move from Elvis's

racquetball court to his grave, out by the swimming pool. This is where the

True Fans often break down.

The tourists, though, usually just take pictures, then head back across

the street to the plaza of stores selling licensed souvenirs. This is a place

where good taste never even tries to rear its head. Just about anything they

can put a likeness of Elvis on and sell, they do. You can get, for $2.95, a

decanter shaped like Elvis wearing a karate uniform. You can get some Love Me

Tender Conditioning Rinse. If you like to read, you can get a copy of I

Called Him Babe--Elvis Presley's Nurse Remembers, You can get sick.

But here's the thing: the True Fans don't much like this, either. Most

of them accept it, because they know that without the tourists and the

souvenir dollars Graceland would have to close, and they'd lose a strong link

with him. But they don't like it. They don't want a souvenir manufactured in

Taiwan 10 years after Elvis died; they want something real.

Like Elvis's cigar butt. Tom Kirby got one. His friend and fellow gate

regular, Debbie Brown, recalls how this came about:

"We were good friends with Jo Smith, who was married to Elvis's cousin,

and she had always been real thoughtful, especially as far as Tom was

concerned, because he had always been such a good fan. ... So they were

playing racquetball or something, and [Elvis] laid his cigar down, half

smoked, and then he walked out. So she picked it up, and she thought it would

be a real neat souvenir for Tom. So she brings this cigar to Tom--she wrapped

it up in a little tinfoil paper--and Tom is so excited, he runs over in the

middle of the night, pounds on the door, and I go, 'What,' and he says, 'look

what Jo's given me.' And he unwraps the precious little tinfoil holding his

cigar, and he goes, 'God, Elvis's cigar. It's just fresh, she got it to

night.' And I go, 'God, let me see it.' And I grab it and stick it right in

my mouth, because I know it's been in his mouth. And Tom goes, 'But I haven't

even put it in my mouth yet!'"

An even more wonderful thing happened in Atlanta, where Brown, Kirby, and

some other gate people went to see Elvis in concert, and where they managed to

get into his actual hotel room, after he had left for his last show.

"The keys were hanging in the presidential suite, in the door," Brown

recalls. "We instantly took the keys out, went inside, and shut the door. We

went through the wastepaper cans. ... We were running around, jerking open

cabinets. There was a cart there, and it had a big giant urn of the most

horrible black coffee--that's the way he liked his coffee--and the bacon there

was on a large platter, and it was burned to a crisp--that's the way he ate

his bacon. Instantly we knew we had success, and we just grabbed this

bacon--Elvis had this!--and we went [she makes gobbling sounds]. You know, so

we can say we ate with him. He just wasn't there, but we ate off his tray.

"Then my girlfriend and I looked at each other, and we thought--the bed!

So I ripped the sheets back, and she said, 'What are you doing?' And I said,

'I'm looking!' And she said, 'For what?' I said, 'A pubic hair!'

"You'd have to be a die-hard fan to appreciate that. I mean, I know it

sounds sick, but wouldn't that be the ultimate, for a female?"

I'm driving the 93 miles down Highway 78 from Memphis to Tupelo,

Mississippi, where Elvis was born and lived for 13 years, to see if maybe I

can get a clue as to what this is all about.

The drive feels very Rural Southern. Kudzu vines swarm everywhere. Corn

is $1 a dozen. A preacher is talking on the radio.

"I've been down that Long Road of Sin," he says. "I went out and just

ate the world."

Election campaigns are under way, in the form of signs in people's yards.

RE-ELECT

ZACK STEWART HIGHWAY COMMISSIONER

JIMMY DALE GREEN SHERIFF

"Sometimes," the preacher says, "we all get in that old carnality way."

The Birthplace is at the end of a short street lined with extremely

modest homes. Shacks, really. The Birthplace is a shack, too, only it has

been fixed up nice and moved a short distance to a little park, which also has

a modern building where you can buy souvenirs.

The Birthplace has only two rooms, furnished with donated items. The

most authentic item there is Laverne Clayton, who sits in the bedroom and

charges you $1 admission. She was born in 1935, same as Elvis; she lived next

door to him for 10 years, went to school with him.

"He liked K-Aro syrup and butter and biscuits," she says. "He liked to

play Roy Rogers. I was in the schoolroom, third grade, when he sang "Old

Shep." We thought he was silly. We didn't pay him no mind."

And now she collects money from people who come from Japan just to see

where he was born. And she doesn't understand, any more than I do, why.

"A lot of the people don't believe Elvis is dead," she says, shaking her

head. "They tell me he's on an island somewhere."

"You don't argue with real Elvis fans. You just let them talk."

At the Birthplace I buy a book called Elvis Now--Ours Forever, a

collection of reminiscences from True Fans edited by Bob Olmetti and Sue

McCasland, who was a gate person in the mid-'70s. The book almost throbs in

your hands with the intensity of the fans' devotion.

Jan Lancaster, Tupelo, Mississippi: "Every time I went to Memphis, I went

by [Graceland]. ... Like I was eight months pregnant, and my girlfriend and I

went up there with our husbands. They went to a skin flick, dropped us off,

and I had a coat on so if ELvis sees me he won't know I'm pregnant. We sat

all night long--it was 22 degrees. ..."

Linda Horr, Richmond, Indiana: "I don't think any fan could love Elvis as

much as I do, except maybe, to the fans who have actually met him, the hurt is

worse. If that is so, then I thank God for sparing me that kind of pain--for

the loss I feel is bad enough."

Part of it, of course, is his music. He really could sing, and except

for a sterile period in the '60s when he was acting in mostly awful movies

with mostly awful soundtracks, he made a whole lot of good records--"Jailhouse

Rock," "Heartbreak Hotel," "Suspicious Minds" ... "Burnin' Love," and many

more that don't get played much on the radio. Elvis croons continuously over

the P.A. system at the souvenir-store plaza across from Graceland, and as you

wander around you often find yourself thinking when a new song comes on, Yeah,

that was a pretty good one, too.

Part of it was his lack of pretense. I realize that seems like an odd

way to talk about a pampered, insulated superstar who performed in spangled

jumpsuits, but if you watch tapes of him in concert, what strikes you--what

strikes me, anyway--is that, unlike his preening, pouting, self-important

impersonators, the real Elvis never seemed to take himself particularly

seriously. He laughed a lot, and most of his jokes were at his own

expense--muttered throwaway lines about the legendary Pelvis, the Leer, and

(near the end) the Paunch. He seemed to find the adulation as inexplicable as

many of the rest of us do. Watching him, I found it hard not to like him.

"Elvis," says Linda Cullum, veteran of many years at the gates, "was

always a regular person."

And indeed he was, in some ways. He got very famous, and he got very

rich, but he didn't move to Monaco, didn't collect Mausse, didn't hang out

with Society. He was a boy from the South, and he stayed in the South, and

when he made it, he brought his daddy and mama and relatives and friends to

live with him in and around his mansion. To the end, he hung out with good

old boys, and he did the things a good old boy does, only more so.

There's a long-standing tradition in the American South in which getting

drunk and/or stoned and chasing women and shooting off pistols and racing cars

around for the sheer hell of it are normal, everyday male activities,

generally accepted with a resigned or amused shrug by much of Southern

society. In the show business part of this society they called this "roarin'

with the 'billies [hillbillies]." In country music, tradition practically

dictated that as soon as you got a little money, you went out and spent it on

cars, clothes, rings and women, all flashy. Many in rock and roll adhered to

this self-indulgent philosophy.

Elvis was a product of this culture and when you traveled with Elvis, you

were roarin' with the No. 1 Billy.--Elvis: the final Years, by Jerry Hopkins

The cars, the guns, the jewelry, the wild parties, the binges, the famous

plane trip from Memphis to Denver in the dead of night solely to buy peanut

butter sandwiches--none of this bothers the fans. Hey, it was his money. He

earned it.

Another part of it--a big part, the shrinks say--is sexual: repressed

longings released by this exotic, sensual stud who dared to thrust his hips at

the Wonder Bread world that was white American pop culture in the '50s. But

that was a long time ago, and there have been plenty of sex symbols since.

Why do these people remain so loyal to Elvis? Why does it seem as though

their ardor has intensified, rather than cooled, since his death?

And why are their feelings so personal, for a man some of them never saw

in person, and many of them never met? Talk to a True Fan, and odds are she

won't talk about Elvis's art, his genius, the way fans of, say, Bob Dylan will

talk. Odds are she'll tell you how, when he performed, he always seemed to be

looking at her, singing to her. The True Fans really believe that Elvis loved

them,just as much as they love him. They talk about how much he cared for

them, how much he gave them, how, in a way, he died for them. He was under so

much pressure, the True Fans say; he worked so hard to meet the demands of his

public. No wonder he was sick. No wonder he turned to drugs. In some fans

you sense a distinct undercurrent of guilt: If only he hadn't kept his pain so

private, if only I had known, maybe I could have helped. ...

This devotion gets more and more confusing the longer I try to understand

it. I've been reading books, listening to records, watching tapes, talking to

fans, talking to Graceland officials. I have two notebooks full of quotes

from people trying to explain the Elvis Thing. They can't, and neither can I.

But I'm not laughing at it, the way I used to.

There's a painful scene near the end of the documentary "This Is Elvis"

showing Elvis in one of his final concerts, six weeks before he died. His

appearance is shocking: This is a bloated, obviously sick man, his belly

hanging out over the gaudy belt of his jumpsuit. He sings "Are You Lonesome

Tonight," and when he gets to the talking part in the middle, he forgets the

words; forgets the words to a song he must have sung a thousand times. He

keeps going, stumbling and slurring, not looking at the audience, giggling to

himself as he blows line after line, finally giving up.

When, mercifully, the song ends, Elvis introduces his father, Vernon, who

looks only slightly older than his son, and much healthier. And then Elvis

sings "My Way," holding a piece of paper, in case he forgets the words.

"Sometimes," says Debbie Brown, "I'll drive by the gates at about 3 in

the morning--that was his time--and I'll turn my back on all the souvenir

stores, and just look at the house, and it reminds me a little bit of what it

was like. But I don't really like to do that too much, because it reminds me

of how empty it is now. It's over. The fantasy's over.

"But just for a little time, I was part of something special. And I was

special."

After Shirley Connell let me look over her back fence at Elvis's horses,

she showed me her photo album. It's thick with snapshots of Elvis, many taken

at the gates. Sometimes it's just Elvis; sometimes she's in the background;

sometimes he has his arm around her. The two of them change, as you flip

through the pages, he from bad-ass motorcycle rocker to Vegas headliner, she

from girl to woman, the two of them growing older together.

"I try not to even drive by the gates anymore," she says.

NOW THAT'S SCARY

Recently I played lead guitar in a rock band, and the rhythm guitarist

was--not that I wish to drop names--Stephen King. This actually happened. It

was the idea of a woman named Thi Goldmark, who formed a band consisting

mostly of writers to raise money for literacy by putting on a concert at the

American Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim, California.

So she called a bunch of writers who were sincerely interested in

literacy and making an unbelievable amount of noise. Among the others who

agreed to be in the band were Tad Bartimus, Roy Blount, Jr., Michael Dorris,

Robert Fulghum, Matt Groaning, Barbara Kingsolver, Ridley Pearson, and Amy

Tan.

I think we all said yes for the same reason. If you're a writer, you sit

all day alone in a quiet room trying to craft sentences on a word processor,

which makes weenie little clickety-click sounds. After years and years of

crafting and clicking, you are naturally attracted to the idea of arming

yourself with an amplified instrument powerful enough to be used for building

demolition, then getting up on a stage with other authors and screaming out

songs such as "Land of 1,000 Dances," the lyrics to which express the

following literary theme:

Na, na na na na, na na na na Na na na, na na na, na na na na

So we all met in Anaheim, and for three days we rehearsed in a Secret

Location under the strict supervision of our musical director, the legendary

rock musician Al Kooper. This was a major thrill for me, because Kooper had

been my idol when I was at Haverford College in the late 1960s. Back then I

played guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, and we tried very hard to

sound like a band Al Kooper was in called The Blues Project. Eventually The

Federal Duck actually made a record album, which was so bad that many stereo

systems chose to explode rather than play it.

Anyway, I could not quite believe that, 25 years later, I was really and

truly in a band with Al Kooper, and that he was actually asking for my opinion

on musical issues. "Do you think," he would ask, "that you could play in the

same key as the rest of us?"

So, OK, skillwise I'm not Eric Clapton. But I was louder than Eric

Clapton, as well as many nuclear tests. I had an amplifier large enough to

serve as public housing. It had a little foot switch, and when I pressed it,

I was able to generate sound waves that will affect the global climate for

years to come. We can only hope that Saddam Hussein is not secretly

developing a foot switch like this.

We practiced six long hours the first day, and at the end, Al Kooper

called us together for an inspirational talk.

"When we started this morning, we stunk," he said. "But by this

afternoon, we stunk much better. Maybe eventually we can be just a faint

odor."

In the evenings we engaged in literary activities such as going to see

the movie Alien . I was concerned about this, because when I watch horror

movies I tend to whimper and clutch the person sitting next to me, who in this

particular case was Stephen King. But as it turned out, the alien didn't

scare me at all; I live in Miami, and we have cockroaches that are at least

that size, but more aggressive. The only scary part was when Sigourney Weaver

got injected with a hypodermic needle, which on the movie screen was

approximately 27 feet long. This caused me to whimper and clutch Stephen

King, but I was pleased to note that he was whimpering and clutching his wife,

Tabitha.

But the real thrill came when our band finished practicing and actually

played. The performance was in a big dance hall called the Cowboy Boogie,

where hundreds of booksellers and publishing-industry people had drunk

themselves into a highly literary mood. The show went great. The audience

whooped and screamed and threw underwear. Granted, some of it was extra-large

men's Jockey briefs, but underwear is underwear. We belted out our songs,

singing, with deep concern for literacy in our voices, such lyrics as:

You got to do the Mammer Jammer If you want my love.

Also a group of rock critics got up with us and sang a version of "Louie

Louie" so dirty that the U.S. Constitution should, in my opinion, be modified

specifically to prohibit it.

Also--so far this is the highlight of my life--I got to play a

lead-guitar solo while dancing the Butt Dance with Al Kooper. To get an idea

how my solo sounded, press the following paragraph up against your ear:

BWEEEOOOOOAAAAPPPPPP

Ha ha! Isn't that great? Your ear is bleeding.

MUSTANG DAVEY

Recently, I was chosen to serve as a musical consultant to the radio

industry.

Actually, it wasn't the entire industry; it was a woman named Marcy, who

called me up at random one morning while I was picking my teeth with a

business card as part of an ongoing effort to produce a column.

"I'm not selling anything," Marcy said.

Of course when callers say this, they usually mean that they ARE selling

something, so I was about to say "No thank you" in a polite voice, then bang

the receiver down with sufficient force to drive phone shards deep into

Marcy's brain, when she said she was doing a survey for the radio industry

about what songs should be played on the air.

That got my attention, because radio music is an issue I care deeply

about. I do a lot of singing in the car. You should hear Aretha Franklin and

me perform our version of "I Say a little Prayer for You," especially when our

voices swoop way up high for the ending part that goes, "My darling BELIEVE

me, for me there is nooo WAHHHHHAAANNNN." My technique is to grip the

steering wheel with both hands and lift myself halfway out of the seat so that

I can give full vocal expression to the emotion that Aretha and I are feeling,

which is a mixture of joyous hope and bittersweet longing and the horror of

realizing that the driver of the cement truck three feet away is staring at

me, at which point I pretend that I am having a coughing seizure while Aretha

finishes the song on her own.

I think they should play that song more often on the radio, along with

"Brown-Eyed Girl," "Sweet Home Alabama," and of course the Isley Brothers'

version of "Twist and Shout," which, if you turn it up loud enough, can propel

you beyond mere singing into the stage where you have to get out of the car

and dance with tollbooth attendants.

On the other hand, it would not trouble me if the radio totally ceased

playing ballad-style songs by Neil Diamond. I realize that many of you are

huge Neil Diamond fans, so let me stress that in matters of musical taste,

everybody is entitled to an opinion, and yours is wrong. Consider the song "I

Am, I Said," wherein Neil, with great emotion, sings:

I am, I said

To no one there

And no one heard at all

Not even the chair.

What kind of line is that? Is Neil telling us he's surprised that the

chair didn't hear him? Maybe he expected the chair to say, "Whoa, I heard

THAT." My guess is that Neil was really desperate to come up with something

to rhyme with "there," and he had already rejected "So I ate a pear," "Like

Smokey the Bear," and "There were nits in my hair."

So we could do without this song. I also believe that we should use

whatever means are necessary--and I do not exclude tactical nuclear

weapons--to prevent radio stations from ever playing "Honey," "My Way," "I

Write the Songs," "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden," and "Watchin' Scottie

Grow." I have holes in my car radio from stabbing the station-changing button

when these songs come on. Again, you may disagree with me, but if you know so

much, how come the radio industry didn't randomly survey you?

The way the survey worked was, Marcy played two-second snippets from

about two dozen songs; after each snippet I was supposed to say whether I

liked the song or not. She'd play, for example, "Don't Worry, Baby" by the

Beach Boys and I'd shout "YES! PLAY THE WHOLE THING!" and she'd say, "OK,

that's a 'like.' Or she'd play "Don't You Care" by the Buckinghams, and I'd

make a noise like a person barfing up four feet of intestine, and Marcy would

say, "OK, that's a 'don't like.'"

The problem was that I wasn't allowed to suggest songs. I could only

react to the generally mediocre candidates that were presented. It was just

like the presidential elections. This is too bad, because there are a lot of

good songs that never get played. My wife and I are constantly remarking on

this. I'll say, "Do you remember a song called 'Boys'?" And Beth, instantly,

will respond, "Bop shoo-bop, boppa boppa SHOO-bop." Then both of us, with a

depth of emotion that we rarely exhibit when discussing world events, will

say, "They NEVER play that!"

I tried suggesting a couple of songs to Marcy. For example, after she

played the "Don't Worry, Baby" snippet, I said, "You know there's a great

Beach Boys song that never gets played called "Custom Machine." The chorus

goes:

Step on the gas, she goes WAA-AAA-AAHH

I'll let you look

But don't touch

my custom machine!

I did a good version of this, but Marcy just went "Huh" and played her

next snippet, which was "I Go to Pieces" by a group that I believe is called

Two British Weenies. I don't care for that song, and I told Marcy as much,

but I still keep hearing it on the radio. Whereas I have yet to hear "Custom

Machine." It makes me wonder if the radio industry really cares what I think,

or if I'm just a lonely voice crying out, and nobody hears me at all. Not

even the chair.

THE WHAMMIES

In a recent column I noted that certain songs are always getting played

on the radio, despite the fact that these songs have been shown, in scientific

laboratory tests, to be bad. One example I cited was Neil Diamond's ballad "I

Am, I Said," in which Nell complains repeatedly that nobody hears him, "not

even the chair." I pointed out that this does not make a ton of sense, unless

Neil has unusually intelligent furniture. ("Mr. Diamond, your BarcaLounger is

on line two.")

Well, it turns out there are some major Neil Diamond fans out there in

Readerland. They sent me a large pile of hostile mail with mouth froth

spewing out of the envelope seams. In the interest of journalistic fairness,

I will summarize their main arguments here:

Dear Pukenose: just who the hell do you think you are to blah blah a

great artist like Neil blah blah more than 20 gold records blah blah how many

gold records do YOU have, you scum-sucking wad of blah blah I personally have

attended 1,794 of Neil's concerts blah blah What about "Love on the Rocks"

Huh? What about "Cracklin' Rosie"? blah blah if you had ONE-TENTH of Neil's

talent blah blah so I listened to "Heart Light" 40 times in a row and the next

day the cyst was GONE and the doctor said he had never seen such a rapid blah

blah. What about "Play Me"? What about "Song Sung Blah"? Cancel my

subscription, if I have one.

So we can clearly see that music is a matter of personal taste. Person A

may hate a particular song, such as "Havin' My Baby" by Paul Anka (who I

suspect is also Neil Sedaka), and Person B might love this song. But does

this mean that Person B is wrong? Of course not. It simply means that Person

B is an idiot. Because some songs are just plain bad, and "Havin' My Baby" is

one of them, and another one is "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown."

That's not merely my opinion: That's the opinion of many readers who took

time out from whatever they do, which I hope does not involve operating

machinery, to write letters containing harsh remarks about these and other

songs. In fact, to judge from the reader reaction, the public is a lot more

concerned about the issue of song badness than about the presidential election

campaign (which by the way is over, so you can turn on your TV again).

And it's not just the public. It's also the media. I put a message on

the Miami Herald's computer system, asking people to nominate the worst rock

song ever, and within minutes I was swamped with passionate responses. And

these were from newspaper people, who are legendary for their cold-blooded

noninvolvement ("I realize this is a bad time for you, Mrs. Weemer, but could

you tell me how you felt when you found Mr. Weemer's head"). Even the

managing editor responded, arguing that the worst rock song ever was

"whichever one led to the second one."

Other popular choices were "A Horse with No Name," performed by America;

"Billy, Don't Be a Hero," by Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods; "Kung Fu

Fighting," by Carl Douglas; "Copacabana," by Barry Manilow; "Me and You and a

Dog Named Boo," by Lobo; "Seasons in the Sun," by Terry Jacks; "Feelings," by

various weenies; "Precious and Few" by some people who make the weenies who

sang "Feelings" sound like Ray Charles; "The Pepsi Song," by Ray Charles;

"Muskrat Love," by The Captain and Tennille; every song ever recorded by Bobby

Goldsboro; and virtually every song recorded since about 1972.

"It's worse than ever" is how my wife put it.

Anyway, since people feel so strongly about this issue, I've decided to

conduct a nationwide survey to determine the worst rock song ever. I realize

that similar surveys have been done before, but this one will be unique: This

will be the first rock-song survey ever, to my knowledge, that I'll be able to

get an easy column out of.

So I'm asking you to consider two categories: Worst Overall Song and

Worst lyrics. In the second category, for example, you might want to consider

a song I swear I heard back in the late 1950s, which I believe was called

"Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys Do." I've been unable to locate the record,

but the chorus went:

Won't you take a look at me now

You'll be surprised at what you see now

I'm everything a girl should be now

Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-Five!

I'm sure you can do worse than that.

Send your card today. Be in with the "in" crowd. We'll have joy, we'll

have fun. So Cracklin' Rosie, get on board, because Honey, I miss you. AND

your dog named Boo.

THE WORST SONGS EVER RECORDED

BAD SONG SURVEY

PART ONE

Before I present the results of the Bad Song Survey, here's an important

BRAIN TAKEOVER ALERT: Be advised that this column names certain songs that you

hate and have tried to suppress, but as soon as you read their names your

brain will start singing "Yoouunngg girl, get out of my mind; my love for you

is way out of line" ... over and over AND YOU CAN'T STOP IT AIEEEEEEE. Thank

you.

First, I have NEVER written a column that got a bigger response than the

one announcing the Bad Song Survey. Over 10,000 readers voted, with cards

still coming in. Also, wherever I went people expressed their views to me,

often gripping my shirt to emphasize their points. ("You know that song about

pina coladas? I hate that song. I HATE IT!") Song badness is an issue that

Americans care deeply about. Second, you Neil Diamond fans out there can stop

writing irate unsigned letters telling me that I am not worthy to be a

dandruff flake on Neil's head, OK? (Not that I am saying Neil has dandruff.)

Because you have convinced me: Neil Diamond is GOD. I no longer see anything

but genius in the song where he complains that his chair can't hear him.

Unfortunately, a lot of survey voters are not so crazy about Neil's work,

especially the part of "Play Me" where he sings: ... song she sang to me, song

she brang to me ...

Of course I think those lyrics are brilliant; however, they brang out a

lot of hostility in the readers. But not as much as "Lovin' You," sung by

Minnie Riperton, or "Sometimes When We Touch," sung by Dan Hill, who sounds

like he's having his prostate examined by Captain Hook.

Many people still deeply resent these songs. Many others would not rule

out capital punishment for anyone convicted of having had anything to do with

Gary Puckett and the Union Gap ("Woman," "Young Girl," and "This Girl Is a Man

Now," which some voters argue are all the same song).

Likewise there are boiling pools of animosity out there for Barry "I

Write the Songs" Manilow, Olivia "Have You Never Been Mellow" Newton-John,

Gilbert "Alone Again, Naturally" O'Sullivan, The Village "YMCA" People, Tony

"Knock Three Times" Orlando, and of course Yoko "Every Song I Ever Performed"

Ono. And there is no love lost for the Singing Nun.

The voters are ANGRY. A typical postcard states: "The number one worst

piece of pus-oozing, vomit-inducing, camel-spitting, cow-phlegm rock song EVER

in the history of the solar system is 'Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.'"

(Amazingly, this song was NOT performed by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.)

Here are some other typical statements:

* "I'd rather chew a jumbo roll of tinfoil than hear 'Hey Paula' by Paul and

Paula."

* "Whenever I hear the Four Seasons' 'Walk Like a Man,' I want to scream,

'Frankie, SING like a man!'"

* "I wholeheartedly believe that 'Ballerina Girl' is responsible for 90

percent of the violent crimes in North America today."

* "I nominate every song ever sung by the Doobie Brothers. Future ones also."

* "Have you noticed how the hole in the ozone layer has grown progressively

larger since rap got popular?"

Sometimes the voters were so angry that they weren't even sure of the

name of the song they hated. There were votes against "These Boots Are Made

for Stomping"; the Beach Boys' classic "Carolina Girls"; "I'm Nothing But a

Hound Dog"; and "Ain't No Woman Like the One-Eyed Gott." A lot of people

voted for "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," offering a variety of interpretations of

the chorus, including: "Weem-o-wep," "Wee-ma-wack," "Weenawack,"

"A-ween-a-wap," and "Wingle whip."

Many readers are still very hostile toward the song "Wildfire," in which

singer Michael Murphy wails for what seems like 97 minutes about a lost pony.

(As one voter put it: "Break a leg, Wildfire.") Voter Steele Hinton

particularly criticized the verse wherein there came a killing frost, which

causes Wildfire to get lost. As Hinton points out: ... 'killing' in 'killing

frost' refers to your flowers and your garden vegetables, and when one is

forecast you should cover your tomatoes ... Nobody ever got lost in a killing

frost who wouldn't get lost in July as well."

There was also a solid vote for Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the

Edmund Fitzgerald," a real fun party song. Several voters singled out the

line: "As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most."

Speaking of bad lyrics, there were votes for:

* Cream's immortal "I'm So Glad," which eloquently expresses the feeling of

being glad, as follows: "I'm so glad! I'm so glad! I'm glad, I'm glad,

I'm glad!" (Repeat one billion times.)

* "La Bamba," because the lyrics, translated, are: "I am not a sailor. I am a

captain, I am a captain, I am a captain." And he is probably glad.

* "Johnny Get Angry," performed by Joanie Sommers, who sings: "Johnny get

angry, Johnny get mad; Give me the biggest lecture I ever had; I want a

BRAVE man, I want a CAVE man ..."

* "Take the Money and Run," in which Steve Miller attempts to rhyme "Texas"

with "what the facts is," not to mention "hassle" with "El Paso."

* "Torn Between Two lovers." (Reader comment: "Torn, yes, hopefully on the

rack.")

* "There Ain't Enough Room in My Fruit of the Looms to Hold All My Love for

You." (This might not be a real song, but I don't care.)

Certainly these are all very bad songs, but the scary thing is: Not one

song I've named so far is a winner. I'll name the winners next week, after

your stomach has settled down. Meanwhile, here are some more songs you should

NOT think about: "Baby I'm-a Want You," "Candy Man," "Disco Duck," "I Am

Woman," "Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini," "Last Kiss,"

"Patches," "The Night Chicago Died," "My Ding-a-Ling," and "My Sharona." Just

FORGET these songs. Really.

P.S. Also "Horse with No Name."

AND THE WINNER IS ...

BAD SONG SURVEY

PART Two

I hope you haven't had anything to eat recently, because, as promised

last week, today I am presenting the winners of the Bad Song Survey.

In analyzing these results, I had to make a few adjustments. For

example, the Bob Dylan song "Lay Lady Lay" would have easily won as Worst

Overall Song, with 17,006 votes, except that I had to disallow 17,004 votes on

the grounds that they were cast by my Research Department, Judi Smith, who

tabulated the votes and who HATES "Lay Lady Lay."

To win, a song had to be known well enough so that a lot of people could

hate it. This is a shame in a way, because some obscure songs that people

voted for are wonderfully hideous. One reader sent a tape of a song called

"Hooty Sapperticker," by a group called Barbara and the Boys. This could be

the worst song I've ever heard. It consists almost entirely of the Boys

singing "Hooty! Hooty! Hooty!" and then Barbara saying: "Howdy Hooty

Sapperticker!"

Several readers sent in an amazing CD from Rhino Records called Golden

Throats, which consists of popular actors attempting to sing popular music,

including William Shatner attempting "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," Leonard

Nimoy attempting "Proud Mary," Mae West attempting "Twist and Shout," Eddie

Albert attempting "Blowin' in the Wind," and--this is my favorite--jack "Mr.

Soul" Webb attempting "Try a Little Tenderness." You need this CD.

But now for our results. Without question, the voters' choice for Worst

Song--in both the Worst Overall AND Worst Lyrics category--is ... (drum roll

...

"MacArthur Park," as sung by Richard Harris, and later remade, for no

comprehensible reason, by Donna Summer.

It's hard to argue with this selection. My 12-year-old son Rob was going

through a pile of ballots, and he asked me how "MacArthur Park" goes, so I

sang it, giving it my best shot, and Rob laughed so hard that when I got to

the part about leaving the cake out in the rain, and it took so long to bake

it, and I'll never have that recipe again, Rob was on the floor. He didn't

believe those lyrics were real. He was SURE his wacky old humor-columnist dad

was making them up.

The clear runner-up, again in both categories, is "Yummy Yummy Yummy (I

Got Love in My Tummy)," performed by Ohio Express. (A voter sent me an even

WORSE version of this, performed by actress Julie London, who at one time--and

don't tell me this is mere coincidence--was married to Jack Webb.)

Coming in a strong third is "(You're) Having My Baby" by Paul Anka. This

song is deeply hated. As one voter put it: "It has no redeeming value

whatsoever--except my friend Brian yelled out during the birth scene in the

sequel to The Fly, in full song, 'Having my maggot!'

Honorable mention goes to Bobby Goldsboro, who got many votes for various

songs, especially "Honey." One voter wrote: "why does everybody hate Bobby

Goldsboro's 'Honey'? I hate it too, but I want to know why."

Why? Consider this verse: "She wrecked the car and she was sad; And so

afraid that I'd be mad, but what the heck; Tho' I pretended hard to be; Guess

you could say she saw through me; And hugged my neck."

As one reader observed: "Bobby never caught on that he could have bored a

hole in himself and let the sap out."

A recent song that has aroused great hostility is "Achy Breaky Heart," by

Billy Ray Cyrus. According to voter Mark Freeman, the song sounds like this:

"You can tell my lips, or you can tell my hips, that you're going to dump me

if you can; But don't tell my liver, it never would forgive her, it might blow

up and circumcise this man!"

Many voters feel a special Lifetime Bad Achievement Award should go to

Mac Davis, who wrote "In the Ghetto," "Watchin Scotty Grow," AND "Baby Don't

Get Hooked on Me," which contains one of the worst lines in musical history:

"You're a hot-blooded woman, child; And it's warm where you're touching me."

That might be as bad as the part in "Careless Whisper" where George Michael

sings: "I'm never gonna dance again; Guilty feet have got no rhythm."

Speaking of bad lyrics, many voters also cited Paul McCartney, who, ever

since his body was taken over by a pod person, has been writing things like:

"Someone's knockin' at the door; Somebody's ringin' the bell; (repeat); Do me

a favor, open the door, and let him in."

There were strong votes for various tragedy songs, especially "Teen

Angel" ("I'll never kiss your lips again; They buried you today") and

"Timothy," a song about--really--three trapped miners, two of whom wind up

eating the third.

Other tremendously unpopular songs, for their lyrics or overall badness,

are: "Muskrat Love," "Sugar Sugar," "I'm Too Sexy," "Surfin' Bird," "I've

Never Been to Me," "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida," "Afternoon Delight," "Feelings," "You

Light Up My Life," and "In the Year 2525" (violent hatred for this song).

In closing, let me say that you voters have performed a major public

service, and that just because your song didn't make the list, that doesn't

mean it isn't awful (unless you were one of the badly misguided people who

voted for "The Tupperware Song"). Let me also say that I am very relieved to

learn that there are people besides me who hate "Stair-way to Heaven." Thank

you. P.S. Also "I Shot the Sheriff."

READER ALERT

This is the last section; like the first one, it's mostly family stuff.

It includes a column I wrote when my son got hit by a car, which was very

scary; and one about his reaching adolescence, which veteran parents have

assured me will be even scarier. There is also some important advice in here

for young people, who represent our nation's Hope for the Future. I myself

plan to be dead.

THE OLD-TIMERS GAME

My son got his ear pierced. He's 12. For 12 years I worked hard to

prevent him from developing unnatural bodily holes, then he went out and got

one on purpose. At a shopping mall. It turns out that minors can have their

earlobes assaulted with sharp implements by shopping-mall-booth personnel who,

for all we know, have received no more formal medical training than is given

to burrito folders at Taco Bell. And the failed Clinton administration is

doing nothing.

You're probably saying: "Don't blame the government! As a parent, YOU

must take responsibility! You and your wife, Beth, should sit your son down

and give him a stern reprimand."

Listen, that's a great idea, except for one teensy little problem, which

is that BETH IS THE PERSON WHO DROVE HIM TO THE PIERCING PLACE. This is the

same woman who, when Rob was 6, allowed him to get a "punk" style haircut that

transformed him in just a few minutes from Christopher Robin into Bart

Simpson; the same woman who indulges his taste for clothes that appear to have

been dyed in radioactive Kool-Aid.

No, Beth is not on my side in the ongoing battle I have waged with my son

to keep him normal, defined as "like me, but with less nose hair."

Now you're probably saying: "Who are YOU to be complaining? When you

were young, didn't YOU feel you had the right to do things that your parents

disapproved of?" Perhaps you are referring to the time in ninth grade when

Phil Grant, Tom Parker, and I decided that pipe-smoking was cool, so we got

hold of some pipes and stood around spewing smoke, thinking we looked like

urbane sophisticates, when in fact we looked like the Junior Fred MacMurray

Dork Patrol. I will admit that when my parents found out about this

(following a minor desk fire in my room) and told me to stop, I went into a

week long door-slamming snit, as though the right of ninth graders to smoke

pipes was explicitly stated in the U.S. Constitution.

But we cannot compare these two situations. In the case of my

pipe-smoking, my parents were clearly overreacting, because the worst that

could have happened was that I would have burned the house down and got

cancer. Whereas I have a very good reason to object to Rob's earlobe hole: It

makes me feel old. Rob wears a little jeweled ear stud, and it's constantly

winking at me and saying: "Hey there, old-timer! YOU'D never wear an ear

stud! And neither would Grandpa Walton!"

I am also being rapidly aged by Rob's choice of radio stations. The one

he now prefers is operated by one of the most dangerous and irresponsible

forces on Earth, college students. I was concerned about what they might be

playing, so I tuned it in on my car radio. The first song I heard didn't

sound so bad, and I said to myself. "Hey! Perhaps I am still fairly hip

after all!" And then the deejay came on and said, apologetically: "I realize

that song was mainstream." He said "mainstream" the way you would say

"composed by Phoenicians." Then he played a song entitled--I am not making

this up--"Detachable Penis."

Yes, college students are in on the plot with my son to make me feel old.

Not long ago I was sitting on a beach near a group of male college students

who were talking about a bungee-jumping excursion they had taken. They were

bragging about the fact that they had leaped off the tower in the only cool

way, which is headfirst and backward. They spoke with great contempt about a

group of fathers--that's the term they used, "fathers," making it sound as

though it means "people even older than Phoenicians"--who had jumped off

feet-first, which the college students considered to be pathetic.

This made me feel extremely old, because I personally would not

bungee-jump off the Oxford English Dictionary. My son, on the other hand,

would unhesitatingly bungee-jump off the Concorde. And he's only 12. Who

KNOWS how old he'll make me feel by the time he's 14. What if he wants a nose

ring? I won't allow it! I'm going to put my foot down! I'm going to take

charge!

I'm going to steal Beth's car keys.

BREAKING THE ICE

As a mature adult, I feel an obligation to help the younger generation,

just as the mother fish guards her unhatched eggs, keeping her lonely vigil

day after day, never leaving her post, not even to go to the bathroom, until

her tiny babies emerge and she is able, at last, to eat them. "She may be

your mom, but she's still a fish" is a wisdom nugget that I would pass along

to any fish eggs reading this column.

But today I want to talk about dating. This subject was raised in a

letter to me from a young person named Eric Knott, who writes:

I have got a big problem. There's this girl in my English class who is

really good-looking. However, I don't think she knows I exist. I want to ask

her out, but I'm afraid she will say no, and I will be the freak of the week.

What should I do?

Eric, you have sent your question to the right mature adult, because as a

young person I spent a lot of time thinking about this very problem. Starting

in about eighth grade, my time was divided as follows:

Academic Pursuits: 2 percent.

Zits: 16 percent.

Trying to Figure Out How to Ask Girls Out: 82 percent.

The most sensible way to ask a girl out is to walk directly up to her on

foot and say, "So, you want to go out? Or what?" I never did this. I knew,

as Eric Knott knows, that there was always the possibility that the girl would

say no, thereby leaving me with no viable option but to leave Harold C.

Crittenden Junior High School forever and go into the woods and become a

bark-eating hermit whose only companions would be the gentle and understanding

woodland creatures.

"Hey, ZITFACE!" the woodland creatures would shriek in cute little Chip

'n' Dale voices while raining acorns down upon my head. "You wanna DATE?

HAHAHAHAHAHA."

So the first rule of dating is: Never risk direct contact with the girl

in question. Your role model should be the nuclear submarine, gliding

silently beneath the ocean surface, tracking an enemy target that does not

even begin to suspect that the submarine would like to date it. I spent the

vast majority of 1960 keeping a girl named Judy under surveillance,

maintaining a minimum distance of 50 lockers to avoid the danger that I might

somehow get into a conversation with her, which could have led to disaster:

JUDY: Hi.

ME: Hi.

JUDY: JUST in case you have ever thought about having a date with me, the

answer is no.

WOODLAND CREATURES: HAHAHAHA.

The only problem with the nuclear-submarine technique is that it's

difficult to get a date with a girl who has never, technically, been asked.

This is why you need Phil Grant. Phil was a friend of mine who had the

ability to talk to girls. It was a mysterious superhuman power he had,

comparable to X-ray vision. So, after several thousand hours of intense

discussion and planning with me, Phil approached a girl he knew named Nancy,

who approached a girl named Sandy, who was a direct personal friend of Judy's

and who passed the word back to Phil via Nancy that Judy would be willing to

go on a date with me. This procedure protected me from direct humiliation,

similar to the way President Reagan was protected from direct involvement in

the Iran-contra scandal by a complex White House chain of command that at one

point, investigators now believe, included his horse.

Thus it was that, finally, Judy and I went on an actual date, to see a

movie in White Plains, New York. If I were to sum up the romantic ambience of

this date in four words, those words would be: "My mother was driving." This

made for an extremely quiet drive, because my mother, realizing that her

presence was hideously embarrassing, had to pretend she wasn't there. If it

had been legal, I think she would have got out and sprinted alongside the car,

steering through the window. Judy and I, sitting in the backseat about 75

feet apart, were also silent, unable to communicate without the assistance of

Phil, Nancy, and Sandy.

After what seemed like several years we got to the movie theater, where

my mother went off to sit in the Parents and Lepers Section. The movie was

called North to Alaska, but I can tell you nothing else about it because I

spent the whole time wondering whether it would be necessary to amputate my

right arm, which was not getting any blood flow as a result of being perched

for two hours like a petrified snake on the back of Judy's seat exactly one

molecule away from physical contact.

So it was definitely a fun first date, featuring all the relaxed

spontaneity of a real-estate closing, and in later years I did regain some

feeling in my arm. My point, Eric Knott, is that the key to successful dating

is self-confidence. I bet that good-looking girl in your English class would

LOVE to go out with you. But YOU have to make the first move. So just do it!

Pick up that phone! Call Phil Grant.

CONSUMERS FROM MARS

Recently I was watching TV, and a commercial came on, and the announcer,

in a tone of voice usually reserved for major developments in the Persian

Gulf, said: "Now consumers can ask Angela Lansbury their questions about

Bufferin!"

As a normal human, your natural reaction to this announcement is: "Huh?"

Meaning: "What does Angela Lansbury have to do with Bufferin?" But this

commercial featured several consumers who had apparently been stopped at

random on the street, and every one of them had a question for Angela Lansbury

about Bufferin. Basically what they asked was, "Miss Lansbury, is Bufferin a

good product that I should purchase, or what?" These consumers seemed very

earnest. It was as if they had been going around for months wringing their

hands and saying, "I have a question about Bufferin! If only I could ask

Angela Lansbury!"

What we are seeing here is yet another example of a worsening problem

that has been swept under the rug for too long in this nation: the invasion of

Consumers from Mars. They look like humans, but they don't act like humans,

and they are taking over. Don't laugh. We know that Mars can support life.

We know this because Vice President for Now Dan Quayle, who is the

administration's No. 1 Man in the space program, once made the following

famous statement, which I am not making up:

"Mars is essentially in the Same orbit ... somewhat the same distance

from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are

canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen.

If oxygen, that means we can breathe."

You cannot argue with that kind of logic. You can only carry it to its

logical conclusion, which is that if there are canals, that means there are

boats, and if there are boats, that means there are consumers, and apparently

they are invading the Earth and getting on TV commercials.

I saw another commercial recently wherein a middle-age man gets off an

airplane and is greeted by his wife, who says something like: "What did you

bring back from your trip?" And the man replies: "Diarrhea." Yes. He

probably hasn't seen his wife in a week, and the first thing out of his mouth,

so to speak, is "Diarrhea." Is this the behavior of a regular (ha ha!) human?

Of course not. This is clearly another invading consumer from Mars, just like

the ones that are always striding into drugstores and announcing at the top of

their lungs that they have hemorrhoids.

The worst thing is that, as Martian consumers take over, they're starting

to influence the way businesses think. I received chilling evidence of this

recently from alert reader Rick Johansen, who sent me an Associated Press

article by David Kalish about food manufacturers who are putting less food

into packages, but not reducing prices. One example was Knorr brand leek soup

and recipe mix: The old box contained four eight-ounce servings, but the new

box, which is slightly larger, contains only three eight-ounce servings. The

story quotes a spokesperson for the manufacturer, CPC International, as saying

that this change was made because--pay close attention here--there were "a lot

of complaints from American consumers that we were giving them too much in the

box."

Sure! We believe that! We believe that all over America, consumers were

sitting around their dinner tables, saying, "You know Ralph, I am sick and

tired of getting so much soup in a box. I'm going to write in and demand that

they put less in without lowering the price."

"Good idea!" Ralph would answer, pounding his fist on the table. "And

then let's tell Angela Lansbury about our hemorrhoids!"

No, those were not American consumers who complained to CPC

International; those were Martians. Also, most product instructions are now

written for Martians. Alert reader Mark Lindsay sent me the instructions for

the Sunbeam Dental Water jet; under the heading IMPORTANT SAFEGUARDS is the

statement--I am still not making this up--"Never use while sleeping." Don't

try to tell me that's for Earthlings.

And how about all those manufacturers' coupons featuring Exciting Offers

wherein it turns out, when you read the fine print, that you have to send in

the coupon PLUS proof of purchase PLUS your complete dental records by

registered mail to Greenland and allow at least 18 months for them to send you

ANOTHER coupon that will entitle you to 29 cents off your next purchase of a

product you don't really want? Do you think anybody besides extraterrestrials

ever actually does that?

I have here a package sent in by alert reader Roger Lyons, who purchased

a Revlon Pedi-Care Toe Nail Clip device for $2.19 at a Giant Supermarket in

Washington, D.C. On the package is Revlon's Full Lifetime Guarantee, which

states that if you find any defects, you should follow this procedure:

Wrap securely in a box or mailing tube ... Mail insured and POSTAGE PAID

... Notify us within six months if implement is not returned ... GUARANTEE

IS NOT APPLICABLE if implement has been serviced by other than Revlon, has

been abused or allowed to rust. Keep lightly oiled in a dry place to avoid

rusting ...

And so on. Who would DO this? Who would ever think of saving the

package so he or she would know HOW to do this? Only Martians! Face it,

human consumers: They have taken over. It's too late to do anything about it.

Your best bet is to stay calm, remain indoors, maybe oil your toenail

clippers. Me, I have to set up the landing lights on my lawn. Zorkon is

bringing in a new group tonight.

SAY UNCLE

Summer vacation is almost over, so today Uncle Dave has a special

back-to-school "pep talk" for you young people, starting with these heart-felt

words of encouragement: HA HA HA YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL AND UNCLE DAVE

DOESN'T NEENER NEENER NEENER.

Seriously, young people, I have some important back-to-school advice for

you, and I can boil it down to four simple words: "Study Your Mathematics."

I say this in light of a recent alarming Associated Press story stating

that three out of every four high-school students--nearly 50 percent--leave

school without an adequate understanding of mathematics. Frankly, I am not

surprised. "How," I am constantly asking myself, "can we expect today's young

people to understand mathematics when so many of them can't even point their

baseball caps in the right direction?"

I am constantly seeing young people with the bills of their baseball caps

pointing backward. This makes no sense, young people! If you examine your

cap closely, you will note that it has a piece sticking out the front called a

"bill." The purpose of the bill is to keep sun off your face, which, unless

your parents did a great many drugs in the '60s (Ask them about it!), is

located on the FRONT of your head. Wearing your cap backward is like wearing

sunglasses on the back of your head, or wearing a hearing aid in your nose.

(Perhaps you young people are doing this also. Uncle Dave doesn't want to

know.)

So to summarize what we've learned: "FRONT of cap goes on FRONT of head."

Got it, young people? Let's all strive to do better in the coming school

year!

But also we need to think about getting these math scores up. A shocking

number of you young people are unable to solve even basic math problems, such

as the following:

A customer walks into a fast-food restaurant, orders two hamburgers

costing $2 apiece, then hands you a $5 bill. How much change should you give

him? a. $2 b. $3 c. None, because the question doesn't say you WORK there.

You could just take the money and run away.

The correct answer, of course, is that you should give the customer: d.

Whatever the computerized cash register says, even if it's $154,789.62.

You young people must learn to handle basic mathematical concepts such as

this if you hope to ever become a smug and complacent older person such as

myself. I was fortunate enough to receive an excellent mathematical

foundation as a member of the Class of 196.5 Billion Years Ago at

Pleasantville High School, where I studied math under Mr. Solin, who, in my

senior year, attempted to teach us calculus (from the ancient Greek words

calc, meaning "the study of," and ulus, meaning "something that only Mr. Solin

could understand").

Mr. Solin was an excellent teacher, and although the subject matter was

dry, he was able to keep the class's attention riveted on him from the moment

the bell rang until the moment, several minutes later, when a large girls' gym

class walked past the classroom windows, every single day, causing the heads

of us male students to rotate 90 mathematical degrees in unison, like elves in

a motorized Christmas yard display. But during those brief periods when we

were facing Mr. Solin, we received a solid foundation in mathematics, learning

many important mathematical concepts that we still use in our professional

lives as employees of top U.S. corporations. A good example is the

mathematical concept of "9," which we use almost daily to obtain an outside

line on our corporate telephones so that we can order Chinese food, place

bets, call 1-900-BOSOMS, and perform all of the other vital employee functions

that make our economy what it is today.

You young people deserve to have the same advantages, which is why I was

so pleased to note in the Associated Press story that some university

professors have received a $6 million federal grant to develop new ways to

teach math to high-school students. The professors know this will be a

challenge. One of them is quoted as saying: "There is a mentality in this

country that mathematics is something a few nerds out there do and if you

don't understand mathematics, it's OK--you don't need it."

This is a bad mentality, young people. There's nothing "nerdy" about

mathematics. Contrary to their image as a bunch of out-of-it huge-butted Far

Side-professor dweebs who spend all day staring at incomprehensible symbols on

a blackboard while piles of dandruff form around their ankles, today's top

mathematicians are in fact a group of exciting, dynamic, and glamorous

individuals who are working to solve some of the most fascinating and

challenging problems facing the human race today ("Let's see, at $2.98 apiece,

with a $6 million federal grant, we could buy ... OA! That's 2,013,422.82

POCKET PROTECTORS!").

So come on, young people! Get in on the action! Work hard in math this

year, and remember this: If some muscle-bound Neanderthal bullies corner you

in the bathroom and call you a "nerd" you just look them straight in the eye

and say, "Oh YEAH? Why don't you big jerks ... LET GO! HEY. DON'T PUT MY

HEAD IN THE TOILET! HEY!" And tell them that goes double for your Uncle

Dave.

PUNCTUATION 'R' EASY

It's time for another edition of "Ask Mister Language Person," the column

that answers your questions about grammar, vocabulary, and those little

whaddyacallem marks.

Q. What are the rules regarding capital letters?

A. Capital letters are used in three grammatical situations:

1. At the beginning of proper or formal nouns. EXAMPLES: Capitalize "Queen,"

"Tea Party," and "Rental Tuxedo." Do NOT capitalize "dude," "cha-cha,"

or "boogerhead."

2. To indicate a situation of great military importance. EXAMPLE: "Get on the

TELSAT and tell STAFCON that COMWIMP wants some BBQ ASAP."

3. To indicate that the subject of the sentence has been bitten by a badger.

EXAMPLE: "I'll just stick my hand in here and OUCH!"

Q. Is there any difference between "happen" and "transpire"?

A. Grammatically, "happen" is a collaborating inductive that should be used

in predatory conjunctions such as: "Me and Norm here would like to buy you two

happening mommas a drink." Whereas "transpire" is a suppository verb that

should always be used to indicate that an event of some kind has transpired.

wRONG: "Lester got one of them electric worm stunners. RIGHT: "What

transpired was, Lester got one of them electric worm stunners."

Q. Do you take questions from attorneys?

A. Yes. That will be $475.

Q. No, seriously, I'm an attorney, and I want to know which is correct:

"With regards to the aforementioned" blah blah blah. Or: "With regards to the

aforementioned" yak yak yak.

A. That will be $850.

Q. Please explain the expression: "This does not bode well."

A. It means that something is not boding the way it should. It could be

boding better.

Q. Did an alert reader named Linda Bevard send you an article from the

December 19, 1990, Denver Post concerning a Dr. Stanley Biber, who was elected

commissioner in Las Animas County, and who is identified in the article as

"the world's leading sex-change surgeon"?

A. Yes.

Q. And what did Dr. Biber say when he was elected?

A. He said, quote: "We pulled it off."

Q. Please explain the correct usage of "exact same."

A. "Exact same" is a corpuscular phrase that should be used only when

something is exactly the same as something. It is the opposite (or

"antibody") of "a whole nother."

EXAMPLE: "This is the exact same restaurant where Alma found weevils in her

pie. They gave her a whole nother slice."

Q. I am going to deliver the eulogy at a funeral, and I wish to know whether

it is correct to say: "Before he died, Lamont was an active person." Or:

"Lamont was an active person before he died."

A. The American Funeral Industry Council advises us that the preferred term

is "bought the farm."

Q. Where should punctuation go?

A. It depends on the content.

EXAMPLE: Hi Mr Johnson exclaimed Bob Where do you want me to put these

punctuation marks Oh just stick them there at the end of the following

sentence answered Mr Johnson OK said Bob

The exception to this rule is teenagers, who should place a question mark

after every few words to make sure people are still listening.

EXAMPLE: "So there's this kid at school? Named Derrick? And he's like kind

of weird? Like he has a picture of Newt Gingrich carved in his hair? So one

day he had to blow his nose? like really bad? But he didn't have a tissue?

So he was like sitting next to Tracy Steakle And she had this sweater? By

like Ralph Lauren? So Derrick takes the sleeve? And he like ..."

PROFESSIONAL WRITING TIP: In writing a novel or play, use "foreshadowing" to

subtly hint at the outcome of the plot.

WRONG: "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?"

RIGHT: "O Romeo, Romeo! I wonder if we're both going to stab ourselves to

death at the end of this plot?"

YOU'VE GOTTA BE KIDDING

Today's scary topic for parents is: What Your Children Do When You're Not

Home.

I have here a letter from Buffalo, New York, from working mom Judy Price,

concerning her 14-year-old son, David, "who should certainly know better,

because the school keeps telling me he is a genius, but I have not seen signs

of this in our normal, everyday life."

Judy states that one day when she came home from work, David met her

outside and said: "Hi, Mom. Are you going in?"

(This is a bad sign, parents.)

Judy says she considered replying, "No, I thought I'd just stay here in

the car all night and pull away for work in the morning."

That actually would have been a wise idea. Instead, she went inside,

where she found a large black circle burned into the middle of her kitchen

counter. "DAVID," she screamed. "WHAT WERE YOU COOKING?"

The soft, timid reply came back: "A baseball."

"A baseball," Judy writes. "Of course. What else could it be? How

could I forget to tell my children never to cook a baseball? It's my fault,

really."

It turns out that according to David's best friend's cousin--and if you

can't believe HIM, who CAN you believe?--you can hit a baseball three times as

far if you really heat it up first. So David did this, and naturally he put

the red-hot pan down directly onto the countertop, probably because there was

no rare antique furniture available.

For the record: David claims that the heated baseball did, in fact, go

farther. But this does NOT mean that you young readers should try this

foolish and dangerous experiment at home. Use a friend's home.

No, seriously, you young people should never heat a baseball without

proper adult supervision, just as you should never--and I say this from

personal experience--attempt to make a rumba box.

A rumba box is an obscure musical instrument that consists of a wooden

box with metal strips attached to it in such a way that when you plunk them,

the box resonates with a pleasant rhythmic sound. The only time I ever saw a

rumba box was in 1964, when a friend of my parents named Walter Karl played

one at a gathering at our house, and it sounded great. Mr. Karl explained

that the metal strips were actually pieces of the spring from an old-fashioned

wind-up phonograph. This gave my best friend, Lanny Watts, an idea. Lanny

was always having ideas. For example, one day he got tired of walking to the

end of his driveway to get the mail, so he had the idea of hanging the mailbox

from a rope-and-pulley system strung up the driveway to his porch, where he

hooked it up to a washing-machine motor. When the mailman came, Lanny simply

plugged in the motor, and whoosh, the mailbox fell down. The amount of time

Lanny spent unsuccessfully trying to get this labor-saving device to work was

equivalent to approximately 5,000 trips to get the actual mail, but that is

the price of convenience.

So anyway, when Lanny heard Mr. Karl explain the rumba box, he realized

two things:

1. His parents had an old-fashioned wind-up phonograph they hardly ever used.

2. They both worked out of the home.

So Lanny and I decided to make our own rumba box. Our plan, as I recall

it, was to take the phonograph apart, snip off a bit of the spring, then put

the phonograph back together, and nobody would be the wiser. This plan worked

perfectly until we removed the metal box that held the phonograph spring; this

box turned out to be very hard to open.

"Why would they make it so strong?" we asked ourselves.

Finally, recalling the lessons we had learned about mechanical advantage

in high-school physics class, we decided to hit the box with a sledge hammer.

Do you remember the climactic scene in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark,

when the Nazis open up the Ark of the Covenant and out surges a terrifying

horde of evil fury and the Nazis' heads melt like chocolate bunnies in a

microwave? Well, that's similar to what happened when Lanny sledge-hammered

the spring box. It turns out that the reason the box is so strong is that

there is a really powerful, tightly wound, extremely irritable spring in

there, and when you let it out, it just goes berserk, writhing and snarling

and thrashing violently all over the room, seeking to gain revenge on all the

people who have cranked it over the years.

Lanny and I fled the room until the spring calmed down. When we

returned, we found phonograph parts spread all over the room, mixed in with

approximately 2.4 miles of spring. We realized we'd have to modify our

Project Goal slightly, from making a rumba box to being in an entirely new

continent when Lanny's mom got home.

Actually, Mrs. Watts went fairly easy on us, just as Judy Price seems to

have been good-humored about her son's heating the baseball. Moms are usually

pretty good that way.

But sometimes I wonder. You know how guys are always complaining that

they used to have a baseball-card collection that would be worth a fortune

today if they still had it, but their moms threw it out? And the guys always

say, "Mom just didn't know any better."

Well, I wonder if the moms knew exactly what they were doing. Getting

even.

SEXUAL INTERCOURSE

Today's Topic for Guys is: Communicating with Women.

If there's one thing that women find unsatisfactory about guys--and I

base this conclusion on an extensive scientific study of the pile of

Cosmopolitan magazines where I get my hair cut--it is that guys do not

communicate enough.

This problem has arisen in my own personal relationship with my wife,

Beth. I'll be reading the newspaper and the phone will ring; I'll answer it,

listen for 10 minutes, hang up, and resume reading. Finally Beth will say:

"Who was that?" And I'll say, "Phil Wonkerman's mom." Phil is an old friend

we haven't heard from in 17 years. And Beth will say, "Well?" And I'll say,

"Well what?" And Beth will say, "What did she SAY?"

And I'll say, "She said Phil is fine," making it clear by my tone of

voice that, although I do not wish to be rude, I AM trying to read the

newspaper here, and I happen to be right in the middle of an important panel

of "Calvin and Hobbes."

But Beth, ignoring this, will say, "That's all she said?"

And she will not let up. She will continue to ask district

attorney-style questions, forcing me to recount the conversation until she's

satisfied that she has the entire story, which is that Phil just got out of

prison after serving a sentence for a murder he committed when he became a

drug addict because of the guilt he felt when his wife died in a freak

submarine accident while Phil was having an affair with a nun, but now he's

all straightened out and has a good job as a trapeze artist and is almost

through with the surgical part of his sex change and just became happily

engaged to marry a prominent member of New Kids on the Block, so in other

words he is fine, which is EXACTLY what I told Beth in the first place, but is

that enough? No. She wants to hear every single detail.

We have some good friends, Buzz and Libby, whom we see about twice a

year. When we get together, Beth and Libby always wind up in a conversation,

lasting several days, during which they discuss virtually every significant

event that has occurred in their lives and the lives of those they care about,

sharing their innermost feelings, analyzing and probing, inevitably coming to

a deeper understanding of each other, and a strengthening of a cherished

friendship. Whereas Buzz and I watch the playoffs.

This is not to say Buzz and I don't share our feelings. Sometimes we get

quite emotional.

"That's not a FOUL??" one of us will say.

Or: "YOU'RE TELLING ME THAT'S NOT A FOUL???"

I don't mean to suggest that all we talk about is sports. We also

discuss, openly and without shame, what kind of pizza we need to order. We

have a fine time together, but we don't have heavy conversations, and

sometimes, after the visit is over, I'm surprised to learn--from Beth, who

learned it from Libby--that there has recently been some new wrinkle in Buzz's

life, such as that he now has an artificial leg.

(For the record, Buzz does NOT have an artificial leg. At least he

didn't mention anything about it to me.)

I have another good friend, Gene, who's going through major developments

in his life. Our families recently spent a weekend together, during which

Gene and I talked a lot and enjoyed each other's company immensely. In that

entire time, the most intimate personal statement he made to me is that he has

reached level 24 of a video game called Arkanoid. He has even seen the Evil

Presence, although he refused to tell me what it looks like. We're very

close, but there is a limit.

I know what some of you are saying. You're saying my friends and I are

Neanderthals, and a lot of guys are different. This is true. A lot of guys

don't use words at all. They communicate entirely by nonverbal methods, such

as sharing bait.

But my point, guys, is that you must communicate on a deeper level with a

woman, particularly if you are married to her. Open up. Don't assume that

she knows what you're thinking. This will be difficult for guys at first, so

it would help if you women would try to "read between the lines" in

determining what the guy is trying to communicate:

GUY STATEMENT: "Do we have any peanut butter?"

INNER GUY MEANING: "I hate my job."

GUY STATEMENT: "Is this all we have? Crunchy?"

INNER GUY MEANING: "I'm not sure I want to stay married."

If both genders work together, you can have a happier, healthier

relationship, but the responsibility rests with you guys, who must sincerely

... Hey, guys, I'm TALKING to you here. Put down the sports section, OK?

HEY! GUYS!

NERDS 'R' us

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS TO THE HIGH-SCHOOL GRADUATING CLASS OF 1992: As I

look out over your shining faces, I am reminded of the Bartlett's familiar

quotation by the great Greek philosopher Socrates, who said, "Eventually your

skin will clear up and your faces won't shine so much."

As is so often the case with great philosophers, he was lying. Your skin

is a lifelong enemy, young people. It has millions of hardy zit cells that

will continue to function perfectly, long after the rest of your organs have

become aged and decrepit. Remember Ronald Reagan? No? Well, he used to be

the president, off and on, and in 1985, after undergoing a medical procedure

on his nose, he met with the press and made the following two statements,

which I swear to you young people that I am not making up:

1. "It is true I had--well, I guess for want of a better word--a pimple on my

nose."

2. "I violated all the rules. I picked at it and I squoze it and so forth and

messed myself up a little."

And President Reagan was no spring chicken at the time. I believe that,

at one point in his acting career, he actually was in a movie with Socrates.

The point I am making, young people, is that your skin will never "clear up."

People have been known to break out with embarrassing blemishes at their own

funerals.

But postmortem acne is not what you young people should be thinking about

today as you prepare to go out into the world, leaving behind the hallowed

halls of your school, but not before sticking wads of gum on virtually every

hallowed surface. Perhaps you think you have gotten away with this. You may

be interested to learn that, thanks to a Used Gum Tracing procedure developed

by the FBI, school authorities can now analyze the DNA in the dried spit

molecules and, by cross-referencing with your Permanent Record, determine

exactly who was chewing every single wad. This means that someday in the

future--perhaps at your wedding--burly officers of the Gum Police will come

barging in and arrest you and take you off to harsh prisons where you will be

forced to eat food prepared by the same people who ran your high-school

cafeteria.

Yes, young people, modern technology promises an exciting future. But

you must also learn from the wisdom of your elders, and if there is one piece

of advice that I would offer you, it is this: Burn your yearbook right now.

Because otherwise, years from now, feeling nostalgic, you'll open it up to

your photo, and this alien GEEK will be staring out at you, and your children

will beg you to tell them that they're adopted.

it is a known science fact that, no matter how good your yearbook photo

looks now, after 15 years of being pressed up against somebody else's face in

the dark and mysterious yearbook environment, it will transmutate itself into

a humiliating picture of a total goober. This is true of everybody. If, in

early 1991, the U.S. government had quietly contacted Saddam Hussein and

threatened to publish his yearbook photo in the New York Times, he would have

dropped Kuwait like a 250-pound maggot.

Yes, young people, old yearbook photos can be a powerful force for good.

Yet the horrifying truth is that sometimes newspapers publish the yearbook

photos of totally innocent people. Yes! In America! I know what I'm talking

about, young people, because it happened to me. The March 1992 issue of

Panther Tracks, the newspaper of my alma mater, Pleasantville (New York) High

School, has an article about me, and although I definitely remember looking

normal in high school, there's a photograph of this solemn little junior

Certified Public Accountant wearing glasses sold by Mister Bob's House of

Soviet Eyewear.

People I hadn't heard from in years mailed me this picture, along with

heartwarming and thoughtful notes.

"Dave!" they'd say. "I forgot what a Dweeb you were!"

Or: "Who styled your hair? Bigfoot?"

This is unfair, Class of '92. Let me assure you that I was very "hip" in

high school. I distinctly remember an incident in 1964, when Lanny Watts and

I got a stern lecture from the assistant principal, Mr. Sabella, because we

showed up at a school dance with our sport-jacket collars turned under, so the

jackets looked like they didn't HAVE collars, because this was the style worn

by the Dave Clark Five. Remember the Dave Clark Five, young people? No?

Sure you do! You must! They had that big hit with the drum part that went:

NAIHOMPA NAIHOMPA OMPA. Wasn't that a great song, young people? Hey, are you

laughing at me? STOP LAUGHING AT ME, YOU LITTLE ZITFACES!

Thank you.

UNEASY RIDER

It's 6 P.m., and we're waiting for our 12-year-old son, Rob, to return

from a quick bike ride. We're going to go out to dinner to celebrate the fact

that, for the 1,000th consecutive night, we have figured out an excuse to not

cook at home.

We're locking up the house when a young man comes to the door and asks if

we have a son. "There's been an accident," he says.

"Is it bad?" Beth asks.

"There's blood everywhere," he says.

Sometimes I wonder if parenthood is such a good idea. Sometimes I envy

fish and frogs and lobsters and other animals that just emit their young in

egg form, then swim or hop or lobster-scoot away from the scene, free of

responsibility, immune from anguish. I can remember when there was nobody in

my world as important to me as me. Oh, I loved other people--my wife, my

family, my friends--and I would have been distraught if something bad happened

to them. But I knew I'd still be here. And that was the really important

thing.

Rob changed that. Right at birth. When he came out, looking like a

cranky old prune, he didn't cry. Beth, instantly a mom, kept saying, through

her haze of labor pain, "Why isn't he crying? Why isn't he crying?" The

nurse said sometimes they don't cry, but I could see that the doctor thought

something was wrong, because he was trying to do something with Rob's mouth,

and he was having trouble. He whispered something to the nurse and took Rob

away, and the nurse kept saying this was routine, but we knew it wasn't. I

stood there, wearing my goofy hospital outfit, holding Beth's hand, trying to

cope with two staggering thoughts: First, I had a child--I had a child--and

second, maybe my child was in trouble.

That was the most sickeningly vulnerable feeling I'd ever felt. And I

didn't even know Rob yet.

It turned out he was OK--just a little blockage. The doctor gave him

back to us, and we quickly became traditional first-time parents, wrapped in a

woozy cocoon of joy and exhaustion, taking a genuine intellectual interest in

poop, marveling at the thrill we felt, the connection, when our son's tiny

hand squeezed our fingers.

But the feeling of vulnerability didn't go away. It only got worse,

always lurking inside, forcing me to accept that I wasn't in control anymore,

not when I knew my universe could be trashed at any moment because of

unpredictable, uncontrollable developments on this newborn comet, zooming

through. When he was happy, I was happier than I'd ever been; but when he was

in trouble ... I can remember every detail of the time when, at 10 months, he

got a bad fever, 106 degrees, his tiny body burning, and I carried him into

the hospital, thinking I can't take this, please, let me be able to stop this,

please, give me this fever, take it out of this little boy and put it in me,

please....

But you can't do that. You can't make it happen to you. You have to

watch it happen to your child, and it never gets any easier, does it?

Now Beth and I are in the car, and I'm driving too fast, but I have to; I

have to see what I don't want to see. Up ahead some people are gathered on

the side of the road, and a woman is kneeling--she has blood on her dress, a

lot of blood--and lying in front of her, on his back, his face covered with

blood is ...

"Oh God," says Beth. "Oh God."

This is where it ends, for some parents. Right here, on the roadside.

My heart breaks for these parents. I don't know that I could survive it.

Now I'm opening the door, stumbling out of the car toward Rob. He's

moving his right hand. He's waving at me. He's giving me a weak, bloody

smile, trying to reassure me.

"It's my fault," he's saying. "I'm sorry. It's my fault."

"It's OK!" I'm saying. "It's OK!"

Please let It be OK.

"I'm sorry," the bloody-dress woman is saying. "I'm so sorry." She was

driving the car that collided with Rob. He went through the windshield, then

was thrown back out onto the road, 40 feet, according to the ambulance guys.

"This is my worst nightmare," the woman is saying.

"I'm sorry," Rob is saying.

"It's OK!" I'm saying. "You're going to be OK!"

Please.

He was OK. A broken leg, some skin scraped off, a lot of stitches, but

nothing that won't heal. He'll be getting out of his cast in a couple of

months, getting on with his ever-busier life, his friends, his school, his

stuff, he'll be growing bigger, moving faster, this bright comet-boy who

streaked into my universe 12 years ago and is already starting to arc his way

back out, farther from me, from my control, from my sight.

But that little hand will never let go of my finger.

I'm sorry. This was supposed to be a hilarious column about how Beth and

I were getting ready to go out for a nice dinner at 6 P.m. and wound up eating

lukewarm cheeseburgers at 11 P.m. on a table in the Miami Children's Hospital

emergency room; and how Rob, after politely thanking a very nice nurse for

helping him sit up, threw up on her; and other comical events. But this is

how the column turned out. Next week I promise to return to Booger

journalism.

In closing, here's a Public Service Message for you young readers from

Rob Barry, who won't be walking for a while but can still operate a keyboard:

I know that bike helmets look really nerdy, and that was my argument.

But I don't think I'll ever say that again. Make SURE you wear your helmets.

And WATCH OUT FOR CARS.

DAVE'S REAL WORLD

The reason I agreed to be in an episode of a TV situation comedy was that

the role was perfect for me. You want to choose your roles carefully, as an

actor. You want to look for roles in which you can display the range, the

depth, the infinitely subtle nuances of your acting talent.

"It's just one word," the director said. "You say 'Howdy.'"

"I'll do it," I said. A role like that comes along once in a lifetime.

The TV show--which might even still be on the air as you read this--is

called "Dave's World." It's loosely based on a book and some columns I wrote.

I use the term "loosely" very loosely. There's no way they could just take my

columns and turn them directly into a TV series; every episode would last four

minutes, and end with all the major characters being killed by an exploding

toilet. So they have professional writers supplying dramatic elements that

are missing from my writing, such as plots, characters, and jokes that do not

involve the term "toad mucus."

(Lest you think I have "sold out" as an artist, let me stress that I have

retained total creative control over the show, in the sense that, when they

send me a check, I can legally spend it however I want.)

I worked hard on "Howdy," memorizing it in just days. Depending on the

scene, I could deliver the line with various emotional subtexts, including

happiness ("Howdy!"), sorrow ("Howdy!"), anger ("Howdy!"), and dental problems

("Hmpgh!").

Then, just before I flew to Los Angeles for the filming, the director

called to tell me that they had changed my role. In my new role, I played a

man in an appliance store who tries to buy the last air conditioner but gets

into a bidding war for it with characters who are based, loosely, on me and my

wife, played by Harry Anderson and DeLane Matthews. (Harry Anderson plays me.

Only taller.)

In my new role, I had to say 17 words, not ONE of which was "Howdy!" I

was still memorizing my part when I got to the studio. It was swarming with

people--camera people, light people, sound people, bagel people, cream-cheese

people, people whose sole function--this is a coveted union job, passed down

from father to son--is to go "SSHHH!" You, the actor, have to say your lines

with all these people constantly staring at you, plus the director and the

writers keep changing the script. The actors will do a scene, and the

director will say, "OK, that was perfect, but this time, Bob, instead of

saying 'What's for dinner?' you say, 'Wait a minute! Benzene is actually a

hydrocarbon!' And say it with a Norwegian accent. Also, we think maybe your

character should have no arms."

My lines didn't change much, but as we got ready to film my scene, I was

increasingly nervous. I was supposed to walk up to the appliance salesman and

say: "I need an air conditioner." I had gone over this many times, but as the

director said "Action!" my brain--the brain is easily the least intelligent

organ in the body--lost my lines, and began frantically rummaging around for

them in my memory banks. You could actually see my skull bulging with effort

as I walked onto the set, in front of four TV cameras, a vast technical crew,

and a live Studio Audience, with no real idea what I was going to say to the

appliance salesman ("I need a howdy").

But somehow I remembered my lines. The director seemed satisfied with my

performance, except for the last part, where Harry Anderson, outbidding me for

the air conditioner, hands the salesman some takeout sushi and says, "We'll

throw in some squid," and I become disgusted and say, "Yuppies." (If you

recognize this dialogue, it's because it's very similar to the

appliance-buying scene in Hamlet.)

"That was perfect, Dave," said the director. (This is what directors say

when they think it sucked.) "But when you say 'yuppies,' make it smaller."

So we redid the scene, and as we approached my last line, I was totally

focused on doing a smaller "yuppies." Then I noticed that (a) the other

actors weren't saying anything, and (b) everybody in the studio was staring at

me, waiting. I had clearly messed up, but I had no idea how. This was a time

to think fast, to improvise, to come up with a clever line that would save the

scene. So here's what I did: I fell down. (It's a nervous habit I have. Ask

my wife.)

When I got up, I explained that I'd been waiting for Harry to say the

squid line.

"They took that out," somebody said.

"They took out the squid?" I said. "The squid is gone?"

It turned out that everybody else knew this, including probably the Live

Studio Audience. So we had to do that part again, with my brain feverishly

repeating "No squid! Smaller yuppies!" (This would be a good slogan for a

restaurant.)

That time we got through it, and my television career came to an end, and

I went back to being, loosely, a newspaper columnist. I have not, however,

ruled out the possibility of starring in a spinoff. I am thinking of a

dramatic action series about a hero who, each week, tries to buy an air

conditioner. I have a great line for ending this column, but I can't remember

what it is.

A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

Now that my son has turned 13, I'm thinking about writing a self-help

book for parents of teenagers. It would be a sensitive, insightful book that

would explain the complex, emotionally charged relationship between the parent

and the adolescent child. The title would be: I'm a jerk; You're a jerk.

The underlying philosophy of this book would be that, contrary to what

you hear from the "experts," it's a bad idea for parents and teenagers to

attempt to communicate with each other, because there's always the risk that

one of you will actually find out what the other one is thinking.

For example, my son thinks it's a fine idea to stay up until 3 A.m. on

school nights reading what are called "suspense novels," defined as "novels

wherein the most positive thing that can happen to a character is that the

Evil Ones will kill him before they eat his brain." My son sees no connection

between the fact that he stays up reading these books and the fact that he

doesn't feel like going to school the next day.

"Rob," I tell him, as he is eating his breakfast in extreme slow motion

with his eyes completely closed, so that he sometimes accidentally puts food

into his ear, "I want you to go to sleep earlier."

"DAD," he says, using the tone of voice you might use when attempting to

explain an abstract intellectual concept to an oyster, "you DON'T UNDERSTAND.

I am NOT tired. I am ... PLOOS!" (sound of my son passing out facedown in his

Cracklin' Oat Bran).

Of course psychologists would tell us that falling asleep in cereal is

normal for young teenagers, who need to become independent of their parents

and make their own life decisions, which is fine, except that if my son made

his own life decisions, his ideal daily schedule would be:

Midnight to 3 A.m.--Read suspense novels.

3 A.M. to 3 P.m.--Sleep.

3:15 P.m.--Order hearty, breakfast from Domino's Pizza and put on loud hideous

music recorded live in hell.

4 P.m. to midnight--Blow stuff up.

Unfortunately, this schedule would leave little room for, say, school, so

we have to supply parental guidance ("If you don't open this door RIGHT NOW I

will BREAK IT DOWN and CHARGE IT TO YOUR ALLOWANCE"), the result being that

our relationship with our son currently involves a certain amount Of conflict,

in the same sense that the Pacific Ocean involves a certain amount of water.

At least he doesn't wear giant pants. I keep seeing young teenage males

wearing enormous pants; pants that two or three teenagers could occupy

simultaneously and still have room in there for a picnic basket; pants that a

clown would refuse to wear on the grounds that they were too undignified. The

young men wear these pants really low, so that the waist is about knee level

and the pants butt drags on the ground. You could not be an effective

criminal wearing pants like these, because you'd be unable to flee on foot

with any velocity.

POLICE OFFICER: We tracked the alleged perpetrator from the crime scene by

following the trail of his dragging pants butt.

PROSECUTOR: And what was he doing when you caught up with him?

POLICE OFFICER: He was hobbling in a suspicious manner.

What I want to know is, how do young people buy these pants? Do they try

them on to make sure they DON'T fit? Do they take along a 500-pound friend,

or a mature polar bear, and buy pants that fit HIM?

I asked my son about these pants, and he told me that mainly "bassers"

wear them. "Bassers" are people who like a lot of bass in their music. They

drive around in cars with four-trillion-watt sound systems playing recordings

of what sound like above-ground nuclear tests, but with less of an emphasis on

melody.

My son also told me that there are also people called "posers" who DRESS

like "bassers," but are, in fact, secretly "preppies." He said that some

"posers" also pose as "headbangers," who are people who like heavy-metal

music, which is performed by skinny men with huge hair who stomp around the

stage, striking their instruments and shrieking angrily, apparently because

somebody has stolen all their shirts.

"Like," my son said, contemptuously, "some posers will act like they like

Metallica, but they don't know anything about Metallica."

If you can imagine.

I realize I've mainly been giving my side of the parent-teenager

relationship, and I promise to give my son's side, if he ever comes out of his

room. Remember how the news media made a big deal about it when those people

came out after spending two years inside Biosphere 2? Well, two years is

nothing. Veteran parents assure me that teenagers routinely spend that long

in the bathroom. In fact, veteran parents assure me that I haven't seen

anything yet.

"Wait till he gets his driver's license," they say. "That's when Fred

and I turned to heroin."

Yes, the next few years are going to be exciting and challenging. But

I'm sure that, with love and trust and understanding, my family will get

through them OK. At least I will, because I plan to be inside Biosphere 3.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dave Barry's best-selling books Include:

Dave Barry Does Japan, Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up, and Dave Barry Turns

40. Championed by the New York Times as "the funniest man In America,"

Barry's syndicated column for The Miami Herald now reaches over 250 newspapers

across the country. Television has even succumbed to his wit--the popular

sitcom "Dave's World" is based on his life and columns.