Chapter 14 – Backstage Pass.

My parents liked going to the movies, so I was introduced to lots of different kinds of films when I was a kid. (Yes, this is a bit of a flashback — we’ll be doing that from time to time, but don’t worry, I’ll try to warn you.)

Film. Flicks. Cinema. It was a big part of our family outings. I loved going to the movies but some types of stories were better than others. Western movies, for example, were cool with me. On the other hand, Doris Day films were blech. Cops-and-robbers were great, but Jerry Lewis films were a blech-and-a-half. (“Genius” my ass; the French are completely nuts to even mention his name in the same paragraph as Buster Keaton. I’m just saying.)

Science-fiction and creature features were swell with me, too, especially the ones with Ray Harryhausen visual effects. It also seemed appropriate to me that so many of the sci-fi stories dealt with disasters and giant beasties that were brought about by nuclear energy.

One day, my parents took me to see a double feature and I noticed the same actor in both films.

“Hey dad, didn’t that guy get shot and die in the other story?” We were at a drive-in theater, so it was okay to talk.

“His character got killed in the other film,” said my dad. “He’s playing a different character in this film.”

A different character? What the hell is going on here? “You mean those people at the O.K. Corral were not actually shot?! What a gyp! That’s not fair! I want them dead!” Yes, I was a bit blood-thirsty back then.

My dad had to explain the concept of scripts, actors, directors, editors, and so on. I still thought it was a cheat, but I really liked the idea of “pretend,” and so there was a lot of it in my life from that point forward. Especially at school. The made-up excuses for not doing my assignments were a good example . . .

Excuse Number One: “The dog ate my homework.” Always a classic. Fun to try getting away with that one, although it was a bit more difficult for me due to the fact that we did not own a dog. But that did not stop me from using it at least once per semester. And then I could use a variation of it a month or so later, as in: “My dog, Rex, got run over by a car.” I guess that would be Excuse Number One-A. Or perhaps it should be Excuse Number K-9.

Excuse Number Two: “It was a religious holiday in my house yesterday.” Creative, don’t you think? This one wasn’t that difficult because my family attempted to get me interested in a whole bunch of religions, although fortunately only one at a time. We tried Catholicism, Judaism, Quakerism, Baptism. Meth-amphetamineism. I’m sure that several of those were made-up but the point is that it was often hard to keep track of the religiosity holidays.

Excuse Number Three: “I couldn’t do my homework because my mom had to go to the hospital.” This is a winner if there is a family member or neighbor to back up your story.

But no matter what the circumstances, it’s comforting to know that you’re not lying, you’re not cheating, and you’re not prevaricating. No, far from it. You are simply “pretending.”

And, truth be told, there actually were two occasions when Excuse Number Three was true. My mom had two miscarriages. The little sister or little brother I was supposed to have did not make it. Twice. No amount of pretending could ever change that.

Make Believe

Anyway, the whole concept of pretending is the reason that I became a drama queen. Wait, no. I mean that’s how I became a lesbian. No, wait. That’s not right, either. It was how I became a thespian. An actor.

After all, if the people in those silly movies could pretend, I could, too. So I began appearing in amateur theatricals. Skits at the Rotary Club. Summer camp acting sessions. School plays. Even church pageants. Well, that last one happened only when we belonged to a church that allowed such blatant examples of Satan’s frivolities.

In high school, there was even a whole program of acting, directing, and stagecraft to which I happily aligned myself after I noticed the attractiveness of the actresses who were involved in it. All of which meant that I spent a lot of time in and around the school auditorium.

I was in such plays as: “Everyman.” “Our Town.” “She Stoops to Conquer.” “Hamlet.” Don’t get excited by that last one; I didn’t get the lead role. I played Fortinbras, which meant that the audience had pretty much gone home by the time my character stormed onto the stage to restore order after all the carnage of Act V.

William’s Way With Words

Shakespeare began making a big impression on me. The words seemed odd at first but they turned out to be enjoyable. If you speak them out loud, they often have a fluidity that is quite pleasing. The better I got at it, the more often I was cast in Shakespearean plays. As a bonus, it soon became obvious that faking a little Shakespeare was good fun. . .

“Forsooth, canst thou see that I, merely the poorest of players, am but forlorn and indeed swimming lost upon the vastness of this stage, standing by one’s lonesomeness, in dire need of any fine line that could be but spoke aloud from within and behind the settings, a brief and humble speech that might, nay, would straighten the path of this our humble production and in no small measure aid us in the reasonable conclusion of this scene with at least some small semblance of human dignity.”

For anyone who has ever been on stage, you realize that what’s being said in that very long and convoluted sentence is: “What the hell is supposed to happen next?” It’s just a bit disguised so as to fool some of the members of the audience.

We were in a scene from “Othello” and somebody “went up” in their lines (hey, it could have been me) and now everything had come to a screeching halt because nobody knew who was supposed to say what at that moment. If the stage manager hadn’t FINALLY taken the hint I was dropping in that phony soliloquy, we’d still be there, waiting for the swordfight or the betrayal or the strangulation or whatever.

Cutting In

In my high school, the “Play Department” (love that term, BTW) often put on brief dramatic or comedic scenes for the artistic enrichment of other classes. For example, the history and English instructors allowed their students to come see us do a bowdlerized version of a Restoration comedy or a truncated script from an Elizabethan drama or a censored section of a Broadway musical.

But there was a big problem with doing plays in the middle of the school day: that damn public address system was also installed in the school auditorium and announcements would blare out at us, often in the middle of a scene. . .

“What is in thy mind, fairest Livia?”

“Oh, my lord, would my soul give me the strength to confess my heart’s desire to you.”

“You can speak freely. Tell me what is in the most tender part of you. I pray thee, speak now.”

“I will, I will, I must! It is just this — ”

“Attention, please. Third Period Nutrition break will be held thirty minutes early due to the pep rally scheduled for one o’clock. That is all.”

Kind of destroys the mood, wouldn’t you agree? And it kept happening again and again. Later on, a bunch of the actors and stagecraft crew spoke about it in calm and measured tones:

“Slime-ass crap-brain dog-sweat pig-slop announcements!”

Note: some of the words have been changed to preserve your ears and maintain a high moral tone in this project. But you see the point, which is that many of us simply did not appreciate the fucking announcements breaking into our scenes. We resolved to do something about it. Once again, it was electronics to the rescue.

Snip Snip

We knew that the wall-mounted P.A. speakers had to get their signal from somewhere. And between that “somewhere” and the speakers themselves there had to be wires. Sure enough, there was a junction box just off-stage left, out-of-sight of the audience. Opening it was as easy as removing four Philips-head screws and letting the metal cover drop onto Billy’s left foot, ruining his new sneakers and opening a gash in two of his toes.

“Damn it, that hurt!”

“Sure, that metal cover is heavy.”

“Well, be careful!”

“I was being careful. It didn’t hit my foot.”

“Up yours!”

“Okay, sorry. Look, you can do the honors of shorting out the P.A.”

“Really?” Billy sounded almost grateful that he got injured.

“Sure. Get something to cut the wires.”

Proud as a peacock, Billy took a flashlight and a pair of wire cutters from the stagecraft tool cabinet and positioned himself directly in front of the open junction box. We all held our breath as he slowly extended the cutting tool and expertly snipped the blue wire.

After the fire alarm bells finally stopped clanging and the school had returned to normal, we made our way back to the junction box and tried again. This time, he snipped the red wire.

Silence.

“Do you think that did it?”

“We won’t know until there’s an announcement.”

We stood there, listening for an announcement. All we could hear was our breathing and the echoing hush of the empty theater.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said.

“Why not?”

“If that was the right wire to cut, then we won’t hear any announcements. We could stand here listening forever. Don’t know about you, but I can’t hack that. Got a date tonight.”

This produced a certain amount of consternation. “What’ll we do?” “How we gonna know?” “I’m hungry.” “Who’s your date?” etc.

“Guys,” I said. “One of us has to be here for first period tomorrow. If you’re standing here and don’t hear the regular morning announcement, then we did it right.”

“You mean I did it right.”

“Yes, Billy. That’s what I meant.”

“Well, I don’t want to be here tomorrow morning,” Walter said. “I don’t want to miss the announcement. What if it’s one of the outlaw broadcasts?”

Wow, I thought. My little tape edits were now thought of as “outlaw.” Cool.

“Okay,” I told them, “I’ll be here tomorrow morning, on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“I want Billy’s sister here with me.”

“Oh yeah,” said the other guys. “She’s hot.”

“Done,” Billy told me. “Wait, big sister or little sister?”

“For Christ sake, Billy, your little sister is seven. I want your big sister.”

“Right,” he said.

“Or your mother,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” said the other guys. “She’s hot.”

“Hey!” said Billy.

“Well, she is,” they said.

“But, but, that’s my mom!”

I can’t prove it, but I’m thinking that the resulting conversation was the first use of the term MILF. Eventually, everything got worked out. What? Oh, no, he got his big sister to show up, not his mom. I wouldn’t meet her until much later, after we nearly cut off some toes on Billy’s other foot. Purely accidental, I assure you.

• To be continued in next chapter (click link to subscribe via RSS) ….

“Secret Sex, A Book Alive Online,” written and lived by John Scott G, is Copr. © 2011-2012 by JSG, all rights reserved under U.S. and international copyright conventions. Commercial use in any form is forbidden without express written permission of the author. Originally published on eNewsChannels.com with permission. Credits: Book cover design: Phil Hatten; Author Photo: Brian Forest.

You have read articles attacking the Super Bowl for a lot of different reasons: The consumerism, the commercialism, and the overall crassness. Hell, I’ve written some of those articles. You can still find them here on ENC as well as on the Music Industry Newswire and the Advertising Industry Newswire (look ‘em up, why doncha).

But today, I’d like to attack this national problem in a different way. . .

“Game Off”

A Play in 1 Act

“Honey, you know what Sunday is? The Super Bowl!”

“Yeah, big whoop. Where are you watching this year?”

“Well, uh, I thought that we’d have some of the guys over and — ”

“Nope.”

“What?”

“Not gonna happen.”

“Well, honey, it’s the Super Bowl, and we usually — ”

“Forget it.”

“Forget it? How is that even possible? It’s mentioned on every show!”

“That’s because you only watch sports shows. Believe it or not, there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t involve incredibly overpaid morons.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s the big game!”

“Oh, well, the big game. Sure. A hundred commercials and an outcome that no one will remember in a week. And have you been listening to the announcers in those things? ‘Halfwitosky needs to press the aerial advantage to counter the spread formation of the cover three or it’s downtown city.’”

“Ha! You’re right, you’re right, they’re idiots.”

“‘Clunkbody needs to work the offensive opportunity and establish a better midfield zone for his wide-in.’”

“Good one, honey! Or, how ’bout this: ‘Nobrainy should have shot the gap on the weak side backoff in order to zero out the over-coverage.’ This is fun, honey. Do another one?”

“I can do a million of them.”

“Sure. We’re having fun now, aren’t we, honey?”

“Yes, dear. We certainly are having fun now.”

“Oh c’mon, we’re sharing here. We’re sharing the fun. It’s good!”

“All right. How’s this: ‘ScmBagg moves in on the under-aged girl but then dances away with the citywide payoff.’”

“Hey, they never actually proved anything against the guy.”

“Oh, you want proven items. Fine: ‘Coachalot is caught cheating but is allowed to remain in the sport, but shhhhh, no one bring it up because it might offend the tender people of Boston.”

“Look, he paid a fine and now everything’s okay.”

“Look, Larry, the people are disreputable, the hype is overkill, the commentary is fatuous, and the whole thing is stupid. Plus, I’m not putting up with the mess. On Sunday, you have a choice: you can stay here with me and we can read or see a movie or work on finishing the bookshelves in the den. Or you can go watch the stupor bowl with some of your friends. But as for having people over here, I have two words for you: no way.”

“Hey, don’t be going there.”

“What?”

“Don’t be with the ‘No way’ thing. That’s not gonna work.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, that’s right. I mean, why do you go with the ‘No way’ thing?”

“Remember when you told me about seeing that porn clip of anal sex and I told you no way?”

“Honey, I can’t forget about it if you keep mentioning it.”

“Of course I’m going to mention it. It’s disgusting.”

“I said I was sorry. It was just a fantasy. You have fantasies. Don’t I get my fantasies?”

“No, Larry, you do not. Let me be very clear: you will never, ever, ever get that fantasy.”

“No, but if it’s just in my own mind. . . ”

“You want to keep disgusting thoughts in your mind while we’re making love?”

“No, no, it’s just — ”

“And we’re not having a Super Bowl party over here.”

“Can’t we discuss this?”

“We discussed it.”

“No, I mean a real discussion. You make your points and I make mine.”

“Ohhhh, isn’t that cute of my little snookums! Okay, dear, you go ahead and make your little points. I’m listening.”

“Now?”

“Yeah, now. As in: Now. Otherwise, it sounds to me like the discussion is over.”

“Um, okay, okay, okay. . . Look, it’s the Super Bowl. It’s, uh, it’s an American institution.”

“And we’re all so very proud of that. Our nation’s contribution to world culture.”

“Everybody watches it.”

“Not everybody.”

“Well, hundreds of millions of people watch it.”

“And you can be one of them. But not here. I’m going to have a little peace and quiet. You can go watch at the Berenson’s or the Gowers’ or the Thatcher’s.”

“Well, I kind of already invited them over.”

“Did you now? That’s very interesting. Yes, I find that very interesting.”

“Okay, now, honey, don’t take that tone.”

“And just exactly what kind of tone do you want me to take?”

“Not that one.”

“Oh? And how about this one?”

“Not that one, either. Look, cutie, I just think we should be calm about this.”

“I’m calm.”

“But we need to talk.”

“We did talk. And we came to a mutually satisfying conclusion.”

“Well — ”

“Unlike last night, where you were probably thinking about disgusting things and got distracted.”

“I’m just under a lot of pressure at work!”

“You want to talk about pressure? Try balancing the household budget when someone blows about seven hundred dollars on beer, and chips, and snacks, and pizza for a Super Bowl party.”

“The guys will help bring stuff over. . . ”

“Not to mention the two hundred dollars to clean the carpet from the spilled dip and the three hundred dollars to refinish the coffee table to get rid of the water rings, scuff marks, and beer stains.”

“I’ll ask them to be careful.”

“You’ll ask them to be careful of someone else’s furniture because they won’t be here.”

“Look, I just  ”

“And how is it that your friends can’t seem to hit the toilet when they use the bathroom?”

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud. Look, darling, this is our place, so I get a vote.”

“That’s right, sweetie. You get a vote.”

“Okay, that’s more like it.”

“So. Vote.”

“Well, all right, I’m voting for — ”

“And I’m voting against. There, you voted and I voted. And so there’s not going to be a Super Bowl party here because you didn’t win the vote. Okay, I’m glad we had this little confab here. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go get the groceries.”

“But wait, you didn’t win the vote, either. Right? I mean, you didn’t win. Wait! Right? Honey?”

CURTAIN.

Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G and originally published on eNewsChannels.com – all commercial rights reserved.

Chapter 13 – Hi, School.

You may not believe it, but the powers-that-be at middle school allowed me to move on to high school. Go figure. I believe they said something like “After in-depth deliberation, it is our judgment that it will be to the reciprocal mutual advantage of all concerned parties that John Scott now move forward with the next stage of his educational pursuits.” Translation: get this guy the hell out of here.

You can probably tell that they felt I was still not living up to my potential. But I disagree. Look, if the goal was to graduate from one level of hell to another, I had achieved it! Don’t I deserve some points for that?

So it came to be that I was set loose on the grounds of William Lovelace Binkley Academy High School. I should point out that here, as well as many other places in this book, names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Opening Gambit

New school, new part of the city, new semester, new everything. Naturally, I set to work making as many female acquaintances as possible.

“Hi.”

“Uh, hi.”

“I’m John Scott.”

“Um, Barbara.”

“Nice to meet you, Barbara!”

“Sure,” she said tentatively. “You, too, I guess.”

“What do you think classes will be like here?”

Okay, that’s how you’re supposed to do it. For you guys who are taking notes, allow me to live up to my goal of being Ever-So-Helpful to you by going over that brief conversation again but this time with the Crib Notes For Success appended for your enlightenment.

The Art of Making Friends

“Hi.” (Smile when you say it. Note: make certain beforehand that you do not have any food stuck to your teeth.)

“Uh, hi.”

“I’m John Scott.” (Note 1: Use your name rather than mine; you’ll find it much more effective. Note 2: Keep smiling. Note 3: Make sure you do that “And your name is…?” tilt of the head to get her to reply. Optional move: hold out your paw for a handshake.)

“Um, Barbara.”

“Nice to meet you, Barbara!” (Always repeat her name. Everyone likes hearing their own name in a social context. Also, it helps to be genuinely pleased about meeting her, genuinely happy about knowing her name, and genuinely ecstatic about saying her name. You really need genuine sincerity. Believe me, once you learn how to fake that, you’ll be well on your way.)

“Sure,” she said tentatively. “You, too, I guess.”

“What do you think classes will be like here?” (It almost doesn’t matter what you ask at this point. Just get her to talk. Basically, you want to give the impression that you’re saying something like “Tell me all about yourself and what you feel about everything because I am absolutely positive that I’ll be fascinated.”)

Once she’s talking, nod and smile whenever it seems appropriate. Like after everything she says. Phrases you’ll want to practice include the following: “You’re right.” “That’s so true.” “Good one!” “Um-hmm!” “Yes.” “I hadn’t thought of that!” And the most important of all: “Tell me more.”

And don’t make the mistake I made that first day. Don’t rush things. You want to have a nice long conversation, or even two or three conversations, before you say something like, “Ever hear of The Game?”

She hadn’t. And she didn’t want to know, as it turned out. After striking out once too often, it occurred to me that I was approaching the wrong type of person. I needed to find the Bad Girls. And the way to do that was to be bad.

Bad, Relatively Speaking

Trouble is, I wasn’t able to do the traditional bad boy stuff. I didn’t get into fistfights. I didn’t steal cars. I didn’t even do the jerk thing by being a sports star. Hell, I barely make it onto the gymnastics team. Officially a part of the team, I was never good enough to compete in the meets and get the Letterman’s Jacket or sweater or patch or crest or whatever.

No, I had to find a different way to be bad. Forging bus passes wasn’t going to cut it and I was a little too afraid of the police department to try forging driver’s licenses. Fortunately, I discovered electronics. This turned out to be important. Here’s why. . .

Now Hear This

At the start of every school day, the entire student body was forced to sit quietly in their seats to hear the morning announcements as they were broadcast through the public address system. Poor-quality but overly-loud speakers were mounted high on the wall of every classroom. While I’ve never been incarcerated, I imagine prisons have pretty much the same sort of P.A. system as the average high school.

We thought of the announcements with mixed feelings. On the one hand, they ate up some time. That meant we had to endure a little less of First Period History or whatever class you were in. But on the other hand, they were grating and annoying and full of pops, whistles, squeals, and squawks and were perhaps the most boring five or ten minutes in the history of recorded announcements.

Wait a minute, did you say “recorded”? Yes, they recorded the daily announcements the previous afternoon. This enabled the administrative staff to come into the office a bit later each morning.

Home Hi-Fi

At the time, my dad had a hi-fi system that he had built. Which means I had access to recording equipment (which meant tape recorders back in those days) and editing tools (which meant razor blades and adhesive tape back in those days). So, all I had to do was get into the administrative offices, snatch the tape, take it home, make some edits, bring it back, and replace the tape so it was in place to be broadcast the next morning.

Grabbing the Friday afternoon recording would give me the maximum amount of time for editing prior to the Monday morning announcements. After four in the afternoon, things got fairly relaxed in the Admin Building. Any student wandering in there at that time of day just had to be a Hall Monitor or someone looking to sign up for a meeting with a Guidance Counselor. Therefore, students moving respectfully and quietly through Admin were routinely ignored. I went through there whenever I needed a new pen or some other school supplies.

No, the really tricky part would be switching the tapes first thing in the morning. There was always a lot of confusion in the Admin offices in the morning, and more than a few folks with dazed and glazed eyeballs from the night before. Still, it seemed like it might be a good idea if I could dare someone else to make the switch. It could be part of an initiation process to be in a club. Or clique. Or gang. Wait, what? No, back up, let’s avoid the gangs and stick with the cliques. The girl cliques. Which were kind of like gangs, come to think of it.

Satin Sweethearts

It became clear to me that I needed to make contact with the Satin Sweethearts. They were not a sewing society. They were not a bowling team. They were not a car club. They were bad girls. Their quadruple-dagger emblem bore an alarming resemblance to that of the Waffen-SS logo of the Third Reich.

One bright and lovely morning during Nutrition Break, I sauntered over to the leader of the Satin Sweethearts so we could have a nice, quiet, polite, and very civilized conversation.

“Bunch of pussies,” I said. As you might imagine, that got her attention.

“What did you say to me?”

“Your girls have no guts.”

“Fuck you. They’ll kick your ass.”

“Hey, don’t blame the messenger. I’m just saying. Look, you make your new members shoplift something from the mall, and I’m telling you that doesn’t take any guts. You know they do it in teams. Two girls create a distraction while one girl tucks something in her blouse or under her skirt. Big deal. I’m proposing something a bit trickier and more fun.”

“Yeah, right. Get the hell out of here. Asshole.” Pause. “Like what?”

And that’s how I was able to get the tapes in and out of the Admin offices. A different girl filched them and swapped them every time. Neat. Sweet.

Good Morning High Students

Every one of the morning announcements was supposed to be fairly straightforward, as you can imagine. And they always began the same way:

“Good morning, students. This is Principal Oafley.” Slightly nasal voice. Guy sounded constipated. “And now I’d like to turn you over to a member of your Student Participation Leadership Advisory Team. Today, it’s your Team-Worker-in-Training, Mark Schriker, who will lead us in the Pledge to the flag.”

Perceptive readers will have noticed that Student Participation Leadership Advisory Team is SPLAT and that Team-Worker-in-Training is TWIT.

After the baying opening from Oafley, it was then time for one of the dweebs on the Student Council to go into a monotonous, mindless, by rote recitation of the Pledge.

“Thank you, Principal Oafley. Please rise and face the flag. Ready, begin. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

“Thank you, Mark. Good job, as usual. And now I’d like to turn you over to your girl’s vice principal, Miss Fairlegson, for the rest of the morning announcements.”

And so on. As I warned you, very boring. But after my editing, the Pledge was a bit different. In fact, everything was a bit different. . .

Tape Tricks

“Good morning, high students. This is Principal Oafley. And now I’d like to turn you over to your student shoddy president, Mark Shreiker, to lead us in the sledge to the flag.”

“Thank you, Principal Oaf. Please rise and deface the flag. Ready, begin. I pledge obeisance to de flag of de untied Snakes of America, and to the Republicans for which it stands, one notion, underwhelmed, invisible, with libertines and bustiers for all.”

“Thank you, Mark. Good hand job, as usual. And now I’d like to turn you over to your girl’s vice principal. Miss Fairlegson, for the rest of the boring announcements. Actually, I’d like to turn Miss Fairlegson over and I’d like to climb Miss Fairlegson and rise up on Miss Fairlegson and go down on Miss Fairlegson and really stick Miss Fairlegson very hard and — ”

There was a very loud POP and that morning’s broadcast ended abruptly. There was nothing but static over the classroom intercom speakers. Not that anyone heard it in the gales of laughter that swept through the campus.

In addition to the fun of screwing with the Admin folks every few weeks, the Satin Sweethearts were now quite accepting of my presence. After all, once they heard what I did with the tapes, I was accepted as one of the bad girls. Wait, that’s not right. Bad boy, not bad girl. Boy.

Well, okay, there was that one time when they made me an honorary member after I passed a very special initiation during which they dressed me up in some of their party outfits. But that’s a whole different story.

What? Oh yes, I looked very hot. Thank you for asking.

• To be continued in next chapter (click link to subscribe via RSS) ….

“Secret Sex, A Book Alive Online,” written and lived by John Scott G, is Copr. © 2011-2012 by JSG, all rights reserved under U.S. and international copyright conventions. Commercial use in any form is forbidden without express written permission of the author. Originally published on eNewsChannels.com with permission. Credits: Book cover design: Phil Hatten; Author Photo: Phil Hatten.

Chapter 12 – Numbers Game.

Jeanne was a quiet flirt. Whether she was in a classroom, out on the quad, or in the lunchroom, she didn’t say much but people gathered around her anyway. Attractive women can achieve this. It’s called the “moths-to-a-flame” phenomenon.

And it’s a lot of fun to watch. But it was soon evident that her flame did not appreciate my mothness. It was made clear that Jeanne’s public circle of friends didn’t have room for me. It was something she conveyed to me in a very subtle way:

“Stop bothering me at school,” she said, confronting me as we stood by a long row of lockers in the Humanities Building.

“What?”

“You have your friends and I have mine. Let’s keep it that way.”

“But we — ”

“You like playing The Game, right?” she asked in a cold, matter-of-fact tone.

A voice inside my head began screaming at full volume: Yes! Yes! Yes!

“Sure,” I said, as nonchalantly as possible.

“Okay, then stop bothering me at school.” She walked away. I just stood there in confusion and consternation. I wanted to yell something at her but got caught up in watching her body move. I watched her hair bouncing slightly with each step. I watched her hips swaying with each step. I watched her thighs flexing with each step. I watched her. . .  well, you know what I watched.

Weirdness and strangeness were familiar to me because, hey, I was in school. But Jeanne’s reaction was taking things to a new level of bizarre. At least three times a week, we touched, kissed, caressed, and made love when we were alone together in her house, but she wanted me to avoid her in public. Odd. Peculiar. Confusing. But I went along with it. A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do, right?

I tried to look at this as a “secret lover” kind of thing, but frankly, the situation didn’t make any sense to me. After all, everyone on the bus could see we were together, yet within the classrooms or anywhere on the school grounds she didn’t allow me into her own private group, a special cadre of associates, acquaintances, and hangers-on. Not sure if she considered any of them to be friends, although they all used that word.

What the Hell?

Questions swirled in my little brain. I wanted some perspective on this. So I asked some family members about the situation. Naturally, I talked to them without providing any incriminating information. In other words, I left out the really good details. But still, the search was on for some explanation of The Ways of Women. I started by asking my mom:

“Ahh, women,” said my mother with a smile. “Men will never know about women. We’re just different, but vive la difference.”

Which I believe is French for “hurray, tonight we have beef” or something very celebratory. Mom was good in so many ways, always providing a kind word, a hug, a snack, and excellent recommendations about clothing (just do the opposite of her suggestions) but she was hopeless when it came to dating advice. So, next I asked my dad:

“Ahh, women,” said my father with a smile. “You will never know for sure what goes on in their minds. That’s one of the mysteries of life. Learn to live with it. It can be fun.”

Yes, I was very lucky to be learning about the fun part. I just wanted to know about the crazy part. So next I asked my uncle:

“Ahh, fuck ‘em,” said my uncle with a smile.

Ah, some useful information. Yet not really an answer.

“Okie-dokie,” my uncle said, seeing my disappointment. “Listen up. There was this famous shrink named Freud. Looks like his name is spelled ‘free-uhd’ but it’s pronounced ‘froid.’ Anyway, he said that men don’t know what women want. And he’s right. Men don’t know what women want. And you know why?”

I shook my head.

“Because women don’t know what women want.”

I looked puzzled.

“All right,” he said, “let us now consider the species known as women. This is a category of creature that has half their wardrobe that fastens in the back. Is that logical?”

“Guess not.”

“Right. Not logical. Okay, this is a race of people that says they want a warm, loving, kind, strong, smart, caring and sensitive man with a sense of humor, and then they go out with the stupidest clod they can find as long as he has a hot car. Is that being straightforward?”

“Um, no.”

“Right. No. And this is a tribe that makes up rules of behavior that only apply to you and only when they want them to apply to you and woe unto you if you can’t figure out what the rules are and when they apply. Does that make any sense at all?” He didn’t even wait for my answer because he supplied his own: “No.”

He let that sink in. Man, it could be daunting whenever my uncle said stuff.

“So, if you find a girl who lets you do it,” he said, “do it!” He slapped a hand on my shoulder. “Afterwards, just look cool and uninterested in her and get the hell outta the way until she wants you around again. Now go get ‘em kid, and don’t bother me ’cause I’ve got serious drinking and smoking to do.” He gave me a bit of a shove but he was smiling.

Like I told you, Uncle Larry was frightening sometimes. Scary-true, but scary nonetheless.

Game On

So things proceeded with Jeanne as they had been proceeding. At school, I moved amongst my circle of friends and Jeanne moved in hers. She never introduced hers to me, and I never introduced mine to hers. In public, we were aloof and distant and reserved. Or mysterious and poetic and mythic. Or we were just being teenagers. Guess it all kind of depends on how you looked at it.

When we were on the bus, it was all fingertips and petting and exploring and lightly pinching and heavy breathing. When we were at her house, it was more of an Extravagant Explosion Exploratorium kind of thing. Here are some conversational highlights:

“That goes where? Really?!”

“Umm, that works great!”

“It’s kind of a tight fit unless. . . oh wow!”

“Don’t touch me there . . . not there. . . Yeah, there!”

And so on.

Game Players

There is an English proverb which states that all good things must come to an end. This may be true, but I didn’t see any reason why those good things couldn’t start up again the next afternoon or during the next bus ride. Besides, have you considered the contradictory information contained in proverbs?

“Look before you leap” vs. “He who hesitates is lost.”

“The pen is mightier than the sword.” vs. “Actions speak louder than words.”

“A change is as good as a holiday.” vs. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

“Birds of a feather flock together.” vs. “Opposites attract.”

“Clothes make the man.” vs. “Never judge a book by its cover.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” vs. “Familiarity breeds contempt.” (Both seemed to apply to our relationship.)

Discovering

One afternoon at her place, we were straightening the living room when I discovered a pair of panties scrunched down in between the sofa cushions. They were nice. Skimpy, flimsy, sheer. Great to look at and would be terrific to touch when they were filled out by a beautiful woman’s body.

“One of yours?” I asked, smiling.

“Let me see,” she said. “Nope.”

“One of your mom’s?”

“Are you kidding? She always wears cotton.”

“Your sister’s, then.”

“Nope.”

“Um, then I don’t — ”

“I told you before: you have your friends and I have mine.”

“You mean. . . ”

“You’re not the only one playing The Game,” she said.

Game Over

I had read about men with men and women with women but never met anyone who was involved with any of that. Or at least I’d never met anyone who talked about it. Picturing Jeanne with another girl wasn’t such a bad fantasy. Thoughts like that fueled the fire for several weeks. Until one day she mentioned something about having “a couple people over for gaming.”

“You mean me and you and your friend?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t mean that.”

“So, what are you talking about?”

“You’re not the only one.”

“Yeah, I get that. You have more than one girlfriend.”

“Yes.”

There was a pause.

“Am I your only boyfriend?”

“You’re not my boyfriend.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do,” she said.

I honestly didn’t know what was going on. I was out of my depth here. “How many players are we talking about?”

“I’m not going to give you a list of names.”

“There’s enough for a list?!”

“I knew you couldn’t handle this,” she said, and began straightening clothes in her closet. She did that whenever the conversation strayed onto a topic she didn’t like.

The conversation wasn’t much to my liking either, but we did keep talking, and slowly the picture emerged. There were about five different people involved at the moment and there had been dozens in the recent past. I was just the latest. We had been hot ‘n’ heavy for a while, to use her term, but now she was moving on.

Wait! “Moving-ing-ing on-on-on…” There was an echo to her words. Then there was an intense and frightening reverberation to all the sounds in her house. And soon there was a full roar everywhere, building to a crescendo of noise and sonic overload and cacophony and thunder that did not end.

“But. . . !?” I stammered. “I don’t. . .!?” I gulped. “What are you. . . ?!” I wasn’t questioning what she was saying — the meaning got through to me. But I literally could not hear her.

Nor could I hear anything else. I staggered out of her house, weak in the knees. Suddenly the sound cloud reversed itself. And there was Nothing. Nothing in the atmosphere but the empty whoosh of air. A car drove past in silence. Then another and another, each with a purity of silence. A dog in the yard across the street was barking without making any noise at all.

I began walking home while my head cleared. I was hurt. Dismayed. Shocked. Deflated. Until it occurred to me that I could play The Game with others.

Which brightened my mood somewhat. Although finding new partners proved more difficult than I had initially expected. Because, as it turns out, it was much easier for a desirable girl to play around than someone, well, like me. Still, it didn’t keep me from trying.

So allow me to say something to you now that is from the bottom of my heart and the top of my tummy (they are so close that I don’t know which one is applicable here). . . you must work hard, be diligent, remain dedicated. You must strive to be able to play on. And I hope that, as you move through your life, you will be able to utilize the lessons arranged for you in this chapter: No matter what obstacles or kitchen utensils you encounter in life, You Must Follow Your Dream! Even if your dream is to get laid.
 

• To be continued in next chapter (click link to subscribe via RSS) ….

“Secret Sex, A Book Alive Online,” written and lived by John Scott G, is Copr. © 2011-2012 by JSG, all rights reserved under U.S. and international copyright conventions. Commercial use in any form is forbidden without express written permission of the author. Originally published on eNewsChannels.com with permission. Credits: Book cover design: Phil Hatten; Author Photo: Phil Hatten.

Right on the Money

Frank Luntz continually strives to help powerful corporations and the rich obtain more wealth, often at the expense of a majority of U.S. citizens and certainly to the detriment of America as a whole. His method: reframe the debate by altering the terminology. Take a look at some specimens of his handiwork…

Exhibit 1: To help insurance companies in their ongoing crusade to plunder the bank accounts of a majority of the American people, Luntz had the GOP stop arguing against the necessary reform of healthcare and instead pontificate about “government takeover of healthcare.” The progressive plan is no such thing, of course, but the Lunzt language confuses a great many people. The irony is that many who are fooled are the very people who would be better off if America adopted some aspects of healthcare/insurance programs already proven successful in other democracies.

Exhibit 2: Siding with Wall Street, corporate raiders, vulture capitalists, and predatory bankers are other pet projects of Luntz. To help them evade retribution for the financial rape of American home buyers — as well as those who believed in saving money via their now-depleted pension plans — Luntz has the GOP apologists say that people are all just envious of anyone with wealth.

Exhibit 3: In an attempt to kill the inheritance tax on estates worth millions and millions of dollars, Luntz has altered the media discussion by having members of the GOP call it the “death tax.” This term helps fool many people into fearing that the tax might apply to them. This despite the fact that the inheritance tax only affects estates that are worth more than regular people could accumulate in multiple lifetimes.

Spreading the Bad Word

Have you ever noticed how the forces of the wealthy and powerful frequently all use the same phrases in their fight against progressive ideas? At “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” videotape editors will often assemble a montage of a clutch of right-wingers all using Lunzt language within the same twenty-four-hour news cycle. It’s humorous, in a sad sort of way. “Obamacare,” says a GOP senator. “Obamacare,” says a GOP congressman. “Obamacare,” says a member of a conservative-funded phony think tank. And so on. The right-wing media falls in line for this ploy again and again.

Right-Wing Media?

Wait, right-wing media? Correct. One of the language scams pulled off by the Greed-On-Parade party is the term left-wing media or left-wing media bias. There is no such thing. Besides a few independent magazines (such as The Nation and Mother Jones), some brilliant but isolated newsletters (such as The Hightower Lowdown), and a couple of comedy programs (“Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”), all but two major media outlets are owned by conservative corporations.

Other than MSNBC and the still-fledgling Current cable channel, the major TV networks, newspaper syndicates, major radio networks, and mainstream magazines all have conservative owners. Some of the writers, reporters, and editors may be progressive, but the corporate entities issuing their paychecks are conservative, sometimes staunchly so (can you say Rupert Murdoch?)

Attack from Your Weakness

In the war of words, the GOP often describes their own faults and them aims them at progressives. In this way, when the terms are accurately pointed at the oligarchy, the effect is blunted because it now feels a bit like the schoolyard “I know you are, but what am I?”

Consider this quote from Newt Gingrich: “They are so consumed by their own power, by a Mussolini-like ego, that their willingness to run over normal human beings and to destroy honest institutions is unending.” Obviously this describes members of the GOP, yet he directed it at the democratic party. Naturally, the right-wing media made little note of this.

In 1990, the Gingrich political action committee called GOPAC issued a memo entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” with a list of words that describe republicans. The list included words like “decay, sick, shallow, traitors, threaten, devour, corruption, incompetent, destructive, greed, intolerant, stagnation, selfish, insensitive, spending, shame, disgrace, bizarre, cheat, steal, bosses, abuse of power.” But here’s the twist: they suggested that these words should be used by the GOP to describe democrats. Talk about attacking from a position of your own weakness! Typically, the right-wing media doesn’t call them out on this subterfuge.

Unholy Alliance

Gingrich and Luntz are part of an interesting unholy alliance. While only unofficially attached, they march in lock-step with numerous powerful figures, some publically recognized, some quite shadowy.

Roger Ailes is perhaps the most important of these. Ailes is president of the misleadingly-named Fox News Channel, and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group. Ailes presides over a massive propaganda dissemination organization available to 90 million homes, not to mention bars, hotels, restaurants, and other retail locations. Fox is a distasteful part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which also spews bile through its newspapers, including the formerly somewhat objective Wall Street Journal. By constantly pumping out distortions, prevarications, and outright lies, the so-called news of News Corporation ramps up fear while suppressing facts.

While every employee of Fox shares in the ongoing deception, many other figures are also part of the anti-truth brigade. Obviously the biggest one would be Rush Limbaugh (yeah, pun intended) but there are oodles of others:

Karl Rove; former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush; Fox News Contributor; Wall Street Journal columnist.

Carl Forti: director of four groups that have already spent thirty-three million dollars on sharp-edged television advertising boosting Republicans and/or attacking Democrats personally. He has been called “the Alexander the Great of the Republican independent expenditure world.”

George Will; consistently inaccurate and supremely condescending panelist on Sunday morning TV programs.

Laura Ingraham; bloviating radio host who formerly worked for Ronald Reagan and Clarence Thomas.

Matt Drudge; semi-literate web content supplier.

Peggy Noonan; official apologist for all things Bush and Reagan.

Michael Savage; not to be confused with the erudite and populist Dan Savage, Michael Savage is one of seemingly hundreds of radio fear-mongers. One of his claims to fame is having been barred from entering the United Kingdom for “seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred.”

Pat Buchanan; described by the Anti-Defamation League as an “unrepentant bigot” who “repeatedly demonizes Jews and minorities and openly affiliates with white supremacists.”

Philip Anschutz; owner of the Examiner newspaper syndicate.

Charles Krauthammer; syndicated columnist.

Stephen Moore; Wall Street Journal editorial board member.

Ramesh Ponnuru; senior editor for The National Review.

Brothers in Lawless

Charles and David Koch are also part of that list. The Koch brothers (it’s pronounced “coke”) are billionaires who fund many fake research organizations and rabble-rousing groups that help obscure the issues, including the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Tea Party.

When you look up Koch Industries, you find such lovely news items as: “Trading with Iran,” “Bribing foreign officials,” “Deadly butane explosion,” “Falsifying benzene emissions,” “Fighting greenhouse gas regulations,” “Denying climate change,” “Fighting Wall Street reform,” and “Stealing oil on Indian reservations.”

Adding injury to other insults and injuries, Koch Industries was named one of the United States’ top 10 air polluters in a 2010 study released by the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts.

A Kansas-based company, Koch Industries is the second largest privately held company in America. Charles and David Koch are worth a combined $43 billion. Every time you purchase products from their Georgia-Pacific company, including Quilted Northern, Angel Soft, Brawny, Sparkle, Vanity Fair, and Dixie paper goods, you help them afford to spread more lies and cause more pain.

Dark List

Some people reviewing this text have asked why I’m not mentioning other disreputable characters such as O’Reilly, Hannity, and Coulter. Well, because: Bill “Sexual Harrassment” O’Reilly and Sean “I Get My Data from the Teleprompter” Hannity are employees of Fox, which has been covered, while Coulter is just an unfunny comic.

Others have asked why the religiosity freaks like Pat Robertson are not mentioned. Excellent point. Every Sunday, and often during the week, thousands of these make-a-buck-from-the-bible folks help spread the manure of the right-wing. Among them are Jim Garlow, senior pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church and chairman of a Newt Gingrich operation called Renewing American Leadership; Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition and former chairman of the odious Christian Coalition; Richard Lee, senior pastor of First Redeemer Church; Dave Stone, senior minister at Southeast Christian Church; Robert George, founder of the conservative American Principles Project and, for some reason, a professor at Princeton; Tom Mullins, senior pastor and founder of Christ Fellowship Church; John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church; Stephan Broden, senior pastor at Fairpark Bible Fellowship; and David Barton, founder and president of a so-called pro-family organization, Wallbuilders. As you can imagine, all are a menace and quite repulsive.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

When GOP candidates provide unintended hilarity as they attempt to spread the right-wing lies, the media refuses to call them out on it. For example:

Mitt Romney said that business does not harm people by looking toward short-term profits but instead focuses on the long-term. Yes, he actually made such a statement. It is just possible that even the most slow-witted Republican voter can see through that whopper. But the news shows paid scant attention to the statement.

Rick Santorum attacked Romney for being “just a paler shade of what we have” in the White House. It was mentioned on news shows, but without much follow-up about how this reveals the racial bias of this candidate.

Ron Paul says Social Security is unconstitutional. Jon Huntsman admitted to being “radical” for wanting to end Medicare as we know it. Rick Perry (owner of the “Niggerhead” ranch) tops the Paul and Huntsman oddities by saying Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and federal education policies are all unconstitutional. But do these dangerous views get much coverage? Not that I’ve seen.

The disconnect between GOP posturing and media scrutiny is sometimes bizarre. Huntsman, who spent most of his campaign pointing out Romney deficiencies and labeling him unelectable, exited the race and endorsed . . . Romney. It has gotten only a blip in the media. As I’m writing this, a TV spot just ran announcing that the next GOP debate is being sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute. Again, not a peep from the press.

Ignoring Change and Hope

Something else not well-covered by the media: The White House recently said that U.S. corporations must pay their share in taxes, and that the U.S. tax code should not encourage companies to hire workers in Mexico, India, eastern Europe and elsewhere rather than in struggling American cities.

The White House also proposed the following: increasing the amount of foreign income subject to U.S. tax law; requiring companies to treat some foreign subsidiaries as corporations for U.S. tax purposes; and a set of disclosure rules to discourage wealthy individuals and companies from hiding wealth in off-shore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands.

And where did I read about all this? In a detailed article in the online version of the The Guardian, a U.K. publication. The U.S. right-wing media simply mentioned it and moved on to other topics.

Yes, there are a few lonely voices echoing amidst the right-wing cacophony. For example, this from Michael Kindt, writing on Cagle(dot)com: “Perhaps someday Americans will realize that liberty has a broader definition. We should be free to live our lives without interference from government so long as we don’t hurt other people, but we should also be free FROM things, too, like poisoned air or water resulting from completely unregulated industry.” This should be a topic for every GOP debate, but the questioners are mostly shirking their responsibilities. These people are, after all, employees of right-wing organizations.

What They Say/What They Mean

Because so much of our national news and commentary comes from the perspective of autocracy, communication gets warped. When the news is perverted in this manner, there is no examination of statements, no follow-up on meaning. Since the media is foregoing their responsibility, the rest of us must pick up the slack. Here are some of my efforts:

They say: “President Obama wants to ‘fundamentally transform’ America.” They mean: “The GOP likes things the way they are: a wealthy corporatized elite holding the majority of the nation at arm’s length.”

They say: “We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great.” They mean: “We like the fact that the founding fathers were rich, white, slave-owning men of property.”

They say: “Obama wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society.” They mean: “Don’t be cutting into the fabulous profits enjoyed by our corporate pals in banking, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, petroleum, etc.”

They say: “Lower taxes on job creators.” They mean: “Give more to the rich while raising taxes and reducing infrastructure for a majority of citizens.”

They say: “Get rid of regulations that prevent growth.” They mean: “We don’t need to worry about unclean water, tainted food, or uninspected prescription drugs.”

They say: “Government must stop taking money from hardworking Americans.” They mean: “Government must stop taking money from rich Americans.”

Legacy

Thanks to Frank Luntz, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, Carl Forti, the Koch Brothers, GOP candidates, and the entire conservative cabal of contributors, combatants, and commentators, the following points will remain relevant:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. — Joseph Goebbels

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. — Benito Mussolini

Article is Copr. © 2012 by John Scott G, and originally published on eNewsChannels.com – all commercial rights reserved.

Chapter 11 – Get on the Bus.

A school bus might seem like a personal injury lawyer’s wet dream. A long metal tube on wheels. Very high center-of-gravity. No seat belts for the passengers. Often over-crowded, with three kids in seats designed for two people.

There’s no personal history here; no school bus crash stories. I’m just saying.

I’m also just saying that school buses are driven by people on an odd split-schedule requiring them to be up before dawn for the morning run and then back at work in the afternoon to get the little bastards home.

What do bus drivers do between nine a.m. and 3 p.m.? Well, there are the field trips. Remember, back when you were in middle school, how sometimes you’d be taken out of class and you’d get to go tour a museum, or see some classical music, or take part in a spelling bee, or watch a session of local government? I sure do because school buses are an erotic memory for me.

WTF I hear you say. Yes, erotic, and I can tell you exactly why: it was all because of a girl named Jeanne. I remember everything about her, starting with her name: Jeanne Something. (Okay, sorry, I don’t remember her last name.) But I remember so much else. She was a young boy’s fantasy come to life. Beautiful. Lovely. Smart. How smart? Hey, she came up with The Game.

The Game

All you needed were two players and an egg timer. You know, one of those little hourglass-shaped dealamabobs with sand inside. You flip it over and the sand runs from the top to the bottom. Takes about three minutes. Okay, a watch would also work but there was a kind of classic simplicity to the egg timer.

Anyway, the rules for The Game were simple: One person holds still for the whole three minutes. That’s it.

Oh, did I forget to mention that while one person is holding still, the other person can try making them move by doing, well, anything? Yeah, that makes The Game a LOT more interesting.

There were some exceptions to the rule about holding still. You could turn your head to watch what was being done to you. Or to see what was about to be done to you. You could make facial expressions. You could moan. You could close your eyes. You could beg. You could kiss.

We played The Game the first time I sat next to Jeanne on the bus. From her purse, she pulled a plastic egg timer attached to a rosary. She looped it over the rail of the seat in front of us. After she explained The Game, she told me I could go first. I was very shy. I gently touched her wrist. She didn’t move. I touched her neck. She arched an eyebrow. I slid my hand over to the back of her neck. She closed her eyes for a second. I touched her ears. I touched her shoulders. I slowly ran my fingers up and down her arm. Then I let my hands lightly caress her knees. Just before the sand ran out of the timer, I held her hand.

“For that,” she said, “you’ll get to play again. But right now, it’s my turn.”

She did everything to me that I had done to her, and then went a little further. I am not the smartest guy in the world but even I could figure out that whatever is done by one player is a signal that that’s what that player wants done back.

We sat next to each other on the bus every day. We tried to sit in the very back of the bus so we could kiss. She sometimes got a couple of her tall friends to sit in front of us so we would not be seen by the bus driver in his rear-view mirror. Even so, we were spotted once and the driver announced over the vehicle’s intercom system, “Hey you two in the back. No making out on the bus.” It was the proudest moment of my life up to that point.

Time is Relative

For weeks, those bus rides were the most important part of my day. My week. My very existence. And it’s amazing how brief they seemed to be. Before knowing Jeanne, the trips to and from school were long, dull, boring, dull, uneventful and rather dull. In other words, they were dull. After knowing Jeanne, the trips to and from school were spectacular, exciting, uplifting, stimulating, thrilling, and more importantly, they were over waytoomuchtoofast.

Everything was perfect. Then, one day, suddenly, a shock. Jeanne’s parents were moving! Horror. Terror. Disaster. Apoplexy. Okay, okay, calm down. They were simply moving to a bigger house in a new development in the same town. It was just a few miles away. But here’s the frightening part:

It put her on a different bus route. See above-mentioned Horror, Terror, Disaster, etc.

Wherever her new house was located, it was now very clear that my parents had to move there, too. Unfortunately, they didn’t see it that way. So, understandably, I discovered a sudden need to ride a different bus to and from school. Or at least on the way home. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” said the driver of Jeanne’s new bus. “That’s a four-oh-two,” he said, indicating my bus pass. Yup, it was stamped 402 in big black letters. “This is route one-one-seven, kid. You’re in the wrong line.”

Obviously, I needed a different bus pass, but for some strange reason the school was disinclined to give me one.

My First Brief Career as a Criminal

Funny how hormones can lead to crime. In this case, forgery. And I admit it, I was ready, willing and determined to “falsely make, alter, or counterfeit” a document which I could “present as true and genuine” with a clear “intent to deceive.” Which sounds bad but I am sure you’ll agree that I now was demonstrating strong motivation and dedication, both of which my teachers had been requesting for quite some time. My life now had purpose and direction. It was imperative that I be able to get on the right/wrong bus.

I began doing research into falsifying documents. How did the big guys do it? Again, it’s amazing what you can find in the library. I learned about type fonts, kerning, leading, typesetting, layout, design, types of paper, and more.

Using my own bus pass (the dreaded, antiquated, and entirely useless Route 402) as a guide, I began putting together what was needed to create a reasonable facsimile of a second bus pass (the wonderful, new, and altogether splendid Route 117).

So, I asked myself, what nearby firm had typesetting capabilities? Ah, the local Weekly Shopper newspaper. I never thought much of those rags before but with my newfound interest, I volunteered to help them with their mailing labels, “just to get some work experience for my resume, ma’am,” I told them. Which brought big smiles from the Weekly Shopper staff. “What a nice young man,” they said. “And so movtivated!”

A few hours of work and it was a simple matter to express my new newfound interest in the typesetting department. “Say, that’s interesting!” I told them. They let me try it. I did my name in Courier, just like on my bus pass. “Oh, why don’t you try something more creative,” they suggested. “Good idea,” I replied and then typeset all the rest of the info on the bus pass, which involved Times Roman regular, bold and extended, not to mention Helvetica light, bold, compressed, rounded, and extended.

A little time in the Layout and Paste-Up department and quite a bit of the fake pass was all set. The big problem for me was the oversize one-one-seven; the numerals were nearly a half-inch high and printed in a mottled pattern.

“Wow,” I said to one of the nice ladies at the Weekly Shopper. “This is a strange type font on my bus pass.”

“Looks kind of like a rubber stamp,” said the nice lady.

Suddenly, I had a new, new, newfound interest. This time in rubber stamps. Hmm, they were blocks of rubber. Like a big rubber eraser. Like the big block erasers in the art room at school. If I had one of those, I could carve a one and a seven to make the big bold one, one, seven. Suddenly, I developed a new, new, etcetera, interest in art. Of course, my interest lasted only long enough to purloin an eraser and some Xacto blades.

Real vs. Fake

Working under the brightest light bulb in the house and using a magnifying glass to check my progress, I cut, whittled, carved, and sanded the eraser until I had the numbers I needed. Then, borrowing an ink pad from my dad’s desk, I added the all-important one-one-seven to my fake pass.

I was so proud of my creation. I laid it on my bedside table and put the real one next to it. Oops, big problem. They were not the same. The fake one was too good. Too new. All bright and shiny. Hell, the real one probably didn’t even look that crisp and sharp when I first got it.

Well, how did the real bus pass become a bit worn-looking? From being carried around in my wallet while I sat on it. So I put the one-one-seven in my wallet and sat on it. And bounced on it. Every so often, I pulled it out, fondled it, and then returned it to my wallet and sat on it again.

Nope, still not “used” enough. So it was back to the library for more research on forgers and their creations. I read a little from a lot of books. And then I found the solution and raced home to try it.

I took a small paint brush that had previously been used to paint model airplanes. Then I poured myself a glass of iced tea. Very carefully, I coated the back of the pass with the tea, then blotted it with my wash cloth and dried it in front of a house fan. And it was soon just as good as old.

“What in heaven’s name did you get on your wash cloth?” my mom asked later.

Next afternoon, I was back on the bus with Jeanne. And therefore The Game could continue.

Play House

Turned out that going with Jeanne to her new house had a tremendous advantage. Both her parents worked and her sister hung out somewhere else until about 6:30 when she came home to change for work.

My plan for the end of our “date” was to walk to the nearest library and call my folks, saying that I had needed to work on a school report and only that branch had the reference books I needed. But it turned out that Jeanne’s sister, who was old enough to drive, could drop me off a couple blocks from my house on her way to the IHOP or Burger Emporium or whatever mall store was employing her that month after the previous place had fired her for shoplifting or absconding with some of the funds in the cash register.

This meant that Jeanne and I had the house to ourselves from 3:30 to 6:30. Great! Now, do you see any potential problems with this set-up? I mean, what kind of trouble could we get into while playing The Game alone in the house?

As it turns out, we could get into quite a bit of trouble. In fact, we got into trouble on the couch. On the chairs. On the floor. Up against a wall. On top of the TV. Wait, what? Yup, they had one of those monster long cabinets that held a TV, stereo, books, and records (as in vinyl 33-1/3 rpm platters, which are just like compact discs only bigger and cooler and more fragile but heavier). This piece of furniture weighed a ton and easily supported us.

We would turn on the radio or TV or hi-fi, dance a little, do The Game a little, and turn ourselves on. Naturally, we sometimes ended up atop the appropriately-named “entertainment center.” During those times when I was on the bottom, I noticed that some of the areas of the unit were warm from the electronics and tubes and fans and whatnot inside. Not that it mattered that much because our bodies made all of it warm rather quickly.

Speaking of warm, one afternoon, she led me into the kitchen.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Kitchen utensils,” she said. “You can use this one on me here.” She demonstrated it for a minute that seemed like nanoseconds. Then she stopped and shrugged. “It’ll work a lot better once these clothes are off.”

“I’ll bet.”

“But you have to warm it up first.”

“Well, I don’t seem to have any trouble warming you up.”

“Not me, silly. I’ll get undressed and you take care of this.”

Here are a few handy tips in case you find yourself in a similar situation: You can warm up kitchen utensils by blowing hot air on them, holding them in your hands, clasping them between your legs, wrapping them in a towel and putting them in the oven for a few minutes, submersing them in a pot of hot water, laying them next to the toaster, and so on.

As long as we ended up together, I was okay with this new variety of gaming, although call me old fashioned, I preferred the version where it was just me and her without the implements.

Still, speaking as a boy, I’d have to say that everything about this whole situation was absolutely and astonishingly perfect in every way. Right up until I found out Jeanne was also playing The Game with someone else.
 

• To be continued in next chapter (click link to subscribe via RSS) ….

“Secret Sex, A Book Alive Online,” written and lived by John Scott G, is Copr. © 2011-2012 by JSG, all rights reserved under U.S. and international copyright conventions. Commercial use in any form is forbidden without express written permission of the author. Originally published on eNewsChannels.com with permission. Credits: Book cover design: Phil Hatten; Author Photo: JSG.

Chapter 10 – Boss Angeles.

There are two possible openings to this chapter. Here’s the straight-to-the-point version: Our family had enough of Fort Richland and moved.

And here’s the arty-as-hell version: After a few years in the richly rigid and unintentionally Dadaistic city of Richland, the entire family was ready for a saner lifestyle and a more cultured existence. But we didn’t get it because we moved to Los Angeles.

Radio Waves

Right from the start, I was deliriously happy with Los Angeles because of the radio stations.

DJ: Hey, welcome to the boss sound from the “Los” town! This is your main boy on your joy toy, the glad grad with the sonic pad! Yes, baby! It’s Commander Space on the rockin’ place! Where it’s at, where it’s happening, where it’s groooooooovy, baby! Right here, everything is all NOW, all the time! So remember, gals and pals, ya gotta Hear It, Don’t Fear It. And you know you’re gonna hear it ’cause we are 50,000 ear-dusting gut-busting watts of musical excitement! And you are Dialed In, baby! Ya know who we be, so say it with me, babes, we are: K! F! U! K! in Boss Angeles!

[Cue semi-wiggy barely-controlled freak-out music track, maybe something like "Psychotic Reaction" by Count Five or "Incense and Peppermints" by Strawberry Alarm Clock.]

Can you imagine how Southern California seemed to me? Coming from the Midwest by way of Podville, this place was more than a whole new world for me, it was a whole new universe. Everything was beyond the norm. It was Over The Top, Totally In, and Far Out all at the same time. This was a planet seemingly made up of bleached blondes and blonde beaches, barrels of barbiturates and oodles of booze, customized cars and customized pharmaceutical concoctions.

Beach City Laid-Back Revolutionaries

Culture shock hit me like a cherry bomb flushed down a boy’s room toilet. Even the geography of the city was awesome. Every part of Southern California seemed like it was close to the beach. There was something about the air and sky that whispered “ocean nearby.” Even if you were in the middle of Rancho Cucamonga, which is at least fifty miles from the beach, somehow it always felt as if the waves were right past the next intersection.

Unfortunately, a beach city tends to attract people whose noggins are full of very few ideas and whose work ethic lacked what my grandfather called “oomph.” So when the layabouts of So-Cal felt they needed to Express Themselves they formed a mini-mob and, despite holding practically no views of any kind, they voiced them anyway. . .

LEADER: What do we want?

CROWD: Some stuff, man!

LEADER: When do we want it?

CROWD: Right now, or like, soon!

True, there were some disgruntled and disaffected souls who practiced revolution. Well, they practiced talking about revolution, although they usually didn’t do anything about it. They usually didn’t do anything about it because of two things: great weather and the availability of drugs. The need for actual insurrection was often lost in a balmy breeze and a shifting haze of Cannabis Sativa. That’s the wild stuff from the hemp plant. We are talking weed. Ganja. Bud. Pot. Chronic. Maryjane. Or my favorite term, wacky tobacky, which wasn’t used much by the Locals, but was a fave expression of Uncle Gerry.

“That wacky tobacky has a tendency to mellow things out,” he said.

“Can I try some?” I asked him.

“Naw, your parents would be upset.”

“Couldn’t you mellow them out with some first?”

He smiled. “That’s an interesting idea,” he said and then winked at me. It was like a promise of a present to be enjoyed in the not-too-distant-future.

Just as an aside, I’ve never understood why the USA spends so much money on every possible type of tactical military weaponry in order to launch an invasion or incursion or whatever; why go through all that trouble when we could probably disarm entire topographical regions just by dropping pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes from cargo planes.

But I digress.

Life+Style=Attitude

There were lots of different lifestyles to investigate or emulate in La-La Land. While people around the globe referred to us as L.A. or Hollywood, we called the areas by far more specific names like Van Nuys, Norwalk, Wittier, Sierra Madre, Alhambra, Santa Monica, and so on. The place is home to millions of people in about six dozen interconnecting cities and a lot of ‘em offered numerous choices of activities.

Talk about diversity! On the one hand there were surfers; on the other hand there were citizen’s planning organizations. Members of car clubs cruised the streets on Wednesday nights, but members of book clubs met at the library on Saturday mornings. Over here were musicians; over there were members of the John Birch Society. Do you like poetry? They’ve got entire societies of poets. Do you like chess? You can play in rec rooms, dorm rooms, or in the park. Bowling, horseback riding, knitting, politics, religion, sports, whittling, art. . . you name it, L.A. had it.

Anything you could imagine (and a lot you wouldn’t think of despite thinking for about a million years) could be found in El Lay. There were even some guys who took a very creative view of what could be put together with everyday items that were easily purchased at the local hardware store.

“We would do interesting things with chemicals and propellant,” one of them told me. “So far, we never, kind of, ever got caught.” (And yes, these guys probably did have something to do with the development of the late eighties/early nineties television show, “MacGyver,” but knowing Hollywood, they probably didn’t get paid anything for it.)

Bubble

Like New York City, there actually was too much going on. Unlike New York City, you could do things inside an insular bubble that kept out the real world. I remember going on some sort of group outing, I think to see a movie in Westwood, and on the way back all of us got very excited about this great new promotional structure that had been erected to announce the upcoming release of a new Beatles album. At least, that’s what we assumed. It was monstrously huge and could be seen for miles around.

We described it to our friends once we got home and we were shocked to learn it was part of some religious group’s architectural offering, or something. “That’s a statue of the Angel Moroni,” we were told by Ted, one of whose parents was an actual member of the organization.

We then were told the Full Story . . . Apparently, there’s this angel who guards the “golden plates,” which are the source of some important book. Or maybe it was that Moroni was a person who wrote in the “golden plates” back in pre-Columbia days, then died and became an angel who now guards the plate thingies. Or something. It’s about as realistic as someone living inside a whale, when you get right down to it.

Ted told us all of this gobbledygook in a very serious manner and we were suitably impressed. Which means we managed not to laugh, although the pressure was building up by the time he paused for breath.

“Ah yes,” he said, “the Angel Moroni. Of course,” he added, “the kids call it Angel Macaroni.” Not a great joke. A juvenile joke. A joke for eight-year-olds. But we exploded with laughter. What a release of tension! When we all caught our breath, Ted added, “And the rest of us just refer to it as Angie Moron or The Angle Maroon.” We all enjoyed a good chuckle over the whole thing. Yes, including Ted.

Sex, Drugs, Rock, Shock

While I thought the surrealism of the Macaroni thing was very funny, and the customized cars were very cool, and the surfer chicks were really well-built, I just wasn’t sure what group to try to join. And besides, deep down inside, I was just like a bunch of my generation, who, when asked if we thought ignorance and apathy were big problems, our mumbled answers were that we didn’t know and didn’t care.

Despite the lack of initiative among all us would-be rebels, there were a bunch of revolutions going on at the time: political, anti-war, fashion, sexual. But you probably want to hear about the sexual revolution, am I right?

Let’s try that again: Am I right?

That’s more like it. Now I want you all to get in the proper mood for a presentation of some important aspects of the sexual revolution. It’s vital that you understand the feeling of freedom it conferred upon the teen members of the proletariat, especially those of us who came from a closed-in, buttoned-down, up-tight, middle class, middle-American failed-Protestant background.

A lot of time has gone into finding a good way to demonstrate this concept. Once we begin, I think you’ll see that we have come up with the best way for you to fully “get it.”

So, to appreciate the true spirit of the sixties, I want you to stand up now and remove all your clothes. Then we’ll turn and go to the first person to your right and help them remove all their clothes. Then, marching bare arm in bare arm, naked hip next to naked hip, you can gather more and more people in your immodest movement. Feel the freedom of being able to live totally unencumbered by those false symbols of antiquated conformity. You’ll be liberated and refreshed by being able to face the world in your natural-born state of existence.

So, let’s all stand up right now, take off your clothes, and hug the first person you see. Everyone will feel so much better because of this. Really, it’s going to be quite an exalted experience. All right, here we go, we’re all standing up and getting rid of those restrictive garments. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

No problem, everything’s fine, just go ahead now. I’ll wait.

Oh, you want me to go first? No problem. Hold on a sec’. . .

There we are. Hold on another sec’ while I turn up the thermostat. As you can see, it’s a bit cold in here. . . . Okay, I’m back. Now it’s your turn. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Uh, people, the clothing?

Is there some kind of problem here? You’re reading this so I know you understand English. The directions are fairly simple.

Step one: locate clothing.

Step two: remove them.

Look, you managed to dress yourself this morning, right? Okay then. Just do it again in reverse.

People, work with me. This is the best way you’ll be able to experience the true humanity of humanity, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the skin, the simple splendor of the mortal body. Doing this will be magical, mystical, beautiful! It will be your way to participate in a minor miracle of sharing. Now, smile, take a deep breath, take off your clothes and start hugging people in the goddam spirit of love and understanding!

• To be continued in next chapter (click link to subscribe via RSS) ….

“Secret Sex, A Book Alive Online,” written and lived by John Scott G, is Copr. © 2011-2012 by JSG, all rights reserved under U.S. and international copyright conventions. Commercial use in any form is forbidden without express written permission of the author. Originally published on eNewsChannels.com with permission. Credits: Book cover design: Phil Hatten; Author Photo: Phil Hatten.

Chapter 9 – Playing in the Poison.

My dad was speaking on the telephone. Well, mostly he was listening intently on the telephone. From what he was saying, it sure seemed like it was a Very Serious Conversation. Which was no big deal to me as a kid except for one thing: this Very Serious Conversation was about me. I wanted so much to be in on both sides of the discussion but of course could only catch one-half of it.

“I see,” said my dad into the phone. There was a long pause. From my standpoint, it was an ominous pause.

“I see,” he said again. There was another long break in the action. My mom and I watched from across the room, trying not to make any noise, hoping that somehow we’d be able to catch some of the words the other person was speaking.

“My thoughts?” asked my dad, his voice sounding too loud in the room, although he was speaking in a normal tone of voice. “Well, what you’re saying is not entirely surprising.” Pause. “That’s right,” my dad said, “because we’ve heard this before.” Pause.

“Yes, at other schools. And bible study class. And Indian Guides. And the Cub Scouts. And the Boy Scouts. And Little League. And the little theater group. You are making a fairly common observation, I’m afraid.”

Short torturous pause.

“Um-hm, future. I agree.”

Long torturous pause.

“I agree with that as well.”

Frighteningly long torturous pause.

“You can rest assured I will do so.”

Pause.

“Not at all. A pleasure talking to you. You have a good rest of the evening, too.”

He hung up the phone.

We endured yet another hiatus. The seconds dripped by like, well, like something taking a long time to drip.

“So?” asked my mom. “Yeah, so?” I thought to myself. But I kept silent. It just didn’t feel as if this was the right time for me to be saying anything.

“Well,” said my dad, “it appears that the IQ test you took a few years ago has once again come back to haunt you, young man. That was your school’s Boys Vice Principal and it seems that you are, and you know what I am about to say . . . ”

We all did. And so we all said it together:

“Not living up to your potential!”

We all laughed. Except my mom and dad.

“This is serious,” he said.

Uh-oh. How serious? Serious as in I’m going to have to really buckle down and apply myself and make an extra effort to pay attention in class and not show up the teachers whenever they say something that was not accurate? Or serious as in for the love of God just keep quiet and pretend to go along with the crowd so we don’t have another one of these phone calls? Or (gulp) worse?

“First of all,” said my dad, “you’re going to have to really buckle down and apply yourself.”

I nodded. My mom nodded, although it seemed less like moral support and more like the threat of Armageddon.

“And,” my dad continued, “you’re going to have to make an extra effort to pay attention in class.”

I nodded again. The soul of reason and responsibility, that was me.

“And it’s very important that you not show up your teachers whenever they say something that is just plain wrong.”

I nodded. Vehemently. Earnestly. You know, as if I really really meant it.

Pause.

“And for the love of God,” said my mom, “would you please just keep quiet and pretend to go along with the crowd so we don’t have another one of these phone calls?”

Whew! I was off the hook! Until the next time.

Paying Attention

Okay, now folks, whether you’re a parent or not, just consider that phrase. “Paying attention.” Should attention be something that you pay for? Think about the cost of it. What the hell is supposed to be paid for getting useless information that’s supposed to widen my imagination but only succeeds in creating walls of conformity . . .

The whole thing makes me think about those terrible late-night TV commercials. “How much would you pay for the twelve zinc-encrusted commemorative coins AND the electric-powered sofa pillow polisher? Wait, before you answer, you’ll also receive the complete instruction manual to picking up beautiful women in bars PLUS six of the nineteen hidden secrets of the Universe! NOW how much would you pay???!”

[Note: for those of you who cannot wait for the coins, the pillow polisher, the women in bars instruction manual, and the secrets of the universe, just send twenty dollars to John Scott G c/o eNewsChannels, Los Angeles, CA. Mark the outside of the envelope "Contains cigar ashes -- do not open in drafty areas." Allow 6 to infinite weeks for delivery.]

But for those of us stuck in classrooms run by martinets, morons, and old maids, the price of attention was too damn high. Better that we should read something not in the curriculum. Better that we should engage the fantasy center of our craniums. Better that we should just go outside and play.

“Go outside and play,” said my mom, who said she wanted to “talk with your father,” which seemed innocuous enough to me but which I later found out meant something closer to “Get out of the house now because I’m going to fuck your father’s brains out.” Good for mom! And way to go, dad!

Playing Outside

While the parental components were playing inside, I joined my friends and acquaintances to play outside. And we were in luck that evening because the fog trucks were hitting the streets.

“Whooooooooooooosh!” said my friend Danny. Arms outstretched, head cocked to one side, he raced forward, then drifted to the left, and then back to the right until he disappeared into the swirling clouds of ground-covering vapor.

“Whooooooooooooosh!” said Danny’s brother Beau as he similarly ran through the haze.

A dozen “Whoooooooooooooshes!” rang out in the dusk of the evening, as many boys and several girls pretended to be jet airliners, jet fighters, jet bombers, or rockets. Some, of course, added the cockpit noises. “Roger, you a cleared for takeoff.” “Come left to zero niner four.” “Enemy engaged, target locked-on, fire at will,” followed by those krsssh-tschsh-czrusssshhh sounds of imitation automatic weapons fire and explosions.

Some of the other kids favored Frankenstein, Dracula, or The Shadow, so they were not “flying” through the clouds but rather lurching, gliding, or sleuthing through the mist. “Rrrrrrrrrrrrgh!” said one. “I’ve come to suck your blood!” said another. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” said a third.

One kid always wanted to be Sherlock Holmes. “Look Watson, the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

“Those are your sister’s footprints, dumbass,” came the reply.

“Who said that?”

“Wow, great detective!”

“I can’t see anything in the fog.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

And it was so: once you were close to the fog trucks, there was no discerning who was who or what was where. Did this lead to occasional collisions?

Bonk. “Oww!”

Yes, it did.

Fog Trucks?

That’s what we called them. About once a month during the summer, the streets of the city were closed as pick-up trucks and vans rolled slowly up and down the thoroughfares. Each vehicle would be carrying a large stainless steel tank and spraying equipment. Dense white clouds were propelled into the air behind the truck. The clouds would stay rooted to the ground but billow up about six to eight feet high and basically just kind of hang around for several minutes. And, of course, we could easily keep up with the slow-moving fogmakers.

We would run through the cotton-candy whiteness, lost in our own private worlds of bravery, adventure, intrigue and excitement, breathing in the seductive, mysterious and eddying clouds of Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane.

Let’s all say it together! “Die-chloro-die-phenyl-try-chloroethane.”

There, isn’t that fun! It really should be a song on “Sesame Street.”

We’re talking DDT here, an insecticide used mainly to control mosquito-borne malaria. (Yes, I know: so much of my youth seems to revolve around mosquitos that you’d think this would be a science-fiction book.)

Anyway, DDT. Also known as Anofex, Cesarex, Chlorophenothane, Dedelo, Dinocide, Didimac, Digmar, Genitox, Guesapon, Guesarol, Gexarex, Gyron, Hildit, Ixodex, Kopsol, Neocid, OMS 16, Micro DDT 75, Pentachlorin, Rukseam, R50, and Zerdane.

It was really popular, as you can tell. They were making it then like they make designer water now.

Breathe

DDT is now known to have problems. Well, to cause problems. Turns out that DDT is effective against mosquitos at first, but there are possible downside risks for other creatures that chance to breathe it. Studies have been shown that DDT brings with it some hazards that include chronic ill effects on the central nervous system, the liver, the kidneys, and the immune system. You know, minor stuff.

Plus, DDT is not rapidly metabolized by animals. Humans are animals, so you see the problem. With a biological half-life of around eight years (meaning it can take that long for an animal to metabolize half of whatever has been assimilated), DDT can build up inside you over time.

But none of us knew that. Not the kids. Not the parents. Perhaps the government scientists knew it, but if so they weren’t talking. “Hey, it kills the bugs, don’t it?” was how one of the truck drivers put it. And if he was satisfied, why should we worry? Voice of the people. A precursor to Joe-the-Plumber.

So we played in the clouds from the fog trucks, never once imagining that our parents or our civic leaders or our large and important corporations would let us do anything that would be harmful to any of us.

All that is different today. Right? Today, we live in more enlightened times, with proper oversight and intelligent governmental regulations that are firmly in place for the betterment of all and the protection of everyone in our whole society. Right?

Right? Hello?

Oh look, a politician is being interviewed on TV. And the fog trucks are back.
 

• To be continued in next chapter (click link to subscribe via RSS) ….

“Secret Sex, A Book Alive Online,” written and lived by John Scott G, is Copr. © 2011-2012 by JSG, all rights reserved under U.S. and international copyright conventions. Commercial use in any form is forbidden without express written permission of the author. Originally published on eNewsChannels.com with permission. Credits: Book cover design: Phil Hatten; Author Photo: Brian Forest.

Words as weapons of social redemption. That’s what you will find in the wild and witty tumble of exquisite prose flowing from the mind of Mark Morford, surely one of the most erudite fellows to ever create a newspaper column that has censors continually on the edge of their chairs. Twice each week, you can count on Morford to serve up a brilliantly written essay that is life-affirming while often chock-full of bile and battery.

There is so much evil in the world that Morford is compelled to rail against it time and time again in the hope that someone will join in his sweet song of satire so that there can be a Movement, a Revolution, or even just s series of Strongly-Worded Letters to the Editor. Or perhaps it’s enough that he generates a few collective sighs of recognition that there is another soul in the universe who calls out the mistakes, mismanagement, and megalomania of people with more power than humanity.

While oodles of readers share in his disgust for all things repressive, there are also large numbers of people who find his views a tad upsetting, such as those in cahoots with conglomerates, religions, right-wing politics, and police states. Needless to say, when the GOP is finally installed as the social enforcers for the mega churches and multi-national corporations, Mr. Morford will be among the very first who will be whisked away to a re-education camp.

In the meantime, he writes an explosive column in the San Francisco Chronicle (print) and SFGate (online) where his work is regularly excoriated by greedwhores and jesusfreaks throughout the English-speaking world.

Attacking for Good

All of the nearly 100 essays in this collection are excellent or better. All are thought-provoking as well as entertaining. Many are impassioned attacks on the appalling avarice and power-lust of people like the Koch brothers, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, Carl Forti, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Pat Robertson, and the many others of their ilk.

With an artful presentation of the facts, he always manages to make his case with the linguistic equivalent of a fusillade of venom-tipped dueling swords. Sometimes it gets personal. Consider this tidy little description of Dick “Puppetmaster” Cheney and his “hunting” trips:

Dick and about nine other overfed white guys sitting in a comfy luxury blind with their manly shotguns, waiting for the Westmoreland guy stationed behind them on a hill to release clusters of stunned, fat, tame game birds from a net. Then they shoot them. Lots and lots of them. And then they slap each other on the back. And they grunt and say nice shot as the birds drop like flies as dogs race back and forth hauling dead or dying birds into huge piles. What fun.

Time and time again, Morford reveals Truth, Anti-Beauty, and the American Way of doom, death, decay, and destruction that is being carried out in the name of power and profit.

Positivity

The most heated debate seems to arise from his columns exposing the hypocrisy, hatred and fear-mongering of the right. However, Morford will also gleefully deliver a head-slapping turnaround into positivity. Consider this excerpt from one of his columns offering us an optimistic way of looking at the world:

Realize that for every ongoing war and religious outrage and environmental devastation and bogus Iraqi attack plan, there are a thousand counter-balancing acts of staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all over the world, right now, on a breathtaking scale, from flower box to cathedral.

Other columns take a comedic turn, while still upholding the Morford tradition of attacking trolls and troglodytes wherever he may discover them:

I say our culture needs psycho parents and their preening, hyperplucked kids, simply because the culture needs future Paris Hiltons and Lindsay Lohans and spoiled UCLA sorority girls with names like Dakota and Bree because, well, who else will we mock? . . . Who will grow up to date all the obnoxious frat guys and have lousy drunken sex with them for 3.2 minutes and later marry and soon contribute to prescription med statistics and America’s fine Christian divorce rate?

Email from the Dark Side

One of the ironies of the modern age is that many people who are most harmed by the policies and practices of the conservatives are tricked into voting for them. Much of this lunacy is fueled by religiosity mutants, all of whom are excoriated in in this book, and many of whom regularly send vicious, if grammatically inept, hate letters to Morford, who gleefully includes some examples of them. As he puts it:

Scattered like intellectual potholes throughout TDS, you’ll find a very bleak bizarro-world where everything is backwards and phlegmy and violent and sad. . . This is my hate mail. A premium sampling, a few dozen of the nastiest, most nauseating, hilarious, vile hunks of spittle I’ve received over the years. It is something to behold.

It is, indeed, a sore sight for any eyes. I couldn’t finish some of the letters. Too disgusting.

Killer Commentary

Morford writes in a style that is a titillating threat to the casual reader. I’ve sent his columns to some folks who have responded by saying “That was great but I’m exhausted after reading it!” The phrases come flying at you in squadrons, carrying you along on waves of emotion, elation, rage, and righteousness. This guy uses nouns, verbs and adjectives like bullets, sentences like stinger missiles, and paragraphs like cluster bombs.

When a writer decides to try altering the public consciousness, the approach often goes in one of two directions: either horror story or tug-at-the-heartstrings. Morford alternates between the two but does so with such dynamism that the effect is almost the same as a combination. In any case, his writing argues from the human side of each issue while not overlooking the social, political, and emotional positions.

You can judge the superb quality of his work by opening the book to any page at random and diving into his rivers of ruminations. I also think you can judge the effectiveness of his arguments by looking at the effluvia of those who attack him.

Mullet Haiku

Sprinkled through the book you will find a fine collection of haiku, the unrhymed Japanese-derived verse arranged into three lines of five/seven/five syllables. I know what some of you are thinking: Yipes! Poetry warning! Be advised that these are quite special in that they are what Morford calls Mullet Haiku. And they are hysterical. Examples:

Dang! Your tube top is

making me want to forget

that you’re my cousin

and

Velveeta nachos

Case of warm Old Milwaukee

Happy birthday, mom

and my own personal favorite for its cinematic presentation:

Stop sign on dirt road

Taunts me with its brand new face

Hand me my damn gun

The Yang and the Yin

Magnificently belligerent, frighteningly beautiful, virtuously wicked, horribly lovely, and joyfully scandalous, “The Daring Spectacle” is a treasure trove for lovers of words and ideas.

Book Summary
“The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism”
by Mark Morford
Rapture Machine, Paper, 350 pages, ISBN-13: 9780984299706, $20.00.
rapturemachine.com
markmorford.com
daringspectacle.com

Article is Copr. © 2011 by John Scott G and originally published on eNewsChannels.com – all commercial rights reserved.

Chapter 8 – Don’t Look, Don’t Count.

The amount of plutonium produced at the plant each day was Pop Secret. Wait, no, that’s a microwave corn snack product. It must have been Top Secret. Yeah, that’s the term we want. The information was protected by a very official classified classification, something like: super ultra-magnificent big important clandestine hotstuff. Or SUMBICH.

I may have the acronym wrong but the point is that there were about seven different security clearances needed to be in the same room with those figures. Although it’s amazing how much data can be discovered with just a little browsing…

Shelving the Problem

We’re in the Reference section of the Richland Public Library. Towering over our heads are shelves full of unpublished thesis papers, half-finished doctoral dissertations, and semi-published notes for symposia, presentations, speeches, grant applications, and a grocery-shopping list. Well, that last one was something that dropped out of my pocket. You could tell it was my list because it only had three words on it: “bubble gum” and “Trojans.”

No, it wasn’t that I needed to do research on the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. I needed prophylactics. Specifically, condoms. While there were lots of brands, the name that we all used was Trojan. This may have been because that company did the most marketing. Or perhaps it was because of what we heard from our fathers and about an aspect of their military service where they were all forced to carry condoms when they got to go on leave. Maybe that was the brand name they used the most often.

I know that Jimmy Doublejoint, sometimes called Double-J or DJ, cracked us all up by quoting the War Department slogan: Put it on before you put it in. DJ seemed to know a lot about condoms. Or at least about a bunch of brands, some of which had interesting names like Durex, Beyond Seven, CautionWear, Undercover, Night Light, and our favorite, Rough Rider. I don’t remember my dad ever mentioning a specific brand name, which made the guys’ conversations about them that much more exciting.

A word or three about Jimmy Doublejoint. His nickname was not a drug or sex reference but acknowledgement of the extraordinary structure of his bones and cartilage, which allowed him to put his arms and fingers into angles that were not normally found in much of the natural world. Oh, and in case you’re interested, drugs will feature in some parts of this narrative, just not yet.

Anyway, the library. In one of those research papers was a formula for determining the daily plutonium production. Yup, right there in an unclassified publication. The only information you needed to work the formula was the temperature of the river water near the plant’s drainage pipe.

Down the Pipe and Up the River

Yes, you read that correctly: the nuclear plant poured some of its waste water directly into the river. Oh, but don’t worry, because…

“There is absolutely no problem with radiation leakage or seepage or anything like that. Of that you can be absolutely certain.”

Yup, very similar to the wording used by the maintenance guy earlier. Not sure of the name of the person I’m quoting this time — he was a minor official who was speaking during a presentation at a local PTA meeting. Quite a few listeners did not entirely believe what he was saying. I think some people doubted him because he used “absolutely” twice out of twenty-one words. Also, quite a few residents thought it was peculiar that you couldn’t go night fishing on that part of the river. Not because it was patrolled by boats full of stern-looking men with machine guns, which it was, but because the glow in the water scared the fish away. Or killed them.

My Uncle George, the one who designed and built an experimental plane (and later died flying it), said he didn’t think it was unusual that the formula for determining the daily plutonium output was considered Top Secret despite it being right there on the bookshelf of the public library. “People who have security clearances usually don’t have much use for a library,” he said. “Because books can cause you to think,” he pointed out.

Others in the pod city had different thoughts. “The Dewey Decimal System is, after all, a well-known Communist plot,” was one such idea. The word “idea” having a totally different meaning from the one in the dictionary.

Security Blanket

There is a Fear that invades people’s hearts and minds when under a security cloud such as surrounds a secret government installation. A deep-seated Fear of revealing Important Information. You could not, under any circumstances, divulge the number of core rods in the reactors. This would be Classified Information, Eyes Only, Burn After Reading type of stuff. Hell, burn before reading.

One day, my dad’s boss and his wife were over at our house with a few other folks from The Plant, as they called the bomb factory. I mean the facility. The boss’s daughter was getting married next month and so the adults were having an informal get-together to help put addresses and stamps on the invitations to the wedding and the reception.

At one point, my dad looked up from the return address stickers and said to his boss, “Hey did you notice that your home address is the same as the number of core rods?”

The man’s face went as white as a fresh cotton pillowcase. You could almost see the gears grinding away in his head while the sweat glands started working overtime. “Ohmygodohmygod am I exposing a Top Secret?” he seemed to be thinking to himself.

Don’t Look, Don’t Count

Some of the city “secrets” were ridiculous. For example, another thing that was Top Secret was the number of reactors at the plant. Now, at the time, there were no more recognizable pieces of architecture in the world than the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids of Giza, and the Andy Gump portable toilet. Oh, and a nuclear reactor containment tower.

As you flew into the Tri-Cities Semi-International Airport (slogan: “Proudly serving the people of Richland while conveniently located in Pasco”) you could look down and see all the containment structures. But you were not allowed to say how many there were. In fact, you would often hear people say, “Wow, what a great view of a certain undisclosed number of containment towers.”

The buses which took the workers to and from Reactors A, B, C, and D were named Bus A, Bus B, Bus C, and Bus D. So even if a spy had not flown into Richland but had hitched a ride or walked into town. . .

SPY: Excuse please, finding number “E” bus am looking for?

GUY: Uh, there is no “E” bus, pal. We only got A through D.

SPY:  Am thanking you with your helpingness. (To himself, counting on his fingers) A, B, C, D. . .  Is good. Is having five reactors.

A Classroom Can Lack Class

For many reasons, including the one given by my uncle, reading was not a favorite pastime for the sons and daughters of the worker drones in Richland. This enabled the schoolteachers to use reading as a method of torturing their pupils.

“All right, people, get out your readers.”

There was an off-key chorus of groans.

“Read aloud to the room from the top of page thirty-four. . . Bobby.”

“Yes, Miss Quirksbarb. ‘The Story of the Boy on the Back Porch. One summer after, afternoon, a small boy was won. . . wond. . .”

“Wondering.”

“Wondering. . . was wondering what to do. ‘Oh!’ he thought. ‘I wonder what to do. Oh, oh, I wonder what to do this summer afternoon. Oh, oh, how I wonder,’ he said.”

“That’s fine, Bobby. Next is . . . John Scott.”

There was a pause because I was reading some material that was a bit more advanced than those incredibly stupid “readers” that would have you believe that someone ever said anything remotely resembling “Oh, oh, how I wonder.”

“John Scott!”

“Yes?”

“I am certain that class would be interested in hearing what was occupying you this time. Please do share it with us.”

“Hmm, no,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I said I don’t think so.” Yup, I said it just a bit louder than the last time.

“We heard you. We are all waiting to discover just what it is you find so fascinating.”

“Well, okay, but do you remember the last time I told you what I was thinking? About finding the formula for the daily plutonium production.”

“Yes, but — ”

“And then someone in the class finked about it.”

“There is no need to — ”

“I won’t say who it was (Martin Stasserback), but after the rat-fink chickenship tattletail whining of a real lowlife (Martin Stasserback), there were FBI agents who came here and interrupted us right in the middle of the spelling bee.”

“Well, yes, that’s correct, but — ”

“And then they told us we dasn’t use that formula, even though there’s no such word as ‘dasn’t.’ And then they went away after shaking hands with all the adults. But that book with the formula is still in the library. I saw it there yesterday. Is that an example of how adults behave?”

“Now don’t get smart with me, young man.”

“So dumb is better?”

“That will be enough of that! Read from your book this instant!”

“Okay. ‘The rain and the distant thunder were a symphonic backdrop to our lovemaking. She arched her back and slid up her skirt.’”

“What on earth…?”

“‘She uncrossed her legs and her nylons made a sweet singing sound. Her hands went to the front of her blouse and – ‘”

“What is that you’re reading?!”

“It’s called ‘Passion’s Perfect Desire.’ It’s pretty good. Listen: ‘Her hands went to the front of her blouse and she began caressing her generous mounds of — ”

“John Scott!!!”

“What?”

“Bring that book to me this instant!”

“I’m not finished reading it yet.”

“Bring it here!!!”

“You want to read it?”

“You will go to the principal’s office at once!”

“He wants to read it?”

“Out!!!”

Looking back on my academic career, I can assure you that I got to know the Principal and the Boy’s Vice Principal of every school I ever attended. Not quite certain why.

• To be continued in next chapter (click link to subscribe via RSS) ….

“Secret Sex, A Book Alive Online,” written and lived by John Scott G, is Copr. © 2011 by JSG, all rights reserved under U.S. and international copyright conventions. Commercial use in any form is forbidden without express written permission of the author. Originally published on eNewsChannels.com with permission. Credits: Book cover design: Phil Hatten; Author Photo: Phil Hatten.